Anthony Brandt, 87, Remembered for Prolific Writing, Wit and Devotion

Within two weeks of meeting him, Lorraine Dusky knew that, one day, she would marry Anthony Brandt.

He was a writer, a poet, an intellectual. He was thoughtful yet silly, philosophical yet fun — a handsome, deep thinker who understood her in a way that few could.

And on a wintry day in 1981, while sitting across from one another at Murf’s Backstreet Tavern in Sag Harbor — “The most romantic place in the world,” Dusky said — he casually brought it up.

“You know, maybe we ought to just get married,” he’d said, Dusky recalled.

“I’ve been thinking about that, too,” she’d replied.

Over the next 43 years, they built a life together in the village — hosting parties, dining at The American Hotel with friends and family, immersing themselves in current events and civic duty — as well as apart. A cardinal figure in Sag Harbor’s preservation efforts, Brandt loved history and architecture, sailing and slapstick humor, and all things literature. And he appreciated a good conversation.

Earlier this month, Dusky facilitated as many as she could, putting his loved ones on speakerphone as she held it close to his ear, so they could say their hellos and, ultimately, their goodbyes.

On November 14, Brandt died in his sleep at East End Hospice Kanas Center for Hospice Care on Quiogue — one week before his birthday. He was 87.

“We tried to have as nice last days as we could,” Dusky said.

Born to Grace Scott and Axel Hjalmar Brandt on November 21, 1936, Anthony Scott Brandt grew up in Westfield, New Jersey, alongside his brother, Charles, and they spent their summers on Long Beach Island in, of all places, Brant Beach — not loosely named after the family, but rather for a type of goose.

There, the brothers worked at the Brant Beach Yacht Club, reporting to the harbormaster. If there was a storm coming, they would ride out on skiffs to fetch all of the boats anchored in the bay — either securing them or bringing them to shore, recounted Anthony Brandt’s son, Evan.

“That always struck me as being very exciting,” he recalled. “He said that his mother would stand on the little dock overlook, that looked out on the bay, and through force of will, keep them safe by watching.”

After graduating from Westfield High School, Brandt attended Princeton University, where he quickly pivoted from chemistry — which his parents urged him to study — to English. Though his first love was poetry, he worried about financial security and, instead, gravitated toward nonfiction and journalism.

“He wanted to strike out in the world and to do interesting things and write about them,” Evan Brandt said, “and he did.”

But first, he married his high school sweetheart, Barbara Rescorla, in 1958. Two years later, they had a daughter, Katherine Grace Brandt, and then their son four years after that. He earned his master’s degree from Columbia University; she attended nursing school. And the young family soon moved to Shrub Oak, a hamlet in Yorktown.

There, they lived in a Civil War-era farmhouse that, at one point, operated as a hotel — complete with the door numbers still on the three third-floor bedrooms. Brandt had a garden — and an unofficial contest with a neighbor on who could grow the tallest corn — and a printing press installed inside a barn in the backyard, where he produced nothing but spoof business cards featuring an illustration of Uncle Sam “saying something sardonic,” his son said.

Brandt thought it was hysterical.

“He used to tell me that his most important job as a father was to teach me irony,” his son said, “and he was very thankful that both of his children appreciated and had a good sense of irony. One of the best gifts I ever gave him was a bottle of wine, and the label said ‘Irony’ on it, and when I was out there last time, I found it in his office. He had never opened it. He wanted to look at it while he was working.”

During this childhood, Evan Brandt recalled his father as a quiet man, who largely wrote from home — and demanded quiet from everyone around him, too. But on Sunday nights, the family would come together to watch television, starting with the “NBC Mystery Movie,” which ended at 10 p.m.

And if Evan Brandt laid still enough from his perch on the floor, his parents wouldn’t notice he was there when “Monty Python’s Flying Circus” came on.

“I very much wanted to watch that, because I thought it was funny, but more because of how much it made my father laugh,” he said. “I never heard him laugh like that as a kid, except when he was watching that.”

Despite his sense of humor and wry wit, Brandt was a serious man and, in Shrub Oak, he wrote and published his first book, titled “Reality Police: The Experience of Insanity in America.” As part of his research, he pretended to be ill in order to see what a state-run mental hospital in Poughkeepsie was like on the inside.

And what he found — including questionable methods by a psychiatrist there — landed him in the middle of a lawsuit, which he ultimately won, once he exposed it.

This is the backdrop against which Dusky, an accomplished author and journalist, and Brandt, who was freshly divorced, first met.

“That was the story of why I thought he was such great marriage material,” she deadpanned. “He was completely broke and being sued.”

But still, she was smitten. Within a month of connecting at a friend’s brunch in New York, they moved in together. Within two, they relocated to Sag Harbor, where Dusky already had a rental. And within eight, they were married — on September 20, 1981, in the great room of Ted Conklin’s grandparents’ house in Westhampton Beach.

They became the “Scott and Zelda of Sag Harbor,” said their longtime friend, who owns The American Hotel — the home of countless lunches and dinners with their circle of friends.

“I remember when Lorraine brought him out to Sag Harbor to show him off to all the gang, and we kind of roasted him that first night, sitting under the moose,” Conklin recalled with a laugh. “And he became part of the group.”

Dusky coaxed out a new side of Brandt. Before they married, he had just a few friends, his work and his family — and his son said he was surprised to see how much his father loved entertaining.

