Madness Under the Royal Palms (30 page)

Brownie was a perennial, but she had turned down her invitation. She had visitors from out of town and had invited twenty-four people to her three tables in the Orange Room at the Everglades. Brownie would have invited Marylou but she was recovering from a stroke and was not in town. Brownie’s was the biggest party in the building, an expensive, indeed extravagant evening, but it was a mark of Brownie’s panache to live now as she had always lived. Cathleen and Walter also were at the Everglades with a small group. In all her years on the island, Cathleen had never once been invited to the Coconuts, the most telling evidence that she was still not completely accepted by the establishment. Eles had been invited to the Coconuts, as she always was, and she had planned to go after dinner at the Everglades, but she became so weak that she had to go home in the middle of dinner.

The evening at the Everglades was oversubscribed, in part because the B&T had canceled its New Year’s Eve, a first in the history of the club. Next door Mar-a-Lago was rocking with bands and midnight fireworks. Some of those B&T members who came to the Everglades were roundly upset by the proceedings. The decorum that was supposedly the mark of the club was being roundly abused. Some members and guests pulled out cameras and cell phones and, violating one of the basic club tenets, took pictures and called friends as if they were standing in Times Square at midnight.

Jasmine arrived at the Flagler Museum with an escort other than Eric, and late in the evening met him at Club Colette, where they danced as if they had spent the whole evening in each other’s arms. There the couple saw Dan Ponton, for whom this was the most extraordinary New Year’s Eve of his life, and the proprietor of Club Colette was as much a celebrant as anyone. It had been no more than a year and a half ago when he started getting irritable and thought that he must have been working too hard too long. When his tennis game fell apart, the forty-seven-year-old club owner checked that off to age. He had problems with his walk that he tried to pretend was nothing. And when his vision began to fail him, he figured age was a bitch and he’d better get glasses. He went to see several eye specialists who could find nothing wrong. One of them sent him to have an MRI and that procedure discovered that he had a brain tumor, a benign meningioma as big as a fist growing on the frontal lobe of his brain.

Dan was further diagnosed and operated on at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston in December 2006. Dr. Arthur Day opened up Dan’s skull and operated on him for an astounding seventeen hours before finally sewing him back up. It had happened so quickly that he had hardly contemplated the risk, but in the weeks of recuperation he fully reflected upon the incredible good fortune, and this evening was yet another occasion for celebration.

Also at Club Colette that evening was Barbara Wainscott and her escort. How many evenings she had spent in this room with David, and how long ago it seemed when she had fêted Prince Edward at Elephant Walk for their mutual birthdays and envisioned herself and David at the heights of Palm Beach society. She had had a surgical procedure to lose weight and she looked stunning. She had unfettered pride, a dubious virtue in a single woman of a certain age in Palm Beach, and she was usually alone. She might be here this evening, but she was no longer a major part of the social scene. She came out when the royals were in town, but she preferred largely to stay at home.

For Barbara this evening had a special poignancy, for David had died in February after three years alone in the house on Jungle Road. Barbara’s name was not mentioned in the
New York Times
obituary, although the article named his previous ex-wife, in all probability a studied omission, not an oversight.

When David died, he was buried in a cemetery in the small town in Pennsylvania from whence he came. Above his grave there is a tombstone, and on the tombstone is engraving. At the top there is the Star of David that in Palm Beach David sought to keep away from his name. Below there is writing:

D
AVID
B
ERGER

B
ELOVED

S
ON,
H
USBAND,
B
ROTHER

F
ATHER,
F
ATHER-IN-LAW

G
RANDFATHER,
U
NCLE,
F
RIEND

W
AR
H
ERO,
P
OLITICAL
R
EFORMER,

T
HE
P
EOPLE’S
L
AWYER

S
EPT.
1, 1912

F
EB.
22, 2007

David was born on September 6, 1912.

