Back to the Island - Richard Johnson

The Cessna 402 will fly direct from Boston to Martha's Vineyard - once the pilot has verified my weight. For safety reasons and not, I trust, as a joke. I write it on a slip of paper and slide it across the check-in counter. God bless him - he doesn't laugh. Just sits me, centre-aircraft, as ballast. Next to a man who will not shut up about the chicken livers he desperately needs for his turkey stuffing. You see it's Thanksgiving, and Thanksgiving can do funny things to a man. We land on a tiny airstrip where two Cape Air ground-staff handle everything from making the coffee to screwing back the gas cap after they've refuelled the plane. In this place, seven miles off the south-east coast of Massachusetts, life is lived a little differently.

Martha's Vineyard isn't an island - it's a state of mind. From Memorial Day through Columbus Day, the well-to-do of New Jersey, Washington, and New York come out to play. And effect that Ralph Lauren chinos-and-plaid-shirt lifestyle. The world's celebrities clambake in a rock-lined sandpit on the beach. At least that's the theory. In practice, they hire in outside caterers to clambake for them, given the dangerously high incidence of salmonella in seafood when it hasn't been cooked properly. The caterers end up producing a clambake-style effect on the Neff now that Massachusetts state law prohibits open fires. But what the hey - when you lead a jacuzzi lifestyle, it can all feel pretty darned real.

Steven Spielberg, Tom Hanks and Calvin Klein prefer to holiday in the Hamptons. That's why the Hamptons have become an extension of West LA. The Vineyard is altogether more exclusive. It takes effort - or a private plane - to get there. It's all privet hedges and old money - definitively East Coast. Not for the vulgarians of the West Coast. Kevin Costner, Sally Field, Glenn Close and Sharon Stone drop by when they can. Clinton has been three times. And the phonebook reads like Newsweek. You'll find the owner of the Washington Post, the ketchup Heinzes, and the sitcom writer Marty Nadler (who owns the house that Laverne and Shirley built). The Vineyard attracts a different sort of celebrity. It isn't a place for game show hosts.

The fog is blowing in on a perilous crosswind. Rachel announces that a Cape Air plane over in Bangor has just hit a deer, and that ours will be the final flight tonight. She hands back the last Louis Vuitton. "I checked some guy for five years" she says. "Then I saw him on 60 Minutes, and he was a major Wall Street forecaster. Or, like, he'd won a Nobel Prize for Economics. Weird." The taxi driver runs me to Edgartown, the Vineyard capital. We pass no billboards. No McDonalds. On an island larger than Manhattan, there's only one traffic light. The roads are a series of loops, hugging the contours of the island - none of that straight-to-the-horizon stuff that Americans so love. The Vineyard is a part of the United States - but, empirically, apart from it.

Martha's Vineyard is mighty handsome - for a body of glacial debris. The Wampanoag tribe, island residents these past 10,000 years, insist it was made by a legendary sachem, who created the place with his cape. Whatever, the end result is beautiful. Jon, the taxi driver, takes me past a collection of clapboard shacks, hung around the rickety pier at Menemsha. A couple are eating dinner (a twist of steamers, a bag of fries for the gulls, and a dozen littlenecks) on two 10-feet Life Guard stands they have pulled together. A boat pulls on its whistle. Two cars sound their horns. This is how Vineyarders like to celebrate their sunset. And up here the sky doesn't get black until midnight. So there's an awful lot of celebrating to be done.

Jon offers me a rate on his Peeping Tom tour - the Vineyard by moonlight. When he reveals he was once a green beret, I agree to a tour as long as it doesn't involve camouflage and night-sights. He drags his taxi round at 3mph, and a queue of traffic builds up behind us. "Beep, beep?" he says. "You won't hear that. We say good evening here. Stand up when a woman walks into the room. Try to find a can on the road. The only thing you'll see is rose petals. I love this place. It was what I had when I was growing up. And what I lost when I went to Vietnam." "Enough already" is what I'm thinking. "And put your bloody foot down". But you don't say it out loud when a man can kill with his bare hands.

