Something Happened on Skimhampton Road

2021 marks the 60th anniversary of the publication of Catch-22. According to New York Magazine, although Catch-22 was a best seller, novelist Joseph Heller’s former East Hampton home was not. The three-bedroom cottage—where the author died in 1999—went on the market in 2005 with a $3.65 million price tag. It was cut to $3.2 million after nine months. It was later taken off the market and reappeared in the spring of 2007 listed at $3.1 million.

With its literary pedigree, posh neighbors (including real-estate mogul Arthur Zeckendorf and New Yorker architecture critic Paul Goldberger), and an acre of land why wouldn’t it sell? It even had a separate studio where Heller wrote his novels, and a poolside patio where he read them. “It’s a very good south-of-the-highway location,” says Corcoran’s Elaine Stimmel, who saw the house when it first went on the market. “But it needed a bit of work, and most buyers out here don’t want a project.”

The house finally sold in 2015 for $2.28 million. According to Brown Harris Stevens listing agent Mary Ellen McGuire, "Joseph Heller’s home was on and off the market after he passed, and the asking price adjusted to the market. His widow was the driving force. Joe was a very good friend and neighbor."

From the BHS listing website:

This very special property is sited on a full acre on one of East Hampton's most prestigious lanes, minutes from pristine ocean beaches. Home to one of America's most celebrated authors, the lovely cottage-style house displays elegant charm throughout.

Staging and Marketing for Success

What can we learn from this high-profile example? What steps could have encouraged a quick sale at the original asking price back in 2005? Were problems exposed during the home inspection tours? Or was it simply a matter of sentimental attachment to the cottage? Family properties, especially vacation homes, are hard to part with, even if infrequently used after the death of a loved one.

One strategy is to turn a family getaway into a rental property for a few years, and then to do what is called a 1031 exchange. Owners of investment properties, condos, houses and multi-unit residential and commercial buildings can defer paying high capital gains taxes when they sell and purchase another (Like-Kind) property held for investment. Read more on Investopedia.

There are 12 lovely photographs on the listing, but the house looks dated. Did they stage the property, and make the necessary repairs and upgrades before putting it on the market back in 2005? Just the same, the Hellers' cozy beach cottage in the Hamptons could benefit from an updated interior, even if only virtually staged to preserve historical artifacts.

Everyone loves to watch a good video walkthrough. For my own preferences, I would have liked to have seen a marketing campaign that more closely resembled Newport Beach, California than Newport, Rhode Island, befitting of a world famous author. But perhaps East Coast discretion and restraint precluded that. 

Read about the 10 video influencers to keep on your radar for 2021 on Inman and the Three Global Luxury Property Specialists as Top Video Influencers on the Coldwell Banker blog.

Catching up with Joseph Heller

When my father, David Eskey, was an undergraduate at Penn State, he took an English Composition class from Joseph Heller. The year was 1951. You may recognize Heller as the author of Catch-22, a best-selling novel that became a cult classic during the Vietnam war, but you may not know that he was also a writing teacher. Joseph Heller took a liking to my father's short stories, and introduced him to his literary agents, Mavis McIntosh and Elizabeth McKee. At the time, neither of them were famous, although Heller had published a few short stories in places like the Atlantic Monthly. My father worked closely with Heller over the next few years, with Joe providing meticulous notes in red and green pencil in the margins of Dad's handwritten and typewritten drafts.

Then, in December of 1953, he sent Heller a book prospectus. Although I have copies of all of my father's short stories (8 still unpublished), the book prospectus has disappeared from his file. In 1955, Heller published what was then called Catch-18 in New World Writing, No. 7. It was the first chapter of what would eventually become a complete novel called Catch-22. Five years later, in 1960, Dad was on a plane to Baghdad, to teach English in a remote outpost in Iraq. It was there that he married my mother. I was born the following year, back in Pittsburgh, in 1961.

Robert Gottlieb at Simon & Schuster

After its release in Great Britain in 1962, Catch-22 sold a million copies, and made Joseph Heller a household name. His editor was Robert Gottlieb, and his publisher was Simon & Schuster. Gottlieb had risen up the ranks, after Jack Goodman, the Editorial Director, had died suddenly at the age of 47. In all, six senior executives at S&S were gone, and Gottlieb was at the helm.