T
HE BEST PARTY, OR
at least the party where people had the most fun, was at Mark Brentlinger and Bryan McDonald’s open house at their newly renovated home. In a dig at the ultraexclusivity of the island (and the precise opposite of the Coconuts’ mandate), the invitations read: “Guests of guests may bring guests.” At the stroke of midnight, the muscular bartenders ripped off their shirts, and the new year began.

There were not enough of the old aristocrats to fill the pavilion at the Flagler Museum, and the Coconuts had invited many new people, but as the guests poured in, several of the old-timers told me afterward that they had been filled with a sense of disquiet. They did not know these people, and these people did not know them. There were few couples of stunning appearance, few classic gowns or daring décolletage, and a surfeit of sheer pedestrian ordinariness. And there was a terrible self-consciousness, a killer of delight and spontaneity, and the guests mingled with all the stylized formality of a corporate cocktail party.

The whole model of an American aristocrat is to act unselfconsciously with certainty and grace, but there was a wariness that affected the entire evening and almost everyone. Where once there was glee, there was at best mere conviviality. Where once there was joy, there was social calculation. Where once one knew a couple were a lady and a gentleman by their mere presence, here one knew nothing.

There were hundreds of people, perhaps five hundred in all, overwhelming the white-coated Coconuts and the old world of Palm Beach. Lost in the crowd, the Coconuts looked like scraps of paper tossing on an undulating black sea. What was the point of this evening if one had to greet new people? And why were there so many of them?

When my wife and I arrived, Dick Cowell, a third-generation Palm Beacher whose son is a Coconut, invited us to sit at his table, warning us that we’d better take our places before everything filled up. We sat down but did not stay very long. There would be fireworks at midnight, and almost no one sat at the elaborately setout tables, picked up the hats and noisemakers, or danced to the music, but moved immediately out onto the patio to wait for the fireworks.

At precisely midnight, the celebrated Gruccis set off a gigantic display of pyrotechnics from two rafts on the Intracoastal Waterway. Looking up into the skies were people like Cowell, who had seen the famous fireworks in Monte Carlo on the evening of Prince Rainier’s wedding in 1956, and the display in New York harbor on July 4, 1976, but no one had seen anything as intense and immediate as this. It was not so much fireworks bursting high above, but the sky full of white light, staggering, overwhelming bursts of color.

On and on it went, the acrid smoke drifting across the water, the noise at times like an artillery bombardment, again and again the West Palm Beach skyline illuminated like full noon. Many of these buildings across the water had not been there a decade ago, office buildings and half empty condominiums, teetering on the verge of bankruptcy. And behind them ghettos as dangerous as any in America, and beyond that Latino slums, with handguns going off in the air to celebrate
Año Nuevo.

Finally, after twenty-two minutes, in one immense burst of light and noise, the display ended, and most of the Coconuts left a party that had in some ways never begun.

The Everglades emptied out about the same time. Brownie drove a few blocks away to the Colony Hotel, where an old acquaintance of hers, Jim Kinnear, a Canadian oil billionaire, was giving a sixtieth birthday bash. He spent a reputed million dollars on Brownie’s kind of party, flying in many of his guests and providing them with endless Dom Perignon and caviar, and eighties rock and soul from Daryl Hall and John Oates singing their hits, including “Rich Girl.”

When Brownie left at four a.m. most of Palm Beach had long since gone to sleep.

I
had been living in Palm Beach for fourteen years, and working on this book for at least two years, and still I had not managed to reach the central core, the island within the island.

From the day I set out on this project, people told me it would be incomplete if I did not talk to Pauline Pitt, that she was the queen of the old Palm Beach. Soon after I began my research, I wrote her a letter and tried in many ways to reach her, only to be put off. That did not surprise me. When an anthropologist visits a remote village, it is usually the local drunk or the least favorite ne’er-do-well who greets him or her at the outskirts. It takes a long time to meet the people who truly run the village, and I had almost finished my research when I drove over to Pauline’s lakefront home to interview her.

