Madness Under the Royal Palms (22 page)

Eles grew into a gorgeous upper-class Southern belle, but she was as remote from the world as the concubines in the emperor’s palace in imperial China. The result was a creature of ultrafemininity, unready for life in the workaday world, but brilliantly prepared to be a hostess par excellence, and both a protector and a symbol of upper-class traditional values. She was a lovely, strong-willed, highly opinionated, ultraconservative woman.

When I had lunch with Eles every few months, it was like going on a formal date. I would drive over to Pelican Hall and park my car in the sweeping driveway, to be shown inside either by her social secretary or maid. Within a few minutes, this tiny, impeccably dressed woman would walk down the stairs, and after air kisses, off we would go to one of the best restaurants on the island.

Innumerable people told me that she would be an impossible interview. We both would have a couple of glasses of chardonnay, but she was articulate and witty, with her own savage take on the pretenders invading her island. When she opened her mouth, she sometimes spoke language so foul that it would have wilted a rose. I will not be quoting her most lurid remarks, because in print they look so unrelentingly ugly, but it was different being with her. As she spewed out her profanity, she made charming what would have sounded vile coming from almost anyone else.

Researching my book, I was often with people professing their endless virtue, promoting their philanthropic endeavors, boasting of their concerns with the plight of the world, when I saw often it was only about them, to promote themselves, to enhance their social status. Eles had none of that pretense. Her children had never consumed her energy or emotions. Her husbands were there only to please her; her friends were there to amuse her.

One time over lunch at Café L’Europe, Eles was livid over the five-hundred-dollar hair coloring she had received at Salon Margrit, the beauty parlor across the street where she and many of her friends went most days. It had been the owner’s birthday, and all these people kept coming in wishing Margrit a happy birthday. It was an outrageous assault on Eles’s appointment.

If Cathleen did not like you, she turned her back. If Brownie did not like you, she pretended she did not know you. If Eles did not like you, she told you to your face in the most brutal, searing terms. If she could not reach you, she left a message on your answering machine that when you got home would burn your ears.

Eles had been brought up to marry well, and she did so, to Samuel Boykin Jr., a wealthy young man with impeccable social connections. They had two children and had what outsiders called blessed lives. The couple did not see happiness as the by-product of a life well lived, but as its central focus, and when they did not feel pleasure, they reached out and grasped for it.

During the season, Eles spent much of her time in her boat docked at the pier at the end of Worth Avenue. “I was in Palm Beach and my husband was up in Birmingham. He had a girlfriend in Chicago, so I got a boyfriend down here,” Eles recalls with relish. “Tit for tat. And my boyfriend down here was Warry Gillet.”

F. Warrington “Warry” Gillet Jr. had three children with his wife, Eleanor Tydings. The daughter of former U.S. senator Millard E. Tydings and sister of former U.S. senator Joseph D. Tydings, Eleanor bore the name of one of Maryland’s most famous families. Warry feared that his closest friend had had an affair with his wife. Thus Eles and her second husband not only shared childhoods of great privilege, but first marriages that ended in sexual betrayal that left them incapable of a complete commitment to another human being. There was always something hanging back, a wariness that never left them.

Eles had many times Warry’s money, but both had been brought up in protective luxury and were as fitted to each other as two pieces of a puzzle. Warry’s father was one of the great aces of World War I, and his son and namesake was lesser in most ways except for his manners and grace. Warry could have been Rhett Butler’s grandson. Tall and handsome, Warry had been brought up in an old Maryland family. He had been living in a condominium in West Palm Beach when he met Eles. Although he had income each year from his father’s trust, he was not wealthy in the sense that Eles was, but he had an incredible collection of Gillet family treasures, including a priceless Chippendale dining table, a treasure of bronzes, antique silver, a grandfather clock, and eighteenth-century sideboards.

Warry had matchless taste, and considered it his role in life to indulge that taste to the full measure. He had clothes perfectly tailored to his six-foot-two-inch frame. He wore impeccable hunting pants and shot with the finest of guns. He was a talented chef who, in their summer house in Maine, loved to cook, often shooing the servants out of the kitchen so he could prepare his succulent barbecue.

Warry was also a connoisseur of wine. Every time the couple traveled to London, they stopped at Berry Bros. & Rudd, Britain’s oldest and most celebrated wine and spirit merchant. They were such good customers that the proprietors put on six-hour-long wine tasting luncheons for the wealthy visitors from America, who shipped home cases of the finest vintages to add yet another dimension to what for years was one of the finest wine cellars in Palm Beach.

