In the Hamptons, the founder of Dan's Papers is known for his trademark hoaxes, from lions set loose to control North Haven's deer population to butchers donating meat dropped from police helicopters to sharks, right before "Jaws" debuted.
But it was a fake news account about abandoned real estate that really got Dan Rattiner's hoaxes noticed.
Decades ago, when reclusive billionaire businessman Howard Hughes left his Las Vegas penthouse, no one knew where he was. Rattiner put him in Montauk. Hughes' new whereabouts, the newsman wrote, was the "penthouse" of a long-abandoned, seven-story office building in Montauk. The story got tourists and locals staring at the building.
"That was some hoax," Rattiner said. "People believed he was up there, and they were taking pictures."
Such hoaxes are part of the stuff of Rattiner's memoir due out in May from Harmony Books, "In the Hamptons My Fifty Years with Farmers, Fishermen, Artists, Billionaires, and Celebrities." The author talks about the "mogulization" of the Hamptons and the effect on that great and precious commodity -- land -- as in "someone bought a property for seven thousand bucks and just sold it for $28 million."
Rattiner has read about people "crying in their beers" after buying an acre for $50 long ago, selling it for $500, then finding out they could have reaped $5,000 and more today.
He’s got his own, similar tale. In 1968, he paid $2,500 for about a quarter acre of land in Montauk, a short walk from the ocean, and sold it a few years later for $4,500.
"I was really excited that I had done that," he said. "It’s like doubling your money in four years. That lot today is probably worth about a million."
But Rattiner’s not filling his cups with tears. As he noticed the changes in the Hamptons, the paper man bought a house and the Bridgehampton building where Dan’s Papers has its office.
The modern landscape of the East End is far cry from the fears of encroaching suburbia in Rattiner's youth.
When he was a kid and his family moved in 1960 from New Jersey to Montauk, Rattiner said, the East End used to be a place of factories, winter welfare for fishermen and dirt roads. The Long Island Expressway went as far as Great Neck, he recalled, and Sag Harbor, with military contractors long gone in peace time, was in dire danger of becoming an abandoned village. Artists, from Andy Warhol to playwright Edward Albee ("Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?"), lived and worked out east. Albee wrote the foreword to Rattiner's new book.
Rattiner writes about how the Hamptons came to be, including the time he mapped out all the roads and dirt lanes and named them, publishing it all in his paper. When legitimate maps came out, he saw that his "Werewolf Path" in East Hampton had stuck.
The history is what Rattiner wants to record through his book's first-hand accounting, to preserve what the East End had been, a place that let sleeping dogs lie, before such memories fall to time.
"What I saw at that time was cowboys and ranches out in Montauk and fishing villages," he said. "The Hamptons were totally unknown at that time. A dog could fall asleep in the main street on the white line in the middle of summer . . . You could go to any beach you want.
"Today the place is Beverly Hills. It's a glittering, international resort."