Cape Cod - Walking down the sweeping stairway built for grander times, as the sun sets behind the sand dunes, it’s hard not to reach for a copy of F Scott Fitzgerald’s greatest work. “I glanced seaward – and distinguished nothing except a single green light, minute and far away”, was how he described a similar scene in The Great Gatsby.
The single green light was – and still is – one of the many beacons scattered around America’s Cape Cod and the Long Island coast. And to this day the sight has lost none of its melancholy, while at the same time inspiring the romantic heart, just as the area did for Gatsby back in the Twenties. I am standing in the gardens of a Cape Cod ocean-front property that fittingly was built in 1921 by a real-life buccaneer, Charles Hardy.
He was a Boston stockbroker who bought 10 hectares of virgin land and transformed it into the most glamorous resort his contemporaries had ever seen – so extravagant that it boasted “electric lights and a long-distance telephone in every room”. Today, the Chatham Bars Inn is one of the world’s loveliest hotel destinations, with wonderful wide verandahs overlooking a magnificent private beach and the vast Atlantic Ocean beyond.
The beautiful are born to be damned here. You can imagine Gatsby’s Daisy in her floating white dress “rippling and fluttering as if (it) had just been blown back in after a short flight around the house”, or women in their flapper frocks languishing on the terraces jutting out into the water, heady with love and the scent of the blooms.
Cape Cod is just up the coast from Long Island Sound, where Gatsby longed for his Daisy.
Hire a 4x4 and explore the beautifully preserved towns and harbours. This region is much tended and loved; its houses painted shades of grey, slate and ocean blue, made of timber, with white picket fences and verandas.
My favourite lobster pot cafe is Spanky’s Clamshack, near the John F Kennedy Museum in Hyannis Port. Here, they assure me that the waitress’s motto of “slam my clam and call me spanky” is not rude. I take their word for it – after all, Americans can be quite prudish. Except of course in Provincetown (Mincetown to outsiders), at the tip of the long, extended arm-shaped peninsula in Barnstable County.
This is where you’ll find the riotously gay quarter, tiny wooden houses painted every colour, but mostly pink. Every weekend is like a gay pride street party. It’s a short ferry ride to Martha’s Vineyard, holiday home to the super rich and a favourite haunt of politicians – the Clintons and the Obamas. Paul McCartney loves sailing here. JFK preferred to holiday at Hyannis, where various members of his family had waterfront homes.
His museum is almost as quaint as Hyannis itself, full of pictures of a young Jackie Kennedy in gingham tiedtops and Capri pants. Then, of course, there’s the infamous Dike Bridge on Chappaquiddick Island, off Martha’s Vineyard, which Senator Ted Kennedy drove off, killing Mary Jo Kopechne.
A couple on the vast hotel veranda drinking their triple-strength gin and tonics sum it up perfectly. Hank is in his early 60s and did something on Wall Street, his wife Hilary spends his money – mostly on plastic surgery. “We love Manhattan,” says Hank. “But what you love most can drive you crazy and every year we come here to recharge.” I’ll come here again to recharge but perhaps, unlike Hank, I will also come to gape and imagine I”m part of the Gatsby in-crowd.
l Chatham Bar Inns: chathambarsinn.com, rhinocarhire.com - Daily Mail