Treasured Island

December 1992 By Leslie Bennetts

For more than 350 years, Gardiners Island—part Colonial museum, part Eden off the
coast of New York City— has withstood pirates, redcoats, and other assaults on its
inhabitants and their possessions. Today, two blue-blooded families, linked by
marriage, are waging a bitter war for the future of this historic 3,350-acre
preserve. LESLIE BENNETTS goes behind the lines, where the last Gardiner is
stubbornly holding the fort

Heading full-throttle toward the island, the sleek black boat cleaves the water
like a sword; the notorious Gardiners Bay chop is no match for the Laughing Lady.
Whipping and snapping in the wind, her startling yellow flag unfurls a scarlet
skull and crossbones, splashed like a jolt of blood against an electric-blue sky.
The captain's deck chair is emblazoned with the Jolly Roger as well, but Robert
David Lion Gardiner doesn't sit down. His hands on the wheel, his chiseled face
jutting eagerly into the wind, he stands tall and erect, as proud as the figurehead
on the prow of a ship, never taking his eyes off the green island rising from the
water before us. Between the wind and the waves crashing around the boat and the
sea gulls swooping and crying overhead, it's hard to hear anything, but this
doesn't deter the 16th lord of the manor.

"There's Cartwright Shoals," he shouts, waving his arm expansively at a ridge of

sandbars stretching toward Montauk. "We put lights on them and wrecked ships and
took all the goods off." This was at least 200 years ago, but the events of the
distant past are as real to Gardiner as the salt spray stinging his face this
afternoon. He may look through the people he's with as if they weren't there, but
the ancestors who settled Gardiners Island more than 350 years ago are visible as
flesh and blood to him, familiar in all their quirks; he has pored over their
diaries, tracked down their marriage certificates, and unearthed their gravestones,
and his homes are full of their treasures.

The Laughing Lady veers to starboard and begins to circle the island. "There's the
landing strip—see the grass runway, mowed like a lawn? There's the windmill, in the
X position. It's always painted white, because when we saw the pirate ships coming
we changed the position from X to the cross, so the people on the coast would see
the danger coming and put their valuables away. Here's Cherry Hill pond, with
swans, like the great ducal estates of England!" Even in remarks flung heedlessly
to the wind, Gardiner's inflections are grandly aristocratic; his tone is exultant,
his face alight with the romance of his story. "The Countess Diodati had slaves
dressed as gondoliers on the pond, out of nostalgia for her youth in Venice. Look
at the cormo-

rants on the rocks! See the osprey nests? Look at the lovely rolling country of the
island, like the English countryside—not flat like Southampton." His voice fairly
drips with derision. "Lion Gardiner said it looked like Sussex Downs in England—
that's why he liked it. There's Bostwick Forest— 1,200 acres of oak! Some of the
oaks are 800 years old—pre-Columbian! This isn't a barren island like Nantucket or
Martha's Vineyard, with bushes!" His disdain is so great he practically spits the
word. "These are the trees of a primeval forest—what a difference!"

The current value of Gardiners Island is the subject of much conjecture, although
few would argue that 3,350 pristine acres in the middle of Long Island Sound could
be worth less than $100 million. Lion Gardiner got them for 10 coats of cloth when
he arrived here in 1639 to barter with the Montaukett Indians for what would become
the Gardiner family's ancestral home. The Indians had called it Manchonake, "the
place where many have died," because of a terrible battle between the Montauketts
and the Pequots of Connecticut. "Not a man was left standing," Gardiner reports
solemnly. But the island was blessed with four freshwater streams and studded with
ponds; it had forests and fertile fields and 27 miles of coastline, and it was
teeming with wildlife. The prosperous plantation Lion Gardiner built there was the
first English settlement in what is now New York State. He himself had arrived in
the New World on a fragile North Sea bark, but his descendants would later ply
these waters in style, putting their slaves to oars in livery with the Gardiners
Island crest on the buttons.

As the Laughing Lady slides into the cove where Gardiners have anchored their boats
for centuries, white egrets rise around us like clouds. "My grandmother went to the
Metropolitan Opera wearing egret feathers," Gardiner says. "They were the latest
thing in Paris, but Mrs. Gardiner's were homegrown!" The rushes surrounding the
dock murmur in the breeze off the bay, rustling and whispering as if with a soft
chorus of unintelligible voices; it is impossible to dispel the ghosts of the past
here. Their claims are insistent, an inexorable fact of life that contemporary
Gardiners understand all too well.

Once on the island, the first order of business is clear. Gardiner guns the pickup
truck over the rutted road, crying, "We've got to get the flags up to say I'm here!
I don't dare leave them for the Goelets—they'd bum them up, and they have no right
to the Gardiner coat of arms!" When he stops the truck, there is utter silence
except for the birds and the soughing of wind in the tall grasses. The stillness
stops even Gardiner for a moment. "You step back 350 years," he says reverently.
And then, hoisting the big canvas sack he has brought with him from the mainland,
he bounds up the hill to the flagpole to raise the American flag and the Gardiner
coat of arms. The lord of the manor may be 81 years old, but he leaps up a steep
incline so fast that men half his age scramble breathlessly to keep up.

The Goelets are not in residence today, so there will be no ugly confrontations
like the ones that have fueled so many years of litigation. When Gardiner talks
about the time Robert Goelet, his niece's husband, tried to run him off this road
and kill him—a charge Goelet vehemently denies—he savors every syllable, as
energized by his bitter war with the Goelets as he is by the endless tales of
previous battles testing the mettle of the island's inhabitants. Spanish pirates
burned the Gardiners' Queen Anne manor house in 1728, but the family tied strings
to all their jewels, silver, and other valuables and hung them down the granite
well ringed with lions' heads. "The pirates never thought of looking down the
well," Gardiner says triumphantly, patting it with satisfaction.

