Bb Jove!
British author P. G. Wodehouse was best known for creating Jeeves, the world’s most famous valet — not butler! — whose name is synonymous with his profession.
Now Wodehouse’s former Hamptons property is on the market for $2.5 million. The beach house — built in 1991 on the site of Wodehouse’s former home — is at 21 Basket Neck Lane. Built as an English country style home, the 3,500-square-foot residence features six bedrooms and five bathrooms, and sits on 1½ acres.
There’s also a pool and a deep-water dock — minutes from Beaches, Moriches Bay and Westhampton Beach. Wodehouse lived in this spot from 1952 until his death at Southampton Hospital in 1975, at age 93, the year he was finally knighted by Queen Elizabeth. What is less known, however, is Wodehouse’s tortured past.
The British humorist moved to the United States in 1945, shortly after British intelligence interrogated him as an alleged Nazi collaborator, which he denied.
In 1941, Wodehouse was living in France when the Nazis arrested him, sent him to Germany, put him up at the Hotel Adlon in Berlin, and paid for him to deliver a series of propaganda broadcasts about how well the Nazis treated him.
The Nazis then paid for Wodehouse and his wife, Ethel, to live in luxury at Le Bristol Paris — still during the war.
That’s where British intelligence interrogated him in 1944. In the interrogation, Wodehouse told an M15 officer that he “never had any intention of assisting the enemy and that I have suffered a great deal of mental pain as the result of my action.”
Documents released by Britain’s National Archives in 2011, however, reveal that M15 planned on prosecuting Wodehouse if he ever returned to England, according to the Guardian. Quite an incentive to stay in the Hamptons.
In his day, Wodehouse wrote more than 90 novels, including a few written during the war in Germany and around 20 written after the war in the Hamptons.
The listing broker is Corcoran’s Evan Church.