Madness Under the Royal Palms (3 page)

When Barbara put together the invitation list, she did not ask David for
his
Palm Beach names, for she knew that he would not have them. David had no friends, only business acquaintances. His main sources of male camaraderie were his tennis partners at the Breakers Hotel, where he played several times a week.

Among the other regulars at the Breakers courts was Eddy Louis, a middle-aged Middle Easterner married to an American woman three decades his senior. David and Barbara saw Eddy and Vera Louis often at the most exalted charity balls, where the couple put on their own command performance, dancing with endless panache. Eddy was largely unwelcome unless on the arm of his wife, and it would have been unthinkable to invite the couple.

Another man who played tennis at the Breakers and like Eddy was not a member, was Eric Purcell, a good-looking fortyish man with easy manners and quick patter. David knew little about him. He had been living with one woman in the North End and escorting several old ladies, and he would happily have donned his dinner jacket and been an exemplary escort. But Barbara did not even consider asking him, and for the last few months he had mysteriously disappeared.

I was another one of those tennis acquaintances. Soon after my wife and I arrived in Palm Beach, I joined the Breakers Club so I could play tennis and meet some of the players and pretenders off the court as well. It now costs $150,000 to join, plus $15,000 annual dues, but it was a refundable $5,000 when I signed up, with around $2,000 in dues. It was there at the preeminent resort hotel on the island that I met and played tennis with Eddy Louis, Eric Purcell, and David Berger.

David was an avid tennis player, amazingly physically fit for a man in his early eighties. Like most of the megawealthy, David rarely traveled alone, always with at least one other person, and often with a considerable entourage. The group that arrived a few minutes before David’s game seemed energized and nervous, as if around him everything proceeded in double time.

David had a chess player’s approach to doubles, planning his moves far ahead and making up in finesse what he lacked in power. Playing against him, I could imagine what an opponent he must have been in the courtroom.

After our games, we often sat and had spirited conversations. David had been one of the leading Democratic fund-raisers in America, and was conversant not only about the highest levels of politics, but elite business affairs as well. David told Barbara that I was the only interesting person he had met at the Breakers. It is not quite the compliment it may appear. For the most part, the club members are narrow men who made their fortunes doing things such as building airplane hangars or buying mobile home parks. They have largely retreated into lives that begin and end with personal pleasure. Beyond talking about how they had made their fortunes, they are passionate about nothing except their own wellbeing.

David put me in a different category, but he and Barbara had no intention of getting to know me beyond the tennis courts. I was not part of circles to which they sought entrée. I could do them no good, and I might say or do something that would set them back in their quest for acceptance. David and Barbara were royally dismissive of those who were not part of the rarified social circles. That meant most of the residents including Fred and Rose Keller, whose presence never graced elite events. Fred was a good tennis player but David would never consider playing with him.

Barbara was not thinking about the people she had not invited. The evening had been a triumph, and she was full of an immense sense of satisfaction that she and her lover were on the cusp of achieving their dream. She had good reason to believe that she had lifted David and herself to the upper reaches of Palm Beach society, to which he so strenuously aspired and which she considered her birthright.

As she stood at the doorway gaily chatting with the departing guests, Barbara had no inkling that within a few years David’s and her lives, and the lives of many of those around them, would change in ways she would have considered impossible. The old elite world that she and David were seeking to enter was dying. Weakened by inertia, self-absorption, indulgence, moral myopia, and spiritual inbreeding, it was vulnerable to being overcome by a forceful, often merciless new world of money. As much as David wanted to become part of that old world, he was one of the forces destroying the society that he sought so desperately to enter.

As Barbara said good-bye to her last guests, she had not even the slightest premonition that one of these women would be accused of poisoning her husband; one would accuse her husband of violently assaulting her; and one of her guests would fall grievously ill and miraculously recover. There would be divorces and public shame. Among the outer circle murder, suicide, humiliation, and virtual exile would ensue. As for Barbara’s own fate, it would be both unthinkable and, as she saw the world, unspeakable.

