In one of their early summers as relative newlyweds, circa 1973, Peter and Jamee Gregory rented a house on the beach in Southampton. Several of their friends rented similar houses. It was an instant social scene, one that sounds right out of a vintage half-hour sitcom or a Hamptons Palm Royale.
“It was crazy and fun,” recalls Jamee, who had graduated from Vassar and was working in publishing. “There were six of us couples and we used to swim every night in the ocean in the moonlight. Nobody thought anything about it.”
That is, she says, “Until Jaws came out. All that ended with Jaws.”
Steven Spielberg’s great white shark thriller, filmed on Martha’s Vineyard and released in summer 1975, arrived with the tagline: “You’ll never go in the water again.”
“We all saw it,” Peter says.
And for the Gregorys and their friends, never going in the water again proved to be something of the truth. “No one went in the ocean in Southampton at night again,” Jamee laughs.
Shark scares aside, they still look upon that time fondly. All the more so because the Hamptons were so unspoiled and, well, rent was dirt-cheap. The rent, in the early ‘70s, recalls Jamee, was an astounding “$3,000 for a year on the beach.” Peter postulates the same property would go, this summer, for $600,000.
Even decades later, when imagining what a serious investment that might have been, Jamee reacts with her typically contagious bemused awe. “I just don’t think about it,” she laughs.
The Gregorys met in a similarly serendipitous way. It was Jamee’s first week in New York City. She was 21 and needed to find a more permanent home than her uncle’s apartment at the Stanhope. A friend from college introduced her to an Englishman who was looking for a tenant. She liked his apartment; he said he’d rent it to her if she’d come to a party. That’s where she met Peter.
“He said, ‘Your date looks like a real geek. Why don’t you dump him and come with me?’” Jamee recalls. She demurred but gave him her new business card. “I felt very sophisticated,” she says. “Six months later we were married.”
The Gregorys have been a fixture in New York society ever since. Jamee has a legendary broad smile and infectious sense of humor, one that matches the bright and vibrant colors and prints she so often wears to events. Over the years, she has served on the boards of the Society of Memorial Sloan Kettering, where she was the 36th president, as well as the Boys’ Club of New York, Venetian Heritage, New York Botanical Garden, March of Dimes, and the Central Park Conservancy. Peter, a financial advisor and senior portfolio manager at Morgan Stanley, has a dry wit that complements his wife’s sunny demeanor.
They don’t like to say their ages. “I think age only matters if it’s a wine,” says Jamee. Peter spent a lot of his 1950s childhood entrenched in the arts and in East Hampton. His parents were art collectors. They were painted by Salvador Dalí, a friend and occasional houseguest.
His late younger brother, Alexis, founded Vendome Press, a publisher of art books. His older brother, André, is an actor and theater director, perhaps best known as the quirky subject of My Dinner with Andre, in which he appeared as himself opposite the actor and playwright Wallace Shawn.
At first, the Gregory brothers were anti-Hamptons. “They thought it was boring out here,” says Jamee. “Then they decided they did love it and rented a house next to Truman Capote.”
Alexis, a consummate entertainer, eventually landed in Water Mill, in a house he kept until he died, in 2020, from Parkinson’s and complications from COVID. André had a home in Sagaponack until he moved to Truro, on Cape Cod.
“At that time, there were lots of Gregorys lurking around,” Jamee says. She, however, remained loyal to her deep love for Southampton. “I always thought it was so beautiful. And when you’re driving out from the city, you get there first.”
The Gregorys took a break from the Hamptons with an eventful few years away in London. They welcomed their daughter, Samantha. And when the family returned to New York, with Samantha now three, they started looking for and bought the Southampton house they live in to this day.
“We’ve never looked back,” Jamee says. “It was love at first sight.”
The home, a few minutes’ drive from the beach, was newly built by Pat Patterson, a friend from the area. “Everything was shiny and bright, brand-spanking new,” Jamee recalls.
More importantly, she immediately saw the potential for a garden. Her mother, Arlene Tucker, had always been a facile gardener and, growing up in Wisconsin, had Jamee water all the plants. “I’d put the hose on until the flowers fell over,” she recalls. Still, Jamee took a shine to the hobby. During those years in London, Jamee studied up and prepared. She took classes at the Royal Horticultural Society.
“We would take trips to all these stately homes,” Jamee says. “When I went to London I didn’t know much, but you’d see all these grand gardens and these grand English ladies. I was just bitten by the bug. When I came back, Hilary Geary and I went to the New York Botanical Garden and took their classes.”
Immediately visiting the home in Southampton, “I could see that I could make a beautiful garden. That would be the highlight of the house. With a garden, the house would never be a headache.”
Just as Jamee’s garden has grown and changed over the years, Southampton, for the Gregorys, has done the same. In the early days of their time there, The Hamptons was “a thing only some people knew about,” says Peter. “But it all transformed in the 1980s.”
Read the full story in the new issue of PALMER On the Road, available now.
