In keeping with Dan Rattiner's financial sensibilities, Harmony Books has decided that making money requires giving some of its products away for free.
Rattiner's
In the Hamptons, released officially on Tuesday, May 6, will be distributed to hundreds of Hampton Jitney riders over the Memorial Day weekend as part of a giveaway promotion. The concept is simple: Favorable word-of-mouth will prompt others to purchase In the Hamptons.
Dan's Papers is a fixture on Suffolk County's East End, a free newspaper filled with advertisements and multiple bylined articles by its founder, the aforementioned Mr. Rattiner.
In the Hamptons
chronicles in a very lively manner the author's life and times, starting with his pharmacist father's momentous decision to move the Rattiner clan in 1956 to Montauk from Millburn, NJ when Rattiner was 16. Rattiner started The Montauk Pioneer, a weekly newspaper, while still in college, correctly believing advertising dollars would flow to a free publication with high-quality editorial content about local events and personalities.
His newspaper company's expansion into the Hamptons also gave Rattiner a larger platform from which he launched various civic crusades, such as saving the Montauk Lighthouse, a landmark the federal government appeared ready to let fall into the ocean through erosion. Preserving Bridgehampton's Bull's Head Inn was another Rattiner cause and, while I'm glad it didn't become a gas station, it is a harder to get excited about the Inn's fate.
Most of the media coverage about In the Hamptons has focused on the celebrities, both dead and alive, that turn up in its pages. There are some terrific anecdotes about the late novelist John Steinbeck's twilight years in Sag Harbor in the 1960s, an era when the biggest thing in that town was a Bulova watch factory.
Moreover, the Montauk-related back story about
The Rolling Stones' song Memory Motel and tales about the impact singer Billy Joel and model Christie Brinkley have had on the Hamptons scene are also a great read.
The minor chink in In the Hamptons' armor is Rattiner's apparent glee in the occasional publication of false stories. For me, even the best joke isn't worth the hit a newspaper's credibility takes if it knowingly prints incorrect information. The author disagrees.
"I sometimes write hoaxes because I feel it is important every once in a while to break the trust between reader and writer in order to keep the reader on his guard," Rattiner wrote, in an e-mail to me last Friday. "Not everything in a newspaper should be taken at face value. Reporters have their opinions too, and I think they sneak in. Be skeptical of what you read. In other words, it's ALL opinion, in my opinion."
While we disagree on that point, Rattiner remains a great storyteller and redeemed himself in my eyes by seemingly not contributing $1 to the $109 million Bill and Hillary Clinton have amassed since 2001.
That piece of information emerged when Rattiner met former President Clinton last summer in the Hamptons. Rattiner asked him whether he remembered umpiring the 1988 Hamptons charity softball game, an annual tradition which pits the region's artists against its writers. Not only do I remember it, Clinton said, I wrote about it in my autobiography. To his credit, Rattiner had not read the former president's memoirs, and many Americans probably would not do so, even if Clinton's My Life were given away for free.
