Madness Under the Royal Palms

I
have lived all over the world, from the mountains of Nepal to the provinces of France, a city in southern Peru to a town in Japan, but Palm Beach is as exotic and as hidden a place as I have ever resided. I first visited the island in December 1991. I drove east on Okeechobee Boulevard from West Palm Beach and across the middle bridge onto Royal Palm Way.

The island, off the east coast of South Florida, is faultlessly beautiful, with a sense of solitude and security all its own. There are flowers everywhere and the Atlantic Ocean lies nearby, but the air is so pure and pristine that there is no scent at all. The tall palms lining Royal Palm Way are the descendants of trees born of twenty thousand coconuts from the cargo hold of a ship that smashed against the shore in 1878. The scene could have been Cannes or Nice, except for the fact that there are no shops, no cafés, and no blissful boulevardiers along the street. Instead, imposing vault-like private banks line the street. Welcome, they say silently, to wealth—real wealth.

I drove a few blocks south to Worth Avenue, which, along with Fifth Avenue and Rodeo Drive, is one of the most celebrated luxury shopping streets in America. I got out and walked along its three blocks. Even though this was a few weeks before Christmas, there was only a handful of shoppers. At the eastern end of the street stood a splendid public beach, but there were no restrooms and few parking spots, nowhere to eat, and only a few people scattered on the beach. Everything conspired to tell the visitor he or she was not welcome.

There is no luxury trademark in the world quite like Palm Beach. For over a hundred years, the wealthiest Americans have been coming here for the winter season, living lives of exclusivity and privilege apart from the rest of us. As I drove the length of the thirteen-mile-long island, I tried to see as much as I could, but most of the estates stood behind walls and manicured hedges, and everything seemed shrouded from view.

I wanted to find a place away from the winter gloom where I could write my books in solitude and sunshine. For some unfathomable reason, I kept thinking, why not live here? I cannot quite explain it, even today. It would have been more like me to buy a bungalow in Key West or a cottage in Naples.

In 1994, my wife, Vesna, and I purchased a duplex in a condominium on South Ocean Boulevard, a block north of Worth Avenue. Edward Durrell Stone, architect of the Kennedy Center, designed the elegant, modernist building that is the most architecturally significant apartment building on the island. I found everything about it spectacular, from the way I could lie in bed looking out on the ocean, to my office overlooking the inner courtyard and atrium pool. When I got up early in the morning and sat in my office looking down on people coming in and out of their apartments, I felt like Jimmy Stewart in
Rear Window
.

We had been there less than a week when there came a knock on the door. A committee from the board presented themselves. I thought they were there to welcome us to the building, but that was not why they stood there in an unsmiling, stolid line. I was told I could not sit in my bathrobe in my office without blinds. I apologized. We were redoing the apartment and our new blinds had not arrived. I had no idea that I had scandalized my neighbors. I found it odd that they felt they needed to show their strength of numbers, when all it would have taken was a phone call from one board member.

A little later, I noticed a wet spot high on the living room wall that, day after day, grew larger. The swimming pool is on the roof, and I assumed that it had leaked. Once the stains dried up, I asked the building to pay a few hundred dollars to have that part of the wall repainted.

The board president came to inspect the purported damage. There is a sartorial progression in Palm Beach. Men of a certain type deal with aging by dressing in wilder and wilder colors. Blue is good for the sixties, green for the seventies, and for the eighties a red so vibrant that these gentlemen look like walking fire hydrants. The board president was old beyond his years. Though barely in his fifties, he wore the reddest of pants. He surveyed our apartment with a face that matched them and refused to sit down, as if that would mean he had accepted some sort of commonality with me.

Our apartment was furnished with art from Peru to Yugoslavia, and rugs from Tibet to Russia. Many of our guests thought that it had been professionally decorated. The president surveyed the room as if under siege.

“It must be like living in a trailer park,” the president sniffed.

“The reason you don’t like me is I don’t wear red pants,” I told him, equally candidly. “My wife’s name isn’t Muffie, and I don’t have paintings of sailboats on my walls.”