Pauline could have been a character in an Edith Wharton novel, an elegant woman trying to reach out beyond the impregnable walls of class, scaling to the top in daring ascents, looking beyond but always falling back. She is a woman with an intelligence and moral energy beyond the circumscribed walled city of privilege in which she lives.

She is sixtyish, and looks far younger, not in the way that so many Palm Beach women do, with their face-lifted and Botoxed features creating dramatic advertisements for their supposed youth. She probably has had work done too, but if she has, it is faultless, leaving her a gentle, youthful countenance. There is something almost Oriental in the wrinkleless softness. She also has the voice that Marylou Whitney would like to have had if she had not turned her accent into a theatrical announcement that she is upper class.

For four years in a row, from 2004 to 2007, Pauline chaired the Preservation Ball. It was a perfect fit, for it has become practically the last overwhelmingly WASP event, raising money to preserve the architectural and cultural heritage of Palm Beach. Besides her charity work, Pauline is also an interior decorator working primarily for her friends. In her own house, she has created a bold, eclectic décor: Oriental pieces mixed with antiques, contemporary pieces, family portraits, and artifacts all set together. The rooms do not shout professional decorator, stamping one obvious personal style on everything.

Her maternal grandfather, Charles A. Munn Jr., was one of the founders of the Everglades. He was known as “Mr. Palm Beach” in part because each Christmas he sent out a list of the three hundred people in Palm Beach who mattered, the defining social register of the island. During most of that time there were only a few hundred houses on the island, and he was less like Mrs. Astor naming the four hundred who represented true New York society than the compiler of a fairly obvious directory. When Munn died in 1981, the list was taken over by the Cuban-American sugar magnate Alfonso Fanjul, who bequeathed it to his son, Pepe. It is a far more difficult task to make the list these days, and if the Fanjul roll does not have quite the imprimatur of its early incarnations, it is still a primary social arbiter. The 2007 list is an eclectic one that contains the names of six Fanjuls and two convicted felons, Alfred Taubman and Conrad Black.

Pauline’s bloodlines go back in the American and Palm Beach elite a long way on her father’s side as well. Her paternal grandfather, George F. Baker, helped found the First National Bank in 1863, when he was only twenty-three years old. He was number four on the first Forbes list of the wealthiest people in America. His son, George F. Baker Jr., followed his father working for what is now Citibank.

Pauline was brought up with a kind of wealth and privilege more common to the Gilded Age than to women of her generation. The Bakers had a complex of mansions at Park Avenue and East Ninety-third Street that originally had a railroad spur in the basement connecting to tracks beneath Park Avenue. On Long Island her father built two summer homes from which he commuted to Wall Street by sea plane. In Georgia there was a plantation that Pauline remembers with special fondness. And then, of course, there were the winter visits to Palm Beach.

The wealthy are probably no unhappier than anyone else, but their misfortunes often seem to stand out more. For her first husband, Pauline married Dixon Boardman, a man many felt was beneath her, not in wealth but in character. “My beef with Boardman is not his womanizing—it’s probably the only good thing about him—but the way he treated a wife to whom he owed everything,” wrote the columnist Taki. “To be a cad one has to be a gentleman first, and in my book Boardman gave us cads and womanizers a bad name.”

The couple divorced and Boardman imparted further malice, at least in the eyes of observers, in marrying a much younger woman. For her part, Pauline married a man far older, seventy-three-year-old William H. Pitt, who had been married forty-five years to his late wife. There was little danger that he would wander, but six months after they married in 2000 he died. Then five years later, her older brother, sixty-six-year-old George Baker III, died flying his private plane to Nantucket. In 2008 her other brother, Anthony, died flying an experimental plane that he had just purchased.

