iHamptons

Location! Location! Location! by Mary Cummings

posted Fri Apr 18, 2003

If Nancy Grigor were just a little more earnest, a little less comfortable with the perks that accrue to a beautiful woman, her story would make a great film for Lifetime TV. An inspirational tale with a feminist spin, it would go something like this: former top model for the Ford agency, bird of paradise who preened for big bucks, strutting the runways wearing Halston, Valentino, Blass, and Versace, launches a highly successful business in the Hamptons and finds happiness, fulfillment and empowerment by using her brain instead of her body.

Unfortunately, the formula is not a good fit. First of all, Grigor isn’t the least apologetic about the big money she made as a model, a career she calls “serious.” And secondly, Hamptons Locations, the scouting service that she runs out of her Amagansett home/office for clients who come to her from all over the world to find the perfect setting for their films, ads or events, has obviously failed to fill her with CEO-style self-importance.

On this April day, the five-foot-ten blond, who was featured in the pages of “Birds of Paradise: An Intimate View of the New York Fashion World” wearing a shocking pink satin jumpsuit and a 1000-megawatt smile, is dressed like a stage hand—black jeans, black flats, black long-sleeved T. Her blond hair is long and shiny, her model’s figure in fine trim, but she is wearing big glasses and no trace of makeup.

“I’m having fun,” she says, obviously anxious to get the modeling chapter out of the way and move on to her role as major matchmaker, finding photogenic locations for camera crews and anyone else in search of settings suggestive of the good life in the Hamptons. (She was even less anxious to talk about her personal life, except to confirm that she is married to Michael Griffith, a well-known international attorney.)

To hear her tell it, modeling is far more stressful than running a business.

“When you’re in front of the camera,” she says, “you have to worry about so much. You have to go to bed early, your hair has to look right. It’s a big responsibility, trying to sell clothes, makeup, a product. It’s a very serious thing to do and most models don’t last.”

No question, there were perks. At the top of her form in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, she was part of a scene wannabes would have killed for an opportunity to crash. “I used to go out with Halston,” says Grigor. “I was one of the token blondes on his arm. Steve Rubell used to greet us at the door, Roy Cohn, Andy Warhol—sadly all dead.”

Modeling careers are notoriously brief but Grigor says she was lucky. Hot fashion trends come and go but the Lauren Bacall look, Grigor’s niche in the fashion world, had more staying power than most. Plus, she says, “I was versatile. I did catalogs, TV commercials, photos for NBC, a lot of runway.”

The runway was the glamour part but TV commercials were the cash cows. For seven years Grigor could be seen on the small screen, tossing her blond mane under the nose of a guy who gets one whiff of that great Clairol scent and is smitten. Each time the hair flew, the money flew in to Grigor’s bank account. When the pile was high enough, Grigor bought a house on Little Fresh Pond in Southampton. Clairol funded that first house and a few years later she traded up, acquiring her current home on the ocean in Amagansett.

At first, when she was still modeling, she would let her editor friends do shoots at her house for nothing.

“They used to come and use the house as a location and I never charged them,” she says.
Then one day she remembers sipping some coffee while watching a shoot and saying to herself, “Wait a minute. Maybe I should be making some money.”

That was when she started building her inventory of houses and other photogenic locations in the Hamptons, a stockpile that now includes more than 500 houses and other sites. For each of them she has prepared a portfolio highlighting the site’s most attractive features (just as her own best features were once highlighted in her model’s portfolio).

And she, too, has her superstars. Instead of great legs, golden hair or queenly carriage, what she looks for in a house, before anything else, are camera-friendly spaces.

Ten years in the business have taught her that certain houses are used over and over again for a reason. “They have to have high ceilings and great light,” she says. “If they have a porch, that’s great. If they’re on the water, that’s terrific. But it’s really all about wonderful high ceilings and lots of light.”

The house that is most in demand, the house that “everybody knows” so that her usual practice of not revealing owners’ names would be futile, is the Michael Kennedy house in Wainscott. “The Kennedy house has it all,” she says of the 19th-century shingled “cottage” whose profile, perched on the Wainscott dunes, is a signature image of the Hamptons at its most idyllic. She booked it for “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,” starring Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet, one of three movies she has been working on that are shooting this season in the Hamptons.

For “The Door in the Floor,” with Kim Basinger and Jeff Bridges, the filmmakers had their hearts set on the cool minimalism of a Richard Meier house. When no one with the real thing was willing to take them in, Grigor found a suitably modern alternative.

“Considering that owners can get anywhere from $1,500 (on the porch for a couple of hours) to $20,000 a day, it would seem like a deal too tempting to turn down but, says Grigor, it sometimes takes some persuasion. People are usually intrigued, she says, but they’re also afraid. That’s understandable, she concedes, “but once they get to know me, they learn that I treat their houses as if they were my own.” There’s no smoking; there are certain designated places for eating; and owners can declare any area off limits.

“They’re professional people,” says Grigor of the crews she brings in. “they’re not there to trash the house.”

Then there are the owners who love the excitement. The homeowners who hosted the cast and crew of the movie “Town and Country” with Warren Beatty and Goldie Hawn made it a condition that they could be there and introduce their children to the stars.

“They also made a lot of money,” laughs Grigor, “and the shoot went very, very well.”

“Surprisingly, in light of the good money to be made with virtually no effort required of homeowners, Grigor seems to expend more time and energy in scouting and wooing people with desirable locations than she does in bagging the clients who pay for them. True, wherever she goes (and she gets around) she hands out her Hamptons Locations business card. And she does advertise.

“I have ads running all over the world—Paris, London, Japan, everywhere,” says Grigor.

But to be sure that when they call—and the calls increase every year—she will have just what they want, however quirky or unusual, she covers her territory with hawk-like attention, takes bike rides down obscure trails, ignores “No Trespassing” signs, knocks on any doors that seem to promise something interesting, and marketable, inside.

“I’m always looking,” she says. “I have beautiful farms, barns, modern houses, old traditional houses. I’m looking for all types because you never know.”

She also has restaurants, bars, and even keeps a list of antique cars, authentic pickup trucks, motorcycles and other artifacts that film crews might have a use for.

All of this is organized and retrievable in her head but lately Grigor has been computerizing, supplementing the hard copy portfolios with CDs and images she can e-mail. She is even able to supply site-seekers with images that move from room to room and around the exterior of a house. The new technology has been a great boon for clients with last-minute requests, she says, “but, believe it or not, in the film industry, they still want to see hard copy.”

The one thing Grigor cannot control is the weather, and this April has proved particularly trying in that respect.

“This week we had rain and snow,” she says, rolling her eyes. “The models were getting wet and it was 30 degrees on Tuesday. On Saturday, the crews were sitting in the parking lot at the Southampton Inn, waiting for the snow to melt.”

Traditionally winter—which tends to overstay in the Hamptons—is a slow time for film crews, who are most active locally in spring summer and fall. A few years ago, Grigor decided to take up the wintertime slack by reversing her “no weddings” policy.

She had always gotten about 15 or 20 calls a week from people looking for wedding locations, she says, but had always turned them away. Now she has more than 100 locations to show them and Hamptons Locations has a lively off-season offshoot.

Even at the height of the summer season, Grigor claims that the crews she brings out are not as unwelcome as one might suspect.

“I refer only local people for business,” she says. “If they need a caterer, I recommend someone. Every night they go out to dinner, 15 or 20 people. I tell them where to go, what hotels to stay in. I try to keep it all in the community.”

Best of all, the crews almost never stay for the weekend. “My people come usually Monday through Friday,” says Grigor. “Everybody loves me.”