From Ono, which is set at Artman’s Bar in mid-December. It is a holiday reunion party, and everyone is there, including my father’s alter ego, Dave Ellas, who shows up in 5 of the 8 short stories:

Fine, coldly brilliant, the thin crescent of the new moon edged the dead shadow of the old, reachless high, incontestable, cat's eye of night, the restless immensity of the dark sky rolling over, and down around and away.

In an era where fiction writing is a dying art, these stories are in the Top 1%. They passed review by Joseph Heller and his literary agents, and survive today remarkably intact. Curtis Brown, a literary agency in New York City, has expressed tentative interest in publishing the collection posthumously. I am thrilled to be able to finish what my father started so many years ago, and hope to find a publisher who will do them justice.

He lay back and heard the slow squish of the cars passing back and forth over rainy Ridge Road as if from far away. It rained all day Saturday. The spring rain fell like early tears, an hour and hour downpour, big warm drops tumbling down one after another and spattering quietly in the street, as though a sad god were crying softly over the town. He tramped down the same old thirteen steps and out onto the Ridge Road sidewalk, into the rain.

The Apthorp

Heller was living at the Apthorp when Catch-18 was published, sharing the apartment building with aging actresses and ballet stars, opera singers, a CIA spy and a collection of famous psychoanalysts. Even with uniformed door attendants, the building was poorly maintained. Fuses would blow and toilets would leak, but as Nora Ephron wrote in her piece in the New Yorker, it was a pretty good deal to live in the Apthorp in the 70s and 80s.

In 1973, Heller's second novel, Something Happened, was released. From a review by Carmen Pettacio in the Los Angeles Review of Books:

Joseph Heller spent more than a decade writing the novel and was so convinced of its genius that he stashed manuscripts all over Manhattan, ensuring that Something Happened would survive in the event his apartment burned down. When he finally brought the completed draft to his agent, he forced his daughter to accompany him on the trip — so she could deliver the pages in case he suffered a coronary or got hit by a bus.

Erica Heller was born in Manhattan on 1 February 1952. That was the same year that her family moved to the Apthorp Building, a historic condominium built in 1908 for William Waldorf Astor, former owner of The Observer. Its central courtyard had manicured lawns, fountains, limestone statues, and resembled a European luxury hotel. Thanks to luxury rent decontrol for annual salaries above $200K, in later years, large apartments at the Apthorp changed hands for millions of dollars. Former tenants include Cyndi Lauper, Rosie O'Donnell and Al Pacino. Now, that is mostly over thanks to the Housing Stability And Protection Act of 2019. Today, as a long-standing resident, Erica Heller benefits from a fixed, affordable rent.

The Gourmet Club

The soaring Hamptons real estate prices of the 1980s were no deterrent to bestselling authors. Joseph Heller bought his 3-bedroom cottage at 68 Skimhampton Road at Amagansett in 1982. For many years, Heller could be found lunching with Godfather author Mario Puzo and some other writers at Barrister’s in Southampton (now defunct). Since 1985, Puzo had summered at his home on Pantigo Road in East Hampton. Sometimes they were joined by Mel Brooks, who was staying at his house on Flying Point Lane in Water Mill.

The gatherings had begun years earlier, while Heller was still living at the Apthorp in Manhattan. The group, dubbed by its own members as the "Gourmet Club," included Mel Brooks, Zero Mostel, Mario Puzo, George Mandel, Speed Vogel, Joe Stein, Carl Reiner and select others. They met weekly, and usually ate in Chinatown, seated at a big oblong table. They told inside jokes and ate plenty of chicken fried rice, but their private schemes were shrouded in elaborate secrecy. We can only speculate what they were discussing behind closed doors in Chinatown, and we can only speculate what happened to my father’s book prospectus, as most of the writers, including my father, are no longer alive. Robert Gottlieb, however, is still living in New York City, and may have some of the answers. I wonder if he also has my father's missing book prospectus? I wonder if he has read his 8 short stories?

Sources:

Midnight at the Rickshaw Garage

The Chinese Gourmet Club

Robert Gottlieb: Avid Reader, Reluctant Writer

Barrister's Will Close Its Doors Sunday | Southampton, NY Patch

Joseph Heller's East Hampton House Still Has No Takers

'My dad was diabolical': Erica Heller reveals the shocking truth about life with a literary giant

These Famous Writers Made the Hamptons a Literary Mecca

What it's really like to live at the Apthorp

The War for Catch-22