Jon has ferried round all the stars - hence the tinted windows. The National Enquirer have tried to buy his story. "I could just threaten to write a book - the stars would pay me a fortune to keep my mouth shut." And, yeah, there have been movie deals. Speilberg made Jaws on the island. And by Jaws 4, Jon had gotten in on the act. "For 27 seconds, all you see is my cab". When Playboy wanted a Vineyard centre-fold, they came to Jon. "But they didn't want the scenery to overpower the model - on Martha's Vineyard that can be hard." Truth be told, Jon's done pretty well out of the Vineyard. "Sure, having all these rich people pushes up the cost of living, but look what I get." What he actually points at is yet another t-shirt concession for the day-trippers.

Carly Simon started it all. She married James Taylor, who promptly brought his family over to the Vineyard. Then John Belushi started coming, around the same time as Jacqueline Onassis and Dan Aykroyd. Celebrity immigration went in waves, but since Clinton holidayed here, it has started all over again. "One always makes the distinction BC and AC", says Alan Dershowitz, Vineyard resident and OJ Simpson's star lawyer. "Before Clinton and After Clinton." Focus groups in Washington recommended he would look earthier by holidaying in the Rocky Mountains. He agreed, but once the election was won, headed back to the island. To lead the audience of the fiddle contest in America the Beautiful. And play minature golf with Chelsea. So very real.

The stars come here for the non-star status. The geography of the place makes privacy quite easy - homes tucked away down long dirt roads in remote parts of the island. Vineyarders are great respecters of privacy - something to do with their Yankie sense of independence. Besides, they're too busy making ends meet to go pestering others. A lobsterman will tie up in Edgartown Harbour next to Mick Jagger, Billy Joel and Chrissie Brinkley, but won't go running to the Star's celebrity news desk. Like the time, they tell me, a press photographer was hounding Jackie Onassis. An fisherman (lobster or cod - depends on who's telling the story) just picked him up and threw him in the sea. This, the Vineyard wants the world to understand, was a point of principle.

Martha's Vineyard is the richest place in Massachussets - in the summer. In the winter, it's the poorest. They give away petrol at West Tisbury on Christmas Eve, and bikers distribute toys from the panniers of their Harley Davisons. The island population drops from 90,000 (when the streets look like Where's Waldo) to 14,000. It's a different place. By Thanksgiving, the summer lets have all gone home, and the pretty yachts have sailed out of Edgartown Harbour. The islanders' oily power boats have taken their place - a yacht isn't much good for serious fishing. And the traditional sale of Navajo folk art has started - even the Wampanoag have to accept a 20% mark down come Thanksgiving.

Thanksgiving is when an inspector knocks on your door and says 'Show me your turkey'. I don't want to get deported, so I head for the Main Street Diner in Edgartown. It's down home cookin', with the best buttermilk biscuits in the state. And fried green tomatoes when they're available. This is a diner for Vineyard locals, who get a 10% discount. Today it's turkey dinner with all the fixins'. And Maddie will be my waitress. She's got forearms like a meat worker. But that's because she normally kayaks to work from Chappaquiddick, a small knoll off the Vineyard. "The stars do make the Vineyard more expensive. Gas is $1.85 now. Off island it's $1.20. And groceries are a buck more an item. But I wouldn't live anywhere else."

To get to Chappadquiddick (it's not a day for kayaking) I catch the On Time, a three-car ferry. It runs every six minutes. The ferry has no schedule, so it's always 'on time'. I'm first to drive on. "No stopping" says the ferryman. "Come, come, come". The ocean is rearing up in front of me, and I've got terrible deja vu. Chappadquiddick was guaranteed fame when Edward Kennedy landed his car in the ocean. He was taking pretty aide Mary-Jo Kopechne for a ride after a party, and mistook the end of a wharf for a bridge. She drowned. He's been changing the subject ever since. "Where did it all happen?" I ask the ferryman. He smiles. I follow his instructions to the letter. He directs me to a landfill. Point taken.