Their grandfathers had been founding members of the Everglades Club, and as Eles and Warry sat down to dinner in the Orange Court, they were the perfect examples of the local elite. Eles brilliantly complemented her husband, and was as much the creator of their lifestyle as Warry. One of the first things she did was to buy back the 9,425-square-foot mansion in the estate section that was one of her childhood homes. She then hired Sister Parish, the esteemed interior decorator who had redone the Family Dining Room and the Yellow Oval Room in the White House during the Kennedy administration. The result was a richly traditional old English décor that might have been from a Georgia plantation home. The furnishings were mainly family heirlooms from both the Ingalls and Gillets, including Warry’s nineteenth-century bronzes on the walls.

Eles was dressed by Arnold Scaasi, who created formal wardrobes for many of the island’s most prominent women. The dress designer had learned long ago that in his business, discretion was the only moral absolute. As he fitted his newest customer, he had the distinct impression that her husband was educating Eles in spending
her
money, and spend it she did, on, among other things, a score of Scaasi dresses, each one between ten and twenty thousand dollars.

Eles was not only a perfectionist but also a miniaturist, and she planned her elaborate dinner parties months in advance. If there was to be a hunt dinner featuring some of the game her husband shot, it would not do simply to serve it on any fine china. There must be pheasant service plates and table settings that created the illusion of grasses. If salmon was the main course, then the tables should be outside, covered with conch shells and sea grass leaves, and there must be a shell motif on the finger bowls and dessert plates. And of course, just beforehand, her personal floral arranger created his own unique arrangements to underscore the evening’s theme.

In 1982 when Dan Ponton opened private Club Colette, Eles, Warry, and another couple were his first guests dining there a week before the opening. He has vibrant memories of Eles that evening. “She was the chicest woman of all,” Dan says. “She was the most glamorous, the richest, and the most socially powerful of the pack.”

In the late seventies and eighties, there were no more than half a dozen major charity balls each season, and Eles chaired or served on committees for most of them. “I did cancer three times,” she says.

These balls were overwhelmingly venues of social display, in which charity was little more than a means. Like other chairs, Eles sought corporate and personal sponsors to underwrite the events, who then took generous tax write-offs. There were always elaborate dinners and cocktail parties before the events, in which the hostesses sought to upstage each other. They took tax write-offs too.

Eles did not think of herself as especially charitable, a parsimonious trait that she shared with many of her WASP neighbors. If they gave, they liked to give to things like heart disease or cancer that might personally benefit them, or perhaps the arts, but nothing controversial like AIDS, or notably unpleasant like the homeless, and surely nothing that taxed their trust funds. She would never have involved herself in anything so outré as the Lord’s Place with its unseemly annual dinner dance at the Beach Club in the North End, the Siberia of the island.

Eles’s wealth had not shielded her from the melancholy realities of family life, only exacerbated them. When the children from their first marriages were jammed into their second, there was an unwieldy, painful joining with sharp edges everywhere. Obsessions with money and inheritance became as much features of childhood as puberty.

Eles had particular difficulties with two of the boys. Her husband’s namesake was endless trouble. She had tried in her way to mother F. Warrington Gillet III, but as he grew into adolescence, Warry III increasingly viewed her with wary distance. She did not see the pain in young Warry’s eyes, how he felt that he belonged nowhere, not with his mother’s rich new husband, or with his own father in Palm Beach, but shuttled off to prep school, ignored and largely forgotten.

Young Warry was his father’s son, outrageously handsome and charismatic, and able to get what he wanted with little more than a charming quip. His father looked at his namesake and saw a spoiled scion of wealth, an image that he could have observed in the mirror. One year he decided that Warry III could not “sit on his ass.” The young man needed a lesson in World 101. Warry insisted that his son work as a day laborer in Palm Beach, an experience that taught young Warry primarily that he did not want to be a day laborer.

Warry III had an acting role in 1981 when, wearing a hockey mask, he played the pathological killer Jason in
Friday the 13th, Part 2.
That was the beginning and end of his film career. He returned to New York, where he cut a wide bachelor swath through watering holes both elegant and inelegant. One of Young Warry’s friends, Ernie Garrett, recalls Warry’s father advising his son: “You don’t marry a good-looking woman and then be hurting for money. You marry for money, son, and you can have good-looking women all your life.” That was one of the many fatherly axioms young Warry did not follow.