“It seems to me that she helped him enjoy and understand the value of friendships and companionships,” he said, “and taking the time to enjoy the people around you.”

One of them would come to be journalist Robert Caro, a Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer who found himself face to face with Brandt at a party in 1990, 33 years after they had both graduated from Princeton. “And we fell into, immediately, a terrific conversation about writing,” he said.

Brandt was devoted to the craft, Caro said. He’d go on to become a well-known magazine writer, publishing stories in The Atlantic, Connoisseur, Esquire, Psychology Today, American Heritage, TLS — formerly the Times Literary Supplement — and more.

He edited several books, including “The Tragic History of the Sea: Shipwrecks from the Bible to Titanic,” and “The South Pole: A Narrative History of the Exploration of Antarctica,” and wrote “The Man Who Ate His Boots: The Tragic History of the Search for the Northwest Passage.”

He also held a longstanding column with The Sag Harbor Express and, later, The Express News Group papers, which continued through earlier this year.

“We will always remember Tony for his love for Lorraine and, of course, for his concerns about runaway development,” said Express News Group Co-Publisher Kathryn Menu. “He was a champion in the effort to preserve what was special about Sag Harbor, a village he treasured. Tony used to attend our Express Sessions events, and when he spoke, the whole room would go quiet, because they knew we were about to hear something of real substance.”

Brandt’s devotion extended well beyond his personal writing pursuits and into Sag Harbor — to preserving its heritage, Caro said. He helped start the Board of Historic Preservation and Architectural Review in the 1980s and served as its founding chairman — even returning to the post for three years in 2016, having previously stepped down.

During his father’s tenure, Evan Brandt, who works as a journalist in Pennsylvania, attended one of his meetings just to see how he ran it — “because Lord knows I’m an expert,” he said.

“I was surprised at how proud I was of him for doing that, because I had always considered that his concerns were more lofty,” he said, “but he recognized that it’s important that we all do our part — and do it in a way that makes the most of our capabilities.

“He was a good board member because he was a smart guy,” he continued, “and he would listen to what people said and then he would politely tell them why they were wrong. But he had good ideas. He understood how the world worked.”

Dusky proved to be his match in both intellect and spirit, and Brandt was devoted to her, as well — “very deeply,” Caro said.

Their relationship was passionate and tumultuous, Dusky said. He got used to her always being late, and she accepted that he was always early. They were excellent travel partners, though she preferred to see all the sights, while he liked to blend in and live as locals do.

He was smart, she said, and a good person. When he heard the song “Bridge Over Troubled Water” by Simon & Garfunkel, he told her, “Let me be that for you,” Dusky said.

“Everybody thought we were a great couple,” she said. “That didn’t mean we didn’t argue a lot — we did — but we made up.”

On her birthday, almost every year that they had a party, she would bake a cake and invite about a dozen friends over. And her husband would serenade her, and them, with his rendition of “Sweet Lorraine,” which he publicly debuted at their wedding.

Caro was in the audience for several performances, and found himself moved every time.

“I don’t mean he had a good voice, or even an adequate voice,” Caro said, though it should be noted that the double bass participated in the Princeton choir. “But as he sang it, his love for her really shone through. He would be looking at her and singing ‘Sweet Lorraine’ — very touching moments for me.”

Harris Yulin came to know Brandt during the last five years of his life, he said. He welcomed him into his home and into a friendship, the actor said, and they shared an interest in history. Just weeks before he died, Brandt finished a book about the American dream, a project that dates back to the mid-1960s.

It is currently in front of a number of publishers for consideration, Dusky reported, and Yulin said he is anxious to read it.

“Tony was an open field,” he said, “which you could run at your discretion and pleasure.”

In recent years, the writer had returned to his roots — poetry — and his work was better than ever, according to his wife. He published his first collection, “The Fast,” in 2016, followed by “The Only Available Word” in 2020.

“Up until a couple of weeks before his death, he was sending me a stream of poems he was writing, and I couldn’t wait to get them,” Caro said. “I would call and we would talk about them. He kept on writing until the end.”

The Sunday before Brandt died, former Sag Harbor Mayor Jim Larocca visited his longtime friend at the Kanas Center. They reminisced about their days boating, their adventures and mishaps out on the water — one in particular that involved Brandt lassoing a pole when the engine stalled while bringing the boat into Marine Park. Thanks to him, they nearly avoided a crash.

“He reminded me of this, when I last saw him, that that was the day I promoted him to first mate,” Larocca said. “We got a good laugh about that. He started calling me Captain Hook because of his new title; I referred to him as Mr. Smee.”

He will miss their conversations down on the waterfront, where they’d sit and talk about growing up, history, and share their thoughts on all matters political and current. As they sat together one last time, Larocca asked his friend if he was at peace.

“He said that he was and we talked about what that meant,” he said. “That’s very, very private, but he was genuinely expressing the readiness. But his sly humor was still there, which was, I thought, very nice.”

He paused. “I was very lucky to have that few minutes,” he said.

As her husband faded away from her, Dusky talked to him, reading him stories from The New York Times. When he was conscious, they spoke about his private memorial service, which will be held next month. In addition to his wife and children, he is survived by two grandchildren, Dylan Brandt and Eli Gunther, and a number of nieces and nephews.

When considering what she will miss most about Brandt — her partner in life, in the truest definition of the phrase — her answer was simply one word: “Him.”