Madness Under the Royal Palms (21 page)

The patio, surrounded by the walls of Mizner’s masterwork, was a superb setting for conversation with at least a modicum of the originality of the surroundings. Yet what passed as conversation was for the most part, mundane and obvious social patter, exchanges of such tedium and obviousness that they lasted no more than half a dozen sentences before the speaker moved on to repeat his trite politesse on someone else, and to be greeted in kind. Most of these guests had been trained to think that a monotone of banalities constituted manners, and wit and passionate dialogue the marks of a vulgar arriviste.

There was nothing more difficult in Palm Beach than to host a memorable evening, and not have one’s event end up just another cog in the social machine. There were 150 major charity events for the 2007–2008 season, including balls, dinners, luncheons, fashion shows, or other large events, and probably another hundred charity cocktail parties and smaller events. There were perhaps fifty private events the magnitude of Cathleen and Walter’s gigantic celebration, and several thousand dinner parties either catered or served by a professional staff. If a socially active person stayed home more than a couple of nights, it was as if she had been ostracized. It had reached the point where some people not only did not expect an event to be memorable, but would have found it unnecessarily enervating if it had been.

This particular evening had cost over two hundred thousand dollars, shared in part by another couple. Cathleen had done her best to create an event to be savored in the memories of the three hundred guests. When it came time for dinner, the guests moved up the steps through an arcade into the Orange Room. The room with its retractable roof was not part of the original building. It was the scene of the largest events at the club, from the annual New Year’s Eve party to private weddings and spectacular parties such as this was. The guests slowly worked their way around the tables that ran from the edge of the dance floor to beyond the farthest reaches of the room, looking for their tables.

Cathleen and Walter were both comfortable public figures, and they introduced the evening with panache and grace. That Cathleen did not traipse imprudently into off-color humor disappointed those who would have laughed loudest and then savagely berated her for weeks for her social insolence. This evening she merely expressed her love for her husband, and he did the same; then the two danced as the orchestra played “Just in Time.”

At precisely ten o’clock, several of the couples got up from their tables and began walking to the exits. Before long, almost the entire room was emptying out. It was like the bell had gone off for the next class. A few guests who had flown in from Canada stood dumbstruck at this lemminglike march to the valet parkers. It was Friday evening, the night was in its infancy, and the celebration should have been beginning, not ending.

One of the immutable rules at the Everglades Club is that tipping is not allowed. The staff is presumably sufficiently remunerated that gratuities are not needed, and are an unnecessary intrusion on the social life of ladies and gentlemen.

A long line of couples waited for their cars, including General and Mrs. Alexander Haig. The former White House chief of staff was wearing hearing aids and in other ways was showing his age. No one would have faulted him for asking for some minor preference, but he was a longtime club member and waited like everyone else. Far behind him stood a rotund New York businessman who had purchased a Mizner estate and renovated it in such a manner that it had the spiritual essence of a Marriott Hotel. He pushed his way out of line, flipped his car stub to one of the Latino parkers, and after stuffing bills in the parker’s hand, was off with his equally rotund wife in their Rolls-Royce while others waited. The husband of an aged woman who had made a fortune making wedding dresses also gave the parker a tip and drove off in their Rolls-Royce. Others guests shifted nervously, some of them pulling out bills.

Even half a dozen years ago, such a scene would have been unthinkable, but now it was common. It was not just manners that were breaking down, but a profound social code that had governed Palm Beach for a hundred years. The Everglades board tried to admit only those who would adhere to all of the clubs rules and mandates, but at times it seemed that things were breaking down in Palm Beach almost as much within the clubs as outside.

When the valet parker brought Cathleen’s Rolls, Walter did not even consider tipping. The couple’s home was a few hundred yards down Worth Avenue. Cathleen and Walter went to bed almost the minute they arrived. They got up early in the morning and swam nude in their heated pool, and then spent much of the day together in an endless series of social events and charity meetings.