In 1997, Warry III’s Swedish model bride gave birth to F. Warrington Gillet IV. The following year, the FBI arrested the former actor for his role in a stock swindle. He then developed a plan to place photography studios in malls where young women would have model portfolios taken and buy cosmetics. Young Warry talked several of his mother’s friends, including Marylou Whitney, into getting involved, but the investors lost everything; yet another embarrassment for Eles and Warry.

Eles’s own son, Robert Ingalls Boykin, was troubled too. In 1983, the twenty-six-year-old had been so infuriated at American Airlines for losing his eight pieces of luggage that he called Palm Beach International Airport from his mother’s house, threatening to blow it up. “We are gonna blow those [expletive deleted] Jews up,” he said. When the phone company supervisor called the Gillet residence, the man who answered the phone laughed and called the matter “no big deal” before hanging up. Thanks to his lawyers, Boykin was able to slither out of charges that might well have sent another man to prison.

Robert inherited wealth, but what he needed was to forge his own sense of manhood, outside the walled city of privilege. His positions included an executive post at Bluebonnet Savings Bank of Dallas, a virtual sinecure, when what he needed was something he had truly won himself. He inherited social graces and manners that made him attractive to the daughters of wealth, one of whom he married, when what he needed was to meet with the new and the untried. He drank; so did his mother and stepfather, but booze grabbed on to him. He tried drugs too, and that was worse. But he was rich, not a junkie on a poor block in West Palm Beach, and everyone protected him and figured it would get better.

I
f a poor man eats two Big Macs and a couple orders of large fries all washed down with a large Coke, he is a pig. If a rich man eats a dozen Chesapeake Bay oysters, rondelle of salmon with juniper berry sauce, and chocolate truffle marquise accompanied by a worthy bottle of Haut-Brion Blanc, he is a gourmet. Warry loved food and drink, and as he enjoyed the finest wines and the richest foods, he gained weight, until his handsome form was lost in his bulk. He went on radical diets, often talking personally to diet guru Dr. Robert C. Atkins, but he always returned to the fancy food and the vintage wines, and back came the weight. Eventually he reached an obese 280 pounds.

On the morning of May 13, 2002, seventy-one-year-old Warry drove over to the Ultima Health Club in West Palm Beach for a workout, and returned in time for lunch. Part of his daily ritual was to have his first stiff drink at noontime. He was quite particular about this. He took one cube of Swanson’s beef broth and another of Campbell’s beef broth, and put them in a blender. Into this, he poured lemon juice, a squirt of Worcestershire sauce, a strong jolt of Tabasco, and lots of vodka. Then he turned on the blender and left it on until he had a frothy blend. He poured the mixture into big glass goblets, and garnished the drinks with cherries. One of these drinks was enough for anybody, and too much for many.

After lunch with Eles and a visiting priest, Warry went upstairs to his bedroom, and as he did each afternoon, took a long nap. When he had not come down by six o’clock, Eles went upstairs to wake him, and found that her husband of twenty-seven years had died in his sleep.

The family flew down to Palm Beach, and the next day Warry III says that his stepmother took him aside in her bedroom.

“You’re not going to get anything,” she told him. “You’ve been cut out.”

The Gillets had befriended George and Frayda Lindemann, who had taken the role that Barbara and David had once played with the socially prominent couple. The Lindemanns had several factors that hobbled their acceptance in the island’s elite, including not only their Jewish faith, but the fact that their son had served time in prison for executing a Thoroughbred horse in an insurance scheme. The Lindemanns offered their private plane to fly the family and friends up to Maryland for the burial. Afterward, they flew back home, and that evening Eles went for dinner at the B&T.

There was a dispute over who was to pay for the funeral. Warry’s will stated that “all funeral expenses be paid as soon as practical,” and it would seem indisputable that the services should have been paid by his estate. In any event, Warry III claims that he and his sister were billed $27,000 to pay for the expenses, including $12,000 for the funeral home, $2,300 for C’est Si Bon! for the catering, and $528 for a casket spray. In the end, Warry’s estate paid for his funeral, but Eles says that Warry III owes her money over the event, and that is why her late husband lies buried in the cemetery at St. John’s Episcopal Church in Glyndon, Maryland, without a headstone. Then Eles went ahead and sold the adjoining plots so Warry’s son and daughter would not be buried next to him.

The unmarked grave was only one measure of the emotionally brutal conflict. Eles was worth tens of millions of dollars. With Eles so wealthy, it would have seemed right for a father to leave at least half his relatively small estate to his son and daughter. But in 1993, Warry wrote a will that gave everything to Eles, and on the same day signed a quitclaim relinquishing his right to a share of their Palm Beach home. The codicil signed eight years later in 2001 only made that commitment stronger. Eles asserts that her husband thought that his two children had received plenty from their grandfather’s trust after Warry died; young Warry and Susan received about two hundred thousand dollars apiece from the assets of the trust.