I drive past Chappaquiddick Beach Club. No graffiti - just sand piper trails on the dunes. It's very Norman Rockwell - a decent, old-fashioned America, where the shops still sell homemade brittle and saltwater taffy. 'Community' is still fashionable. The Land Bank Commission, which takes a 2% tax from every home sold on the island, buys up Vineyard real estate for the public every year. If it wasn't for the Commission, the beaches would all be private and under armed guard. To fund welfare services, the island holds an auction every year. A Walter Cronkite sailing trip still goes for more than $10,000, even though the man hasn't read the news in 15 years. And a three-song set by Carly Simon raises $30,000. She throws in peanut butter sandwiches for free.

Vineyarders have always been morally concerned. And culturally aware. Over the years the place has appealed to drawing room communists, black-listed writers, and artists - something about the northern light and the high ocean skies. The counter-culture has always thrived. Just look at the supermarket parking lot - it's like a stopping place in the migratory pattern of Volvos. Study their bumpers carefully and you can still spot the Save The Whale stickers. Island bulletin boards offer Lamaze group forming, yoga workshops and macrobiotic cooking. And if you want an afternoon of cranio-sacral therapy and visceral manipulation, you're laughing. Let's be honest - Martha's Vineyard is hippy heaven. Maybe that's why Peter Simon can't stop grinning.

Simon lives up-island. At the end of a mile-long driveway, past the 'Lhasa Apso Crossing' sign. It's easy to guess by the pink door that this man did psychedelic drugs in the 60s. It's a modest Vineyard home. Sure, he's got a tennis court and a swimming pool, but there's no ocean view. Simon is a professional photographer who decided he didn't want to work in New York ("and take pictures of lipsticks, women in bras and people smoking cigarettes"), so he moved to the Vineyard instead. Now he's available for weddings and barmitzvahs. The fact that he's Carly Simon's brother opened a few doors in the beginning, but now he's legitimate island aristocracy. That's why he walks into a party like he's walking onto a yacht.

He uses the Simon name to sell the island state-of-mind. He has turned the Vineyard into a brandname - with Peter Simon calendars, t-shirts, notelets and CDs. He hands me his latest collection of essays and photographs. "Dig it" he says. If only I knew how. "I pride myself in being very non-aristocratic" he says, without a hint of irony. "I dress down. I go barefoot half the year. I like to talk to the plumbers and electricians and the lobstermen and the garbage men. All those people I care a lot about - as much as I care about the artists, the celebrities and the movie stars. I don't make such a class distinction." But it's impromptu photographs of Clinton that he's got on his mantlepiece - not plumbers.

The men at Martha's Vineyard Rod and Gun Club wear Levis with hammer holsters. And drive pick-up trucks. Good ol' boys who would only ever visit Peter Simon if his pool needed cleaning. I park up my baby blue Ford automatic next to their Subaru Foresters and Ram Chargers - I may as well be wearing ladies tights and pomade. Thank God they're too busy chewing tobacco and shooting at cardboard deer to notice. Tomorrow sees the start of the shotgun season. The scorer (wearing camouflage, but I think he's a scorer) is scoring - "that's 20 points for the vital organs" he says, "and 15 for the lungs. The bad shot in the gut nets 11". It would also mean a lingering death for any deer unlucky enough not to be made of cardboard.

More than 80% of American millionaires are first generation rich. Most are applauded for it. But if there was resentment, it would be seething here. Nelson Sigelman steps up to shoot. Nelson is a reporter on the Martha's Vineyard Times, but he always keeps his waders under the desk. And a rod in the boot of the car. He loves his island. This is the man who could have partied all day with Bill Clinton, but instead chose to go goose hunting with his friend Ralph. Nelson has no regard for celebrity. Nor does Chris. Chris has just fitted a fence for Mike Nichols [tv presenter], and is happy to take a dip - uninvited - in the guy's pool if the sun gets too hot. "My father said treat them like anyone else" says Chris. "Fuck them - they're no better than us. This is our island."