I had never met anyone quite like this blustery Tidewater aristocrat, and I was more intrigued than irritated. Little did I know that what I was experiencing was the tip of a submerged world, which when fully explored, would yield as strange and, in some instances, as decadent a culture as one could find on or off this continent…a place of passions and obsessions not even hinted at by its too-perfect exterior. But somehow the anthropologist in my journalistic makeup must have sensed what lay beneath, because I not only stayed, but I began to explore, to poke around and pursue the answers to my questions.

What mysteries lay behind those foreboding walls? Who truly were these people? Why were many of them so hostile to anyone they perceived as different? And, perhaps most of all, where exactly did their restless pursuit of happiness take them?

Getting at the answers turned into as fascinating, in some cases as shocking, and always as unexpected a journey as I have ever taken.

B
arbara Wainscott blew out all the candles on the birthday cake except for one and motioned to her dinner companion, Prince Edward Windsor, to do the honors. It was not only Barbara’s fiftieth birthday this evening in March of 1997, but in three days it would be Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip’s youngest son’s thirty-third birthday. The guest of honor doused the candle without puckering his princely lips. It was as if Edward had been practicing all day. The sixty-five other guests applauded as much their good fortune being in the presence of a Windsor as commemoration of the dual anniversaries.

The tall prince had a newborn’s pink skin and a demeanor of almost feminine refinement. His looks set him apart from everyone else at the Palm Beach party, and were another reason why many of the guests were nervous to have a conversation with him.

Barbara and Prince Edward continued whispering tête-à-tête, with her occasionally giving out the throaty laugh that was her verbal signature. Her horsey chortling advertised that the prince had bestowed yet another wry jest on his hostess.

Barbara had blue eyes so large that it was as if she had no eyelids. These eyes saw everything of social consequence, judged all and forgave little. She was five feet ten inches tall, and would have been a strikingly handsome woman had she not weighed over two hundred pounds. She was as shrewd in her dress as in every other element of public life, and despite her heftiness, she projected an image of class and wealth that few women of any size could have equaled. That evening in her gold chiffon gown and multilayered, shimmering diamond necklace borrowed from Van Cleef & Arpels, she had the magisterial presence of a monarch.

Barbara sent out heavy, hand-engraved invitations “for a small dinner dance in honor of His Royal Highness The Prince Edward,” from the society printer, Mrs. John L. Strong, in New York City. That was the first of the exquisitely rendered elements for this dinner dance at Elephant Walk, the estate she shared with eighty-four-year-old David Berger, her longtime lover. She had a fastidious sense of detail, a mosaic of concerns that came together into a seamless whole. Barbara could have hired Bruce Sutka, the leading event planner, but he was too flamboyant.

Barbara and David’s home stood at 109 Jungle Road, on the corner of South County Road, a block away from the ocean, just south of the town center. The house was a Palm Beach regency, a style ubiquitous in parts of the island. There was a marquee tent affixed to the back of the house. This permanently tented pavilion was a discriminating setting for parties, but not quite large enough for the event Barbara was planning. Thus she attached to the marquee two temporary tents for the orchestra and the dance floor.

The hostess ensured that the lighting was gently forgiving to the imprecations of age, yet bright enough to highlight every element. She set out mirrored dinner tables that reflected the richly appointed place settings and the glittering jewels on the ladies. She ordered a nursery’s worth of roses, lilacs, crocuses, and lilies of the valley to festoon every empty space, and the white tent gave off the rich bouquet of Rubrum lilies. She spent over a thousand dollars on the centerpiece floral displays on each table. Barbara garnished every dish with a touch of luxury, such as smoked trout mousse with caviar and beef tournedos with foie gras, all served with superb French wines.

Barbara saw to it that the temporary dance floor would not hobble ladies in high heels. Nor would she have her guests assaulted with the blaring blast of brass, sounds that overwhelmed talk at so many Palm Beach parties. She told band leader Bob Hardwick that she wanted a rich overlay of strings and no microphones or speakers. With the eight violins and gently muted brass, her company conversed without shouting while the shimmering, scintillating music practically lifted people out onto the dance floor. Senator Claiborne Pell, a blueblood Rhode Island politician who had just retired from office, hardly left the dance floor.