A
S HAD BEEN HER
tradition for three decades, Cathleen went to the Orange Room of the Everglades for Christmas Eve dinner. Walter sat beside her as did her daughter, Melissa, who was the overwhelming anxiety of Cathleen’s life. Her alcoholic daughter had been in and out of rehab much of her adult life. When she was sober, Melissa was a boon companion, not only Cathleen’s daughter but also a charming friend. Cathleen still felt about Melissa like a young mother. Cathleen might be at a fancy dinner, but there was still part of her thinking and worrying about Melissa. The drinking was trouble enough, but then Melissa had been stricken with cancer and almost died, and with all the painkillers, there was yet another series of problems. The phone rang constantly from doctors, pharmacists, and various professionals, and if she was not fielding one problem, she was fielding another. Cathleen had been to all the meetings, AA and Al-Anon, group therapists, consultants, quacks, doctors, and pseudo-doctors. The problem was not that Melissa liked liquor. The problem was, as Melissa said, that she loved it.

Her mother’s endless solicitiousness irritated her daughter, who acted as if she could never be an adult until her mother left her alone. But how could Melissa be a true adult when she drank as she did and was financially dependent on Cathleen, and showed no signs of giving up either addiction?

The other guest at Christmas dinner was her Filipino maid, whom Cathleen had nicknamed “Grumpy” because she smiled all the time. Grumpy was doubtless the only servant seated with members. Every Sunday, Cathleen let Grumpy invite her Filipino friends to the house for a party, and for hours, music and laughter reverberated through the mansion.

It should have been the most joyous and celebratory of evenings, but for Cathleen, something was just not right. The room was so crowded with revelers, compressed with the same faces, and there was such a sense of self-conscious joy, it was as if the spirit was being force-fed. Everywhere she went these days, even to the most elaborate and brilliantly presented of charity balls, she could not wait to leave, to finish her dinner and to go home with Walter on her arm.

Cathleen invited Melissa, her Alcoholics Anonymous sponsor, and her favorite priest, Father Bill, for New Year’s dinner at her home. When Melissa returned to the table after going to the bathroom, her sponsor exclaimed, “You’re drunk.” She had downed a fifth of vodka in no more than five minutes, and Cathleen had to take her to the emergency room at Good Samaritan Hospital to have her stomach pumped.

Melissa blamed Cathleen for forcing her to come to Palm Beach for dinner, when if she had stayed near her home, she would not have started drinking. And so it went.

When Cathleen looked back on her years in Palm Beach, nothing meant more to her than her work founding the Palm Beach Auxiliary to the Lord’s Place. Cathleen was not sure if she wanted to attend the “private reception honoring Rena & Vic Damone for their ongoing support of The Lord’s Place Palm Beach Auxiliary hosted by Mr. and Mrs. John Castle” at the historic former home of the Kennedys on North Ocean Boulevard. The ladies’ auxiliary was honoring the Damones, largely for hosting the auxiliary tea party four months before the evening of Cathleen and Walter’s party at the Everglades.

Cathleen cringed at these ladies’ events. It was $150 a ticket for the 6–8 p.m. cocktail party, and she thought perhaps she would just send a donation and be done with it, but in the end she and Walter drove north in the new Rolls-Royce her husband had given her as an anniversary gift.

The guests were mainly matrons dressed in designer décor and holding designer purses. In the main rooms, they mingled, ate fancy appetizers, drank wine and mixed drinks, and socialized. The Castles had placed staff in the two diminutive, unrestored rooms where Robert and John F. Kennedy had slept. This unpretentious décor harkened back to an era that was gone.

Diana Stanley, the new executive director of the Lord’s Place, worked the room. In her black dress, she looked like a no-nonsense nurse who specialized in tough love. She had brought along as speaker a formerly homeless woman who was living with her three children in an apartment provided by the nonprofit. Holly had dressed in her best clothes. She looked as if she might have shopped at Wal-Mart or JCPenney. My wife and I talked to Holly, but in all the time that I was watching, nobody else in the room said a word to her.

After about an hour, Diana Stanley quieted the room. She vowed that she would not rest until everyone, including these ladies here today, understood and felt the challenge of homelessness.

“We have been so blessed by your support and donations,” Diana said, looking at the Damones. “So we give thanks for all that you do. And of course, we can never talk about the auxiliary unless we honor our founder, and that would be Cathleen McFarlane-Ross, who had a vision.”

Then Diana turned to the woman beside her. “I’m here with Holly. She’s from our family campus and she’s one of our favorite people. And she’s going to tell you a little of her story about how her life has been touched by the Lord’s Place. First tell us a little about your family.”