Trudy Taylor is more conciliatory. "The rich on the island need to pay more taxes. The island needs the money. I'm interested in public transport, the hospital, and the septic system. Did you know we actually ship our sewage off this island? In the summer time it runs down the streets." When she's not being active, she likes to embroider cushions, and listen to the records of James Taylor - the poet Laureate of the baby boomers. After all, he's her son. Who, like her three other children, lives on the Vineyard. The phone goes. It's a fan from France wanting James to do a benefit. James has a reputation for loving good causes and, unfortunately, a name that's listed in the Vineyard directory. Trudy takes a message.

I have been invited to an A-list party. It's a friend-of-a-friend invitation, but a real chance to make up a tennis four. And see Ted Danson, who has been known to show up at these things without the wig. The venue is a house abutting the select Edgartown golf-course. It's a summer rental with its own private mooring, 500-ft of private beach and teak recliners on the porch. Chat show host David Letterman stays here - at $3,000 a day, I'd never want to leave the house. Party conversation is surprisingly easy, but there's a pre-occupation with class. Well, an insistence upon seeming to ignore it. The real snobbishness is education. Four times I'm asked where I went to school. Apart from that, it's like any other party of thirtysomethings - the main accessory for women is still a clutch bag. For men, it's a second wife.

Peter Simon's words echo round my head. "I get invited to all these multi-million dollar homes. It's either the artistocracy aspect, or the fact that I'm a successful artist, but I am invited to the big events. Like Steve Rattner [investment banker and Democrat supporter] and his August bash. There's Art Buchwald [humourist], Diane Sawyer [tv presenter] and Carly - although she doesn't like big parties. I've seen Henry Kissinger there. It's a Who's Who and a What's What of the island. I don't put on a suit and tie, and nor do they. I go barefoot. We sit under the moonlight. The tables are all decorated with flowers and white linen, but it's still all down home. It feels organic somehow. It's not a status-ey thing." Well, ha bloody ha, he isn't here tonight.

Allen Whiting is - the Vineyard's celebrated artist. His family has been raising sheep on the Vineyard for 11 generations - but they had to find something to do after they came over on the Mayflower. Like most Vineyarders I meet, he is up on his genealogy ("my wife's family was responsible for leasing the creaky old boat to the pilgrims in the first place") and, like most artists, he loves the clarity of the Vineyard's light. "The mainland glows orange, but because the prevailing winds are from the south-west, none of the impurities blow over." He paints the place in beautiful, exact, detail. Apart from the 100 Japanese tourists who should, in fact, be clustering around the left of the canvas and spoiling the view for everybody.

As I drive back to the airport, I pass the parking lot at the foot of Main Street. It's where the The Striped Bass and Bluefish Derby (which, as a social indicator, always makes the front page of the New York Times) has its weigh-in station every summer. It's as big an event as the boat race on Labor Day weekend. Last year the winning boat was made from two Schweppes bottles tied together. Using a bra as a sail. This year a wedge of styrofoam and a handful of feathers took the title. That seems a long time ago now. The fishermen are eating doughnuts and drinking coffee out of the wind. I drive through the Vineyard's scrub landscape of cranberry bogs, rosa rugosa and wild wisteria for the last time.

I still lock my car door at the airport - and feel nervy about the aerial not retracting. I can't break the habits of a lifetime, but there's no crime here to speak of. I notice the Vineyard's shoe tree. Some kid must have started it by throwing his sneakers into the branches. What with this being the Vineyard and all, it's started sprouting Birkenstocks. Martha's Vineyard is definitely more than a gotto (a ghetto for them that's got), but I haven't actually seen any stars. Then James Taylor goes and turns up. Everyone in departures looks away. But there is something I have to know. I sidle up behind him, and listen as he checks in. James Taylor weighs 190lbs. I like the fact that it takes manners to belong in the Vineyard, so I respectfully pretend not to hear. I like Vineyard ways.