A
S
B
ARBARA SURVEYED THE
gathering, she was observing what might appear glorious frivolity but was one of the most important and calculated endeavors of her social career. In fact, Barbara had been preparing most of her life for this. She came from a family that traced its lineage back to the Jamestown, Virginia, colony in the seventeenth century. Her mother’s family, the Buckleys, had lost everything in the Great Depression. Her father, Desmond Simmons, had made a good living as a project manager on major buildings in Manhattan, but Barbara grew up learning that her family had once known rich, advantaged times that seemed forever lost.

In 1965 when Barbara Simmons was attending Mary Baldwin, a Virginia women’s college, former Vice President Richard Nixon introduced her to another college-age Republican, Jeffrey Wainscott. After graduating, the tall, well-born gracious Republican activist married the tall, wealthy, handsome navy lieutenant who flew off to fight for his country in Vietnam. His bride became Pat Nixon’s social secretary during the 1968 presidential campaign and served in the Nixon administration. Barbara perhaps loved the idea of her lieutenant more than the reality, and when he returned, the marriage was soon over. The young divorcée moved to New York City, where she worked in public relations overseeing events for the elite of the city.

Barbara’s aged lover, David Berger, came from the small town of Archbald, Pennsylvania, where his father had been a successful Jewish merchant. David Berger had graduated first in his class from Penn Law School in 1936, eventually becoming one of the first lawyers to pursue federal class action suits, winning colossal settlements in such cases as
Exxon Valdez
and the Three Mile Island nuclear disaster. His legal achievements were well-known, but what was not widely recognized was that his specialization had netted him a fortune estimated at over $350 million. David flew first class to be met by chauffeured limousines that took him to suites in the finest hotels in the world, but wherever he went, he felt his life lacked a crucial imprimatur that could only be achieved in Palm Beach.

For a hundred years, the social elite of America and those seeking to be part of it had been coming to this island off the coast of South Florida to spend the winter season. During that time, Palm Beach became not only the most exclusive resort community in the world, but the most socially segregated town in America. When David was a young man, there were restricted clubs in many other places, but at the Everglades and Bath and Tennis, the two leading clubs on the island, that policy continued unabated and unchallenged. Even in these years at the B&T, if one of “them” somehow got onto the tennis courts or into the dining room, he might well be asked to leave. For most of his life, David could not have joined two other clubs on the island, the Sailfish Club and the Beach Club, either, but when faced with legal and political challenge, they changed their policies.

David had come down to Palm Beach as a young Philadelphia lawyer and stayed at the Whitehall Hotel. He remembered the Whitehall primarily for its old-fashioned tin bathtubs. At this time in the fifties, David and other visiting Jews were like West Berliners on the Berlin corridor during the Cold War, traveling on a narrow strip that contained the three almost exclusively Jewish institutions on the island: the Whitehall Hotel, the Sun and Surf Beach Club, and the Palm Beach Country Club. As he journeyed the route, the image of a forbidden world of glamour and elegance eternally beyond his reach was imprinted on David Berger’s soul.

Now, four decades later, with a vast fortune at his disposal and with Barbara’s guidance, David had set out to become the first Jew to reach the heights of Palm Beach society. “David saw a chance for social acceptance and importance that he wouldn’t really have to work hard for,” Barbara said. “He’d have to
pay
. He understood paying. He didn’t trust favors unless they were bought. He didn’t know about kindness because he had never experienced it.”

T
HE IRONY WAS THAT
David craved to win acceptance in a town that was about half Jewish. The Whitehall Hotel where David had stayed had long since been torn down. The Sun and Surf was now a largely Jewish condominium, and the Palm Beach Country Club was the leading Jewish club. Although there were Jewish homeowners throughout the island, most lived in a heavily populated strip of condominiums between the ocean and the Intracoastal Waterway at the far southern tip of town. It was so geographically separate that when one drove along a tree-lined section of South Ocean Boulevard and around Sloan’s Curve, it was like entering another town.

Unlike the rest of the island where there were few large residential buildings, both sides of the road were lined with large condominiums. Middle-aged ladies walked their poodles, spouses pedaled along on matching bicycles, joggers put in their five miles, and aging gay couples paced each other for their daily constitutional. Retirees eked out their days on small pensions in modest efficiencies along the Intracoastal Waterway, but there were also superb, oceanfront apartments furnished with discriminating style. It was a vibrantly human scene that could have been any number of places along the South Florida coast.