Today's major antagonist is somewhat more difficult to outwit, having infiltrated

the family. Nearly 40 years ago, Robert Gardiner and his sister, Alexandra Gardiner
Creel, were left Gardiners Island in trust by their aunt Sarah Diodati Gardiner,
who stipulated that upon their deaths the island would revert to their heirs.
Although Gardiner has been married for more than 30 years, he has no children, and
if he died today Mrs. Creel's daughter, Alexandra Gardiner Creel Goelet, would
inherit the island—thereby delivering it squarely into the hands of Robert
Gardiner's sworn enemy, Alexandra's husband, Robert Goelet.

He is in many ways a fitting opponent. If the Goelets haven't been in the New World
quite as long as the Gardiners, they weren't far behind, and Robert Goelet is not
only the bearer of "a dread New York name," as The New Yorker once put it, but also
the scion of a major real-estate fortune. The Goelets have, over the years, owned
vast stretches of Manhattan, including such notable properties as the land where
Grand Central Terminal was built, the land under Lever House on Park Avenue, the
old RitzCarlton Hotel, the Racquet and Tennis Club, and the Fulton Fish Market
(which they sold to the South Street Seaport)—not to mention such Gilded Age
extravaganzas as Newport's Ochre Court, a copy of Louis XII's Chateau de Blois, and
Stanford White's Southside, which has been called ''the biggest ex-
"The sandbar of sorrow," Alexandra Goelet's late father used to call the island.

ample of bastard Edwardian in the country." Then there are the hunting lodges in
Canada and a Tudor castle in Scotland, as well as the Clos du Val vineyards, which
are owned by Robert's brother John. A Goelet also cofounded Chemical Bank,
reportedly by bribing members of the New York State Legislature with cash and
lavish gifts of stock to obtain a charter. But despite their formidable holdings
and the fact that they are among the tiny handful of old-line Wasp families that
still retain real power and wealth, the Goelets have assiduously shunned publicity,
managing even now to remain ''one of New York's best-kept secrets," as Quest
magazine described them.

Like Robert Gardiner, Robert Goelet didn't marry until he was past 50, his passions
having previously run to such interests as bird fleas; he had for many years
devoted himself to the private study of natural history, shuttling around the world
to observe fossil fish on the Gaspé Peninsula, puffins on the Westman Islands off
Iceland, elephant seals and sea lions in Patagonia. ''If you don't have a family,
you have more time for your interests," he explained. Born in France at a family
shooting place called Sandricourt, a chateau surrounded by 10,000 acres, Goelet
always enjoyed the luxury of pursuing even the most esoteric hobbies. However, one
day while hiking in Harriman State Park, he met Alexandra Gardiner Creel: a match
made in heaven, indeed. She was divorced from the lawyer Peter Tufo, she was aiming
for a master's degree from the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies,
she shared Goelet's interest in things like luna-moth cocoons, and she stood to
inherit Gardiners Island—a place virtually guaranteed to pique the interest of
Goelet, who has served as president of the New York Zoological Society, as
president of the American Museum of Natural History, and as a director of the
National Audubon Society. The couple were married on Gardiners Island in 1976,
celebrating the occasion with a dinner party for 110 people at Goelet's double town
house on Sutton Place.

Then the real problems began. Relations between Robert Gardiner and his sister had
already been strained by Gardiner's refusal, in 1962, to continue leasing the
island to various sportsmen who used it for shooting parties. Mrs. Creel was
dismayed by the loss of income, but Gardiner was adamant: "I said, 'No. My aunt
left me the island. I'm going to enjoy it.' " However, the trust left by their
aunt, which had maintained the island since the 1950s, was running out of money,
and by the early 1980s Goelet had begun to pay the spiraling costs, which,
according to Gardiner, are now more than $1.6 million a year. When Gardiner refused
to pay half, Surrogate Court Judge Marie Lambert decided he wasn't entitled to use
the island, so he found himself barred from visiting for most of the 1980s while
the Goelets settled into a comfortable routine of using it as a private family
retreat. Last summer, however, the New York State Supreme Court's Appellate
Division ruled that Gardiner, as the life beneficiary of the Gardiners Island
trust, couldn't be excluded from the island whether he helped finance its upkeep or
not. "I won the right to be on the island whenever I want to, plus I don't have to
pay, so the Goelets are fit to be tied," Gardiner says gleefully. ''But they're not
giving up. They're fighting tooth and nail."

Gardiners Island has a long history of spawning family discord, turning brother
against sister, one generation against another; more than a century ago the
question of inheritance drove Julia Gardiner, the First Lady of the United States
during the presidency of John Tyler, into a bitter court fight with her brother.
''The sandbar of sorrow," Alexandra Goelet's late father used to call the island.
But if the conflict surrounding it is familiar, the current legal wrangling has
taken on an atmosphere of crisis, since the trust is virtually broke and something
has to be done. Gardiner is completely convinced that the minute he dies Goelet
will develop the island. In Gardiner's view, Goelet's real goal is ''to make a
fortune for the Goelets—a couple of hundred million in the 21st century. I could
see through it from the very beginning," he says disdainfully. And this he is
determined to prevent. Gardiner thinks the island should be sold to the government
as a wildlife sanctuary or to some preservationist group like the Nature
Conservancy. ''I'm a realist," he says with a shrug. ''I think the only thing is to
get it in a secure public domain with limited access."

The Goelets are vehemently opposed to relinquishing the island or to making any
concessions that would protect it from development, although they have always
denied that such is their intention. Nor do they wish to discuss it. Gardiner, on
the other hand, delights in airing the whole controversy. The Goelets generally
maintain a long-suffering silence in public, but behind closed doors they are
fighting their war of attrition with deadly seriousness. Gardiner may be more
flamboyant, but Goelet can be a formidable adversary; according to Gardiner, on one
particularly memorable occasion, Goelet locked the door of the manor house in his
face and said to him, ''If you come through this door, I'll bash your brains in. I
could crush you to death. I hate your guts!" (Goelet later acknowledged that he had
kept Gardiner out of the house but denied trying to. kill him.)

