The Man Who Would Be King

Roger Jakubowski: I decided that I can’t work for nobody. They’re liable to find out how dumb I really am. Never educated or nothin’. What can I do? A guy’ll tell me to take out the trash, I won’t even do that right. I have to be the boss.

James Kunstler: Why do you think you’re so dumb if you’ve done so well?

RJ: Because I should have a hundred times more. I should own the entire Adirondack Park, that’s what I think. I don’t own it. The whole park, including upstate, the 1000 Islands. Yeah, that’s what I think.

The story of Roger Jakubowski’s preternatural arrival in the North Country two years ago has already entered the annals of Adirondack legend, but for those of you who have been out of state or in a coma since 1985, or don’t get the New York papers, here’s the recap in a nutshell:

New Jersey hot dog millionaire Jakubowski comes to the Adirondacks to inspect an old spring water bottling oper­ation that’s for sale and is so charmed by these mountains that he at once starts buying up everything in sight. His foremost purchase is Camp Topridge, the old Marjorie Merriweather Post estate outside Paul Smiths. The shopping list also includes Crab Island in Lake Champlain, the Big Tupper Ski Center, most of pristine Lake Ozonia, radio stations in Plattsburgh and Tupper Lake, and more. A flam­boyant fellow, his appetite for publicity is bottomless. He courts the press and his droll utterances make great copy.

I’d gone on the state tour of Topridge back in ’84—long before Roger Jakubowski took the property and everything it contained off Governor Cuomo’s hands—so I knew which stuff was Marjorie’s and which was his. What few people understand about Camp Topridge and its creator Ms. Post is that her taste in home furnishings ran along the lines of Elvis Presley’s. Then, of course, Roger moved in some stuff of his own.

There were, for instance, the skunk pelt table mats (hers), and the four-foot-tall brass candlesticks (his), which looked like a gift to the College of Cardinals from the President-for-Life of a third world republic. There was the polyester leopard-skin sofa (hers)—as though nobody would notice it among the dozens of real fur couches, settees, chaises, divans, chairs, and ottomans—and the chess set (his) with pawns the size of pepper mills and kings on the order of Wade Boggs’ baseball bat. There was the clunky, cheap-looking, sludge-colored dinner service (hers), in­cluding demitasse cups, and the un­usual tapestry made of stitched-together shear­ling sheepskin patches depicting Simon Bolivar astride a charger (his) tacked to the lofty ceiling. And of course there were all the motheaten stuf­fed animals, the beaver, porcu­pine, fox, mar­ten, flying squir­rels, elk, bison, caribou, moose, pronghorn, big­horn, cape buf­falo, gnu, eland, ibex, zebra—a veritable Mutual of Omaha Wild Kingdom of dead critters (not to mention whole schools of stuffed fish)—all Marjorie’s. And there was Roger’s 100-watt-per-channel Mclntosh stereo with the six gigantic Klipsch horn speakers, disguised in “rustic” cabinets as big as port-a-johns, blasting out the late and great Marvin Gaye singing “Heard It Through The Grapevine” at a volume loud enough to raise all the aforementioned slain beasts from their sleep of death and send them thundering for the doors. I’d arrived early one morning in mid-spring to find the main gate open and unattended—a situation, I learned later, which had made Jakubowski furious on numerous occasions, according to former employees. But much as he harangued the staff about the gate, the damn thing had a way of staying open, so that any boob, including a nosy reporter, could gain entry to the estate.

The Topridge compound of 60-odd buildings bristles atop a narrow spine of rock and conifer that forms a kind of wall between Upper Saint Regis Lake and Upper and Lower Spectacle Ponds. Begun in the 1930s by the daughter of cereal tycoon C.W. Post, the hodge­podge of little guest cottages and assorted party shacks, along with the main lodge, is a main­tenance crew’s nightmare. In fact, the stagger­ing cost of up­keep, amounting to several hun­dred thousand dollars a year, was the chief reason behind the State’s eagerness to un­load the place (possibly ille­gally, since Marjorie had willed it to the people of New York). In any case, Roger Jakubowski was already up before nine on the morning of my visit, a little bleary perhaps, his long silver hair tousled as though from sleep, trying to instruct his somewhat overwhelmed three-man maintenance crew on their chores for the day. He had one of them in person and issued orders to the others over a crackling walkie-talkie.

Finally, satisfied that his minions would proceed faithfully as ordered, Roger ushered me gruffly up the ridge, past the drabber buildings formerly occupied by Mrs. Post’s army of guides, gardeners and housekeepers, to the gargantuan main lodge. Then, he vanished.

