Author Steven Gaines Opens Up About New Book, Hamptons Life

It’s a Saturday morning in the heat of the summer season and the Candy Kitchen on Main Street in Bridgehampton is a veritable who’s who of Hamptons A-listers.

Jerry Della Femina and his wife Judy hold court in one booth in the eatery, where photographs of days gone by line the walls of the airy blue and white ice cream parlor. Nearby, former Mayor Rudy Giuliani and his wife Judith are sharing a meal and talking quietly.

Sitting on a stool, reading the newspaper and nattily attired in striped seersucker trousers and a crisp white shirt, author Steven Gaines, whose new book “One of These Things First: A Memoir” is garnering critical acclaim, greets a guest with a warm smile.

Gaines, a familiar face in the Hamptons, is very much in his element, greeting the array of notables with conversation and humor, stopping to chat with the Giulianis and kissing Judith’s hand gallantly.

The best-selling author has published a string of acclaimed works including “Philistines at the Hedgerow: Passion and Property in the Hamptons”; “The Sky’s the Limit: Passion and Property in Manhattan; Simply Halston”, a biography of the legendary designer; and “Heroes and Villains: The True Story of the Beach Boys”; he also co-authored of “The Love You Make: An Insider’s Story of the Beatles” with Peter Brown.

But his new work, “One of These Things First: A Memoir”, is both a heartbreaking and uplifting departure for Gaines.

It’s a deeply personal work that tells, straight from the heart, the story of a teenager who, crippled with pain over the realization that he might be gay, and ridiculed by his peers, tries to commit suicide at his grandmother’s bra and girdle store in Brooklyn.

What ensues is a stay at the upscale Payne Whitney Psychiatric Clinic — frequented by Marilyn Monroe and a cast of artists and luminaries.

There, he meets theater producer Richard Halliday, who introduces Gaines to a new world of Brooks Brothers shoes and glittering New York City skyline views that promises a future a long ride from the El train back home.

Meeting Halliday’s wife, Gaines’ Peter Pan idol Mary Martin, who suggests books for the 15-year-old to read, is a pinnacle of the stay.

Gaines has been riding the crest of public and professional acclaim since the book was released by Delphinium/HarperCollins on Aug. 9.

“With a gimlet eye and a true gift for storytelling, Gaines captures his childhood shtetl in Brooklyn like an Edward Hopper tableau, with all its dramas and secrets: his philandering grandfather with his fleet of Cadillacs and Corvettes; a trio of harpy saleswomen; a giant, empty move theater, his portal to the outside world; a shirtless teenage boy pushing a lawnmower in front of a house on Long Island, and a pair of tormenting bullies who own the corner candy store whose taunts drive him to a suicide attempt,” a description on the HarperCollins site reads.

And from the New York Times Book Review: “One of These Things First is not only a departure but an absolute treasure. [Gaines is] a skilled humorist as well as a tender yet trenchant observer of human behavior and the social forces that so often control it.”

Gaines, whose work has also appeared in Vanity Fair, the New York Observer, the New York Times, and New York Magazine, is co-founder and past vice-chairman of the Hamptons International Film Festival. He’s well known on the East End for his radio show, Sunday Brunch Live from the American Hotel in Sag Harbor, and he created iHamptons.com, an online publication.

Sitting with Gaines in a Candy Kitchen booth as he orders a chicken salad sandwich on wheat toast and a vanilla malted, it’s easy to forget the parade of celebrities and well-known personalities in the room and listen only to the writer, a man who brings his Brooklyn childhood to life with vivid clarity, the recollections as close as a heartbeat.

Steven Gaines is, without question, a storyteller.

He weaves together snippets of memories, a tapestry colored by vibrant characters and a rich story redolent of a long-ago, faraway Brooklyn where “homos” were shunned and “fairies” shamed.

Gaines says, that as a child, he was told, time and again that he’d “come to no good.”

Remembering Brooklyn

He grew up in a Borough Park neighborhood, under the El and near the Culver Luncheonette and Culver Theater, a glorious grand dame of a movie house where the little boy would spend hours memorizing lines and watching films again and again until the images were seared into his memory.