I
played tennis most of the time at the Breakers, but I also played at the Seaview Tennis Center, which sits between the private Palm Beach Day School and the public elementary school in the middle of town. When I had a game in the morning, I saw the big yellow buses bringing in brigades of kids from West Palm Beach, while a parade of Bentleys, Rolls, Lexuses, and BMWs dropped off the private school children in their uniforms of blue and white.

The public school students are bused in from across the Intracoastal Waterway. Only a few live on the island, and these are the children of servants and other workers. The two schools share the same playing field, but the children never play together. The public school is a string magnet school with a fine orchestra that sometimes gives concerts at the Palm Beach Day School, but other than that, the two schools have no contact.

The Day School teachers are often excellent, and they try to teach the children about the world beyond Palm Beach, but it is difficult. Ten-year-olds have their hair colored and go in for weekly manicures and pedicures. The private school children learn how to judge another person by his clothes, his car, and his address. Many of them are brought up more by nannies than mothers, and only toddled out occasionally to be displayed to dinner guests like a new bibelot. Many of the children, especially those who are the chil dren of divorce, have their own therapists with whom they discuss their problems.

They live on their own island of children within the island of Palm Beach. If things go according to plan, they go to prep school and then to the Ivy League, and from there perhaps to Wall Street. As long as they live in this pocket of privilege, they are smart and adept, but step across the bridge into what most people call America, and they are confronted with a world about which they know almost nothing.

The Seaview Courts have far more affinity with the public school than with the elite private academy. For two hundred dollars a year, a town resident can play every day on both the excellent clay courts and equally good courts at the Phipps Ocean Park Tennis Center in the South End. It is the best bargain in Palm Beach, but few who play at the restricted B&T or the Everglades would be seen here. The wealthiest islanders either play at their clubs or on their own private courts.

One afternoon Herb Gray and I were having a game at Seaview. Herb is one of the first people I met in Palm Beach, and he is one of my closest friends. He grew up a poor kid in the Dorchester ghetto of Boston, and in 1998 sold his medical supply company for $131 million, out of which he netted $20 million. He had parceled out stock to many employees, a number of whom became millionaires. He is a philanthropist whose gifts the
Palm Beach Daily News
never acknowledges, and that is the way he wants it. Herb is an art collector with a passionate interest in Boston Expressionists from the twenties. He volunteers twice a week as a pharmacist at Good Samaritan Hospital. His wife, Marylou, a nurse, volunteers as well, and when she is in their Boston home, she runs a weekly soup kitchen. Herb and Marylou do not go to charity balls. His name has almost never been in the Palm Beach paper, except when he won the town senior tennis championship. He lives within an almost totally Jewish social world, yet most of those in the haute Boston Jewish world on the island have no idea who he is.

After our match, Herb and I were having yet another of our intense conversations when Fred Keller pulled up on a rusty, decrepit bicycle. The man and machine were perfectly matched. Six-foot-two Keller wore putrid-colored, threadbare surfing shorts, a ratty T-shirt, a white bonnet, and grungy tennis shoes. The mismatched tennis balls he brought with him he had picked up on the tennis court on a previous outing. The beard that covered his angular, narrow face made him look like one of the siblings on the old Smith Brothers licorice cough drops box, albeit one with a gray beard.

There are a number of impecunious, marginal people who live in the creases and edges of Palm Beach, getting by in tiny cottages or efficiencies, driving bicycles and pretending that they do so by choice. I assumed that Keller was in that group, and since he was playing on the court directly in front of me, I watched him for a while.

One can tell a great deal about a person by the way he plays. From what I saw on that court, I assumed that this was a man who once stood high up in the world. He was in his sixties and was playing a powerful, determined game against an opponent half his age who turned out to be his brother-in-law Wolfgang Keil.