		Back to the Island The Cessna 402 will fly direct from Boston to Martha's Vineyard - once the pilot has verified my weight. For safety reasons and not, I trust, as a joke. I write it on a slip of paper and slide it across the check-in counter. God bless him - he doesn't laugh. Just sits me, centre-aircraft, as ballast. Next to a man who will not shut up about the chicken livers he desperately needs for his turkey stuffing. You see it's Thanksgiving, and Thanksgiving can do funny things to a man. We land on a tiny airstrip where two Cape Air ground-staff handle everything from making the coffee to screwing back the gas cap after they've refuelled the plane. In this place, seven miles off the south-east coast of Massachusetts, life is lived a little differently. Martha's Vineyard isn't an island - it's a state of mind. From Memorial Day through Columbus Day, the well-to-do of New Jersey, Washington, and New York come out to play. And effect that Ralph Lauren chinos-and-plaid-shirt lifestyle. The world's celebrities clambake in a rock-lined sandpit on the beach. At least that's the theory. In practice, they hire in outside caterers to clambake for them, given the dangerously high incidence of salmonella in seafood when it hasn't been cooked properly. The caterers end up producing a clambake-style effect on the Neff now that Massachusetts state law prohibits open fires. But what the hey - when you lead a jacuzzi lifestyle, it can all feel pretty darned real. Steven Spielberg, Tom Hanks and Calvin Klein prefer to holiday in the Hamptons. That's why the Hamptons have become an extension of West LA. The Vineyard is altogether more exclusive. It takes effort - or a private plane - to get there. It's all privet hedges and old money - definitively East Coast. Not for the vulgarians of the West Coast. Kevin Costner, Sally Field, Glenn Close and Sharon Stone drop by when they can. Clinton has been three times. And the phonebook reads like Newsweek. You'll find the owner of the Washington Post, the ketchup Heinzes, and the sitcom writer Marty Nadler (who owns the house that Laverne and Shirley built). The Vineyard attracts a different sort of celebrity. It isn't a place for game show hosts. The fog is blowing in on a perilous crosswind. Rachel announces that a Cape Air plane over in Bangor has just hit a deer, and that ours will be the final flight tonight. She hands back the last Louis Vuitton. "I checked some guy for five years" she says. "Then I saw him on 60 Minutes, and he was a major Wall Street forecaster. Or, like, he'd won a Nobel Prize for Economics. Weird." The taxi driver runs me to Edgartown, the Vineyard capital. We pass no billboards. No McDonalds. On an island larger than Manhattan, there's only one traffic light. The roads are a series of loops, hugging the contours of the island - none of that straight-to-the-horizon stuff that Americans so love. The Vineyard is a part of the United States - but, empirically, apart from it. Martha's Vineyard is mighty handsome - for a body of glacial debris. The Wampanoag tribe, island residents these past 10,000 years, insist it was made by a legendary sachem, who created the place with his cape. Whatever, the end result is beautiful. Jon, the taxi driver, takes me past a collection of clapboard shacks, hung around the rickety pier at Menemsha. A couple are eating dinner (a twist of steamers, a bag of fries for the gulls, and a dozen littlenecks) on two 10-feet Life Guard stands they have pulled together. A boat pulls on its whistle. Two cars sound their horns. This is how Vineyarders like to celebrate their sunset. And up here the sky doesn't get black until midnight. So there's an awful lot of celebrating to be done. Jon offers me a rate on his Peeping Tom tour - the Vineyard by moonlight. When he reveals he was once a green beret, I agree to a tour as long as it doesn't involve camouflage and night-sights. He drags his taxi round at 3mph, and a queue of traffic builds up behind us. "Beep, beep?" he says. "You won't hear that. We say good evening here. Stand up when a woman walks into the room. Try to find a can on the road. The only thing you'll see is rose petals. I love this place. It was what I had when I was growing up. And what I lost when I went to Vietnam." "Enough already" is what I'm thinking. "And put your bloody foot down". But you don't say it out loud when a man can kill with his bare hands. Jon has ferried round all the stars - hence the