Madness Under the Royal Palms (5 page)

The next decade and a half reads like a scrapbook in which the pictures have gotten hopelessly jumbled. There is no beginning, no middle, no end, and no logical progression. He was married for a while in L.A. and had two children, but that did not last and he was soon gone. He did some acting, most notably playing the young Orson Welles in a TV movie. He had a hustler’s way with people. Wherever he was, he was selling something: investments in New York, barter exchange in Tucson, sales leads for computers in L.A., elevator advertising in Hawaii, and cars and elevator advertising in Australia.

Eric’s elevator advertising business was up and running in Australia, but he only had a visitor’s visa, and when he had to leave, he sold the company and flew to Miami. He did not know anybody, but he figured it was a good place to restart his business. He was soon out selling ads and getting them placed in elevators. And he started acting again, as he did wherever he was.

Eric had his ex-wife on his back for past child support payments, as well as collection letters from the IRS. When he went out, he could not pick up checks. At forty-one, Eric was older than most of the people in the clubs, but he cut a fine figure in South Beach. He had an actor’s patina, and he could pretend to be an imposing, substantive character strutting along Ocean Drive.

Eric liked women who were exotic and had a touch of the forbidden to them. One evening in February 1995, at the News Café in South Beach, he met thirty-four-year-old Maria Garcia Medina, an Argentinean woman visiting from San Francisco. She was not only darkly beauteous, but had a lean, sophisticated model’s look. He knew as little about her as she knew about him, but it hardly mattered, and within a few days Medina quit her accountant’s job in California and moved in with him in Miami.

Eric said later that he had been “without passion for a long time,” and for a while things went well, but Medina was not what he thought she was, and neither was he. After the couple had been living together less than four months, Eric returned to their apartment at about ten o’clock in the evening.

Eric had been drinking. Maria was sitting on the bed when Eric came in and asked her if she wanted to make love. That was hardly what she was thinking about.

“We should talk,” he said, a strange shift from his suggestion of sex. “What do you think we should do?”

It was a question consuming both of them. “I think I should find my own apartment,” Maria said, and told him she would be staying until the end of the month.

People were always leaving Eric. It was unthinkable that this should be happening to him again, and he reached toward Maria. And when he was finished she was bleeding and she was hurt. She had bruises on her legs, and worst of all, her left eye appeared as if it had been physically moved up her face, her two eyes no longer on quite the same plane.

“Well, actually, I did, if the truth must be known, I may have hit her a little bit in the closet or something, I kind of lost it, you know,” Eric says. “But I never ever would be so stupid as to hit a woman in the face. I mean, I was married for five years. I used to get mad. I would never do that. That’s suicide. I did not hit her in the face that caused that injury.”

The police arrested Eric for assault, battery, and kidnapping, and he spent the night in jail. Maria spent the night in the hospital. She was diagnosed as having an orbital fracture that even after an operation would leave her in some measure permanently disfigured.

Eric had no money for the first-rate criminal defense attorney that he needed, and his mother refused to help him. He settled for an old prep school friend who took the case for nothing. Eric declared himself insolvent, stating that he earned $200 to $250 a week and had no property and no cash, and the court paid his lawyer’s expenses. The case went on for month after month. He could have pled out and avoided prison time by accepting a guilty verdict to a major felony and paying restitution, but he could not have a felony on his record and Maria going after him in a civil suit. In addition to this, his problems with the IRS and child support made it seem as if his life was crumbling.

Palm Beach was only sixty miles to the north, a haven protected from this unseemly Miami world that had so abused him. That was his father’s world, a world of luxury and privilege where he belonged, not in the vulgar, mean streets of Miami. He had no way to get there, but he was an actor and there would be a role somewhere to take him where he belonged.

I
had only been in Palm Beach a few months when I was invited to a cocktail party given by Mildred “Brownie” McLean in the party room at Trump Plaza, a twin-tiered condominium looking out on the Intracoastal Waterway from West Palm Beach.

