Bringing A Touch Of Class To Wainscott With $14.4 Million Purchase

The most expensive real estate purchase revealed on the South Fork last week was one by Wendy Keys. Not that Wainscott needs it, but she will add class to the neighborhood as the former executive producer and programmer for the Film Society of Lincoln Center. She remains on the board of directors of the Film Society and on its executive committee. She also serves on the board of directors of the Westhampton Beach Performing Arts Center.

Certainly a feather in her cap is that beginning in 1972 and through 2008, Ms. Keys directed and co-produced the Film Society’s annual Gala Tribute. Among the legendary directors and actors who have been honored for lifetime achievement have been James Stewart, Bette Davis, John Huston, Laurence Olivier, Federico Fellini, Mike Nichols, Audrey Hepburn, and Gregory Peck.

Several years ago, she got behind the camera herself to direct the documentary “Milton Glaser: To Inform and Delight,” which has made the circuit of Film Festivals, most recently the Hamptons Take 2 Film Festival, and was also featured at the PAC in Westhampton Beach.

Ms. Keys plunked down $14.375 million for a house on Beach Lane that offers six bedrooms, 7.5 baths, and an array of amenities contained in 6,100 square feet. Does Lincoln Center pay that well? Whether it does or not, it helps that Ms. Keys was married to Donald Pels, who died in October 2014. He and his wife were involved in many philanthropic projects, including kick-starting the development of the High Line project in Manhattan and being consistent donors to Human Rights Watch, Rockefeller University, and the New York Philharmonic.

They owned an historic home on Dune Road in Westhampton Beach, one of the few homes that survived the infamous 1938 hurricane.

Mr. Pels had made a smart decision in 1969 when he left Capital Cities Communications to become the chairman and president of Lin Broadcasting. It was a money-losing company until Mr. Pels shed all of its shaky enterprises to focus on Page Boy, a radio paging company. Essentially, this got Mr. Pels onto the ground floor of the emerging wireless and later cellular communications industry.

In the 1980s, Mr. Pels’s now-thriving company owned the cell phone licenses covering New York, Los Angeles, Houston, and other major markets. When McCaw Cellular bought a controlling interest in Lin Broadcasting in 1989, Mr. Pels’s personal profit was $175 million. Over the years, the couple donated a substantial amount of that fortune to various charities and initiatives like the High Line.

Ms. Keys’s previous husband was also a fascinating man. Gary Keys, who died last August at 81, was a producer of jazz and pop concerts and a documentary filmmaker. Among the artists he worked with were Stan Getz, Dionne Warwick, Simon and Garfunkel, Stevie Wonder, Judy Garland, Count Basie, and the Supremes.

He produced the “Jazz in the Garden” series at the Museum of Modern Art as well as concerts at Carnegie Hall and Lincoln Center, the PBS series “Jazz in America,” and documentaries on the singers Whitney Houston and Paul Robeson. His vacation home was not in the Hamptons, but was a house in Cape Negro, Nova Scotia, which he owned with the late singer Richie Havens.