Madness Under the Royal Palms (8 page)

Vera continued to have lovers, and as she grew older she needed them and their confirmation of her beauty even more. Men still pursued her, and she made these affairs delicious little romances that ended as gently as they began. In addition to these lovers, she succored her aging husband until his death at eighty-seven in 1990.

D
URING HER FIVE YEARS
of marriage with Eddy, Vera played three womanly roles: mother, wife, and daughter. She was always subtly correcting him the way a mother does her child. When he talked too loud or too long, she alerted him with a gesture. As his wife, she was his companion and lover. She played a daughterly role too, dutifully listening to him and following his advice as he watched out for the areas of their life of which she was ignorant.

Vera and Eddy had what even her sons admitted was a successful marriage. They often had loud arguments, but they appeared to be little more than lovers’ quarrels. Yet within her family, there was an underlying fear that when Vera was no longer capable of managing her affairs, Eddy might try to pillage the estate.

Even though Vera’s sons deplored luxury, they did not choose to facilitate Eddy’s acquisition of personal wealth. The brothers felt that he performed a professional service admirably, but they didn’t believe that he deserved to be remunerated with a healthy tranche of the family fortune.

When Vera and Eddy had been married about three years, he set out to organize the commercial real estate that was the family fortune so that it would bring a higher return, and he then found a buyer willing to pay sixty million dollars for the New York apartment buildings. The family turned down the offer, but Eddy believed that he was still owed a commission. Vera sided with her family and in a paroxysm of rage, Eddy vowed to divorce her.

Vera realized that nowhere would she find another man like Eddy. To divorce him was to divorce life itself—and that was without accounting for his daughter, Desirée, to whom Vera was like a European grandmother. So she invited Eddy back into the fold of marriage, and he willingly returned.

V
ERA VEERED LEFT ONTO
South County Road, the central north-south road on the island. Giant ficus shrubs fronted most of the houses. The road was like a tunnel through the endless foliage, spilling into the commercial center of Palm Beach.

When Vera and Eddy got back together, her son James was convinced that he must now protect not only his mother’s fortune, but the family’s. In October, after the death of Vera’s brother, who had managed the family money, the family, including Eddy, got together to discuss the fortune. When the couple married, Vera had signed over to Eddy half ownership of the house that she and her late husband had purchased in 1985 for $2,200,000, and she had deeded him the other half in her will. Vera wanted Eddy to be taken care of, and she insisted that she receive a two-million-dollar distribution from the irrevocable trust, so that after her death, Eddy would have the money to maintain the house.

In January of 1997, Vera received the two-million-dollar check. A few weeks afterward, Eddy, Jim, and Jeff signed an agreement to forestall any legal disagreements after Vera’s death. The Fadimans considered this a generous settlement to a man who was seeing their mother through the last years of her life. As part of the document, Eddy waived any rights he might have to overthrow the agreement.

Eddy signed the document largely out of pride, but the more he thought about it, the more upset he became. As he saw it, he had not married Vera for her money, but that did not mean that he would accept being treated wrongly. He believed he deserved as large a slice of the fortune as her sons. “It isn’t fair,” he said to Vera. “You don’t need it,” she said, throwing his words back at him.

Usually, when Eddy got angry, he exploded in a terrifying spasm of rage, and then just as suddenly as it began, his fury ebbed. But now a frigid fury enveloped him.

Eddy did not care how Vera tried to placate him; he was not a servant to be sent off with a tip. They were pawning him off with a cheap brass trinket because they thought he would not know the difference. They had destroyed his love for his wife. He might kiss her good-bye and tell her he loved her, but the words meant nothing. When he looked at Vera, he no longer saw the woman he thought he had married, but a deceiver like all the others. “I always thought women were angels,” he said. “I didn’t know they were little snakes who crawl up on you and eat you alive.”

This was the man who would be there when Vera returned after her ladies’ luncheon. Eddy had turned away from her over money, and his disavowal would have made any woman wonder if he had truly loved her at all, or if it had been merely a scheme to win access to her fortune. With the love gone, or at least roundly deflated, all that was left standing angrily before her was a bold, thwarted mercenary. It was devastating to Vera, but she was a woman who for nearly eight decades had prepared a public face to meet the day, and she gave little evidence of her own pain.

The fact that Vera could barely see out of her left eye did not bother her most of the time, but of course it affected her driving. Looking ahead, she could see the Colony Hotel and the business area where she would be meeting her friends. She would have been there in a minute, if not for the vehicle in front of her, a delivery truck from Green’s Drug Store.