Brooklyn, Gaines said, was “authentic, very real, very down to earth. No one put on airs.”

He was a Brooklyn boy whose father was a guidance counselor and whose mother worked as a bookkeeper.

But, while the neighbors were welcoming to those who fit in, “If you didn’t fit in, if you were different — then it wasn’t great,” he said.

Gaines knew, from an early age, that he was different.

Even at eight years old, when the kids put valentines into a big box, he wasn’t interested in sending any to girls.

When puberty hit, and he had feelings for boys, life became painfully difficult, he said. “I had great shame. I was a freak. This was nothing I could tell my parents, or discuss with them.”

The book, Gaines said, isn’t meant to just be about being gay, or even about a suicide attempt at 15 where, according to the book, he smashed his arms through a glass window of the bra and girdle shop, “sawed” his wrists and forearms “twice back and forth across that shards that held in the frame.”

It’s not about being a little boy who, plagued with undiagnosed and untreated obsessive compulsive disorder, was unable to attend school and spent days hiding in a big packing box at his grandparents’ store, peeping through a pinhole at the inexplicable parade of women passing by with their mysterious stories of private parts as they purchased silk stockings and paid for brassieres.

Instead, Gaines said, the book is meant to celebrate his discovery at Payne Whitney of the erudite men and women who lived in a world of sophistication and culture, the new life that opened to him when he was admitted for treatment after his suicide attempt.

“The real story is about what it was like to be in this incredible psychiatric clinic with these successful, worldly people and how they changed me, showed me a whole new world available to me. It’s about how a psychiatric hospital could be a chrysalis. I was Pygmalion. It was great.”

Broadway producer Richard Halliday, he said, “took me under his wing.” He asked Gaines if he’d lied to his psychiatrist, and said lying would be foolish, “wasting time.”

And so, Gaines writes in his book, “I sat down at the desk in my room and as Lana Turner tears of self-pity rolled down my cheeks, I wrote, ‘I THINK I AM A HOMOSEXUAL,’ in capital letters, signed it, sealed it, addressed it” to his psychiatrist, Dr. Wayne Myers, who spent years trying to “cure” him.

“He told me that he could cure me, that I didn’t have to be sick,” Gaines said. “I didn’t want to live my life like that, I wanted to die. He wasn’t on a witch hunt. He was trying to help me. I was miserable.”

In today’s world, Gaines said, there are suicide hotlines for teens struggling with their sexuality, and many strong role models to help guide the way.

“The world has changed drastically since I was a kid. When you live in a very cloistered kind of community, when there’s no escape, no one to tell you it’s going to be okay, and you can’t find other role models,” suicide often seems the only option, he said.

Speaking out against today’s political climate, Gaines said, “A plank in the Republican party’s platform is that parents should be able to give their children reparative therapy, that’s an outrage.”

According to Time.com, the GOP platform contemplates embracing conversion therapy.

“It’s like saying you can waterboard your children,” Gaines said. “Everyone thinks the world’s so changed. It’s not changed at all.”

A writer takes flight

Telling the story of how the chapters of his life unfolded, Gaines said after leaving the psychiatric facility, he headed right back into a Brooklyn high school, where one girl’s father wouldn’t let her date him because he was “an ex-mental patient.”

Smiling, he said, “I fell in with the popular crowd. I ran for best dressed boy, which is the equivalent of the class gay.”

Later in life, Gaines, who attended film school at New York University, found his calling while working in a “downscale auction gallery, moving furniture,” and hanging out at Max’s Kansas City, a club where artists and writers gathered in the 60s and 70s

One night, child evangelist Marjoe Gortner came in, wearing cowboy boots with crosses and with a tale so captivating Gaines told him it ought to be a book.

“He told me, ‘If you can sell it, you can write it,’” Gaines said.

And so he did.

The book was published by Harper & Row and the documentary, “Marjoe” won the 1972 Academy Award for Best Documentary.

When he went back home to his grandparents’ shop, Rose’s Bras Girdles Sportswear, and told them he had a book contract, Gaines said, “Nobody believed me. But it was true.”

