A toxic mixture of dread, fear, panic, paranoia and self-doubt was brewing in my head on my way out to the Hamptons the last weekend in June.

On the train, I sat on a fold-up chair next to the bathroom and listened to the contents of the bowl swish and swirl around, like the economy and the Bush administration. From time to time, I looked up from my novel (about a sleazy opportunistic journalist in late-19th-century Paris), saw baseball caps, tall boys, tattoos, flip-flops, and shuddered.

I had been invited to stay at the large, elegant estate of the interior designer Tom Britt. When I moved to New York in 1977 he was on the plane with me and I’ll never forget how he uttered the words “exactly!” and “precisely!” Class.

At lunch on Saturday, sitting under a huge umbrella from Thailand in an outdoor white gravel court, I sat next to Jean-Claude Baker, the owner of Chez Josephine and the adopted son and biographer of entertainer Josephine Baker.

“It’s hard because it’s not my East Hampton anymore,” said Mr. Baker, who first came here 30 years ago. “It is like St. Tropez. I knew St. Tropez when it was a little farm with cows, before Brigitte Bardot came there. I’m not saying that Brigitte Bardot’s a cow, but anyway, when she came, it changed everything.”

What did he think of the social scene now: the battles of Baldwin and Brinkley and Perelman-Duff playing out high above the potato fields? The Sex and the City viragos? The young rich gyrating at the clubs?

“I’m too old to be part of that game anymore, but I’m very happy about it,” Mr. Baker said. “A lot of people are making money; they still have lots of sex, you know, and lots of drugs I never did, even when I was at Studio 54. I’m certainly the only one who never did cocaine there—and the good times there! So that’s the Hamptons. Good luck.”

Somehow, later, I made it to the parking lot of Nick and Toni’s where I met Joan Jedell, publisher of the celebrity magazine Hamptons Sheet, who would be my guide through Hell for the next seven hours.

At the LongHouse Reserve, an arboretum and sculpture garden, a blissful-looking Martha Stewart was judging a competition between 22 installations on the grounds. I passed what looked to be a hollowed-out soccer ball the size of a house.

Had she picked up on any new vibe in the Hamptons?

“Yeah, everybody’s riding bikes, because you can’t drive,” Ms. Stewart said without breaking her stride.

After she announced the winners, I asked if there was less extravagance this summer.

“Well, that’s hard to say,” she said, shrugging her shoulders and stretching out her arms, as if to say either “open your eyes and behold paradise” or “leave me alone.”

Next stop, a kickoff party for the Hamptons Designer Showhouse to benefit Southampton Hospital. The fashion, art and social people in the backyard included furrier Dennis Basso.

“This summer, I want to have lunches and dinners for good friends, hang out, feel a little toasty, lots of rosé in the day, lots of red wine at night, and have fun with friends,” he said.

Could anything go wrong?

“No, summer’s a happy time for me! I’m a happy guy. It has to really be bad for me to think it’s bad.”

“I think it’s a very calm summer,” said publicist Scott Currie, by the pool with his boyfriend, who was wearing a cashmere sweater around his shoulders. “People strangely are more polite on the roads. I haven’t got cut off once.”

Fashionista Lauren Ezersky was in between interviews for her show The Juice, which airs on Plum TV. “You know what, I think the mood of the Hamptons has been really cool, calm, collected, not frenzied,” she said. “I think in August, it gets a little ugly sometimes because you have a lot of day-trippers.” Ms. Ezersky shared some local scuttlebutt: Someone has been stealing copper pipes from houses, including designer Isaac Mizrahi’s.

Anything else from the dark side of the Hamptons?

“Permits. Ooh, it gets ugly when you need a permit to park at the beach and they’re all sold out—that’s funky.”

The third party was the Beaches and Bays Gala benefiting the Nature Conservancy. Intimidating crowd. Unapproachable Wall Street and country-club types.

Off in a corner sat an elegant lady, wearing Oscar de la Renta, with two serious-looking hedge-fund kind of guys. She gave me a fake name, Elaine Wilson, and said she was once part of an elite group of artists and writers that included Irwin Shaw, Truman Capote, Adolph Green and Betty Comden. Asked for a highlight from back then, she recalled the night of author James Jones’ funeral, when she sat at a round table at Bobby Van’s with William Morris (“Willie”) and the Styrons.

“Let’s compare this party,” she said. “This is a benefit, people pay $1000 to come to this party. They would never have been invited to, like Gloria Jones’. This is, like, money, and before it was about talent. You’d be sitting at Gloria Jones’ table in the kitchen, this long 16th-century refractory table, and start to have Easter lunch, and she looks up and she says, ‘Oh my God, there’s John Lindsay!’ And we’d all scootch together because you sat on benches, not chairs, and Mayor Lindsay came in with his wife and his mother and father, and Gloria goes, ‘Oh, we’ve been waiting for you, we wondered where you were!’ And she had forgotten that she’d asked them.

“It’s a lot duller,” “Ms. Wilson” concluded. “It’s gotten chicer, richer and duller. … I think it’s awful, the rudeness. I’m appalled.”

CARL BERNSTEIN, BIRDWATCHER

The fourth party, celebrating the opening of painter Paige Peterson’s one-woman show at the Spanierman gallery in East Hampton, was at former Daily News’ publisher Fred Drasner’s house. Mr. Drasner was away, on a yacht with Steve Wynn.