There were often slow-moving vehicles on the road, usually rubbernecking tourists looking at the mansions, and even though there was a broken double line, few drivers were tempted to pass. But Vera’s friends were waiting for her. As she sped up to pass the truck, the driver turned left into a driveway. Swerving to avoid the delivery vehicle, Vera crashed into one of the few walls along a road lined with shrubs. She was cut out of the twisted wreckage and flown by helicopter across the Intracoastal Waterway to Good Samaritan Hospital.

W
HEN
V
ERA’S SON
J
AMES
arrived at Good Samaritan Hospital, he went in to see his mother alone. Her wounds would heal, but she believed her beauty was ruined and her marriage was dead too. “I want the pills, Jimmy,” she said. “I’d rather commit suicide than live as a crippled old lady.”

Jim had long ago discussed death and decline with his mother. He had no philosophical or religious reason to deny her the pills; indeed, just the opposite. But he was tasked with looking over the family fortune, and he felt he could not foster an act that would bring him millions of dollars. And so he spurned her request. It hardly mattered, for within hours Vera was gone.

E
DDY HAD NOT INHERITED
the fortune he thought he deserved, but he was a wealthy man and he lived like one. He had a white Rolls-Royce, a red Ferrari, a splendid home, a firm stomach, and insatiable appetites. He was often out prowling the byways in search of pleasure. He had been married to a woman three decades his senior, and now he slept with women decades his junior.

Eddy had agreed to be the civilian chaplain for the Palm Beach chapter of the Fraternal Order of Police, and at the monthly meeting, he said the prayers before dinner. It was a motley group including some who considered it a cheap insurance policy in case they got in trouble with the police; none stranger than the Lebanese American chaplain mumbling the prayers.

One evening Eddy drove to Boca Raton in his red Ferrari to a party with Meaghan Karland,
*
a witty and provocative woman around town. Meaghan had known Eddy platonically for years, and she was startled when, during dinner, he took her hand and started moving it toward his groin. “Oh please,” she begged, as Eddy pushed her hand against his crotch.

“Well, what do you think?” Eddy asked.

“Well, it’s certainly hard,” the woman said, not knowing what answer was expected of her.

“Let me show you,” Eddy said, upzipping his pants and reaching down for the .38 Smith & Wesson pistol that he was carrying in a crotch holder.

A few weeks later Eddy drove to Meaghan’s home for a party. Afterward, early in the morning, he drove to Bradley’s Saloon, where a Yellow Cab driven by Todd Ostivich was double-parked waiting for customers in the space Eddy wanted for his Rolls-Royce.

“Get the fuck out of the way,” the cabbie remembers Eddy saying. “I want to park here.” Eddy raised his middle finger at the cabbie, a gesture understood even in the most rarified precincts of Palm Beach.

Eddy got out of his car to tell the man to move on. The cabbie was convinced that he had as much right to the spot as Eddy, and the two men attacked each other with withering barrages of abuse.

“I’m going to kick your ass,” the cabbie said to the dandylike figure confronting him.

“Fuck you, suck my dick!” Eddy replied.

“You’ve got no balls,” Ostivich yelled.

“I’ve got more balls than you!” Eddy yelled.

“Well, show me!” the driver retorted.

Eddy unzipped his pants, and for a moment it appeared that he had taken the cabbie literally. But then he reached in and showed the man his pistol resting in its crotch holder. The cabbie had a gun in his car, but he had no time to reach for his weapon, and the frightened man drove away and approached a police officer to tell his story.

Sergeant Diana Burfield drove in her police car to Bradley’s along with the cabbie, who identified Eddy at the bar. The officer unzipped Eddy’s jeans, pulled out his loaded pistol and ammunition, and took him to be booked at the county jail on a felony charge for aggravated assault.

The Shiny Sheet headlined: “CIVILIAN CHAPLAIN ARRESTED AFTER DISPUTE WITH CABBIE.” The following Sunday, the editorial cartoon showed various men carrying their pistols in the approved manner. The detective bore his in a shoulder holster; the private investigator wore his behind his shirt; and the Palm Beach man carried his weapon in a crotch holder.

Eddy lost his position as chaplain, and pled guilty to a misdemeanor for assault and carrying a concealed weapon. He was given twelve months’ probation. Many in the town shunned him, and Eddy decided to leave. He left his daughter with the maid to continue at her private school, and flew out of Palm Beach. He wandered the towns and cities of Asia searching for young women, and then moving on. Every few months, he showed up in Palm Beach.