Pauline had grown up among people who had held their fortunes for several generations, and she had seen so many of them dissipate, if not financially, then psychologically. She had seen how inheritance is often more burden than glory and how without some struggle for meaning life becomes nothing but one flaccid indulgence after another. “I tried with my two children, to say, ‘You never know what can happen,’” Pauline says of her two daughters, Samantha and Serena Boardman. “I sent them to work for a magazine in New York when they were sixteen, not that they were struggling. The idea was you have to get up and do something. And that’s been the problem, I think, in a lot of my generation of WASPs and maybe my older brother’s generation. So many of them just didn’t have any reason to do anything and therefore died of alcoholism or something.”

Pauline had been brought up thinking that publicity is something unseemly, a display that has nothing to do with the lives of ladies and gentleman. “I remember my family was horrified, at least, when there was somebody they knew very well who hired a publicist,” she recalls. “It just was not heard of.” And yet for a time her daughters were princesses of the gossip columns in New York, their exploits as stylish single women followed as avidly in certain circles as the Yankees were in others.

Many of Pauline’s contemporaries in Palm Beach are overwhelmed by the money and vulgar energy of the new arrivals to the island. She could have retreated into her shrinking world, dividing her time between the B&T and the Everglades and using the Fanjuls’ Christmas list as the only telephone book she ever needed. But like the décor of her house, her friends are an eclectic lot.

When Pauline thinks of wealth, she assumes everyone has a plane. “Mostly today, anybody who’s got much has a private plane, right?” she asks, and according to her definition of “much,” she is right. She does not have to worry about traveling commercial on what is “said to be the worst leg for any airline, New York to Palm Beach, for any stewardess because it is just the worst behaved people possible.” And when she arrives to New York and goes to Michael’s or Swifty’s or any of the most exclusive restaurants, she does not have to wait for a table either.

One of her close friends is Emilia Fanjul, who had taken a passionate interest in the plight of the people who live in Pahokee and work the sugar fields that allow her family to live in immense wealth in Palm Beach. “I’ve been out there many times and we’ve given to her school that she’s building, but I mean, they are so poor out there,” Pauline says with conviction. “I mean, it’s just like a different world. It’s like going to Darfur, and it’s only an hour away.”

I wanted to know whether she thought there is a connection between her friend’s family and their business and the way these people are living in this Darfur in the midst of America. And is there something unseemly about the millions of dollars in charity money going to hospitals in Boston, art museums in New York, and research centers in L.A. when ten minutes away lies desperation.

These were the kinds of pesky, imponderable questions that I was asking Pauline. She was clearly not used to thinking much about such matters, and she struggled with them as if they were riddles that could somehow be unlocked.

“A lot of very nice people live here, and those are the ones I focus on,” Pauline said, in what could be her motto. As she spoke a lovely little girl in a school uniform from the Day School came walking into the living room.

“Hi, Julia,” Pauline said as she walked up and began speaking.

“Tonight it’s going to be between thirty-five and forty degrees Fahrenheit,” Julia Pitt said matter-of-factly.

Julia looked like Pauline and even acted like her, but she had not always been Pauline’s child. Pauline’s divorced friend Hethea Nye had adopted Julia shortly before she developed terminal breast cancer. Before she died in 2006, Pauline promised her friend that she would adopt the seven-year-old child. She does not appear to have pondered endlessly over a decision that would change her life the way nothing had in years. It was just what one did.

Pauline went on to talk about Julia’s ninth birthday party held in the garden the previous Saturday. She spoke with vivid detail and pleasure the way she had not about the complex contradictions of life in Palm Beach.

“We had, what, over forty kids,” Pauline said. “We closed the main gate and we got a big blow-up slide that’s about sixty feet high in the air. Giant thing. And a climbing wall. And we had a cotton candy maker. And then we have a little garden over there with a playhouse, a trampoline, and swings. And we had the table loaded with all kinds of sandwiches.”

T
HERE WAS ANOTHER PERSON
whom insiders said I had to talk to if my book was going to be authoritative, and that was Stanley M. Rumbough Jr. Even if his first wife had been other than Dina Merrill, daughter of the empress of Mar-a-Lago herself, Marjorie Merriweather Post, Stan has done enough on his own to be considered by some the unheralded, uncrowned king of old Palm Beach, even if he would cringe at such a title. The octogenarian public citizen has been the chairman or the cochairman of the Palm Beach Civic Association for a decade. It is by far the most important civic group on the island and Stan has been involved in most of the crucial issues in the town for a generation. He also has played a nonpareil role in the development of Planned Parenthood in Palm Beach County.

Despite his age and the fact that he lost an eye on the golf course, there is still an exuberant impish quality to the man. He loves Palm Beach with passionate loyalty and devotion. He loves the island the way he loves women, the sheer lines of Palm Beach, the nuances, the subtleties, the grace.

Stan was a student at Yale when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. By 1943 he was a marine fighter pilot flying a Mustang against Japanese islands in the South Pacific. Captain Rumbough flew over fifty missions and some of his friends did not come home. He won two Distinguished Flying Crosses and eight Air Medals.

America won World War II in the scrappy hollows of West Virginia, and the asphalt streets of New Jersey, but the country also won it on the football fields and gyms of Yale. Five hundred and fourteen Yale men died in World War II

These days in Palm Beach honor guards of young marines back from Baghdad escort elderly matrons into the charity ballrooms, and when Iraq veterans are introduced, it is usually amputees or other disabled. But the younger men on the island have rarely served in combat, and neither have their sons and grandsons.

As soon as the war was over, Stan married the twenty-one-year-old actress Dina Merrill, by any definition one of the most desirable women of her time. Not only was she an heiress to a major fortune, but Dina was an accomplished actress whose archetypal blond looks left her stereotyped in roles as a cold, upper-class beauty. She was named to the best-dressed lists, and they were a stunning East Side couple, the epitome of the sophisticated world of New York in the fifties.

Stan was a natural Republican and he was one of the founders of the political movement that worked to draft General Dwight D. Eisenhower to run for president in 1952. When Eisenhower became president, Stan went to Washington to work in the White House as a special assistant.

Although Stan’s great-grandfather was one of the founders of the Colgate Company, he is not the toothpaste heir that people often call him. He inherited about $250,000, a large sum to most people, but not the basis of a great fortune. He had to work, and work he did, founding various companies, putting together various deals, and making his own not immodest fortune.

Stan’s marriage to Dina lasted nearly two decades, his ex-wife marrying movie star Cliff Robertson after the divorce became final. In 1973 Stan’s and Dina’s son David died in a boating accident. Stan’s second wife, Margaretha, was a Swedish artist, whom he divorced in 1988. His third wife, Janna, whom he married two years later, is a prominent Danish American horsewoman who has won numerous dressage competitions.

When Stan and Janna moved down to Palm Beach permanently, they first purchased a house in midtown in 1990. Five years later, they bought a house on Everglades Island, one of the most exclusive parts of the estate section, for $3.7 million.

I only got to Stan toward the end of my research. The first time I met him, I went to his office at the Palm Beach Towers. He did not talk about his war record or many of his other accomplishments.

“I want to keep Palm Beach the way it is, which is the way I know it,” he said firmly. “And so I’m chairman of the Palm Beach Civic Association, which has over two thousand members and really devote themselves to all types of trying to help keep this town the way it’s always been.” To Stan the great villain and emissary of unwanted change is Donald Trump, who, by manipulating and threatening, turned a temple of the old Palm Beach into a beachhead of the new.

Stan stays close to his former wives, and Trump had apparently done the unthinkable and the unforgivable by insulting Dina Merrill in one of his innumerable autobiographies. The impresario of the new Mar-a-Lago called Dina “Mrs. Post’s arrogant and aloof daughter, who was born with her mother’s beauty but not her brains,” and described her living in Palm Beach in a “terribly furnished” condo. Stan has never entered the portals of Mar-a-Lago since Trump turned it into a club, and as long as he lives he will never go there.