Nelson DeMille - The Gold Coast

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Books by Nelson DeMille

BY THE RIVERS OF BABYLON

CATHEDRAL

THE TALBOT ODYSSEY

WORD OF HONOR

THE CHARM SCHOOL

THE GOLD COAST

THE GENERALS DAUGHTER

SPENCERVILLE

PLUM ISLAND

Published by

WARNER BOOKS

THE GOLD COAST. Copyright 1990 by Nelson DeMille. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

For information address Warner Books, Hachette Book Group, 237 Park Avenue, New York, NY 10017.

A Time Warner Company

ISBN: 978-0-7595-2262-6

A trade paperback edition of this book was published in 1997 by Warner Books.

The Warner Books name and logo are trademarks of Hachette Book Group, Inc.

First eBook Edition: April 2001

Visit our Web site at www.HachetteBookGroup.com

Contents

To my three budding authors:
Ryan, Lauren, and Alex.

Acknowledgments

I wish to thank Daniel and Ellen Barbiero for sharing with me their invaluable insights into Gold Coast life, and also Audrey Randall Whiting for sharing with me her knowledge of Gold Coast history.

I would also like to acknowledge my gratitude to Harry Mariani for his generous hospitality and support.

I also want to thank Pam Carletta for her tireless and professional work on the manuscript for this book.

And once again, my deepest gratitude to Ginny DeMille, editor, publicist, and good friend.

A man lives not only his personal life as an individual, but also, consciously or unconsciously, the life of his epoch and his contemporaries.

THOMAS MANN
The Magic Mountain

Foreword

I was born in New York City, and when I was four years old, my family moved to nearby Long Island. My father was one of the many post-World War II builders to come out to Long Island from the city to help create a new suburban frontier. New York Citys teeming population of eight million was ready to spill out of the five boroughs and pour into the farms and villages of old Long Island. In 1946, Arthur Levit began building 15,000 homes on what had once been potato fields and meadows, the largest single subdivision ever created. By the late 1950s, over a million people had transformed much of Long Island from rural to suburban.

As a kid, Id ride around the unpaved roads of the new housing tracts with my father in one of his army surplus jeeps, and even at that young age, I think I understood that one way of life was passing away and another was beginning. Long Islands Dutch and English history goes back to the early 1600s, and there was much that should have been saved and preserved. But in the rush to provide housing to returning veterans and their baby boomer families, questions of land use and landmark preservation were rarely addressed.

First, the farms fell to the builders, then the forests, and gradually the grand estates of Long Islands North Shorethe Gold Coastbegan to be divided by the surveyors, and the great houses began falling to the wreckers ball. Much of the visible evidence of the golden age on Long Island, spanning from the end of the Civil War to the stock market crash of 1929, was disappearing as housing tracts covered fields and woodlands where ladies and gentlemen once rode to hounds and hundred-room mansions were either deserted, razed, or used to house institutions.

By the 1970s, the acceleration of the destruction had slowed, and efforts were being made to preserve the estates as parks, museums, or nature conservancies.

This was the Long Island I knew growing up, but I was only dimly aware of the history of the Gold Coastthat is, until 1962, when in college I read F. Scott Fitzgeralds The Great Gatsby.

Gatsby is not only an entertaining story, but also a fascinating piece of social history, a peek into the loves, lives, and tragedies of the people who lived in that special time and place, the Gold Coast of Long Island during the Jazz Age.

As I read Gatsby in 1962, I was struck by the fact that the story took place only a few miles from where I was going to college and from where I grew up. Also, the time distance between the stock market crash of October 1929 and my freshman year of college was thirty-three yearseons for me, but not for my parents or some of my teachers, who had lived through the Roaring Twenties and the Great Depression. Yet it seemed to me that most people spoke very little about the 1920s, and only a bit more about the depression. The defining years of their lives seemed to have been World War II. In retrospect, the years between World War I and the end of World War II were so crammed with momentous and earth-shattering events that, as one of my history teachers put it, These thirty years produced more history than the average person could consume.

So, although the 1920s were in many ways a turning point in American history, there were other turning points, so that the Jazz Age, the Roaring Twenties, the Age of Prohibition, while not forgotten, were to some extent eclipsed by subsequent events.

Early in my writing career, I decided I wanted to write a Gatsbyesque novel. I began searching for similar novels written during the period or afterward, and I was surprised at how few I was able to turn up, other than gangster books.

On reflection, I decided that a novel set entirely in the 1920s might not be well received by the reading public, so I decided to write a generational novel, which began on Armistice Day, November 11, 1918, and continued to the present. My book was going to center on Long Island as the cradle of aviation, and the cast of characters in this huge book would include cameo appearances by Charles Lindbergh, Amelia Earhart, Glenn Curtiss, Leroy Grumman, and a host of other aviation greats. The project was breathtaking in its scope and entirely too ambitious for a lazy writer.

But the 1920s still fascinated me, and one day someone said, Examine the pieces of the Crash. Examine the Crash site. In other words, write a contemporary novel set on the old Gold Coast amid the remaining mansions and estates and the crumbling ruins. This seemed to be the best and most workable idea.

But what kind of story did I want to tell? Obviously, I needed old WASP families, some down on their luck, some doing well. I needed to examine the old morals, manners, and mores that still hung on, and compare and contrast them to the new ways, the new suburban America that lay just beyond the hedgerows of the once-grand estates.

I knew the ingredients, the formula, but when I put it together, it still had no heat, no light, no spark. There was something missing and, finally, a chance piece in a local newspaper provided the missing element: the Mafia.

The more successful of the organized crime families had for years been taking up residence on the Gold Coast, and now the entire theme of my proposed novel took form: The Godfather meets The Great Gatsby

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