The Wild Story of Ocean Castle in Southampton

In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, members of High Society in the City of New York built grand summer mansions by the ocean in Southampton. There was tennis, golf, sunbathing and brisk salt sea air, considered a healthy restorative.

One of the largest such mansions — still standing today — is “Ocean Castle,” a summer home that stretches out for nearly 400 feet between the sea and Shinnecock Bay at 840 Meadow Lane. Constructed as a tudor castle with turrets, half timber siding and cobblestone roofing, it resembled a small oceanfront village, perhaps in Normandy.

William F. Ladd, a wealthy Wall Street broker with sugar plantation holdings in Cuba, built it for his family. He bought eight acres, hired the architectural firm of Peabody Wilson and Brown, told them to reconfigure the dunes as they wished (there was no zoning then), and as it was the first of the year, have this 19,000 square foot home completed by July 4 so he could celebrate the fireworks there. This was in 1929. And they completed it on time.

Years later, the owners of the mansion next door were holding a huge coming out party for their daughter who had invited so many friends that they took to ask if the overflow could be put up at Ocean Castle. It was a great party but with people swinging from the chandeliers became so wild that every window in Ocean Castle got smashed.

For a time, things quieted down there. In 1978, however, the property was purchased for $300,000 by Roy Radin, an eccentric young man who was often seen around town sporting a black cape, Panama hat and cane. Some said Radin was a genius. He had become a millionaire before he was 20 by promoting entertainment events around the country. He also held wild parties at Ocean Castle, famous for drugs, bondage and sexual encounters that were, among other things, videotaped. On one occasion, the partygoers helped a semi-conscious, disheveled young woman to the Southampton Railroad station in the middle of the night and placed her on a seat on a train headed to Manhattan. Other passengers, good Samaritans all, helped her from there. It became quite the scandal in the tabloid newspapers at the time.

Among others, the story dragged in Roy Radin’s mother, who lived there with him, and said she knew nothing about any of this. I sometimes wondered at the time that the local police put up with these parties in spite of complaints. Had they been in on it?

A year later, Roy Radin, now 33, was found dead in a dry creek bed north of Los Angeles with a bullet in the back of his head. But that’s a whole other story. This one is about Ocean Castle.

A few years after that, I had a delicious lunch at Ocean Castle, served to us by servants on the lawn between the castle and the sea. We were the guests of Barry Trupin and his wife, who were renting it while refurbishing the old DuPont mansion two doors down and turning it into a French castle, an idea that was greatly frowned upon by certain members of High Society because Trupin was Jewish and, as they said, unwelcome in that community. (Eventually, the Trupins left that project half built. But at the time I was there, they were happily at work to make that neighboring mansion their new home.)

Ocean Castle’s most recent sale was to a corporation called, I believe, Brise Lontaine LLC. So you don’t know who that is. The price? It went for $70 million.