tinted windows. The National Enquirer have tried to buy his story. "I could just threaten to write a book - the stars would pay me a fortune to keep my mouth shut." And, yeah, there have been movie deals. Speilberg made Jaws on the island. And by Jaws 4, Jon had gotten in on the act. "For 27 seconds, all you see is my cab". When Playboy wanted a Vineyard centre-fold, they came to Jon. "But they didn't want the scenery to overpower the model - on Martha's Vineyard that can be hard." Truth be told, Jon's done pretty well out of the Vineyard. "Sure, having all these rich people pushes up the cost of living, but look what I get." What he actually points at is yet another t-shirt concession for the day-trippers. Carly Simon started it all. She married James Taylor, who promptly brought his family over to the Vineyard. Then John Belushi started coming, around the same time as Jacqueline Onassis and Dan Aykroyd. Celebrity immigration went in waves, but since Clinton holidayed here, it has started all over again. "One always makes the distinction BC and AC", says Alan Dershowitz, Vineyard resident and OJ Simpson's star lawyer. "Before Clinton and After Clinton." Focus groups in Washington recommended he would look earthier by holidaying in the Rocky Mountains. He agreed, but once the election was won, headed back to the island. To lead the audience of the fiddle contest in America the Beautiful. And play minature golf with Chelsea. So very real. The stars come here for the non-star status. The geography of the place makes privacy quite easy - homes tucked away down long dirt roads in remote parts of the island. Vineyarders are great respecters of privacy - something to do with their Yankie sense of independence. Besides, they're too busy making ends meet to go pestering others. A lobsterman will tie up in Edgartown Harbour next to Mick Jagger, Billy Joel and Chrissie Brinkley, but won't go running to the Star's celebrity news desk. Like the time, they tell me, a press photographer was hounding Jackie Onassis. An fisherman (lobster or cod - depends on who's telling the story) just picked him up and threw him in the sea. This, the Vineyard wants the world to understand, was a point of principle. Martha's Vineyard is the richest place in Massachussets - in the summer. In the winter, it's the poorest. They give away petrol at West Tisbury on Christmas Eve, and bikers distribute toys from the panniers of their Harley Davisons. The island population drops from 90,000 (when the streets look like Where's Waldo) to 14,000. It's a different place. By Thanksgiving, the summer lets have all gone home, and the pretty yachts have sailed out of Edgartown Harbour. The islanders' oily power boats have taken their place - a yacht isn't much good for serious fishing. And the traditional sale of Navajo folk art has started - even the Wampanoag have to accept a 20% mark down come Thanksgiving. Thanksgiving is when an inspector knocks on your door and says 'Show me your turkey'. I don't want to get deported, so I head for the Main Street Diner in Edgartown. It's down home cookin', with the best buttermilk biscuits in the state. And fried green tomatoes when they're available. This is a diner for Vineyard locals, who get a 10% discount. Today it's turkey dinner with all the fixins'. And Maddie will be my waitress. She's got forearms like a meat worker. But that's because she normally kayaks to work from Chappaquiddick, a small knoll off the Vineyard. "The stars do make the Vineyard more expensive. Gas is $1.85 now. Off island it's $1.20. And groceries are a buck more an item. But I wouldn't live anywhere else." To get to Chappadquiddick (it's not a day for kayaking) I catch the On Time, a three-car ferry. It runs every six minutes. The ferry has no schedule, so it's always 'on time'. I'm first to drive on. "No stopping" says the ferryman. "Come, come, come". The ocean is rearing up in front of me, and I've got terrible deja vu. Chappadquiddick was guaranteed fame when Edward Kennedy landed his car in the ocean. He was taking pretty aide Mary-Jo Kopechne for a ride after a party, and mistook the end of a wharf for a bridge. She drowned. He's been changing the subject ever since. "Where did it all happen?" I ask the ferryman. He smiles. I follow his instructions to the letter. He directs me to a landfill. Point taken. I drive past Chappaquiddick Beach Club. No graffiti - just sand piper trails on the dunes. It's very Norman Rockwell - a decent, old-fashioned America, where the shops still sell homemade brittle and saltwater taffy. 