For Warry III and his sister, the will was a brutal rebuke. Yes, it was about money, but not only about money. It was as if their father had taken a torch to the proud heritage of the Gillet line by deeding Eles even the most precious family heirlooms. Susan called Eles and asked if she might have the Gillet silver. Susan thought she was making a legitimate request. Eles considered Susan a greedy, unpleasant heir making unseemly demands on a grieving widow.

“The silver is well protected in a closet with a special lock,” Susan told her stepmother.

“And that’s where it’s staying. The way you’re treating me, you’re not getting anything.”

That was not strictly true. Eles sent Warry III and Susan a few boxes of their father’s belongings. Susan opened one package to find an old cookbook and legal documents dealing with her parents’ divorce. Young Warry received such memorabilia as one of his father’s old license plates, some old shoes, and a belt emblazoned with a nude woman.

Warry III learned from a friend that his stepmother had donated his father’s elegant suits, Louis Vuitton luggage, and other possessions to the Church Mouse, a Palm Beach thrift store. The friend purchased a couple of items and gave them to Warry III as a gift. In New York, a prominent tailor told him that he had a number of his father’s suits still on his premises. “I went over there and she got wind of it and ordered all the clothes chopped up,” Warry III said.

Warry III heard from friends in Palm Beach that Eles had taken up with one of his father’s closest friends, Andy Avello, a Cuban American clothing buyer for Versace two decades Eles’s junior. Avello eventually moved into Pelican Hall, where Eles referred to him as her “good friend.”

The more Warry III thought about his father’s death and his actions, the more convinced he was that the malevolent figure of his stepmother stood behind it all, and that he must strike boldly back at her. “She hurt us badly, so what’s the next thing?” Warry III says. “Of course you’re going to talk to a reporter and say, ‘I don’t think my dad had lunch on the thirteenth and dropped dead. And I don’t think he meant to disown his whole family. And now Eles has gone out and is porking Andy Avello.’ Of course somebody tells Richard Johnson [editor of the
New York Post
’s Page Six gossip column], whom I’ve known forever, and that was the beginning of six articles that railed her.”

Shannon rushed to Eles’s defense in the method approved by the most esteemed of national media: Spread the story in detail and nuance, while condemning the whole sordid business from a pedestal high above the tabloids. “Eles Gillet’s friends are coming to her defense after recent news reports depicted her in an unflattering light,” Shannon began her much-read weekly column in January 2004. “A New York newspaper reported that Gillet, the widow of F. Warrington ‘Big Warry’ Gillet, was ‘fleeing’ Palm Beach for all kinds of reasons—she was omitted from the
Vanity Fair
spread, her stepson kicked up a fuss over his inheritance, and she’s running off to South America with her tie salesman beau because his horizontal rumba is ‘the best sex ever.’ Yikes!”

Warry III made the firm suggestion that his father may have been poisoned with the oleander plant, and the body quickly buried without an autopsy. His was a scenario as richly detailed and compelling as it was unlikely. There was no evidence that Eles knew anything about the poison or had any reason to kill her husband. Warry III hired a detective and filed a suit to have his father’s body exhumed, saying that there was reason to believe that Eles was “responsible for the untimely death.” He said that his stepmother had argued with her husband in the weeks before his death, turned down an autopsy, controlled her late husband’s entire fortune, and had taken up with a younger man.

Some of that may have been true, but the only thing definitely murdered was several reputations. Young Warry’s own mother, appalled by all the publicity, got him to back off, and he moved on with plans to parlay his suspicions into a Palm Beach movie,
Bloody Social
, which he describes as “the story of a wealthy tobacco heiress who kills her husband and then runs off and marries her Italian stallion and comes back to town.”

The movie never quite happened, and as the years went by, Warry III’s anger at his stepmother was matched by his hatred for his father. “All of his children and grandchildren look at him in disgust because he’s disinherited everyone,” Warry III says. “People have distaste for him. They loathe his name and call him a buffoon and an idiot.”

Eles continued to socialize almost every night and to have elegant dinner parties. Her “good friend” was a heavy drinker and needed a liver transplant. Eles had never waited in a line in her life. She went out and helped to raise a million dollars, dispersed in such a way that Andy got his transplant.

