Tom Wolfe wasn't wearing his trademark white suit when he took me to lunch at the Southampton Bathing Corporation. This would have been a disappointment if it were not that his chosen attire for a run to the beach was just as flamboyant. If I were half as good a journalist as Wolfe, I would rattle off the details of the ensemble, down to the name of the bespoke tailor who had stitched the button holes on the cream-coloured vest he wore in place of a jacket. I remember the vest, dusty-yellow slacks, a cravat around his neck, and lace-up nubucks on his feet. He reached for a straw hat as we left the house he rented as his summer residence, and headed for the Club. I don't recall if it was a proper Panama.
The Southampton Bathing Corporation is the sort of club that Wolfe the novelist might have had to invent if it did not exist. Spread without much thought between the dunes and the beach road, Gin Lane, it is — or was, for perhaps it has been spiffed up now — shabby, in need of paint, Old Money Wasp, Harvard-Yale, White Shoe, Old Wall Street, Upper East Side, and devoid of any aesthetic value or sex appeal. In other words, it was the perfect expression of a certain social status, a status to which Wolfe, at the height of his success, could aspire.
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