Imagine the shock. I return to my home town for my 40th high school reunion, only to find it invaded by terrifying aliens from another world.
I don’t mean those creepy, crawly, scum-covered, over-mandibled aliens encountered in Hollywood movies like “Independence Day.” I’m talking about something even scarier–aliens you encounter in Hollywood, period.
I’m talking about invaders such as Richard Gere, who moved here with his horse (though, thankfully, not with his ex-wife, Cindy); Susan Sarandon and Tim Robbins; B-movie comic Chevy Chase; David Letterman pal Paul Schaffer; designer Ralph Lauren; Sony Music mogul Tommy Mottola; and kindred more.
As the New York Times put it: “This quiet stretch of Westchester County (is evolving) into one of the most glittering addresses in entertainment.”
As my friend Claire (whose family began evolving here in the 1700s, and donated the revered, five-century-old Bedford oak to the village 50 years ago) put it, they’re simply “not Bedford.”
Please don’t infer snobbery here. Ours was a public school–not prep. I am a mere newspaperman. One of my favorite classmates has a vintage baseball card business on Cape Cod.
But ours is one of a long succession of generations that succeeded in keeping Bedford just as it is (or, at least, was): a pristinely preserved, Colonial-era community of old, mostly-white houses gathered around a rolling village green in the Westchester hills some 50 miles north of Manhattan.
Except for that beastly Brit, Banastre Tarleton’s, burning the place down in 1779, and some idiot committee’s recent decision to install Victorian gas lights on the main street (which are about as relevant to its period as neon), Bedford has withstood every attempt to change it.
Until now. Enter Hollywood. It was bad enough when the “Bedford Eat” became the “Bedford Bistro.” I fear a Bedford Spago and Bedford Morton’s won’t be far behind. If not a Planet Bedford.
I certainly have nothing against show biz folk per se. My mother was an actress. In my youth, Bedford was home to Joseph Cotten, Benny Goodman, David Selznick, Tallulah Bankhead and Gabby Hayes. The prettiest girl in town back then grew up to become Ali McGraw.
But they lived discreetly and circumspectly (as, I must admit, do a couple of the more gracious and well-bred newcomers, Glenn Close and Christopher Reeve).
True, Tallulah seldom, if ever, wore clothes, and was frequently to be observed (at least by us delivering peat moss to her estate) cavorting in her nakeds by her pool with a gaggle of similarly sportive young men.
But she kept all that private. You find Gere’s ex-wife near, or totally, naked in magazines, movies and on computer screens. And, unlike the Geres, Tallulah never took out huge newspaper ads proclaiming her heterosexuality.
It’s not that Lauren originally comes from Brooklyn or is a fashion designer. In my day, Bedford had Lilly Dache and Max Factor.
But Lauren has attached himself to Bedford as though it were Windsor Castle and his ancestors had built it. He’s even named a line of his not terribly expensive designer glassware “Bedford.” It’s all so faux.
This isn’t the first time these invaders have broken out of their Malibu, Beverly Hills and Manhattan habitats and swooped down on innocent communities like killer bees moving up from Central America. They’ve hit other places first.
In his new novel “Further Lane,” Parade magazine columnist Jim Brady laments their effect on his beloved Hamptons on Long Island.
“If you follow Liz Smith and People magazine or watch `Entertainment Tonight’ on the tube and have a subscription to Vanity Fair,” he wrote, “you may get the impression East Hampton is a Hollywood production, founded quite recently by Steven Spielberg, Demi Moore and the Baldwin brothers. Those of us who live here know it wasn’t motion picture people who first settled East Hampton but dry, cranky old Puritans out of Maidstone, England, wandering down via Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1640; the first movie stars not to arrive until slightly afterwards.”
The plot of Brady’s lively little book revolves around the murder of someone very, very suspiciously like Martha Stewart, who is stabbed through the heart with a stake from a privet hedge as she returns from a nude midnight swim.
Maybe that’s what has all the glitzies spooked and moving to Bedford. Maybe Demi and the Baldwins will be next.
In which case, I’d better get to work on my new novel set in Bedford. It’s about a fiend who injects E-coli bacteria into cappucino machines.