The guests were an eclectic group; everyone from leading socialites, members of the old establishment, and an intriguing group of artists, PR people, antiques dealers, and interior decorators. The victuals included mini sandwiches and vegetable trays from Publix, and jug wine that also came from the local supermarket. There was only one aging bartender for the large crowd, a nearsighted man who is a fixture at Palm Beach parties.

Brownie came sweeping up to me, her words cascading into each other, and started introducing me around as an author, using superlatives that would have made Tolstoy blush. Brownie kept her age as secret as a nuclear code, but by the time I met her, she was almost seventy. Yet, there were still vestiges of the youthful blonde not only admired for her beauty, but loved for her joyous spirit. In his book Ball, William Wright wrote about Brownie in the early 1970s, when she was putting on the celebrated “April in Paris” ball in New York City, “people—and many of them the right people—don’t just like her, they adore her.” The author described Brownie in her heavy black eye makeup contrasted against her white blond hair as looking like “an albino raccoon.” She wore pronounced makeup so that her appearance would be unmistakable, but if she looked like an animal, it was more a Cheshire cat.

In her public mode, Brownie has a subtle, pleasurable demeanor, as if she had just heard a joke intelligible only to her. She allows herself to be gently petted, but never deeply touched. Champagne is her water. There are some who assume that this woman is a silly Pollyanna so self-absorbed and nonobservant that she notices nothing around her, but the opposite is true. If her catlike eyes cannot quite see through walls, they see to the heart and soul of any matter that affects her.

Brownie has rarely found a party she did not like. She is a philosopher of frivolity. She finds wit where others hear only dullness, amusement where others experience largely tedium.

The worst she ever says about anyone is, “I do not know her,” and that was what she said about Barbara Wainscott. The comment could be taken either as a bald statement of fact, or brutally dismissive, and she usually prefers to leave the matter ambiguous. In Barbara’s case, she had known her since the sixties, and her meaning was clearly the latter.

Brownie is a legendary figure, not only in Palm Beach, but in the haute world of New York and Europe. Wherever she goes, from Claridge’s or Ascot in England, to the Ritz in Paris, people greet her with delight. Her life on the island goes back to the most glorious days of the fifties, and she evokes that era the way nobody else does.

Brownie has been married to two wealthy heirs, first George Schrafft, whom she divorced, and then the ultrawealthy John “Jock” McLean II, who left her a widow. By rights, she should have inherited a fortune. The rumor I heard was that she had been terribly profligate and had fallen on hard times. Living in West Palm Beach and repaying her social obligations in a cocktail party was déclassé enough, but she was not through falling. Within a few years, she had to sell her condo and move into a tiny apartment near the Intracoastal Waterway. She laughed as gaily as the first time she had visited Palm Beach, kept her troubles deeply within herself, and lived much as she had always lived, driving onto the island each evening for parties.

Palm Beach society forgets those who are sick and dying, and turns its back on those who have lost their money. Brownie should quickly have been shuttled aside, her name taken off the invitation lists, her picture gone from the Shiny Sheet. She remained, however, a ubiquitous presence at many prestigious events. The Coconuts is the most exclusive New Year’s Eve party, and even today Brownie is the only invitee who can arrive with her ever-changing entourage and enter the celebration en masse.

Of course, there are some people who feel that Brownie can no longer help their social advance, and they sidle around her. Brownie’s presence is no longer the imprimatur it once had been, and Barbara Wainscott was not alone in ignoring her. She is not invited to events where once her name would have headed the list, and although some refer to her as the dowager queen of Palm Beach, she is now a queen ignored by many of her subjects.