With his newfound success, Gaines bought his parents tickets to Europe.

Siren Song of East Hampton

Once he got the first book contract, a friend told Gaines that to write, he needed to get out of the city, and steered him to Springs.

This was back in the 70s, Gaines said, when the sidewalks were rolled up come September.

There may have been nowhere to buy food after 5 p.m. in the dead of January — ”Now, the gas stations have food,” Gaines said — but the emerging writer was smitten with the sleepy town and siren song of the sea.

It was in East Hampton that he honed his craft. “I didn’t know how to write, so what I did was, I went to the East Hampton Library every day. I took a biography every day and I sat at a table with a pad and took notes.”

Over the years, Gaines, a “Top of the Pop” columnist for the Daily News, also wrote an autobiography about Alice Cooper, “Me, Alice,” and lived with him for a year, traveling the world with the rock star.

The book was a critical success; today, first edition copies sell for approximately $2,000; the book has been named one of the Top 10 rock and roll books, Gaines aid.

Later, he found his way back to the Hamptons, where he first lived on Meadow Lane in Southampton before finally settling in Wainscott.

He’s proud of the longevity of the Hamptons International Film Festival, which he co-founded. “It’s fulfilling because it wasn’t just a one year thing. It grew, and it turned out it really did have legs, and became an important international film festival. That’s really, really amazing to me,” he said.

Despite the glamour of a star-studded life, Gaines is, at heart, a gentle spirit, who speaks tenderly about his Lab mix, Shep, a rescue dog with whom he spends much time on the beach in the Hamptons. So deep is his love for four-footed friends that he’ll stop in the street, get down on his knees, and hug dogs, he said.

A dream realized

“One of These Things First”, Gaines said, is a book that’s been waiting to be told for 50 years. He’s about to turn 70 in November, so the time was right.

“I’ve written about so many other people, other things, for commercial value,” he said. “I just thought, ‘This time, it’s going to be about me. I need to tell this story.’”

Gaines said he was fully prepared for the book to “go unnoticed” and was “shocked” when the glowing reviews began to pour in. “It’s just astonishing. I feel very gratified,” he said.

The book was written in his home of the heart, East Hampton. “It’s a great, nurturing environment for artists and writers. It’s a wonderful place, a community of very supportive people,” he said.

Writing the book brought Gaines back to a childhood where long-ago pain and deep ties still exist.

“I had to unearth feelings I had about people who are long dead. I had to revisit them, bring them to life — and say good-bye again,” Gaines said. “That was a very difficult thing to do. I had to relive that apartment, above the store.”

Of his old home, 4315 18th Avenue, Gaines writes in his book, “I promise myself that I won’t go back there anymore. Nostalgia is dangerous. I continue to try to remember my childhood so I can understand it better, yet I don’t know what it is I’m trying to understand. . . We were just another frayed thread in an infinite tapestry.”

And yet.

So strong is the instinct to go home, to the place where it all began, that Gaines said he found himself pulling up an image of the address online, only to find that it had been “completely enveloped in flames,” destroyed by fire. “I thought it was amazing, the place has been cleansed by fire,” he said. “That kind of sewed up things up for me.”

Today, the home has been rebuilt; the home is for rent. Gaines has sometimes found himself contemplating a move to the old neighborhood. “But then I think, ‘Why would I want to go back, to that same place?”

It’s those stories from childhood that live forever in memories, he said, those ties that have proven eternal.

When he’d finally begun to realize his dreams, Gaines went to his grandfather’s mistress, Katherine, who lived with his grandparents, cohabitating as an unlikely trio until his grandfather left the family for a younger woman he met at the bank.

Katherine, upon learning she had breast cancer, refused to seek treatment unless Gaines’ grandfather came home; when he didn’t, her cancer had spread and it was too late to seek treatment.

“I went to her and gave her the first copy of the book, because I knew she wasn’t going to be around long,” he said.

“She said, ‘You want me to see your success.’ Everyone had always said, ‘He’s going to come to no good.’ I wanted people to see I did come to some good.”

Photo by Lisa Finn.