During the French revolution it was quite incorrect to look aristocratic. Courtiers could end up decapitated for having pomegranates embroidered on their jackets or for other breaches of liberty, equality and fraternity. Certain aristos, unable or unwilling to conform to egalitarian ideals, thought it was a cause worthy enough to give up not just their powered wigs, but the heads underneath them.
We sometimes detect the same sense of privilege in Hamptons real estate. When you spend millions or tens of millions of dollars on a home, it is hard to avoid a sense of entitlement. But instead of the threat of a guillotine, fate humbles us with traffic jams on Route 27. Fate does not dare intrude on those privileged few with private helicopters. Only fog does, and presumably their souls will someday be tortured by the remembrance of their carbon footprints. Also presuming they have read Dante.
Madonna is renting on Lily Pond Lane and owns a horse farm in Bridgehampton. Famous names and extravagant amounts of money are deliciously newsy. But the people who drive the real estate market here are usually not famous or even particularly glamorous. They are however rich—although less rich than they were a few years ago. In their world big bank accounts are the only credentials you need for entitlement. Even as the general economy struggles, the super rich, in some eerie Darwinian way, are expanding and driving the merely rich into the shadows, if not quite into extinction.
Being outrageously rich in the Hamptons is a populist sport. Our everyman, our average Joe, really looks like everyone else, acts like everyone else, wears the same jeans and sneakers, but he measures his millions in the double or triple digits. They are so young they make anyone over fifty feel like a dinosaur and anyone with less than twenty million a little shabby.