As the battle rages on in the courts, time is obviously on the Goelets' side; their
adversary has already defied the actuarial tables, after all. "They're basically
just buying time," says one close observer. "The Goelets are too genteel to fight
this kind of battle. They're just waiting for Bob Gardiner to drop dead." But
Gardiner is undaunted, and he loves to taunt the Goelets by hatching diabolical
schemes to thwart them—such as adopting an heir, a possibility he spent several
years investigating but seems in no hurry to effect. The feud has stymied all
attempts at arbitration, confounding everyone from town officials to the succession
of judges who have tried to find a solution.

Obviously the stakes are high—neither 350 years of history nor a couple of hundred
million dollars are trifling matters. But in Gardiner's view the feud is rooted in
envy as well as greed. "Mrs. Goelet wasn't bom a Gardiner, she was bom a Creel," he
says contemptuously. "Her father was from Kansas City.

And Mr. Goelet is consumed with arrogance. He's furious that the Goelets were not
in America in the reign of Charles I. They're nouveaux riches, compared to the
Gardiners. .. . But he wants the island. He's avaricious, and terribly pompous. . .
. When my sister was alive, they wrote to her and said when they were in residence
on the island my sister and her husband were not to set foot on it. Not only did
Mr. Goelet go up to the manor house and lock the door in my face, he took over. To
him, it was his island: he wanted it, and he was going to get it, by hook or by
crook. So here are the two people who were the sole heirs of the island, locked out
—excluded!" His voice rises to a shriek of outrage. "The greed of the Goelets is
unbelievable! Goelet's been telling people he's the richest man in the world. He's
not; he's 1 of about 28 heirs of the Goelet fortune. I happen to be richer than he
is. . . . The Gardiners are a family that had money long before the Astors, the
Rockefellers, the Fords. We got most of our land before Cromwell beheaded Charles I
—78,000 acres plus the island, all from the Stuarts!"

Gardiner speaks of the Stuarts as familiarly as if they were neighbors who often
dropped by for coffee. Returning to the island after one period of exile, he was
horrified to find a cherished Daniel Mytens portrait of Charles I deposed from its
usual place at the manor house and damaged, whether through carelessness or through
malice (although Gardiner's verdict is clear). Skirmishing over possessions has
long been a favored tactic; Gardiner accuses the Goelets of confiscating everything
from paintings to his rifle, his shotguns, and the Gucci cartridge belt he wears
during shooting parties in the fall. "They just behaved as if I were dead!"
Gardiner exclaims indignantly. Several years ago, when he announced to the press
that the Goelets had thrown a portrait of him "into the outhouse," the Goelets
could contain themselves no longer, pointing out in exasperation that the island
doesn't even have an outhouse.

However, such details often seem to be merely a lively sideshow. To observers such
as Tony Bullock, the East Hampton town supervisor, who is embroiled in the ongoing
dispute about how Gardiners Island should be zoned, the crux of the problem is
simple. "I guess it's like, who's king of the island?" Bullock says with a sigh.

It's like entering a dream. Exploring Gardiners Island, at first one seems to have
been transported mysteriously to Colonial times. The oldest building on the island,
and one of the oldest on the Eastern Seaboard, is the carpenter's shop, which was
built in 1639 and still boasts its original bench, along with rough beams hand-hewn
with adzes from Bostwick Forest and a stone foundation of rocks "all chinked
together without cement—like Machu Picchu!"

Gardiner says. Beside the carpenter's shop rests a cannon dating from about 1720,
retrieved from a British warship that went down in Gardiners Bay. Then there's the
"bound-boys' house*'' where indentured servants working off their parents' debts
once lived; the tinroofed brick smokehouse, where the Gardiners smoked their own
hams from the pigs they raised on the island; the blacksmith's shop, with its

ancient bellows, forge, and anvil; the game larder; and the slaughterhouse. Open
any door, brush away the cobwebs, and motes of dust dance in the shafts of
sunlight; tiptoe across floorboards cut by a wind-powered sawmill 300 years ago and
you find each structure as untouched as if its 17th-century inhabitants had just
gone out for their lunch break. The superintendent's house, which once served as
the island's prison, still boasts a checkerboard carved on the floor by British
soldiers who bivouacked there during the War of 1812. Over near the cemetery, a big
iron vessel overflows with geraniums: it's a try-pot, in which whale blubber was
boiled down into oil, a relic from the Mary B. Gardiner, a whaling ship that made
the Gardiners more than $1 million in 1810. The graveyard is littered with
tombstones from the 1700s and 1800s, including a false tomb that conceals an
underground passage from the manor house, where Gardiners used to hide when pirates
came to call. High up on a hill overlooking the bay, the brick chimneys of the
slate-roofed manor house poke through the trees. The current manor is relatively
new; according to Gardiner, it was built in 1949 after Winston Guest, who was then
leasing the island, entertained a guest who smoked in bed and burned down the
previous manor house, which had stood since marauding pirates burned an even
earlier structure more than 200 years before. But almost all the other buildings
are preserved in their original state, including the great 17th-century windmill
with all its original hand-hewn machinery, commanding the hill facing Long Island.
"What a time capsule it is," Gardiner says, surveying his domain. "Williamsburg is
new compared to this." (In fact, Williamsburg was originally settled six years
before Lion Gardiner even laid eyes on Gardiners Island.)

'It's the rape of Gardiners Island by the Goelet family that's what the story is,
says Robert Gardiner.

