Paul Hallingby Jr. loves this Caribbean enclave’s coral-colored houses, its worn chintz, engraved stationery and imported household help. He treasures what he calls his “old-fashioned beach house”: a $9 million, 6,500-square-foot villa with two circular driveways and a private beach.
Then there is the always-reassuring sight of the neighboring Lyford Cay Club, a pink mansion with Tara-style white columns, where Hallingby, a managing director emeritus of Bear, Stearns & Co., has been a member for 16 years.
He and his friends Sandra McConnell, an Avon heiress, and Bill Paley Jr., a son of William S. Paley and the beautiful Babe Paley, appreciate the club’s conservative prohibitions. Couples must be married to stay overnight, public displays of affection are frowned upon and bikinis cannot be itsy-bitsy.
Everybody still chuckles at the scolding Sir John M. Templeton, the British philanthropist, received for wearing white bathing trunks that went transparent when he hit the water.
“It’s a very pleasant social life,” Hallingby said of this thousand-acre gated resort community 12 minutes from Nassau.
Here on “Lifeless Cay,” as many residents have called it, there are no stores, no restaurants, no Manolo Blahniks. At least, not at the moment. But the clicking of those sky-high heels is getting closer.
The worlds of fashion, celebrity and shiny new money, are invading this part of the paradise where the Duke of Windsor once reigned as governor.
Where reasonable-size villas once ruled, 50,000-square-foot houses are springing up.
“Who needs that?” Hallingby said. He is considering selling up and moving out.
Is the last bastion of civilized society in danger of becoming extinct? Like Southampton, N.Y., Greenwich, Conn., and most recently Palm Beach, Fla., Lyford Cay is being invaded by the young and the feckless. Almost nobody likes it.
“This always happens to gated communities,” said Elliott Sclar, director of the Urban Planning Program at Columbia University. “The middle class always ruins the upper class’s fun.”
Especially, he added, when the middle class has money.
So habitues of this Eisenhower-era retreat for the uber-moneyed set — Nicholas F. Brady, the former secretary of state; the Bacardi family — now confront party-hearty spillover from nearby Paradise Island.
That’s where Sol Kerzner, a South African developer, has built Atlantis, a gaudy $850 million resort, and revitalized the Ocean Club, an estate once owned by the Old Guard grocery heir Huntington Hartford.
“I have my own set of values,” said a newcomer, Peter Nygard, whom some call the Canadian Hugh Hefner. His hotly debated home is a 150,000-square-foot “hut” — a Polynesian village by way of Club Med with flocks of 300 peacocks, parrots and cockatoos free-ranging indoors and out, and a lagoon through the house.
The spread is growing; he’s pumping sand daily to expand his stretch of beach on his five acres.
The typical Lyfordian blue blood, “is afraid to step out of the box,” Nygard said, adding, “I’m part of a new generation.”
It is taking root inside the gates, just half a mile from the Lyford Cay Club. Nygard, who is a self-made clothing designer, said he grew up in poverty in Finland, the son of a mother who was a seamstress and a father who worked in a bakery. Now, he is worth more than $500 million.
“I have no choice whether to be old money or new money. I’m new money, based on a new set of values, and that’s based on merit,” he said, looking over a stream of purple steam belching from two 40-foot urns.
“Nygard Cay is a perfect neighbor for Lyford Cay,” he said, standing on his beach with a red and green parrot on his shoulder.
Some of the rich and famous certainly think so.
Prince Andrew and Sarah Ferguson came by several weeks ago. So did Robert DeNiro.
Michael Jackson has dropped by. And George and Barbara Bush, whose photograph adorns his office.
“I’ve built them a presidential suite,” Nygard said, pointing to a cabana built into artificial cliffs some 60 feet high. No, the former first couple hasn’t stayed over.
Like his tony neighbors, he favors classical music but prefers to blast it through his compound. Each day at sunset, Cocoy, a houseman, has orders to time the last chord on a CD so it crashes to a finale just as the sun slides into the ocean.
Nygard bought his mother a house a few miles away. He calls it a “boring house,” suburban in style, with a portrait of his parents (who were married for 57 years) hanging over the fireplace.
“Men are used to traditional women, but women, they are not traditional anymore,” said Nygard, who has seven children with four different women. Not an unusual occurrence even in Lyford Cay, but there’s a major difference: only one made it down the aisle with him.
As for today’s breed of independent woman, he says, “I don’t know how to deal with them.”
E.P. Taylor, a Canadian brewer and racing magnate, bought Lyford Cay in 1954 from Sir Harold Christie, a powerful Bahamian developer. Then he hired Henry Montgomery of Britain’s Bass-Charrington brewery fortune, who had serious European connections, to offer lots to the right people: Prince Rainier III of Monaco, Stavros Niarchos of Greece, Henry Ford II, the Aga Khan.
Taylor ran Lyford like his own private club until 1971, when he sold it to the members, ensuring that its standards would continue after his death.
His dictatorship was replaced by committees on everything from croquet to decoration.
Most of the land is governed by the Lyford Cay Property Association. It can put restrictions on new development, but there are rogue parcels whose fate is not governed by anyone.
That includes a piece where a developer is building — horrors — condominiums.
Nygard bought his prime acreage through a silent auction, much to the chagrin of club members, who have vowed not to sell him more.
Lyfordian property owners say Nygard’s loads of landfill have caused their own neighboring beaches to erode. As for his personal style, it is not in the spirit of their Cay.
“There’s been a building boom in the last four years,” said Anne Smith of the Lyford Cay Real Estate Co. “A lot of people have never heard of this place, and many people would like to keep it that way.”
They include Samantha Gregory, a Manhattan socialite, who has spent holidays here since she was 8.
“It’s like the 1950s,” said Gregory, who was born in 1974. Fifties is code for “really boring,” she admitted. Still, she added, “it’s a timeout.”
She, too, has noticed cracks in the pink-stucco facade. At the club, where she sees the same people who have been serving her ice cream since she was a little girl, she also notices a lot of faces she doesn’t recognize and a lot of un-Lyford-like behavior.
“It’s getting much more like Palm Beach,” sniffed Elizabeth Moffett, a septuagenarian who vacationed here with two husbands and is now a frequent guest. In the early days, “everyone had money, and no one talked about it,” she said, adding, “Now, it’s who has the most caviar and the biggest bottle of Champagne.” Her host, who asked not to be identified, said she saw visitors from Palm Beach renting houses in the compound for $5,000 a day. “They were all overdressed, wearing all their gold jewelry,” he said, “and always asking where the next charity party was.”
Here, life is purposefully low key, in a way that seems oddly normal and strangely suburban given the trust-fund babies lurking behind every bush. People set great store by the club’s greasy hamburgers and slow service. There are family barbecues and limbo parties, and members travel the roads by golf cart.
Michelangelo is the only hairdresser at the Lyford Cay Club, and he is booked months in advance. The new people are getting around that problem, however; along with their mounds of luggage (FedEx-ed ahead) they bring their own beauty gurus.
“The reason people are fleeing back to Lyford from Palm Beach is because of the infusion of vulgarity that’s creeping up from Miami and down from the newly rich New York crowd,” said R. Couri Hay, a Couristan carpet heir and the society editor of Palm Beach magazine and Hamptons magazine.
Yet, Hay acknowledged, “it’s the only haven of gentility and etiquette and family life left.”
