He sold it to Francesco Galesi, a Manhattan investor, for $2.3 million in 1993.
Trupin's vision of Dragon's Head was never realized.
His efforts to renovate were protracted and costly and eventually embroiled him in a series of lawsuits with the Town of Southampton. Trupin rejiggered the house as an ersatz French chateau, installed the interior of an English pub and a shark tank, and named it Dragon's Head. Overgrown and semiderelict, the house was sold at auction in 1979 to Barry Trupin, whose fortune derived from truck leasing, for a reported price of $330,000. For decades, the duPont family held on to the white elephant and then finally shuttered it. It had 45,000 square feet and 72 rooms, 60 of them bedrooms. duPont in the English Georgian style in 1929, Elysium was the largest house in the Hamptons in the days before the industrialist Ira Rennert came along, and supersized domiciles became the vogue. Klein, the house has been called a lot of things in its time and has a history that is worth a slight detour. The smattering of conservative locals who joined in lent to the evening a surreal aspect, as if the White Party in Miami had been relocated to the Meadow Club. A handful of journalists were also asked, with the understanding that cameras would be confiscated lest anyone catch Ms. Klein invited 400 of his friends, an assortment that included Barry Diller and David Geffen and the agent Sandy Gallin and also Martha Stewart and Lauren Bush and the Rev.
(Estimates by local caterers were in the $500,000 range.) For a measure of the party's scale, however, consider the waiter to guest ratio of one to three.
Great expense had obviously been gone to, but how much precisely those who work for Mr. Klein's new beachfront house, a Gothicized behemoth sitting on 10 acres astride a narrow billionaire's sand spit between the ocean and Shinnecock Bay. The pretext for the party was the opening of Mr. Klein, and the world of fashion as it is now, were still young. But getting there would have taken much longer.Īnd it appeared as if it was the Pines of that era that was being evoked at Calvin Klein's big party in Southampton last Saturday, an event that was by turns enchanted, confounding and suffused with nostalgia for a period when Mr. It is likely that America might eventually have gotten around to a taste for buffed bodies, depilation, white lilies, spare interiors and designer underwear if there had never been a Fire Island Pines circa 1981. In the last months before AIDS devastated a generation, a small group of gay artists and designers began putting forth a highly stylized and lacquered version of their own reality, one whose influence seems to have had the half-life of plutonium. Lebowitz's own moment of cultural valence, specifically the beginning of a decade when the gay influence on America's aesthetic life achieved a kind of apogee. It has been a long time since the humorist Fran Lebowitz first made the often-quoted remark that ''If you removed all of the homosexuals and homosexual influence from what is generally regarded as American culture, you would be pretty much left with 'Let's Make a Deal.' '' The quotation dates from the 1980's, and so does Ms.