Joanne Kaufman at the New
York Times offers an interesting and amusing piece on author Nelson DeMille’s dream house.
What would a celebrity
profile be without some rich biographical detail? So here’s a little something
to get the ball rolling: Nelson DeMille’s father, Huron, was a contractor.
Chew on it. Ponder it as you
learn that despite the father’s occupation, the son — the best-selling author
of thrillers like “Plum Island,” “Night Fall” and “Wild Fire” — didn’t think
twice about writing a very large check for a house in the exclusive Hill
section of Garden City, N.Y., a house whose foundation he had never probed,
whose wiring he had never investigated and whose plumbing was a mystery. Truth
to tell, he had only ever seen the place at night, as a guest of the owners.
“It looked great when I was
there for parties,” said Mr. DeMille, 73, whose new novel, “The Cuban Affair,”
will be published next month by Simon & Schuster. Then there was the
provenance: The shingle-style manse had been built in the early 1920s by a
business partner of Howard Hughes.
After the deal closed, in
1998, Mr. DeMille began strolling around his new acquisition, promptly realized
the place was a wreck and called in a group of contractors, who, he recalled,
“scratched their heads.” One of those head-scratchers was Mr. DeMille’s very
own brother, who didn’t mince words: “Tear it down,” his brother said,
channeling the movie “Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House.” Well, O.K.
Admirably, the wry Mr.
DeMille took the whole thing in stride. “Maybe I always knew in the back of my
mind that I was buying a building lot for a lot of money,” he said. “People
always say, ‘Location, location, location,’ and houses on the Hill don’t come up
for sale very often.
“I’d always fantasized about
big houses,” Mr. DeMille continued. “I like to be able to wander around them.
There are things you can do in a big house that you can’t do in a smaller
house, like have the whole family over. I think that’s one of the reasons I
wrote ‘Gold Coast,’” he said, referring to his 1990 novel set amid the lavish
mansions of Long Island’s North Shore. “But even when I became a best seller, I
lived in modest places. Now I had the chance to build my own house.”
You can read the rest of the
piece via the below link:
You can also read my
Counterterrorism magazine interview with Nelson DeMille via the below link:
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