PLAYING BALL 1948 – 2025

It was Artists vs. Writers in another friendly softball game held on the third Saturday in August. This year the score was 9 to 6, with the writers on top after being beaten three years running by the artists. There were no surprise pinch hitters, no celebrities (ok. the actress Lori Singer playing on the artists’ team, but she does that every year. The big excitement was the money raised: $90,000 for four charities: the East End Hospice, the Eleanor Whitmore Early Childhood Center, Phoenix House and the Retreat.

The artists’ team 2025 (Photo credit: Lisa Tamburini)

The softball game dates as far back as the earliest days when artists began making their homes in the Hamptons. That can be attributed to three people: an imposing art critic, a not-very attractive heiress, and a publisher with a reputation for smut. In the post-war years, there was no Long Island Expressway. A trip to the Hamptons was an ordeal. If you were a writer, poet or artist, a place at the beach might mean a shack with no electricity, no plumbing, no heat. Rent might run $15 a month. Of course, it helped if someone in the family had an inheritance. The three key people did.

Harold Rosenberg

The influential art critic Harold Rosenberg and his wife, May Tabak, bought a shack in the Springs (no plumbing) in 1944. He was 6 foot 4, the victim of an infection that left him with a limp. An imposing intellect, he later became the art critic at The New Yorker. In the Hamptons, he was a pioneer. Shortly after, Jackson Pollack and his wife, Joan Mitchell, bought a house in the Springs for $5,000. They did it with the help of Peggy Guggenheim, the wild daughter of vastly rich Guggenheims, who had returned from Paris with a husband, the painter Max Ernst, in tow. She loaned Pollack $2,000. The house had no heat, no insulation, no plumbing. But it did have electricity.

Soon that area was a hotbed: Isamu Noguchi, Willem and Elaine de Kooning, Motherwell, Franz Kline, Philip Pavia, Franz Kline, Howard Kanovitz, Wifrid Zogbaum, Syd Solomon. And the softball game was born. Not the Artists and Writers softball game. Just the artists softball game. They played at Zogbaum’s yard out in Montauk. Pavia was a good player. DeKooning was terrible. (Europeans were at a disadvantage, of course.)

Mostly it was a casual affair. Scores were rarely kept. Booze was consumed.

Peggy Guggenheim. She was self-conscious about her nose and considered herself plain. This is a still from the documentary “Peggy Guggenheim: Art Addict”

Then along came Barney Rosset, another fellow who had rich parents. In 1951 he bought a tiny publisher called Grove Press — it had put out only three obscure books — and immediately set out a program of releasing books that had been banned, like “Lady Chatterly’s Lover,” things by Samuel Beckett, Jack Kerouac, William S. Burroughs. He didn’t buy his own home in the Hamptons until around 1952, but it was in the “Georgica area,” he remembers in his memoir, and it was a symbol of modernism, Pierre Chareau’s repurposed Quonset Hut on two acres. It had belonged to Peter Matthiessen, an early writer in the Hamptons. Soon Rosset was introducing his wives (many) and friends (many more) to the Hamptons.

Editor at work: Allen Ginsberg (thin, with hair), the poet Gregory Corso, and Rosset in the 1950s

His first wife was the Abstract Expressionist painter Joan Mitchell, a woman who ultimately made most of her brilliant career in France. He remembers visiting the Springs with Joan in 1950, and she introduced him to Motherwell. Joan Mitchell fit right in, and was recruited for the softball team. (She was from Chicago, an athlete, and better than Motherwell.)

Soon the writers came. Ultimately Neil Simon, Joseph Heller, John Irving, Mike Lupica, Jean Stafford, Jonathan Lemire, E.L. Doctorow, John Steinbeck, Kurt Vonnegut, John Gruen, James Jones and Truman Capote. Those are the ones we now think of as Hamptons writers.

Ann Liquori, playing for the writers, takes a swing (Photo credit: Lisa Tamburini)

In recent years there have been ringers (professional ball players, movie stars, politicians), although this year none turned up. Bill Clinton, long after he left the White House, was a guest umpire for the first inning in 2019. He was particularly acceepting of wild swings, which was appreciated.

Bill Clinton signs autographs

And there is always some discussion about what exactly qualifies as an artist or writer… a baseball player who writes a letter to his wife? Is he a writer? A really buff surfer who decorates his SUV? Is he an artist? Dust-ups are regular, and part of the game. — Linda Lee