When my wife was away, word got out that there was an extra single male available. The phone would ring, and out I would go, spiffed up in black tie or a suit. I thought it would be fun, but I was a social eunuch who charmed to the left, charmed to the right, and went home alone. And there was a gruesome similarity to the events, a rote quality to the conversation, a stilted pattern to the evening, a quick and early exit

It was different when I went out with Brownie. Evening for her did not begin until the stars were rising in the heavens, and it did not end until she decided that it ended. She never had a bad time, and if you were with her, you never had one either. It was clear from what she said that the parties in her early years on the island had been far more exciting. People gave more, and they got more too, and Brownie was the very model of an exemplary hostess. She is not a woman of great intellectual depth or interests, and I might once have found her concerns trivial. But this is a superficial society given over to pleasure and amusements, and she reigns over it as does no one else.

One evening Brownie and I drove over to the Colony, where her old friend Carolyn Skelly had taken a penthouse. The oil heiress was a tiny woman with a grotesque scar that covered half her face. There were all kinds of rumors about how she been so disfigured, but it seemed like a perfect metaphor for her tragic life. People were always using her. They stole her jewels. They ate her food. They drank her liquor. They flattered her to her face and defamed her behind her back. She knew it; she let it happen, but she did nothing to circumvent her detractors.

There must have been four or five of us in Brownie’s group the evening at the Colony penthouse, and when we came bursting in, the party began. Suddenly there was joy and much laughter. That was Brownie’s way. She lived and died for parties, for endlessly amusing nights, and she never pretended to be anything but what she was.

Palm Beach is full of women who come from nowhere, and by marrying wealthy men, rise to the heights of what is called society. Unlike men on the island who talk in excruciating detail about how they made their fortunes, these women do not discuss the mechanics of their success. Brownie almost never talks about her earliest years, but it is not because she is ashamed of her background or her means of ascent, but because those days are reservoirs of pain.

W
HEN SHE WAS A
young girl, Mildred Brownie Brown rode her horse bareback on trails in the foothills of the Allegheny Mountains of Virginia. She was a willful, determined tomboy who took no guff from anyone. Her spoiled, comely young mother died when Brownie had hardly reached the age of memory, burned to death in bed smoking a cigarette while reading. Her father was the measure of all things, both father and mother to his daughter and younger son.

Brownie’s pony was an unruly beast with a temperament unfit to be the plaything of an eight-year-old girl. The pony took no greater pleasure than throwing Brownie off its back, and when she got back on, throwing her off again.

One day Brownie walked into the barn with the firm intention of killing the pony. She jumped up above the stall and began poking at the terrified animal with a pitchfork. The pony kicked and snorted as it backed away, raising such a ruckus that a farmhand ran to the main house to fetch Brownie’s father.

“Now, what’s the matter, old girl?” Brownie’s father said. “Can’t you handle this without trying to hurt the pony? Can’t you get even with it? Can’t you get mad and not try to kill it?”

“But it’s such a mean little animal,” Brownie said, looking up at her father.

Her father looked down at Brownie and then spoke as if imparting some secret wisdom to his daughter. “Leave it alone, and it’ll kill itself.”

When the pony wasn’t throwing Brownie, it was biting at the other horses. A few weeks later, the other animals kicked at the pony, driving it into a ravine, where it died. Sometimes the tiniest, seemingly most inconsequential moments in a person’s life are the most profound, resonating forever, and her father had given her one of the essential lessons of her life. Fate took care of itself; one only had to stand aside and wait.

When she was a tall, vibrant twelve-year-old on the verge of womanhood, Brownie’s father died in a farm accident, and Brownie was alone. There was not enough money for both her younger brother and Brownie to go to school and to have someone take care of them. So thirteen-year-old Brownie said that she was of age. Claiming to be twenty-one, Brownie went to work at the West Virginia Pulp and Paper Company as a page girl taking messages around the office.

“I was a big girl, and I was smart, strong, rough, and tough,” Brownie recalls. “I’m a likeable soul because I’m not arrogant, demanding, or commanding. And they all loved me in that company. They sort of protected me because I was a little kid, you know. And I was cute, I guess, I had no idea what I looked like.”