'Community' is still fashionable. The Land Bank Commission, which takes a 2% tax from every home sold on the island, buys up Vineyard real estate for the public every year. If it wasn't for the Commission, the beaches would all be private and under armed guard. To fund welfare services, the island holds an auction every year. A Walter Cronkite sailing trip still goes for more than $10,000, even though the man hasn't read the news in 15 years. And a three-song set by Carly Simon raises $30,000. She throws in peanut butter sandwiches for free. Vineyarders have always been morally concerned. And culturally aware. Over the years the place has appealed to drawing room communists, black-listed writers, and artists - something about the northern light and the high ocean skies. The counter-culture has always thrived. Just look at the supermarket parking lot - it's like a stopping place in the migratory pattern of Volvos. Study their bumpers carefully and you can still spot the Save The Whale stickers. Island bulletin boards offer Lamaze group forming, yoga workshops and macrobiotic cooking. And if you want an afternoon of cranio-sacral therapy and visceral manipulation, you're laughing. Let's be honest - Martha's Vineyard is hippy heaven. Maybe that's why Peter Simon can't stop grinning. Simon lives up-island. At the end of a mile-long driveway, past the 'Lhasa Apso Crossing' sign. It's easy to guess by the pink door that this man did psychedelic drugs in the 60s. It's a modest Vineyard home. Sure, he's got a tennis court and a swimming pool, but there's no ocean view. Simon is a professional photographer who decided he didn't want to work in New York ("and take pictures of lipsticks, women in bras and people smoking cigarettes"), so he moved to the Vineyard instead. Now he's available for weddings and barmitzvahs. The fact that he's Carly Simon's brother opened a few doors in the beginning, but now he's legitimate island aristocracy. That's why he walks into a party like he's walking onto a yacht. He uses the Simon name to sell the island state-of-mind. He has turned the Vineyard into a brandname - with Peter Simon calendars, t-shirts, notelets and CDs. He hands me his latest collection of essays and photographs. "Dig it" he says. If only I knew how. "I pride myself in being very non-aristocratic" he says, without a hint of irony. "I dress down. I go barefoot half the year. I like to talk to the plumbers and electricians and the lobstermen and the garbage men. All those people I care a lot about - as much as I care about the artists, the celebrities and the movie stars. I don't make such a class distinction." But it's impromptu photographs of Clinton that he's got on his mantlepiece - not plumbers. The men at Martha's Vineyard Rod and Gun Club wear Levis with hammer holsters. And drive pick-up trucks. Good ol' boys who would only ever visit Peter Simon if his pool needed cleaning. I park up my baby blue Ford automatic next to their Subaru Foresters and Ram Chargers - I may as well be wearing ladies tights and pomade. Thank God they're too busy chewing tobacco and shooting at cardboard deer to notice. Tomorrow sees the start of the shotgun season. The scorer (wearing camouflage, but I think he's a scorer) is scoring - "that's 20 points for the vital organs" he says, "and 15 for the lungs. The bad shot in the gut nets 11". It would also mean a lingering death for any deer unlucky enough not to be made of cardboard. More than 80% of American millionaires are first generation rich. Most are applauded for it. But if there was resentment, it would be seething here. Nelson Sigelman steps up to shoot. Nelson is a reporter on the Martha's Vineyard Times, but he always keeps his waders under the desk. And a rod in the boot of the car. He loves his island. This is the man who could have partied all day with Bill Clinton, but instead chose to go goose hunting with his friend Ralph. Nelson has no regard for celebrity. Nor does Chris. Chris has just fitted a fence for Mike Nichols [tv presenter], and is happy to take a dip - uninvited - in the guy's pool if the sun gets too hot. "My father said treat them like anyone else" says Chris. "Fuck them - they're no better than us. This is our island." Trudy Taylor is more conciliatory. "The rich on the island need to pay more taxes. The island needs the money. I'm