I asked my friend if he knew anything about Keller. Herb said he played against him, and I should play him too. Keller, it turned out, was hardly impecunious. He was a commercial real estate magnate worth tens of millions of dollars who lived in an estate on the Intracoastal Waterway in the North End. “He complains about his young wife a lot and how she nags him,” Herb said. “But you know one day we were playing and these little kids from the Day School came marching by out to the play field, and old Fred just stopped playing and pointed out there and said, ‘That’s my Fredchen. He’s my son. I love him so much. You have to come over and see this beautiful kid.’ It was touching and kind of strange.”

Few people living in Palm Beach go back as far in the area as Keller did. He arrived in West Palm Beach in 1957 with his first wife, Blanch, and his adopted son, Brian, from his wife’s previous relationship.

Keller was born Fred Bohlander on Long Island in 1934, the only son in a family of German immigrants who believed in Aryan racial superiority. His carpenter father taught his only son that “we of northern European heritage have intellectual genetic advantages over other races…[and] that we Germans are superior to others.” His people had come up with an efficient way of dealing with the mentally retarded by “culling the herd,” but that would never be accepted in America. Fred got tired of the constant kvetching of the Jews about the Holocaust when no one talked about how
his
people had suffered, the firebombing of Dresden, the atrocities in Russia, where German soldiers were held prisoners years after the end of the war.

Fred envisioned himself as the noble patriarch of a Germanic family, with a loyal, obedient wife and a brood of strong, stalwart children, all of whom looked up to the patriarch with deference and respect. He had been working as a surveyor on the St. Lawrence Seaway in upstate New York for the Perini Corporation when he met his first wife. Blanch Witherell was a telephone operator and had a son, Brian, who had been born out of wedlock. She was a tall, healthy, Teutonic-looking woman. “I simply felt that Blanch was good breeding stock for a future family because I had these genetic notions that I was brought up with, and she had produced a son and was physically tall and well-proportioned,” Fred wrote in his unpublished memoir.

Fred liked the fact that he would get a ready-built family. He and Blanch married and moved down to Florida, where he worked for the same company as an assistant project engineer. They lived in a little house in northern West Palm Beach.

Palm Beach residents think of West Palm Beach as their warehouse, a dispirited repository of hospitals, electronics emporiums, funeral homes, antiques stores, fast food, and everything too déclassé or ordinary for their refined precincts. That is an unfair judgment on a town that has its own fascinations, but just a few blocks east of the Intercoastal Waterway lie some of the most desperate slums in the nation. To those who stop their Rolls or Mercedes at the traffic lights a few blocks across Flagler Memorial Bridge, there is always a risk of a holdup; and those who for some bizarre reason turn left into the impoverished community might be stripped of their jewelry and money.

One evening Fred stood looking across the Intracoastal Waterway from his depressing quarters. It was only a few hundred yards to Palm Beach, but it might have been an ocean distant. Another man might have looked across with awe and wonder, accepting that there were those who live so far beyond what he could aspire to or even imagine. Someone else might have looked across at that same line of great homes with anger and dismay, asserting that one day the terrible unfairness of life would end. But Fred looked across, vowing that one day he too would live there. Palm Beach was the yardstick by which he would measure his life. To him the island was the ultimate symbol of success. Three decades later, he was not only living in Palm Beach, but in an estate at precisely the spot where he had gazed with such envy and longing.

Blanch gave birth to a son, Eric, in August 1958 in West Palm Beach. Fred, his wife, and the two children returned to Long Island, where another son, Paul, was born. As the marriage deteriorated, there were several breakups and reconciliations. Keller was a proud, vindictive man who found it unthinkable that his wife would want to leave him. Each time she walked out, he considered the child support and alimony payments nothing but the punitive ranting of an intemperate judge.

Again and again, Fred tried to haul Blanch back into their marriage. When she bailed, he rose up against his wife’s assaults on
his
family. Fred considered religion little more than adult fairy tales. In one angry moment, he destroyed Blanch’s crucifix, an attack not only on his wife, but on her faith and even on the idea of God. In February 1962, on Brian’s birthday, Blanch reported that Fred “slapped me in the head, stating that it does not leave marks that way.” That action led her to ask for a final divorce and move with the children to Parrishville in upstate New York, to live near her mother.

In June, Fred arrived in Parrishville in his Volkswagen Beetle to visit his boys. Keller had run off with the sons once before, and Blanch refused his request to take the three boys alone. Blanch got into the little car with their sons, and the reconstituted Bohlander family drove to the remote rural Barnhart Island Park adjacent to the St. Lawrence Seaway, on which Fred had once worked. After an afternoon romping in the park, Fred suggested that his two older sons race him to the car. When Brian and Eric were safely ensconced in the backseat and Blanch was putting little Paul in the car, Fred pressed on the accelerator and sped away, leaving his ex-wife alone in the dusk, miles from any help.

With the secret assistance of his parents, Fred flew with the three boys to Germany, where he lived for a number of months before moving to Spain. The little group eventually settled outside Washington, D.C., in the Virginia suburbs.

Brian was the only son old enough to have vivid memories of those years, and they began with his starkly painful recollections of the boys crying in the backseat of the car, wrenched away from their mother, and forced into a new, unknowable world. Fred told his sons that their mother had died in an automobile accident. Even their name was gone—they were no longer “Bohlanders,” but now were “Kellers.”

Fred had no recollections of the sons feeling distraught, and felt that he was right to take the boys. “I was going to lose my kids, and Blanch was an alcoholic,” Fred said. “I could not see my kids growing up in a backwoods area where hunting and logging were the big events. I wanted my kids to have more. Extraordinary circumstances require extraordinary actions. These are boys. Fathers are better bringing up boys. What choice did I have?”

Fred’s parents sold their home on Long Island and moved down to Arlington to live with their son and help bring up the grandchildren. Fred lied about his education to get a good job as an engineer. He began buying cheap properties, the start of his real estate fortune. Brian was not Fred’s biological son, and he treated him unlike his other sons. The boy was deeply troubled, and his stepfather eventually gave him up to a foster home. It was there that Brian’s memories led to his mother. Although Fred caricatured her as little more than a pathetic alcoholic, for eight years she had been on her own single-minded pursuit for her children. She had written hundreds of letters, won thousand of dollars on two television game shows, and used the money to pay for lawyers and investigators. By the time she found her sons, Blanch was a broken woman with few financial or emotional resources, and Fred was able to pay her off with a few thousand dollars and have her leave only with Brian. All he sought were his two biological sons.

In the rapidly developing suburbs, Fred was a merciless businessman. He told with relish the story of how one day in the
Washington Post
he saw an ad in the classified section for a commercial property for sale for five hundred thousand dollars. The old lady selling the property was clueless, and as soon as Fred bought it, he flipped it for ten times that amount. In one of his apartment houses, the tenants would not leave. He had the front doors torn off and the toilets pulled out.

Brian told me how his adopted father bought a mansion and moved in, using the grand setting as a prop to sell used cars. He purchased old cars for next to nothing. One of his tenants, who ran a garage, turned the odometers back and fixed the vehicles up just enough so they would run for few miles. Fred then sold them through classified ads in the
Washington Post
as a rich man’s personal once-owned vehicles. Maybe it was not big money, but he thought it was hilarious when the purchasers came back knocking on his door when their car stopped a few miles down the road.

When Fred started coming down to Palm Beach again in 1966, he was remarried, living in a modest rented house in the center of town, and buying commercial properties. When he returned to live full-time in 1984, he was newly divorced and ready for what he considered the life of a Palm Beach millionaire.

Like so many people, when Fred arrived on the island, he jettisoned his past, stripping his life of anything unseemly and unpleasant. By then he had been married four times, but he never talked of that, and especially not of the circumstances of his first marriage.

His two sons grew to be tall like their father, each over six and a half feet tall. They had the brains and the education that could have taken them anywhere. But Eric got involved in drugs and alcohol when he was in high school, and after dropping out of college a few credits before finishing his degree, had made a disaster of his life. Married and divorced twice by the time he was thirty, Eric hardly saw his two kids from his second failed marriage. It was sad, but it wasn’t Fred’s fault.