“Okay, I’m a mother of three, I graduated the program in December. I was in a rush to finish and get with my family, and my mother was kind enough to let us…” Holly went on in a stream of largely unconnected words. Diana understood the endless travail of homelessness, and she coaxed Holly’s story out of her, and the optimism that she felt in her new apartment. “I’m staying at the Lord’s Place as long as it takes,” she concluded, articulating each word.

Diana thanked Holly and then said what she had come here to say. “When we gather together in a beautiful cocktail event like this, sometimes we don’t always stop and pause to think about why we’re here,” she said in a preacher’s voice. “I guess it’s what I’d like us all to do tonight. We’ve been graced with this beautiful home, and less than three miles away we have families living in cars, families living in fields, children that are two and four like my little Rosa and my little Michelle whom I’ve just met, children that have no home, but have been blessed enough to connect with the Lord’s Place.”

As soon as Diana finished her remarks, almost everyone moved toward the door, on to the next event.

D
avid was a big drinker. He usually started dinner with three martinis, and then he and Barbara shared at least one bottle of wine. In December 1999, Barbara noticed David leaving his second martini half touched on the dinner table. In the lives of most people, that would have been hardly worth noticing, but Barbara knew how much her husband was a man of habit, and sensed that something was wrong.

“How do you feel?” she asked.

“Not great,” replied David, who had never been sick in his adult life.

“I want you to go to Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston for a checkup,” Barbara said, more a command than a request.

“We’ll take the dog and get a corner suite at the Ritz. And I want you not to tell the boys, because it may be nothing.”

Barbara feared that if David’s sons knew, they would push their father to seek medical treatment in Philadelphia, where they would have more control. The couple flew up to Boston, and after checking in at the Ritz-Carlton Boston, David began his tests. It took only a few hours for the specialists to confirm that David had both Alzheimer’s and stomach cancer so advanced that without treatment, he would die in a few weeks. He was operated on, losing about half his stomach, and afterward began chemotherapy that burned away whatever cancer remained.

When David first became sick and his death seemed imminent, Barbara realized that she had not paid enough attention to her financial condition. In their prenuptial agreement, David had legally promised to create a trust in his wife’s name, add her as a coowner to his apartment in Manhattan, and transfer one of his Mercedes to her name, but he had done none of this. Once David’s condition improved, Barbara confronted him. He said he had merely let matters slide, and quickly ordered his attorneys to make things right. A trust owned the Palm Beach house, and Barbara insisted that he buy a house for her on the island where she could live after he died. He authorized her to spend up to a million dollars, and she bought a house in the North End.

For the long seven weeks that they were in Boston, Barbara spent much of her little free time shopping at the luxury stores along Newbury Street. “I want you to spend whatever you want on whatever you want,” David had told her several years before. “You know why I’m saying this?”

Barbara did not say anything, but she thought, “David’s sons are going to screw me when David dies. So If I want things, I’d better get them now.”

Barbara took David’s remarks as his way of telling her that his sons would do whatever they could to see that she did not cut deeply into their inheritance. And she took her husband at his word. Barbara loved exquisite things, and she bought whatever struck her expensive fancy, including couture clothes especially fit for her large figure; shoes handmade for her outsized feet; hats uniquely designed for her big head; handbags, scarves, artwork, and home furnishings.

When the couple returned to Palm Beach, they knew that their lives would never be the same again. Many women would have handed their husband over to a nurse as they hurried out of the house for lunch and an afternoon of bridge, but Barbara did not do that. There were nurses, but she was the primary caregiver.

Barbara learned to set up the IV-like device with nutrient packets that fed to a tube in David’s stomach. It took several hours to feed him, and at night, she lay restlessly next to her sleeping husband, waiting for the alarm to go off, signaling that it was time for a new nutrient packet.

Those who only knew Barbara from her social life in Palm Beach would not have predicted her behavior. “I loved him and I wanted to preserve his dignity,” she says. “By doing this myself I felt there wouldn’t be people who could say he’s got a hole in his stomach.”

As much as she performed as a caregiver, Barbara’s larger role was to try to keep David’s life as unchanged as possible. The couple flew to London on private planes, taking their medical equipment with them to their suite at Claridge’s. They continued to go to the races at Ascot, and to stay with Prince Edward at his country estate.

