If you don’t get here by chopper, you’re not rich enough to stay

New York’s newly moneyed have taken over the Hamptons, leaving the one percenters feeling poor and downtrodden.

The Hamptons place is so packed with billionaires that the millionaires are complaining.

One recent Thursday morning I rushed to the station for a day trip to the Hamptons, New York. I saw a friend who was heading there with a huge party for the weekend. “How did you manage that?” I asked, amazed.

It is still possible to get to the Hamptons from Manhattan, by train or by bus, but staying there is another matter. The place is so packed with billionaires that the millionaires are complaining. This month Vanity Fair published a piece on the “new headache” of Hamptons regulars: “Even richer people.”

“There’s so much money now it’s nauseating,” one longtime homeowner told the glossy magazine. “I’m a 1-per-center, but I bear no resemblance to these people.”

They feel poor and downtrodden, the high street is clogged with Lamborghinis and even a simple thing such as reserving a restaurant table is now regarded as a highwire act. There are just too many rich people who would also like to eat dinner and are willing to offer the maitre d’ the use of their yacht. A restaurateur told me recently that a grocery store magnate had paid him “a five-figure sum” just to hold a table for him for the season. “You are basically renting a house,” he said.

As for actually renting a house, it seemed to compare, cost-wise, to renting an international footballer. So how had my friend managed it?

Well, she replied, one of her friends had grandparents who had bought a place in the 1950s, a lovely rambling house by the beach. The area had gone up-market since then, obviously. They now lived next door to Jon Bon Jovi and Martha Stewart.

A Hamptons beach house. Picture: The Wall Street Journal

Our train appears on one of the boards and there’s a general rush for the platform: couples in Ralph Lauren and young princelings dressed like hip-hop artists. The truly loaded go by helicopter because the train is a faff.

Long Island looks rather like a crocodile, stretching eastwards from Manhattan and opening its jaws. The Hamptons are on the lower jaw. “Southampton is for the nouveau riche because it’s closest to New York,” my friend said. “East Hampton and Amagansett is the old money; Paul McCartney, Jackie Kennedy’s place was out there.”

I suppose McCartney has been knighted, but I love it that we refer to him as old money. Alec Baldwin, who also lives out there, told a story on his podcast of people running into McCartney in the Hamptons as he pootles about on his bike and becoming overcome by the sight of him. He hugs them and tells them it’s all right, Baldwin said.

Paul McCartney pictured walking in the Hamptons in 1997. Picture: News Corp

I had to work on the train and when someone shouted the name Amagansett, and it seemed to be about the right time, I jumped off. It turned out to be Bridgehampton, a stop too soon. I asked a group of young women if there was somewhere to get a taxi and they looked at me as if I were a simpleton. Eventually a Lyft driver arrived, explaining that the 20-minute journey would take at least an hour and would set me back $80. It was 2pm and an unending line of large cars was rumbling slowly east.

It says something about the Hamptons now, that I’ve only been there for work. A predecessor used to have a house out there to which he would surreptitiously migrate during the summer months, hoping that when his editors called they wouldn’t catch the sound of seagulls. Once, a lady rang him to say that she represented a leading American sportsman who was then engulfed in a huge and newsworthy scandal. She said the guy would meet him in mid-town in 20 minutes, which would have been fine if he were in Manhattan. “I remember thinking, ‘Maybe I could get a helicopter,’ ” he told me. Then it turned out the whole thing was a prank, set up by a rival.

By the time I arrived, ten years ago, the Hamptons was prohibitively expensive. You’d see adverts in the papers, offering nice-looking pads for $41,000 a month.

Step inside @AlecBaldwin and @hilariabaldwin's incredible 18th-century farmhouse on Long Island. https://t.co/WibEGW1Wykpic.twitter.com/a3x0fUefax

— ELLE Decor (@ELLEDECOR) April 27, 2017

A New York socialite advised me that it was important, if I were going to advance in society, to become friends with someone who had a place there, but we’ve never quite pulled it off.

“It’s hideous,” a friend assured me, when I called him to ask about his trip there. He and his wife had miraculously become friends with someone who owned a house in East Hampton. “It’s not on the Beyonce side,” his wife said. “Their house is probably a [million dollars], but it’s not crazy.”

“When you walk to the village, the shops are all Ralph Lauren, Calvin Klein,” my friend continued. “Everyone looks like a child of Trump. Pink trousers, buttoned-up shirt tucked in, a lot of paunches, slicked-back hair. That’s the look. The restaurants are all massively overpriced.” At garden parties, where rose is served around the pool, “no one is interested in what you do. It’s all about the money,” he said.

“Everyone is white,” he added. His wife, who is Asian, said she sometimes sees a famous Indian-American actor at some of the parties. “It would just be me and him,” she said.

Once, a few years ago, I had to rush out to the Hamptons to cover a shark fishing tournament. It was being held in Montauk, at the furthest tip of Long Island, once popular with artists and now visited by surfers and a younger crowd who can club together to rent a room there. It was still impossible to find accommodation at the last minute. I considered sleeping on the beach until someone involved with the tournament found me a spare bed. It was beautiful, out on the water. Riding home on someone’s speedboat, we saw a whale leap fully out of the water and land with a crash just off the bow.

“Come on. That’s like Disney World,” one of the fishermen said. That’s more or less how I think of the Hamptons now. When I went more recently, it was to interview the writer Michael Wolff, who had bought a place in Amagansett. I asked him and his wife what they did out there.

“That’s a very good question!” he exclaimed. “What do we do?”

They were planning to eat in a restaurant that night and discussed the plan carefully. A gorgeous beach lay ten minutes in one direction, facing the surging Atlantic.

Walking back with me along the main road, Wolff pointed out a shop where “you can get everything you could get in a normal shop for three times the price”. Then I climbed on to a bus for the long ride back to reality.

The Times