Dirty Girl Things

The Point sits atop a 20-foot cliff in the village of Kings Point overlooking Long Island Sound, where sailboats glide through a panorama of bridges and lighthouses against the backdrop of the Connecticut shore and the Manhattan skyline.

The stucco mansion, one of nine homes across the estate’s 21 acres, is filled with arched doorways, marble fireplaces, Oriental carpets, crystal chandeliers, genteel furniture and photographs of celebrated visitors like Eleanor Roosevelt, John V. Lindsay, Woody Allen and Sarah Ferguson.

These days, Mrs. Kern, an 81-year-old widow, lives alone amid floors rotted in places and some paneless windows. Parts of the grounds — which include a vineyard, a lily pond, a clay tennis court, a horse paddock, a squash court, a gym, a greenhouse and formal gardens — are neglected and overgrown.

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The turmoil echoes the “Gatsby” theme of intrigue and betrayal beneath the facade of wealth and society, a tale set in the Jazz Age when Kings Point boasted of tycoons and celebrities like Walter Chrysler, W. R. Grace, Oscar Hammerstein and George M. Cohan.

The Point is on a private road off Gatsby Lane, a name apparently chosen by a developer, at the tip of the peninsula where Manhasset Bay meets Long Island Sound, a location matching the West Egg area that F. Scott Fitzgerald described in “The Great Gatsby,” said John Handler, the official village historian of Kings Point. The mansion in the book was even bigger than the one where his mother lives, John Handler said. He and others say that Fitzgerald, who once lived in Great Neck, probably attended parties at the Point held by Richard Church, who bought the estate in the early 1900s from the family of John Alsop King Jr., for whom Kings Point is named.