On one of his visits, I ran into Eddy at a party. He pulled out a photo of a thin Thai girl with a boyish figure and a sad smile. He said that he was living with her deep in the jungle in a house he had built on leased land. He tried to make it sound irresistibly romantic. But it was both indescribably sad and chilling—in order to finally control the relationship, Eddy Louis had become his own sexual Kurtz, living with this childlike woman in Thailand. He had gone from one jungle to another.

V
era had been fatally injured almost in front of Elephant Walk, but Barbara Wainscott had hardly known the deceased, and she paid no attention to the story in the Shiny Sheet. Palm Beach’s socialites have no interest in tales of death and disease, although that is an omnipresent reality, given the aging population. There is no hospital, no funeral home, no cemetery, and the few doctors are primarily plastic surgeons or dermatologists.

Barbara was about to have her fiftieth birthday, and it was a time for her own melancholy reflections on life and how she had ended up in this house in Palm Beach living with a man three and a half decades her senior, shepherding him through the social wilderness of Palm Beach. She could hardly believe that it was ten years ago when she had first met David, just after she had passed her fortieth birthday. She had been putting on parties and events for Blackstone, a new company run by Peter G. Peterson and Stephen A. Schwarzman. Barbara considered herself a poorly paid adjunct to what the men in the company thought was the real world. She was a middle-aged single woman brilliantly educated to be the wife of a wealthy man, but without such a man in sight.

So when her friends from Palm Beach called to ask her to go on a blind date with a rich Philadelphia lawyer, she did not play the reluctant maiden. They told her that he had just ended a long-term relationship, and would soon be plucked up. Barbara looked David up in
Who’s Who
and saw that he was seventy-five years old. Her date was old enough to have been her father’s elderly mentor.

David picked Barbara up at her East Side apartment with a car and driver. He wore a tailored suit with a silk handkerchief in his vest pocket, a dandyish touch. Barbara felt the whole look was spoiled by the dreadful, clunky watch he wore. David turned out to be an inventive, intriguing conversationalist with a quick and ready wit, but he was short and bald, and as they walked together along Madison Avenue, they were a Mutt and Jeff of a couple.

Barbara was a shiksa princess who represented everything David desired: a full-blown, classy woman who could open doors that until now had been closed to him. They soon became lovers, spending most of their free time with each other.

At times, David appeared to be generous, but whatever he paid, it was usually the least acceptable amount. He was a stingy man, no less so because few recognized that quality in him. Long ago, he had understood that the best way to disguise his penuriousness was to produce the illusion of generosity in the least expensive ways: tipping extravagantly, giving to charities in which his largese was publicly acknowledged, and making lavish gifts to those whose associations he valued. All this he did, but the stinginess remained, along with an inability to trust anyone with his deepest intimacies, and a compulsion to view each encounter as an exchange in which he either benefited or suffered.

After several months, David made it clear that he wanted Barbara to guide him to the social heights. He told her that he would pay whatever he had to pay to get where he wanted to go. He had his law firm put Barbara on a monthly retainer to do public relations in order to raise his status in Palm Beach.

Barbara painted a thin coat of romance over the arrangement, but she understood perfectly well that underneath lay a business agreement. Barbara fancied herself something of a romantic, but she did not love David in the way that she had once used the term. She had a certain affection for the man, but it was hard to be passionate about someone who asked you to accept a position similar to that of an employee. He was hardly expecting the ardor of adolescent love. Even more a realist than his new younger lover, he was purchasing a certain service at a reasonable price.

Barbara approached it all with gritty realism. She had missed Prince Charming’s call, and he was unlikely to call back. Barbara looked upon David the way she would a neglected house that she was contemplating renovating. For years, Barbara had been creating events to advance the lives and fortunes of others. Now she would be doing so to advance both David and herself. Barbara was a social artist, and David was staking her to an immense canvas.

Barbara learned that David had been married to a woman from a prominent Pennsylvania German Jewish family. After separating from his wife, David lived alone in what had once been a house for servants behind the grand house that served as offices of his boutique Philadelphia law firm, Berger & Montague. He had commissioned a well-known architect to gut the building, and told him to design a residence where no woman would want to spend more than a night. The architect had created rooms of cold white marble and mirrors that had all the ambience of a men’s locker room.

What troubled Barbara most was not her morally ambiguous position, but that David had lied to her and told her he was divorced, when he was only separated. It also troubled her to have to deal with his two middle-aged sons, