One thing I learned at a supposedly high-class daytime sex orgy in the Hamptons this past weekend: approach daytime sex orgies in the Hamptons with caution, particularly when it comes to the provision of food.
I’d been to the inaugural Killing Kittens party in New York City last year—a not-so-elite sex party for New York elites—but the Kittens franchise had allegedly classed up since Gweneth Lee, whom the Daily Mirror describes as a “serial mistress,” took over as lead organizer of all parties in North America at the end of 2015.
An email advertising the Hamptons “White Party” at a “sophisticated private estate” promised “afternoon delight to explore your fantasies and deepest desires under the summer sun.”
ADVERTISEMENT
Sure, by 10 p.m., the party’s well-heeled guests were getting up to all kinds of shenanigans in the basement library. Upstairs, the hot tub swirled with naked bodies and various bodily fluids.
But up until then, the party had been a kind of seven-hour Twilight Zone of sexual innuendo and drunken, absurd social one-upmanship.
One of the things I learned in some afternoon conversation with other guests: “’Luding on the beach is amazing.”
This was Laura, a perky, thirtysomething blonde, referring to that time she took Quaaludes while vacationing in Miami.
She and her much older boyfriend, Matt, claimed they were both “’luding” when I met them on Saturday afternoon.
Matt talked about taking Quaaludes at Burning Man and how he managed to land his private plane “right in the middle” of the music festival.
Laura’s sunburnt, slightly doctored breasts were contained within a white string bikini top. Matt wore a white linen shirt and matching shorts.
Both were adhering to the White Party’s strict dress code: “sexy white summer dresses/kaftans, bikinis, big sunglasses” for women; “crisp white shirts, trousers, nice shorts, panama hats (keep it elegant and sexy)” for men.
Tickets for most New York parties cost $300 for couples who are Killing Kittens members, a private community for “the world’s discerning sexual elite,” according to its website. The standard entry fee for “single” women is $150, but tickets for festivities in the Hamptons cost $100 more ($400 for couples and $250 for single women)—and with good reason, Lee told me.
During a phone conversation last month, she explained that the party was being sponsored by a vodka company and by Lelo, a high-end sex toy brand, so guests would be treated to unlimited cocktails and a Lelo “goodie bag.” She was confident that the White Party would be a wild success.
But she seemed harried and manic when I arrived with two friends on Saturday around 4:00 p.m., 30 minutes after the party began. She said the bus driver she’d hired to shuttle guests from New York City had called in sick, but she still expected a strong turnout.
She was particularly excited that Sir Ivan Wilzig, a New Jersey-born bank executive turned musician and free-love crusader who has been called the Hugh Hefner of The Hamptons, was arriving shortly with his entourage of busty beauties to DJ the party. Lee joked that Sir Ivan’s knighthood likely involved being “peed on by a swordsman.”
I did not yet know this regal personage, but it would soon become clear that Lee’s remark about his title was not at all implausible.
Indeed, I recognized Sir Ivan immediately: a squat, bald man wearing a white button-down bespeckled with green jewels, wraparound sunglasses with rhinestones on the rims, and a large peace sign necklace.
“Sex, drugs, and techno,” he said, handing me his card. “Every weekend for 15 years.”
Most people aren’t cut out for this lifestyle. Even Sir Ivan, with his tawny skin and puffy under-eyes, looks like he’s lived hard—although, at 60, he has no intention of taking a weekend off.
In many ways, he is the ne plus ultra of the wealthy swinger one expects to see at a Hamptons sex party: an inordinately rich man who made a name for himself hosting raves and orgies at his castle in East Hampton—campy, Disneyfied versions of the masked sex clubs in Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut.
Other guests were wandering around the well-manicured grounds—13.5 acres of land, including a tennis court and a gazebo—and sitting on rusty chairs beside the pool.
There were plenty of kaftans and a variety of skimpy dresses on the ladies, several of which looked like they’d been cut from the rigging on a shrimp boat.
People crowded around a less-than-full bar serving a menu of rosé, champagne, and tequila. (The vodka sponsors were apparently late).
Thirty or so Lelo gift bags were neatly assembled in the marble dining room—an indication that Killing Kittens was either expecting a small crowd or that there wouldn’t be enough $140 vibrators to go around.
Food was in short supply as well. Several large plates of sushi were devoured within minutes of being set out on a table around 5:30. At least 40 guests, including Sir Ivan and his girlfriends, had trickled in at this point. They swarmed around the table when staffers carted out chicken and beef shish kabobs. These, too, disappeared awfully fast.
The scene descended further into Lord of the Flies-like savagery when a crush of women ransacked the Lelo gift bags, stuffing the contents in their purses.
***
Back at the bar, Sir Ivan talked about the 4,000 sex artifacts “tracing back to antiquity” at his erotic art museum in Miami, which will soon travel to Humboldt University in Berlin. “The Germans want to study this stuff,” he told me.
A stout man in a paisley shirt, orange pants, and panama hat walked across the lawn hauling large tote bags filled with merchandise. He introduced himself as Jit Singh, founder of the “Hamptons Cigar Manufactory & Museum” (the museum has not yet been established).
An aspiring cigar mogul, Singh has also worked as an “Instructor and Coach” for LinkedIn for Beginners, according to his LinkedIn profile.
As the sex party continued to be conspicuously sexless, talking points ranged from Brexit to yet more quaaludes. Many conversations were stilted or awkward, like the beginning of a bad porno. Perfunctory introductions offered in passing were heavy on subtext—the equivalent of drug dealers asking, “Do you like to party?”
Making small talk with strangers at these events is more easily avoided when they take place at night in dark, loft-like spaces. At the last Killing Kittens party I attended, most guests had migrated to the playroom an hour and a half after it started.
At the Hamptons estate, the most punctual partygoers suffered through nearly six hours of chatter with other guests before watching those same guests have sex—or joining in.
Drink and drugs made some conversations looser and others incoherent. One young woman was so high she couldn’t recall where her father was from.
Her 29-year-old Romanian boyfriend, a hedge funder who recently moved from Bucharest to Manhattan, continued his semi-intelligible sermon about the consequences of the U.K. departing the EU.
People with money tend to recognize money, so it wasn’t uncommon to overhear men and women—particularly women—complimenting each other’s designer outfits and jewelry. But some of these compliments were lost in translation.
A thirtysomething Australian woman vented to several of us at the bar about the “gold-digger” with a predatory eye for her boyfriend’s Louis Vuitton T-shirt and Balenciaga pants. The boyfriend failed to lighten the mood with a crude joke about his speckled-white designer jeans.
By 6:00 p.m., two and a half hours after the party kicked off, the food was gone save for a few leftover bags of Lays potato chips, which became the fodder for still more bad sex puns. And the limited drinks were now $15 each.
Several veteran swingers had flown in from Canada and Miami, Lee told me later—a long journey for a lackluster barbecue and two hours of action at the very end of the night.
Killing Kittens’ “private chef” had made a marinade for the shish-kebobs, which Lee purchased at Citarella in East Hampton, but his biggest contribution to the party (sex pun intended) came long after the kitchen had closed.
***
The point of the party—the sex, the orgy—finally started when the sun went down, around 9:00 p.m. Of the 30 or so guests who remained, a handful went upstairs to the hot tub while a dozen others moved downstairs to a small library-turned-playroom in the basement.
Here, one justifiably ravenous man—an older fellow who resembled Prince Edward—began orally servicing his wife while others played ping pong in the brightly lit room behind them. Before long, a small chorus of moans in the playroom were punctuated by percussive thwacks and smacks.
There was seemingly no end to the facile sex metaphors, whether they were spoken aloud or implicit in the party setup. (Of all the rooms in the house, it could hardly be a coincidence that the playroom was situated next to a ping pong table.)
A very young man who had greeted guests in his bathing suit earlier was making the rounds again, this time naked beneath an unbelted bathrobe. It was at this opportune moment that he confessed he was the owner of the estate, which is on the market for $6.5 million.
Several drinks later, I discovered that the party’s Prince Edward lookalike had migrated to an orgy in one of the estate’s four bedrooms. One woman at the center of it all giggled when she emerged: “I gotta get out of here before I get into trouble.”
You’d think being gang-banged six ways to Sunday would qualify as trouble, but for this woman it was just another Saturday night.
Yet the crowd was disappointed. You know a sex party is a failure when Sir Ivan leaves early.
As Lee hustled people out the door around midnight, some stalwarts considered going to Sir Ivan’s castle. The rest of us went to the nearest open restaurant.