Barbara watched as David fought tenaciously to forestall the dying of the light. He had been a superb trial lawyer with a dramatic sense of theater; now he knew that he had to play a new role. With the onset of Alzheimer’s, he could no longer be his loquacious self. He learned to be quiet and to rely upon a few stock phrases, and to those who did not know him, he seemed a quiet old gentleman in pristine health.

In June of 2003, the Bergers were staying with Prince Edward and his wife, Sophie, Countess of Wessex, in their country estate. David had come down to breakfast first, and was sitting with the prince and a couple of other guests. As Barbara appeared, she could tell that the guests were indulging in their favorite sport, taking turns complimenting the prince. “Isn’t the food at Bagshot Park delicious!” one of the guests exclaimed. David looked at the food and then at his acquaintance. “It tastes like shit,” he said.

Barbara apologized for the wildly inappropriate comment, and as the chauffeured car drove them back to Claridge’s, she knew that she would no longer be able to take David out socially. In their two-bedroom suite, he went into one of the bathrooms and fell against the closed door. He could not get up, and his body blocked Barbara from pushing open the door. A worker had to crawl out on the ledge and work his way over to the bathroom, where he entered through the window and propped David up enough to open the door.

David suffered no permanent damage from his fall, but that was about the only good news, and Barbara and David began living full-time in Palm Beach. Except for David hitting tennis balls with a pro at the Breakers, they rarely left the house. For Barbara, the summer months were excruciatingly boring. No one she knew was in town, and her life was what it would be until David died, devoting herself to a husband who soon would not even recognize her.

In July of 2003, Barbara flew up to Boston to have her gall bladder taken out at Brigham Hospital. She left David in the competent hands of a team of nurses. While Barbara was focusing on her recovery, she received a call from her lawyer. “I’ve gotten a communiqué from David’s lawyers,” he said. “It’s a list of supposedly everything you’ve bought in the last three years. I’m sending it to you overnight. I don’t know what it’s about, but it’s not good.”

Barbara was startled that the attorneys could have gotten hold of such information, but David’s son Daniel worked at his father’s law firm and she assumed he was behind this. The accuracy of the list impressed Barbara. She found only one mistake, an item for $225 from Victoria’s Secret. That was not her kind of store, but the rest was accurate except for the handkerchiefs she had bought at Au Trousseau, where an antique French batiste handkerchief cost as much as two hundred dollars. The handkerchiefs were listed as furniture.

“This can’t be right,” the lawyer said on the phone. “What did you buy at Hermès on Newbury Street for $12,500?”

“I bought a pocketbook,” Barbara replied, growing uncomfortable with this quasi-inquisition.

“How many?”

“One.”

“How could you spend so much?” asked the incredulous attorney, whose wife boasted of buying knockoff designer purses from pushcarts on Madison Avenue.

“It’s red ostrich,” Barbara said, as if that should settle the matter.

When she got off the phone, Barbara knew she was in trouble if even her own attorney did not empathize with her. She had him fly down to Palm Beach to talk to David, but he was so far gone that it did no good.

In January of 2004, Barbara received formal notification that she was being divorced. Unbeknownst to her, David had signed his power of attorney over to his sons, and this was the result. Barbara’s husband apparently had no idea what he had done. “David, do you want to divorce?” Barbara asked imploringly.

“No. Of course not. I love you.”

Barbara had been prepared to succor her husband for the rest of his life, and she could have fought to hold on to her marriage. But if David had taught her anything, it was that in life you watch out for yourself, and she had studied at his feet long and well. Her relationship with David had started as a business relationship and it ended as one. She set out to try to take away as much money as she could from their marriage.

David had lied about his assets in the prenuptial, and she was convinced any judge would throw it out of court. Then she would face a brutal, onerous divorce in which the opposing lawyers would portray her as a wildly profligate woman squandering millions of dollars without conscience or concern. And there would be all kinds of allegations that while shamelessly squandering David’s money, she was not taking proper care of her husband. The theme would have resonated with most middle-class Americans, but if she could have gotten a true jury of her peers—women married to fabulously wealthy older men—they probably would have judged her conduct and her expenses as nothing more than normal.