But just to the north in the estate section practically the only human beings one saw were gardeners blowing leaves, or pool men hurrying out of electronic gates. That was what the WASP gentry considered the ideal of a proper Palm Beach life. They derided the area to the south as the “Gaza Strip,” a nightmarish vision of what would happen to Palm Beach if “they” ever took over, a vulgar Catskills South that would destroy peace and property values.

T
HE ISLAND THAT WAS
the focus of Barbara and David’s ambition is America’s first gated community. Its three bridges can be raised in a minute, and are as strong a barrier as the most impregnable of gates. That Palm Beach is the most controlled and exclusionary of towns is signaled in every way, from the toilet-less public beaches and the limited parking to the salesclerks with noses elevated to the sky. And on the highways leading to the island, there are no signs directing the visitor to Palm Beach, a town of thirty thousand in the winter months.

Barbara understood that life in Palm Beach is like an elaborate costume party in which one can wear whatever outfit one wants as long as the mask never falls. For over a century, people have come to the exclusive community to reinvent themselves by cloaking themselves in the illusions of wealth. They often build second acts so unrelated to the first that their biographies are like two different lives mysteriously attached to each other.

The most astute observer of the island’s early years was none other than the novelist Henry James, who traveled back to America after years of living as an expatriate in England. James arrived in February 1905 by train one evening in this enclave of civilization slashed out of the jungle. There, commanding the skyline, stood the six-story, lemon yellow Royal Poinciana Hotel, at the time not only the largest hotel in the world, but the largest wooden structure ever built. The author was often appalled by the boastful grandiosity of America, but he was astounded by this visage. The Royal Poinciana was “a marvel indeed, proclaiming itself of course, with all the eloquence of an interminable towered and pinnacled and gabled and bannered sky-line. To stand off and see it rear its incoherent crest above its gardens was to remember—and quite with relief—nothing but the processional outline of Windsor Castle that could appear to march with it.”

James was equally enthralled by what he saw once he entered the main portals of the hotel. There were rooms for 1,750 guests, a dining room that sat 1,800, and a veritable street of shops “dealing, naturally, in commodities almost beyond price—not the cheap gimcracks of the usual watering-place barrack.”

American commercial culture was triumphant, resulting in an affluent class with the money and aspirations to vacation at the most desirable winter resort in America. James was initially delighted by the sight of these wealthy Americans attempting to learn and employ the kinds of manners that he considered the essence of European culture, indeed, exaggerating those manners as if only in overcompensating could they be sure they got it right. They had “the inordinate desire for taste, a desire breaking into a greater number of quaint and candid forms, probably, than have ever been known upon earth. And doesn’t the question then become, almost thrillingly, that of the degree to which this pathos of desire may be condemned to remain a mere heart-break to the historic muse? Is that to be, possible, the American future?”

Palm Beach had become a university of taste where the new business elite arrived from all over the eastern half of the United States, often for lengthy stays. They changed their clothes five times a day, took tea at the outdoor palm garden, and attended balls and concerts. Vanderbilts, Whitneys, Cushings, Livingstons, and Winthrops stayed in the hotel, although the more typical guests were commercial gentry from cities such as Pittsburgh, Dayton, or Buffalo. They brushed against the crème de la crème, and in so doing emulated their social betters. The Royal Poinciana represented a democratization of class, the world of Newport brought south and expanded so that anyone with enough money could partake.

The author of
Portrait of a Lady
and
Washington Square
was brilliantly attuned to the nuances and subtleties of social life. Yet James was rendered dumbstruck by these hordes of people who were of a size and stature unworthy of these incredible surroundings, and distressingly similar in their demeanor and conduct. “It was the scant diversity of type that left me short, as a storyseeker or picture-maker,” James concluded. “The women in particular failed in an extraordinary degree to engage the imagination, to offer it so to speak, references or openings: it faltered—doubtless respectfully enough—where they for the most part so substantially and prosaically sat, failing of any warrant to go an-inch further.”