Gala Goers Schvitz in Hamptons Heatwave; Alec Baldwin Chills Out

(Bloomberg) -- Fortunately for artist Julian Schnabel, unbuttoning his shirt Saturday night was in keeping with his fashion persona.

Others just sweated it out at the annual gala for LongHouse Reserve in East Hampton, a sculpture garden where cobalt-blue glass spikes by Dale Chihuly rise out of giant ferns and a Yoko Ono all-white chess set breaks the monotony of a manicured lawn.

Jack Lenor Larsen rose to fame as a textile artist before turning his attention to shaping the woods around his home for public enjoyment. The transformation of the landscape never ceases.

On this evening, the man-made dunes were covered in thousands of rose petals and the pool was filled with roses, all the better to scent the too-still night air.

Schnabel’s son, Vito, and Zac Posen found a cool spot on a bronze bench by Wendell Castle. Donna Karan’s cooling strategy was to wear white and stay moving “to see all the art,” she said. During dinner, she and Julian Schnabel were honored, and Benjamin Clementine performed, providing a degree of distraction from the sweltering heat.

In the comfort of the air-conditioned Avram Theater in Southampton, before the heatwave, Alec Baldwin traced his love of classical music to when he was in his 20s, driving around Los Angeles.

“I was listening to popular music in a car, it was 1986 I guess, and I turned on the classical station, and thus began my journey,” Baldwin said. Now, “the only thing I listen to is classical music. It’s what I collect and download. I look for a Mahler a few more seconds longer so I can hear a different version.”

His story was quite different from those of the pianists he joined during one of Pianofest’s weekly concerts. The performances, which run through Aug. 12, are a highlight of the Hamptons cultural scene, alternating between the Avram and St. Luke’s Episcopal Church in East Hampton.

The festival brings together musicians in the early stages of their careers in a house filled with Steinways. They practice 10 to 12 hours a day, relax at the beach, and perform the craft most of them have been honing since they were preschoolers.

“While I was watching ‘Gilligan’s Island,’ you were playing Beethoven,” Baldwin said.

“I was 11,” said Matt Griswold, revealing the age he discovered classical music via a YouTube video of Vladimir Horowitz. “I love pop music,” he said. “To me, great art music contains the full gamut of human emotion and experience.”

For Baldwin, attending Pianofest concerts is one way to get up to speed on a genre he didn’t grow up listening to, especially with the context provided by the nonprofit’s founder, Paul Schenly, head of the Cleveland Institute of Music piano department.

“Please regale us with your musicological notes,” Baldwin said after a performance of Chopin’s Preludes.

“One of the difficulties of playing the Preludes is that you have to go instantly from one mood to the other,” Schenly said. “On the other hand, they’re easier in some ways than playing a Beethoven sonata, where there are different contrasting themes but they all have to stay approximately the same tempo.”

Baldwin peppered the pianists with questions, as he does on his NPR podcast “Here’s the Thing.” To Emilija Rozukaite, he asked about what it was like to take up the piano as a young girl.

“The first 10 years were really painful," Rozukaite said. “I just wanted to be in the fields barefoot and run around. Then I had difficulties in my family and music just saved me.”

Baldwin then asked whether it’s a good idea as a parent to push your kids toward music.

“If the child picks it up himself, why not?” Rozukaite replied. “But I have to warn you, it’s a very difficult profession, emotionally, financially -- but also rewarding, most of the time.”

Reflections on a Wall Street career was the topic of a less musical, more moneyed event at the bookstore BookHampton. The entertainment was investment banker turned author Peter Solomon in conversation with Jim Zirin, and the East Hampton audience included Ralph Schlosstein, Byron Wien and Tom Hill, who sounded enthusiastic about his new role helping Two Sigma quants get in the long game.

The theme of Solomon’s self-published book, “Wasting Time Constructively,” is how he navigated Lehman Brothers and built his own boutique investment bank. He recalled interviewing Steve Schwarzman for Lehman, during which the applicant said he’d become president of the Yale Ballet Club because it was a good way to meet women. “Wow, I thought, a perfect investment banker!” Solomon wrote.

There are blow-by-blow accounts of successful deals and ones that got away, like failing to convince the owners of Mr. Coffee to sell in 1976, and being unable to persuade Lehman partners to take the Beatles’ music company as a client.

There’s a guide on deciding whether or not to go to business school, what can be learned by junior bankers when senior bankers invite them to lunches and parties, and a cautionary tale about eating clams in Rome. Occasionally, Solomon breaks from business to tell some tales of his time in Mayor Ed Koch’s administration, particularly the incident that put him in front of a group of truckers in 1979.

Agitated by gas price increases, the truckers took to the Long Island Expressway, threatening to block the Queens Midtown Tunnel and Queensboro Bridge unless they got to speak to the mayor. Koch was out of town, so Solomon was sent there in a helicopter with little time to puzzle through the situation.

“In this case, I pretended to be That Guy Who Knows What He’s Doing,” Solomon wrote. “I leaped from the chopper, looking tough, decisive, aggressive. It was an act, but I must admit, a pretty good one.”

To contact the reporter on this story: Amanda Gordon in New York at agordon01@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Pierre Paulden at ppaulden@bloomberg.net, Steven Crabill, Peter Eichenbaum

©2019 Bloomberg L.P.