David’s lawyers offered her a generous cash payment, and Barbara decided to accept. The negotiations took place rapidly. Barbara felt the overwhelming desire of David’s sons to get her out of the house as soon as possible. In exchange for a settlement that would allow her to live a life of wealth on her own, the lawyers presented her with an agreement that contained many onerous clauses. The worst of it was that she had to agree never to see David again nor to contact him in any way.

The agreement was to be signed and millions of dollars transferred to her name on March 8, 2004, Barbara’s fifty-seventh birthday. The evening before, Barbara went into David’s bedroom just before he went to sleep at 6:45 p.m. to say good night for the last time. She was full of a mounting sense of horror and rage and perhaps a modicum of guilt. She knew that with Alzheimer’s patients, it is crucial to keep everything in their lives the same, not even moving a chair a few feet or buying a new dresser.

When Barbara got up the next morning and left the house at around 7:30, David’s door was shut. She drove over to her lawyer’s office. At shortly before eleven, she and her attorneys arrived at the offices of David’s attorney, where David was shuttered away in another room to sign the final agreement. Much of the furniture in the Jungle Road house was Barbara’s, and while the final documents were being signed, movers were taking away the furnishings and moving them to Barbara’s house in the North End.

David’s sons flew him to Philadelphia immediately after the signing. When he was returned to the house a week later, Barbara was gone. The furniture was gone. The nurses his ex-wife had hired were gone. This man who had come to Palm Beach so long ago with dreams of rising to the heights of society was now living in a house among people he did not know in a world he barely comprehended.

David’s new caretaker was waiting for him. “Son of a bitch,” he kept saying as he saw how different things were. “Son of a bitch. Son of a bitch.”

The caretaker had been told that Barbara was an evil woman who kept David drugged, and abused him by locking him up in his bedroom. It took her a long while to decide that this was not true. It was partially the way David acted sometimes, thinking that the caretaker was Barbara, and it was partially the way his sons treated him, or more accurately did not treat him. They rarely came to visit, and the caretaker concluded that their primary concern was David’s fortune.

The caretaker kept David busy. He loved music and she took him to every musical performance in the area. He loved to walk and she took him along Worth Avenue and out to the malls. He loved tennis and every morning at 8:30, she brought him over to the Breakers to hit with one of the pros for a half hour. She led him to the center of the court where his competitiveness took over. The pro hit the ball and he hit it back twenty or thirty times before missing. And wherever they went and whatever they did, David never saw Barbara again.

P
ALM
B
EACH IS FULL
of people pierced by sorrows brought on by the pursuit of money. It sets wives against husbands, children against stepmothers, the young against the old, and the healthy against the infirm.

When the widow of a man who had owned an extremely lucrative business in Manhattan was dying, her children did not arrive to be there for her last moments, but the lawyers flew in with their briefcases in hand, ready to begin the distribution of her fortune. The supposed benefactors of another aged woman shipped her off to a nursing home in Poland, while they cavorted in Palm Beach with what remained of her fortune.

Almost everywhere, the mindless pursuit of money tore apart the most fragile emotional sutures of family and friends. There is no better example than Eles Gillet. Barbara and David had seen Eles and Warry often when David was healthy, but now Barbara saw her old friend only occasionally.

Unlike Brownie, Cathleen, and Marylou, Eles had been born to privilege. Eles had grown up in enclaves of advantage, and had never had her dainty hands soiled with the mundane travails of quotidian life. When she was a child, her parents traveled extensively, shuttling their two daughters into the arms of a black nanny who was more their mother than their biological mother was. When her parents were home, Eles and her sister were brought out in their dainty dresses to christen the latest ship launched by Ingalls Shipbuilding Corp., a subsidiary of Ingalls Iron Works, a company built, in the words of her grandfather, from “a one-horse ship—one Negro and one mule” into the biggest steelworks in the South.

In 1938, her grandparents built their six-bedroom house on Via Del Lago in the estate section. The family patriarch, Robert Ingersoll Ingalls Sr., was a man of deep Presbyterian faith. In 1948 when his only son and namesake, Robert Jr., divorced his wife to marry a widow with two children, his father severed his son from the family company he was serving as president.

Eles was twelve years old when her parents divorced. She was shuttled out of Pelican Hall and moved to her father’s yacht, docked at the end of Worth Avenue. As a preteen, she was especially vulnerable to the adult games of duplicity, and there is no neat tabulation of the damage rendered.