Outside, the journalist Carl Bernstein and his wife, Christine Kuehbeck, were eating barbecue, very low-key, dressed down.

Mr. Bernstein said he’d been coming out since 1976, though he took a 15-year hiatus.

“I’m a social dropout,” he said.

“That’s not true, Carl,” Ms. Kuehbeck said. “You go to so many parties.”

“I do not. Like I used to? I learned long ago not to generalize about the American people. We are a very complex, heterogeneous group, and obviously I think there’s universal concern in the country about the economy, because clearly the economy is in trouble.”

And the crowd?

“As my wife, Christine, says, sui generis out here. But I’m not good—excuse me, my wallet. You asked me about the economy, and my wallet went right out of my pocket and down off the couch, and I’ll never find it. Oh, no, here it is.”

Mr. Bernstein was asked about the Hamptons then and now.

“I’m clueless,” he said.

“Come on, Carl, we talk about this all the time,” Ms. Kuehbeck said. “There’s a huge difference from 30 years ago in the Hamptons. It was a simple place, it was a down-home place; you went to the beach. Now people are always worried, what’s my house worth? What’s my property going to bring?”

“I’ve been coming out for seven or eight years. I live a much quieter existence,” Mr. Bernstein conceded. “We got two swans on the pond, and every year they lay six eggs and then the water washes over the eggs and”—

“He doesn’t want to write about our swans, what are you talking about? Carl has become a birdwatcher.”

“It is true, it is true.”

“Do you know that Carl helped put up a osprey nest?”

“There you go! I did, it’s true.”

Sitting nearby was Ryan Victor, the exceptionally bright 22-year-old son of big-time literary agent Ed Victor and Carol Ryan, a lawyer and chic knockout.

“My mother often shops at a little store called Loaves and Fishes, and my dad horribly resents this because the prices are so excruciatingly high that even we need at least three mortgages to afford it,” Ryan said. “It looks like a shack, and you go in and get a pot of chicken salad or whatever and they weigh it and they’re like, ‘Twenty-seven dollars and 99 cents,’ and you can’t believe that this is correct. So my dad was in there one day begrudgingly and they’re buying some things, and a Mexican guy who works, obviously, in the area thought this was just a shack store, and he goes in, and he gets a pack of tortilla chips and a soda and a thing of salsa—it’s kind of funny that he bought those things, but he did—and he puts them on the counter, and the woman rings them up and she says, ‘That’s $34,’ and he takes sort of a gulp of air and looks around. And at this point, he has, I guess, too much pride; he can’t say, ‘That’s absurd, that’s ridiculous,’ and leave. So he gets out his wallet, and he pays pretty much all of the money in his wallet for this stuff.

“And this guy left, obviously to go help build another giant McMansion somewhere in Bridgehampton. That’s my story for you. I think that’s as best that I can describe something about the Hamptons that to me really resonates with my own pseudo-socialist viewpoint.”

MELLOW NELLO

I hitched a ride for party number five, the Denim & Diamonds benefit for cancer in Southampton, which was petering out as the band played “New York, New York.”

The party was honoring Count Alex de Lesseps and his wife, LuAnn, one of the Real Housewives of NYC, who was racing around in a white Ungaro gown and getting photographed and filmed. Had she picked up on the vibe?

“Not yet, because I’ve been in the south of France until now. I just got back yesterday.”

She agreed that it was going to be the summer of concern, politically. “Who’s going to be our next president? I mean that’s a concern. … And people are debating whether or not to sell … whatever. In the next six months, there’s going to be a crisis, my friend. So if you have anything worth any money, sell it, ha-ha. Real estate wise. Oh, yeah, it’s going to get much worse. Much worse.”

If she was the countess of the Hamptons, what would she get rid of or change?

“SUVs. The word ‘Hamptons.’ I would do benefits backwards. Start with a party, music, everybody dances, has drinks, get everybody stoned, and then you sell the stuff.”

Next up: Nello’s, where Richard Johnson was sitting at a table outside with his wife, Sessa, and five other beauties. The Page Six editor thought it was a little early to characterize the summer, but hadn’t noticed much concern, at least among the very rich.

“If the stock market crashes, it doesn’t matter,” he said. “I think that this area has become so above what’s going on in the rest of the world that it doesn’t matter. The stock market can go down 400 points, and people are still here at Nello’s enjoying themselves. And luckily, I don’t own any stocks, so I don’t care either. This is the summer of my baby’s going to learn how to walk, and I’ve got my boat in the water already and I sailed twice, so I’m happy. It’s the summer of sailing.”

Party boy Stavros Niarchos was walking in the direction of the dance floor, where “Funky Town” was cranking. Woody Johnson, the New York Jets owner, Bush fund-raiser and heir to the Johnson & Johnson fortune, was walking out with his young blond fiancée, Suzanne, after checking out the Peter Beard photographs on the wall.

“I haven’t detected any real malaise, so to speak,” Mr. Johnson said. “I’ll tell you, this is an amazing tribute to Peter Beard. I love Peter Beard.”

Nor did Nello Balan, the owner, seem too worried. His place was packed and the maitre d’ just told him that two $6,000 bottles of Cristal Magnum Rosé had been sold in the past five minutes. Last summer, he admitted, it might have been 10 bottles.

ggurley@observer.com