However, take off in the pickup truck and the time warp bends further: Colonial
America vanishes, and it is as if one had suddenly been transplanted to Eden. Quail
and pheasant scatter before the vehicle, and deer leap in every direction; fawns
gambol in the sun-dappled woods, as plentiful as squirrels in Central Park. A horse
gallops across a field, running free. Trailing cygnets behind them, swans sail
majestically across ponds filled with red Chinese carp. The woods are lush and
fragrant, overgrown with the pink blossoms of marshmallows and thickly carpeted
with wild grapes. The truck jounces through towering stands of locust, hickory, and
oak trees at a high rate of speed, its driver plowing ahead no matter what the
obstacle. When a fallen tree blocks his path, Gardiner simply crashes through it,
oblivious to the branches whipping the passengers in the back of the truck: "You
see, I come from pioneer stock!" he yells exultantly. He may be 81, but he drives
like a cowboy on amphetamines, lurching to a halt only when he comes to a point of
interest. "Here's the hanging oak, where men were hung," he says, waving at a giant
old tree. "We got a lordship and manor, so we could hang a man. The owner of the
island was the judge—it was a most unusual charter." He grins maniacally. "Here's
Willow Brook— I always have a drink here. The water is absolutely pure—this is the
way it was when the Indians were here!" He leaps out of the truck, clambers into
the stream, and splashes around in the water, and then we're off again. "Here's
Lone Tree Hill, where my great-grandmother had a teahouse in the 1850s, overlooking
Bostwick Pond. It had four pillars and a dome. The footman would come out with the
black slaves and set up the silver tea tray and the china cups, and the ladies
would come here and do needlework."

Gardiner is delighted when we overtake a family of wild turkeys, and he begins to

chase them, bent on proving that, conventional wisdom to the contrary, wild turkeys
really do fly. The turkeys waddle faster and faster, desperately trying to evade
the relentless pickup truck. When they scatter across a field, Gardiner veers off
the road right behind them, stepping on the gas as the truck careens wildly over
the meadow in pursuit. Finally the turkeys flap their wings and hurl themselves
hysterically into the air, prompting shrieks of glee from the lord of the manor.
"They fly, they fly!" he howls, overjoyed. "They say they don't, but they do!"

'The Goelets are just waiting for Bob Gardiner to drop dead."

The sense that one has happened upon paradise is marred only by the virulence of
the island's tick infestation, which is so acute that Gardiner's wife refers to the
place as Tick Island. Any sensible visitor spends the rest of the evening picking
deer ticks off his or her person, but even Lyme disease is apparently no match for
Robert Gardiner; according to his wife, he never even checks himself.

Of course, no tour is complete without the leafy glade where a granite marker is
engraved with a reminder of one of the island's more infamous chapters: "Captain
Kidd's treasure was buried here in this hollow and recovered 1699." Captain Kidd
buried 24 chests of treasure in this spot, advising John Gardiner, then the lord of
the manor, that if it wasn't there when he returned he'd have Gardiner's head or
his son's. When Kidd was arrested and tried for piracy, the British demanded the
treasure, and the Earl of Bellomont, the British governor in Boston, saw to the
return of the booty, which consisted of gold, silver, silks, and jewels. Nearly 300
years later, Robert Gardiner danced with Princess Margaret at a ball and mentioned
his interest in the royal family's receipt for the treasure. He received a copy in
due course, and discovered to his amusement that the receipt didn't match the
original inventory. The Earl of Bellomont apparently retained six of Captain Kidd's
diamonds for himself before parting with the remainder of the loot.

Indeed, plunder has been a recurrent theme on Gardiners Island. Its early settlers
were under constant threat from pirates. British troops raided the island during
the Revolutionary War, making off with virtually everything of value, and
commandeered the place again during the War of 1812; after fortifying themselves
with the Gardiners' abundant provisions, they proceeded south to burn the White
House. In recent times, only the determination of a succession of Gardiners has
protected the island from more modem forms of appropriation. Twenty years ago, when
Representative Otis Pike came up with a plan for a federal takeover, Robert
Gardiner opposed it, saying acidly, "Gardiners Island does not need to be protected
by Mr. Pike. It is maintained, preserved, and respected by the family who has owned
it for over 300 years." Every time the island seemed likely to slip away from them,
a resolute Gardiner contrived somehow to keep it in the family. However, the
current lord of the manor exhibits a surprising equanimity about both his own lack
of heirs and the prospect of surrendering the island to another sort of
guardianship at long last.
Continued on page 277

Continued from page 255

"I'm a realist; I'm not just a sentimentalist. I have limited means," says
Gardiner, whose idea of limited means is apparently the $100 million he has
repeatedly told me he's worth. His assets range from a shopping mall he built in
Bay Shore to a marina in East Hampton, but the question of his worth is
problematic. Newcomers meeting him for the first time often wonder whether he's
broke, given his startling propensity for wearing the same frayed, wrinkled,
stained, highly aromatic clothes on one occasion after another; were it not for his
lofty bearing and cultivated speech, he could pass for a derelict. However, those
who have known him for many years say he's always been like this, and decades-old
press clips often note Gardiner's eccentric appearance, which has long puzzled his
friends. "It is

possible that if you have a large enough ego there may be some element of contempt
for others in it," one speculates. "You're the lord of the grand manor: you don't
really have to worry about how you smell, because you're you."

But even if Gardiner is worth $100 million, much of that is obviously in nonliquid
assets, and although he loves to talk about family heirlooms ranging from his
Turner to the ancestral tiara, he frequently adds that you can't buy eggs with
them. "I am not Mr. Ross Perot," he says, lifting his nose as if to indicate
something distasteful. "I could take the whole island, and scrimp and do it—but
what's the point, when I know in a few years it would be beyond me? I have to think
of the future of the island. I'm only interested in its preservation. This is the
oldest estate in the same name on the continent of North America. . . . No family
has done this in America but ours. I don't feel I'm a sudden ne'er-do-well who's
spent money and married 28 times. But as my aunt said, 'You'll find sentiment very
expensive.' I know perfectly well that by 1995 the island will cost over $2 million
a year to run. There are 900 acres of fields to cut three times a year. The harbor
has to be dredged every year, because the sandbar builds up and you can't get a
boat in— that's $50,000. You have to bring in all the food for the three families
on the island, and in the winter, when the harbor freezes up, you have to drop it
by para-

chute from an airplane. Every toothbrush has to come over by private yacht. People
don't realize; they think, Oh, you were so lucky to get this estate! They forget
what it costs. It was an accident of birth I got it, because I was the only nephew,
and my sister was the only niece. It's not that we wanted it—it's that we got it.
Who in their right mind wants to pay $1.68 million a year? But we were also brought
up to consider we had a burden—a responsibility. I was bom to be the custodian of
the family possessions. It's like the great families of Europe; you had to keep the
chateau, keep the castle up. There's no free lunch."