interested in public transport, the hospital, and the septic system. Did you know we actually ship our sewage off this island? In the summer time it runs down the streets." When she's not being active, she likes to embroider cushions, and listen to the records of James Taylor - the poet Laureate of the baby boomers. After all, he's her son. Who, like her three other children, lives on the Vineyard. The phone goes. It's a fan from France wanting James to do a benefit. James has a reputation for loving good causes and, unfortunately, a name that's listed in the Vineyard directory. Trudy takes a message. I have been invited to an A-list party. It's a friend-of-a-friend invitation, but a real chance to make up a tennis four. And see Ted Danson, who has been known to show up at these things without the wig. The venue is a house abutting the select Edgartown golf-course. It's a summer rental with its own private mooring, 500-ft of private beach and teak recliners on the porch. Chat show host David Letterman stays here - at $3,000 a day, I'd never want to leave the house. Party conversation is surprisingly easy, but there's a pre-occupation with class. Well, an insistence upon seeming to ignore it. The real snobbishness is education. Four times I'm asked where I went to school. Apart from that, it's like any other party of thirtysomethings - the main accessory for women is still a clutch bag. For men, it's a second wife. Peter Simon's words echo round my head. "I get invited to all these multi-million dollar homes. It's either the artistocracy aspect, or the fact that I'm a successful artist, but I am invited to the big events. Like Steve Rattner [investment banker and Democrat supporter] and his August bash. There's Art Buchwald [humourist], Diane Sawyer [tv presenter] and Carly - although she doesn't like big parties. I've seen Henry Kissinger there. It's a Who's Who and a What's What of the island. I don't put on a suit and tie, and nor do they. I go barefoot. We sit under the moonlight. The tables are all decorated with flowers and white linen, but it's still all down home. It feels organic somehow. It's not a status-ey thing." Well, ha bloody ha, he isn't here tonight. Allen Whiting is - the Vineyard's celebrated artist. His family has been raising sheep on the Vineyard for 11 generations - but they had to find something to do after they came over on the Mayflower. Like most Vineyarders I meet, he is up on his genealogy ("my wife's family was responsible for leasing the creaky old boat to the pilgrims in the first place") and, like most artists, he loves the clarity of the Vineyard's light. "The mainland glows orange, but because the prevailing winds are from the south-west, none of the impurities blow over." He paints the place in beautiful, exact, detail. Apart from the 100 Japanese tourists who should, in fact, be clustering around the left of the canvas and spoiling the view for everybody. As I drive back to the airport, I pass the parking lot at the foot of Main Street. It's where the The Striped Bass and Bluefish Derby (which, as a social indicator, always makes the front page of the New York Times) has its weigh-in station every summer. It's as big an event as the boat race on Labor Day weekend. Last year the winning boat was made from two Schweppes bottles tied together. Using a bra as a sail. This year a wedge of styrofoam and a handful of feathers took the title. That seems a long time ago now. The fishermen are eating doughnuts and drinking coffee out of the wind. I drive through the Vineyard's scrub landscape of cranberry bogs, rosa rugosa and wild wisteria for the last time. I still lock my car door at the airport - and feel nervy about the aerial not retracting. I can't break the habits of a lifetime, but there's no crime here to speak of. I notice the Vineyard's shoe tree. Some kid must have started it by throwing his sneakers into the branches. What with this being the Vineyard and all, it's started sprouting Birkenstocks. Martha's Vineyard is definitely more than a gotto (a ghetto for them that's got), but I haven't actually seen any stars. Then James Taylor goes and turns up. Everyone in departures looks away. But there is something I have to know. I sidle up behind him, and listen as he checks in. James Taylor weighs 190lbs. I like the fact that it takes manners to belong in the Vineyard, so I respectfully pretend not to hear. I like Vineyard ways.

		© Richard Johnson 2000 - 2009