In his place there soon appeared a man of impressive girth, late 40s perhaps, who somehow managed to look dignified despite his outfit—a kind of blue-denim smock suit. The man introduced himself as Roger Jakubowski’s “art advisor,” Vic­tor Bacon. In fact, Victor served Roger in a wide variety of roles, usually as cook, but he was also family—well, in a way—having once been married to Roger Jakubowski’s sister. Roger referred to Victor as the “proctor” of Topridge. (Odd­ly, two weeks be­fore my visit Vic­tor Bacon had left Topridge  entire­ly, according to a former employee who chanced to meet Victor at the airport. That day Victor had been full of gall and resentment at the Lord of Topridge, and it was as­tounding, the for­mer employee said, to hear that Victor was back again. Later, Vic­tor attributed his leave to health reasons. “I need­ed a little vaca­tion, actually,” he said.)

Victor offered to show me Roger’s art col­lection while his boss washed up before breakfast. In the center of Marjorie’s 30-foot long dining room table—be­tween the giant brass candlesticks—stood an imposing silvered bronze statue of a sword-wielding viking by a sculp­tor named La Port. One had to admire the droll effect of placing such a pugnacious figure amid the salad plates and soup bowls, his broadsword ready should some dinner guest utter an incorrect remark.

At the head of the main stairway, built out of colossal tree trunks, stood a Japanese bronze urn the size of a stockpot full fold rose petals that had lost their scent. “Late Meiji period,” Victor said—meaning the early 1900s, around the time of the Taft administration. Across the vast main room, before a fireplace as big as a walk-in closet, lay another bronze sculpture about four feet around of two bulls fighting. At one-tenth the size it would have made a nice paperweight, or per­haps a doorstop. I asked Victor what his prior experi­ence had been in this line of work. “I used to be in the gift and art-ware business,” he replied. Art-ware?, I won­dered. Anyway, he too made to disappear now, saying he had to prepare Roger’s breakfast, and I was left alone again with the music of The Big Chill blaring from the Klipsches.

Just then I happened to notice what seemed to be a rummage sale going on in one of the sun porches off the main lodge. There was someone—a young woman—searching through a lot of clothes on one of those portable metal racks. Plus, there was an array of miscellaneous bric-a-brac spread out on tables all around the sun porch. You could tell it was Mar­jorie’s old stuff. For example, there were two outsized ce­ramic candlabra the same sludge color as her tableware. I ventured in.

Now, the idea of a rummage sale here was fairly preposterous—not just because we were more than a mile away from any public road—and indeed that’s not what proved to be going on. In fact, it was an advertising company doing a shoot for one of its clients: the K-Mart clothing division. The clothes on the racks, then, were K-Mart fashions. The photo crew was down below somewhere, near the old boathouse. I barely had a minute to chat up the wardrobe girl before Victor Bacon summoned me to the breakfast table.

Roger Jakubowski is hardly the first rich outsider to try and carve a personal empire out of these mountains. Adirondack lore is filled with case histories of megalomania. Consider Robert Schroeder, the 19th century beer baron who built Debar Park in the Town of Duane, Franklin County. The estate in­cluded what was reputed to be the world’s largest hops farm—the flowering herb used to give beer its characteristic flavor. The cen­terpiece was a 60-room mansion with adjoining thor­oughbred stables and a private racetrack. By and by, however, Schroeder’s busi­ness went bust, he lost everything, and committed suicide in a Brooklyn rooming house.

Or take Litchfield Park, a failed attempt to create a Eu­ropean-style shooting preserve filled with walking hunting trophies. Around the turn of the century, Edward H. Litch­field fenced in 9,100 acres in the Town of Altamont and tried to stock it with elk and moose—long extirpated by the white man—and also wild boar. For years he and his son kept at it but the animals all dropped dead sooner or later and in 1905 the experiment was abandoned. It wasn’t until 75 years later that scientists discovered a brain-rotting parasite carried by slugs and spread by white-tailed deer (who are immune to it) which devastated the moose and elk, and thus doomed the Litchfield Park scheme from the start.

Roger Jakubowski’s plans are, well, perhaps less elegant than these strange examples. But in two years he has un­questionably become the most conspicuous citizen in these parts. Meanwhile, much of the North Country establish­ment—that is, the powers-that-be, the old money sports, the WASPy-snobby club folk, the Ad­irondack Council members, the civic leaders—are scared to death of this Jersey parvenu who makes no bones about wanting to buy up the entire gosh-darn Adirondacks like some kind of devouring forest demon out of Algonquian mythol­ogy.