He shrugs. "I was given so much. I was given wealth, and brains to increase my
wealth, and I married a beautiful woman, but I didn't have any children. I don't
think it was me; I had my sperm tested, and they wiggled." He raises a fine-boned
hand and wiggles his fingers, whose nails are long and jagged and filthy. "But I
didn't love any other woman. In life there's always something you pay for."

She has been hiding upstairs all moming, but then her husband gets a phone call.
Gardiner and his visitors are outdoors, in what might elsewhere be termed the
backyard. In this case, behind Gardiner's great stone house in East Hampton, which
served as the summer White House after Julia Gardiner married President John Tyler
in 1844, the avenue of stately arborvitae that leads to the swimming pool is lined
with marble statues. "An allée of gods and goddesses, like the Villa d'Este!"
Gardiner is saying with relish. "Here's Bacchus, wearing nothing but grapes in the
right places. Here's Mercury, and Aphrodite, and Leda and the swan. Over there is
one of the biggest ginkgoes in America; we brought it back from Japan 150 years
ago. This is where old money counts: look at these rhododendrons! Look at the size
of those trees..."

And then an ethereal voice calls his name. Caught up in the excitement of his
inventory, he ignores it. She keeps calling. Finally, exasperated, he heads back
toward the house. His wife has declined to talk to his visitors, refused even to
meet them. "She's absolutely terrified of publicity," he says. In the front hall, a
striking portrait of Eunice Gardiner by Salvador Dali shows her as porcelain-
skinned and almond-eyed, with flame-red hair streaming luxuriantly over her
shoulders. But now, as Gardiner and his guests approach the house, a wraithlike
figure stirs behind gauzy white curtains on the balcony. Shrouded as if by veils,
she lifts a pale hand to shield herself with the billowing clouds of fabric. It is
past noon, but she seems to be wearing a flowing dressing gown; her faded red hair
is still long, as if she were yet the bride who arrived at this house half a
lifetime ago.

There have always been sly whispers about Eunice Bailey Oakes on the social
circuit, even before she and Gardiner stunned everyone by getting married in 1961.
Gardiner's father had died when he was quite young, and he had lived with his
widowed mother until her death, when he was in his late 40s. "People were
absolutely amazed that he married," according to one old friend. His choice of
bride raised eyebrows as well: a former model many years his junior, Eunice had
kept some fast company back home in England. An Affair of State, a history of the
Profumo sex scandal of the 1960s, describes Eunice as a close friend of Stephen
Ward, the doctor who became a central figure in the scandal, was convicted of
running prostitutes, and then committed suicide. "A famous English beauty," as
Gardiner likes to describe her, Eunice had been previously married to William Pitt
Oakes, the unfortunate son of the even more unfortunate Sir Harry Oakes, a Canadian
who had made his fortune in gold mines, settled in the Bahamas, and counted the
Duke and Duchess of Windsor among his intimates. Sir Harry met an un-

timely end in 1943, when he was found in bed at home in Nassau with four gunshot
wounds to the head. The bed had been set afire, and feathers from a tom pillow were
pasted to the raw skin on his scorched body. Despite considerable evidence
implicating Sir Harry's business partner, who had spent the night at the house, Sir
Harry's son-in-law, Alfred de Marigny, who had been nowhere near the scene of the
crime, was arrested and tried for the murder. When de Marigny was acquitted, the
case remained unsolved, one of the most famous society murders of the century.

Many years later, when Eunice Oakes married Robert Gardiner, the American press
made only the most decorous mention of her previous marriage to Sir Harry's son,
who died in 1958 (of alcoholism, according to Gardiner). Eunice was generally
portrayed as the prematurely bereaved widow of an estimable young man. De Marigny
tells a somewhat different story. William Pitt Oakes "was a complete lunatic," says
de Marigny. "He would wake up in the morning and think he was a dog and pee on the
furniture and bark. He was a nut. He should have been put in an asylum, but his
mother didn't want that."

When Robert Gardiner met Eunice Oakes, he was entranced: "I found her fascinating.
She knew Aly Khan. She stayed at Cliveden all the time!" They were married at St.
Thomas Episcopal Church in New York, in what Time magazine described as "the
winter's most glittering wedding." Eunice wore the Gardiner family's diamond tiara
and her 10½carat-diamond engagement ring, another old family stone. As a wedding
present, her beloved gave her a diamond brooch and a double-strand pearl necklace
with a diamond clasp, both "king-size," according to the society columnist Doris
Lilly. At the wedding reception at the Colony Club, a guest was startled when he
overheard two older gentlemen in front of him on the receiving line: "I understand
our host is looking for volunteers tonight," one said wickedly to the other.

However, to the surprise of many, the marriage has endured for more than three
decades. The Gardiners spend much of the year in Palm Beach, and Gardiner loves to
talk about how his wife wears one of the few real tiaras at the annual Red Cross
Ball, but the resident social lionesses tend to be rather dismissive. "I don't see
them from one year to the next," sniffs one Palm Beach grande dame. "They used to
have a big house on the lake, but they sold that and they have a condo. No one sees
them." The Gardi-

ners have since sold the condo and bought another house, but Gardiner is now
talking about moving to Bermuda or Jamaica or even Nevada, for tax reasons. Back in
Palm Beach, Mrs. Gardiner's name still elicits some racy associations, but they are
considered a thing of the past; asked about her, another local gadabout says she's
obsessed with her health, and adds, "Her cavorting around with gentlemen is over."