Brownie had a friend who dreamed of becoming a showgirl on Broadway, and the two sixteen-year-olds headed off to New York in 1943, fresh innocent young women arriving in the great, amoral city.

New York was the biggest, brashest city in the world. For a young woman of no education or background, there was the possibility in those years to marry a rich man that there never was before, and most likely never would be again.

Most single women from unprivileged backgrounds had neither the desire nor the audacity to attempt to connect with men of wealth and privilege. Those of a certain intellectual inclination headed down to the bohemian world of Greenwich Village. Others of a religious mind-set made their church the center of their lives. Then there were those like Brownie who were savvy, pretty, ambitious, shrewd, and socially daring enough to become part of a garish, flamboyant café society where they could meet socially elite men. Any number of Palm Beach society ladies had their genesis in this world.

When these wealthy young men went on their nightly rounds in the immediate postwar years, they sauntered into the back room at 21 for dinner before moving on to the Cub Room at the Stork Club, or to the other celebrated nightclub, El Morocco. And all these places were full of young, wildly attractive women. The men thought they were the hunters, but in actuality they were the prey.

Sherman Billingsley, the Stork Club’s owner and impresario, admitted only those young women with enough class or beauty to add to his sparkling, nocturnal fusion. Brownie made her way there, often with her friend from Virginia. “She and I were popular because we were young, fresh, and I guess we were pretty enough,” Brownie reflects. “We looked innocent enough where they’d say, ‘We’ll take advantage of those two chickens,’ but they didn’t do it.” She and her girlfriend tipped the doorman in their apartment house five dollars a month to tell their escorts that they could not go upstairs, the most efficacious way to say no. That was the way she liked to do things, never raising her voice, never making a scene, but always waltzing away from trouble.

Brownie pieced together a living as best she could, doing some modeling and working for a while as a hat check girl. The wealthy young heirs Brownie was dating came from old money families that lived by the axiom: “A lady should see her name in the papers only three times in her life, when’s she engaged, when she marries, and when she dies.” Yet the old aristocratic imperatives were giving way to a “celebritocracy,” the gossip columnists taking the place of the Social Register. Ambitious young women read gossip columnists such as Cholly Knickerbocker and Ed Sullivan to learn the players and the places.

One evening Brownie attended the tennis matches at Forest Hills with the mysterious Howard Hughes. All during the event, she kept looking down at his dirty tennis shoes and wondering why she had agreed to the date. Things changed for Brownie in the morning when she picked up the
Daily Mirror
and read in Walter Winchell’s column: “Mildred ‘Brownie’ Brown, Virginia socialite, at Open with Howard Hughes.” Winchell’s column had the staccato rhythm of a telegram, and it affected people like a telegraph boy shouting the message throughout Manhattan. Now she had become just what Winchell said she was, a Virginia socialite frequenting the elite clubs of the city.

In a matter of a few years, Brownie transformed herself into an elegant, upbeat woman whom wealthy men found irresistible. To do so, she had to employ immense mimicry based on the most astute observations of the habits, manners, and mores of a whole new class of people. It took subtle empathy, and a faux intimacy, always reserving something of herself. She had always to pretend that she was something she was not or never had been. She could never drop the veil of illusion, until one day the veil became a virtual part of her skin.

I
N
1948, B
ROWNIE MARRIED
George Schrafft, heir to a popular chain of restaurants frequented by secretaries and shop girls. The twenty-seven-year-old playboy was dependent on the erratic largesse of his mother, who wanted her son to do something other than race speed boats and fast cars. He had already been married once and had a daughter, but he was game to go at it again. The couple eloped to New Jersey and returned to stay in Brownie’s little apartment overlooking Sutton Place in Manhattan.

When Brownie became pregnant, poor George no longer had a voluptuous blond playmate able to carouse day and night. George was not about to wait around for the good times to return, and he found other young playthings ready to zoom off in his Aston Martin. George had scarcely taken off his britches when his pregnant wife was onto his adulterous games.