As a heavy drinker himself, Andy was one of the few people who could talk a modicum of sense to Eles’s alcoholic son, Robert. He was even more handsome than Warry III, and had a sweetness of disposition unlike anyone else in the family. His wife had left him and his alcohol-sodden life and taken their children with her. And that had made him even more despondent. He had a condominium in Palm Beach, and the police had grown too familiar with the 911 calls alerting them to a drunken relic lying huddled somewhere.

In 2005, Andy died on a trip to France. By then he was no longer staying at Eles’s house. He had been an anchor to her life in the three years since Warry died. That was a mild misfortune compared to the following year when her forty-nine-year-old son killed himself by jumping off the roof of his five-story condominium in South Palm Beach. Robert had been so unhappy, his life such a litany of despair, that Eles rationalized that her son had found the one ending that gave him peace.

Eles was not one to mope around, leaving her demons easy entrée into her soul. She headed back out into the frenetic social whirl of the island. Wherever she went, though, nothing was the same. It had always been her island, but who were all these people?

Eles always went to the annual Preservation Foundation’s dinner dance. The organization was devoted to holding on to what was best in Palm Beach, and its members included whatever was left of the old social elite and those who hoped to be among them. In the years just before Mar-a-Lago became a club, the event had been held at the estate, but Trump felt that his generosity had been treated with disdain and he turned them away. Since then it was as if Trump had called in his New York shamans to put a curse on the event. Something always seemed to go wrong. Eles was a witness to the carnage. One year the golden paint on some of the chairs had not dried and a number of the ladies left with unwanted souvenirs on their designer-dressed posteriors.

On Eles’s latest foray to the annual ball, there was an Indian theme in the Venetian Ballroom at the Breakers. The room had been transformed into a Raja’s Palace vividly described by Shannon with its “dupioni silk in burnished oranges, reds and yellow, round tables centered with tall trumpet vases filled with kumquats, baby lemons, limes, grapes and oranges, and rectangular tables centered with enormous elephant topiaries draped in ceremonial robes.” It all looked Indian enough, but there was a small problem with the life-size baby elephants on the tables. “I couldn’t see anybody and neither could anyone else,” Eles recalls. “I had a damn leg in my face. Those who had an asshole in their face were really upset.”

At the Everglades, it was hardly better. She had once known everybody, and now she walked in and it was like somebody else’s club. She had the feeling that the Everglades was being taken over by Midwesterners, a strange species that as far as Eles was concerned could have come from Albania. The club had begun admitting many new members whose only obvious virtue was a lack of obvious vices. There was no reason to blackball such potential members, but there was equally no reason to choose to sit next to them at dinner.

At least they were not Jewish. Jews were now admitted even to the Sailfish Club and the Beach Club in the North End, and God knows where it would all end. “Everything the Jews get into, they take over,” Eles reflects. “And people don’t want them to take over the last two things that we have. Those are our clubs.”

Eles was suffering such back pain that she had little interest in contemplating the further decline of her Palm Beach world. If anything, she had too many doctors and too much advice, and no matter where she went or what she did, the pain did not go away. In the evenings, she went to the Everglades, the B&T, restaurants, or dinner parties, and sometimes she had to go home early. Sometimes she just did not show up.

Eles always had a man on her arm; since Andy had left, it had generally been Peter Rock. Peter had been on the island so long and had escorted so many women that few people even knew that the man had a wife in New York working as a decorator. He was by definition more walker than lover, and he was perfectly happy with that appellation. He was a large, boisterous fellow with a showy, overflowing personality that enlivened whatever watering spot in which he happened to land. He liked to drink, and had immortalized himself as one of Brownie’s troops on a trip to Morocco on Royal Air Maroc by falling asleep in the aisle. He was a big man, and no one or nothing could lift him. King Hassan II ordained that he never be allowed in the kingdom again. Brownie’s teacup poodle ran up and down the aisle as well, but the king was so enchanted with the dog that he gave him a passport.

Rock was too busy going out to bemoan the sad fact that he would never see Marrakech again. He and Eles and most of their friends had an inordinate interest in grapes, as long as they were fermented and of a decent vintage. Eles had a dilemma when she had Peter and her other friends over for dinner. There were bottles of wine in Warry’s cellar worth as much as twenty-five thousand dollars. She knew it was gauche to tell her guests that they were drinking incredibly expensive bottles of wine, but she could not abide sitting there watching them slurping it down like
vin ordinaire.
By the time the evening was late, she could have served them Two Buck Chuck, and they would have raved knowingly about the bouquet.