In East Hampton as well, the Gardiners remain curiosities. When Gardiner speaks of
his wife, it is always with enormous pride, but he talks about her the way he talks
about the sapphire-and-diamond parure he likes her to wear. "He is said to look
upon his wife as another collector's item, who may as well be in a strongbox at the
bank," one old friend says acidly. "She can be considered almost a mannequin."
Indeed, before Gardiner acquired a wife to wear his jewels, "he used to carry some
around in his pocket," the friend adds. "He'd suddenly grab you and show you a
loose diamond or two." This could, at times, lead to startling lapses. Helen
Rattray, the editor of the East Hampton Star, recalls her first meeting with
Gardiner, more than 30 years ago. He was friendly with Helen's mother-in-law,
Jeannette Rattray, who came from an old East Hampton family, and one winter night
there was an unexpected knock on the door. Gardiner barged in in a dramatic ankle-
length coat, pulled a chamois-cloth bag out of his pocket, and proudly showed the
Rattrays three antique watches, one of which was encrusted with diamonds,
sapphires, and rubies. There had recently been a series of burglaries in the
neighborhood, and when Gardiner telephoned in distress the next morning to report
that his jewels were missing, everyone feared the worst—until the Rattrays searched
their living room and found that the valuables hadn't been stolen at all. "He had
left the chamois-cloth bag behind, and it had slipped between the sofa cushions,"
recalls Mrs. Rattray. She herself has fallen into disfavor with Gardiner of late;
he considers her newspaper's coverage to be insufficiently worshipful about the
Gardiners and their history, and he has taken to lambasting her as "that Jewish
princess from Bayonne."

Although not exactly titans on the local social scene, the Gardiners do give dinner
parties from time to time. On these occasions the host carries on with his usual
obliviousness. "It's a monologue, essentially—the usual European title-dropping
thing," one guest reports. "Eunice is expressionless; her face shows nothing... .
How she stands him, I don't know. She's very shy and withdrawn, almost anorexic.
She seems to have managed to create an ability to totally detach herself from him
in the presence of others. I've never seen them refer to each other when they're
together. ' '

Longtime observers attribute Gardiner's peculiarities to the way he was brought up.
"He's an aesthete, wedded to his obsessions—the family, the history, the jewels,"
says a friend. "He has less awareness of others than any person I've ever known....
It's as if a part of him never developed at all. What he thinks about when he's
alone, I can't imagine. He's like a miser hoarding his money. This is a really
well-educated man, with a really superior education, culturally, but when you wish
to talk about Turner, you'll hear only about his Turner: what it's worth, who wants
to buy it. You don't talk about Turner; you only talk about his painting. It's like
a V-8 engine that's only functioning on two cylinders."
In Gardiner's East Hampton house, the accumulation of possessions is overwhelming.
"There's my father, there's my grandfather, there's my great-grandfather," Gardiner
says, pointing to the portraits ascending the staircase wall. One scarcely knows
where to look first: at the Romney or the Tiepolo or the Canaletto? At the
intricate decoration on the Gardiners Island gold service, made in 1750 from
"pirate loot," gleaming on "the longest mahogany sideboard in America"? At the
Meissen china with the Gardiner coat of arms or at the 18th-century Savonnerie rug,
at Mme. de Pompadour's porcelain or at the Philadelphia Chippendale chairs?

Given his fanatical devotion to that legacy, the fact that Gardiner will die
without a natural heir is the supreme irony. When he first announced his interest
in adopting another Gardiner several years ago, some observers assumed this was
just another plot to spite the Goelets. However, Gardiner spent a good deal of time
and energy researching family genealogy and tracking down far-flung Gardiners who
might prove to be suitable heirs. He then descended upon Gardiner Green Jr., a
distant relative who lives in Laurel, Mississippi. Gardiner invited him to Palm
Beach, wined and dined him on the island, and filled his head with family lore.
Three years later, Green is still bemused by the whole experience. "I would love to
be lord of the manor in the abstract, but when it's going to cost you $2 million a
year in upkeep, with no tax benefits, and you're going to

go out there three weekends a year, it's a very expensive folly for somebody to
undertake," he points out. "If you're worth $100 million, it would be a problem
unless you made sacrifices, and I'm not worth $100 million." Gardiner had managed
to turn up a relative who drove a Rolls-Royce, had his own airplane, and ran a
museum in addition to his oil-andgas business and real-estate interests, but even
Gardiner Green didn't seem to be up to the job at hand. However, Gardiner isn't
about to concede the field to the Goelets; asked whether his failure to adopt means
the issue is closed, he says slyly, "I still could. I still could."

Not surprisingly, Gardiner Green still thinks about it, although he found the whole
experience "quite unnerving. It's a phenomenally beautiful place, but I'm not sure
I want to sacrifice my whole life for it." He pauses, and then, almost as if musing
to himself, voices the question that lies at the heart of the Gardiner saga: "At
what price the island?" he says softly.

Robert Gardiner may be 81, but he drives like a cowboy on amphetamines.

The limestone mansion on East 67th Street is unmarked; nothing advertises its
purpose to the casual passerby, but this is where the Goelet interests are
headquartered. Inside, the walls are hung with prints of old New York, and canvas
ledgers detail the family's holdings in times gone by. There is no hint of
ostentation, of course; the decor is discreetly elegant rather than opulent, and
the sense of old money hangs over the place like a faint but unmistakable scent.
Here Robert Goelet, an owlish man whose sartorial tastes run to expensive tweeds,
presides over the family empire. The Goelets' place in the history of New York is
secure, but Goelet's personal legacy is somewhat more questionable. On paper, he
seems to have made an illustrious contribution to the life of the city, but his
efforts have not always enjoyed a happy outcome. A dramatic example was provided by
his experience at the New-York Historical Society, where Goelet became a trustee in
1961 and assumed the presidency 10 years later. The society had always been a low-
key institution, Goelet's diffident style seemed to suit it well, and for a long
time nothing appeared to be amiss. "The Society is one of the neatest and tidiest
places in town," Goelet boasted in 1976. However, by the late 1980s there was a
sudden explosion of astonishingly bad news: the society not only faced possible
bankruptcy because of fiscal policies that had drastically eroded its endowment
under Goelet's leadership, but also was under fire for destroying many of the
artifacts it was charged with preserving. A confidential consultant's report found
that the society's collections, after years of being stored in "blatantly shocking"
conditions, had suffered such acute deterioration that some items were irreversibly
damaged. Investigating the warehouse where many of the works were held, reporters
found various paintings to be tom, flaking, covered with white mold and mildew,
"splattered with what appeared to be house paint or acid," as The New York Times
put it, or separated from their warped frames and hardened in distorted shapes.

During the resulting uproar, Robert Goelet, who had recently stepped down under
pressure, avoided reporters' calls, offered no answers to the many questions
surrounding his tenure, and managed to sustain a remarkably low profile, given the
number of years he had dominated the organization. In retrospect, says one former
board member, Goelet's stewardship "was a disaster." Trustees complained about
Goelet's refusal to stoop to the kind of vigorous fund-raising necessary to address
the museum's needs and about his less-than-welcoming attitude toward outsiders. "It
was run like a private club," says a board member who served under Goelet. "It was
not open; it was a group of Goelet's friends, and it did not reflect the diversity
or the financial resources of the city." Coming into that environment could be
unsettling for the uninitiated. "There was a whole shadow play going on you never
understood if you didn't understand the language," says the board member. Those who
tried to reach out in new ways were quickly squelched, as Anna Glen Vietor
discovered when she organized a fund-raiser to drum up some much-needed support.

"Bobby's point of view was that fundraising should be on a one-to-one basis where
you sort of sidle up to someone and before you knew it you had half a million
dollars," explains Vietor, a former board member of the society. In fact, Goelet's
old-boy network wasn't coughing up nearly enough money for the museum's needs, but
that didn't make him any more receptive to a different approach. ''I thought the
party was a fun evening, and the younger people thought it was great, but Bobby
was, shall we say, noncommittal about it," Vietor reports. ''It was so difficult to
do anything; every single thing was vetoed." When she finally resigned in
frustration, Goelet ''was not sorry to see me go," she adds. "He said, 'You talk
too much and have too many ideas.' " But despite the debacle at the New-York
Historical Society, Goelet has always managed to sustain a sterling reputation.
When Quest magazine profiled the Goelet family in a 1989 article called "Eleven
Generations of Power and Affluence," it noted that he has always enjoyed the
sobriquet "Good Bobby," to distinguish him from a less revered relative who was
also named Robert. However, Goelet's detractors contend that most of his positions
owe as much to the circumstances of his birth as to actual achievement. "Bob
Goelet's career is not one of accomplishment; it's one of belonging," says one
observer who is well versed in the Gardiner-Goelet dispute. "It comes with the
territory; it's not something he created. He may very well want to make his mark on
history by being the guy who made millions on Gardiners Island." There's nobody
else who has any interests in them, and there's nobody else who has financed them."

The question of the Goelets' intentions is central to the controversy over the
island, and many onlookers have been persuaded by Goelet's credentials and by his
lifelong reputation as a naturalist that he would never try to develop the
property. Indeed, the Goelets have spent years assuring everyone involved that they
want only to preserve it for their children. The problem is, can they be believed?
Although Goelet's custodianship of the New-York Historical Society might give one
pause, the press has tended to accept his sincerity on faith, as have such
concerned officials as the East Hampton town supervisor. "The idea of the Goelets'
developing the island is completely absurd," says Tony Bullock. "You judge people
on their record, and the Goelets have been painstakingly restoring the buildings on
the island, down to the windmill, and rebuilding the dock. They have done nothing
but pump millions of dollars into that island to keep it properly maintained."

However, if the Goelets really don't intend to develop it, their absolute refusal
to agree to any binding commitment to its preservation becomes rather difficult to
understand. The island retains the oneacre zoning it has had for decades, and
Gardiner is waging a vigorous campaign to get it upzoned to at least five acres,
the current maximum, if not to an even higher category, in order to help protect it
from development. "Anyone who's interested in conservation wouldn't want one-acre
zoning, which on this fabulous jewel is an outrage," Gardiner says. The Goelets
have vociferously opposed such a change, claiming that it would devalue the island
and thus make it more vulnerable to a government takeover at some unspecified time
in the future. Some of Bullock's colleagues on the East Hampton town board don't
necessarily share his automatic faith in the Goelets. "I'm not saying they're
lying; I'm saying actions speak louder than words," says Robert D. Cooper, a town
councilman. "I think it should be upzoned to the max." Cooper's credentials as an
arbiter in the dispute are interesting; he is a descendant of Wyandanch, the
powerful Indian chieftain who originally sold the island to Lion Gardiner, became
his blood brother, and later added an enormous tract of land in central Long Island
to the Gardiner holdings after Lion helped him to pay the ransom for the return of
his daughter, who had been kidnapped by a rival tribe on her wedding day.

Even some of those who find the Goelets' argument convincing are troubled by their
refusal to accept any conservation easements. "If the owner were to grant
conservation easements to the town, there would be permanent restrictions on the
property," Bullock explains. "It would prevent any potential development and would
also reduce their tax bill by a factor of roughly 60 percent. It would also show
good faith. If they were to do that, it would put a lot of these development
discussions to bed.... But the Goelets seem unwilling to bend, on advice of
counsel. I've met with the lawyers for the Goelets; they're like pit bulls. Their
concern is that they would have voluntarily devalued [the island] to the point
where the government could come in and buy it. It's all a question of trust. They
don't trust the government. Can you blame them? The Gardiner family has done a far
better job of maintaining this island than any level of government could ever have
done, so why should we go in and screw it up? The Goelets appear to have the kind
of resources that can properly plan for the future, so the next trust that endows
the island won't run out of money."

However, what if the Goelets' assurances prove to be less than trustworthy once
Robert Gardiner is out of the picture? Could Gardiners Island end up studded with
condos and a golf course, or even a Colonial America theme park? Moreover, Gardiner
has recently raised questions about the precise extent of Goelet's resources. He
claims that instead of financing the upkeep of Gardiners Island out of his own
pocket for the last decade Goelet has formed a corporation with a consortium of
relatives so that Gardiners Island would pass into Goelet hands upon Robert
Gardiner's death, rather than simply being inherited by Alexandra and Robert
Goelet's two children. The Goelet interests "have put up the money to bolster Mr.
Goelet, and that's how he was able to do this skulduggery," Gardiner charges.
"Seventy percent of the assets of that corporation will go to people who are not
descended from Lion Gardiner at all!" The Goelets' lawyer, Arthur Field, says this
isn't true: "The trusts are solely for the descendants of Mr. and Mrs. Goelet.

The Goelets had already acquired Alexandra's brother's rights to the island, in a
deal that created great bitterness in the Gardiner family. J. Randall Creel Jr.,
who was reportedly an alcoholic, died of cancer in 1988. Shortly before his death,
he sold the Goelets his rights to the island in exchange for a relatively modest
payment; his mother understood it to be $ 1 million, but Gardiner says he has
recently discovered it was only $300,000. "That's why my sister was so furious,
that her son had been cheated," Gardiner explains. Mrs. Creel made her displeasure
clear in 1989, when she was interviewed by Dinitia Smith of New York magazine about
the Goelets. "They got him to sign his share of the island away for a million
dollars, which is nothing," she said bitterly. "That was pretty nasty. My son-in-
law will tell you it's worth only $10 million. Some real-estate man in East Hampton
offered me $40 million for my half!" Mrs. Creel stopped speaking to her daughter
and has since died, but according to her brother her estate papers contain an
indictment of the Goelets so scathing they managed to have some documents sealed.
"The Goelets are furious about it because it excoriates them," Gardiner explains.

Gardiner also claims that Goelet bought off Randy Creel's young sons for $5,000
each, thereby acquiring half the inheritance rights to the island for a total of
$310,000. The Goelets' lawyer says that this isn't true and the purchase price of
the Creel interests was "in excess of $1.4 million." The Creel boys—whom Gardiner
has also considered adopting—are now in their 20s and won't discuss it; they seem
almost relieved to be removed from the controversy. "My father used to say the
island was just like the Hope diamond—it brought bad luck to everybody," says James
Creel. "It's just caused so much unhappiness." His brother, Lawrence, says only,
"No comment." The Goelets won't talk about it either, evidently believing they are
not answerable to anyone on the subject of Gardiners Island.

They are, however, vulnerable to court decisions, and in mid-October, Surrogate

Court Judge Eve Preminger dealt the Goelets a blow by ruling that they could not
lease the island and exclude Gardiner, as they had proposed to do. Clearly
exasperated at what she termed "the intransigence of the current family members"
despite the fact that the island's maintenance fund has been exhausted, the judge
ruled that "unless voluntary contributions or leasing proposals which do not
exclude family members are forthcoming" the United States Trust Company of New
York, the trustee of the island, should investigate its immediate sale. This, of
course, was just what Gardiner wanted. Within days, the Goelets had capitulated,
announcing that the risk of a sale "is entirely unacceptable to us" and that they
would resume payments for the island's maintenance even as they continue to
challenge Gardiner—whom Alexandra Goelet denounced as "a freeloader"—in court. The
Goelets have filed enough appeals on various aspects of the proceedings to keep the
whole mess tied up in court for months, if not years. But in the meantime, Judge
Preminger seems less than convinced by their assertions of good faith. "Would the
family be willing to legally bind itself for as long a period as would be legally
possible to non-development?" she asked the Goelets' lawyer, Arthur Field, at a
recent hearing. When Field said no, she replied, "You can understand that in that
case it's hard for the Court to accept as a given that there is any interest on the
part of the Goelet interests in refraining from development.... It is from that
refusal that I must draw the conclusion that there is some interest in
development." Field protested, "I think that is an absolutely unwarranted
conclusion."

But to Gardiner, the Goelets' intentions have long been clear. "This whole thing is
a steal," he says. "It's the rape of Gardiners Island by the Goelet family—that's
what the story is."

The late-afternoon shadows are lengthening across the sun-dappled fields of the
island, and as the day draws to a close, Gardiner grows more and more agitated.
There is so much to see, so many of the island's wonders to show the uninitiated
before darkness falls, and the thought of missing anything makes him as frantic as
the turkeys he was chasing a while ago. "Time is of the essence," he keeps
muttering as we hurtle from one landmark to another. "Time is the enemy!"

Finally, however, he acknowledges that it's time to return to the mainland, and we
head for the flagpole on the hill to retrieve his colors. "They're still flying!"
he crows, as if they might have been captured by pirates while we were exploring
his favorite duck blind.

As the Laughing Lady heads back across the bay, a chill wind begins to blow. The
setting sun blazes fiercely across the water. Regretfully, Gardiner turns to look
back, shielding his eyes from the blinding brightness. Behind us, Gardiners Island
recedes like a mirage. He raises his hand, as if in a private benediction, and his
commanding voice drops to a whisper as he offers his final salute. "Now we say
farewell to the enchanted island," he says, and before long the island has
disappeared from view.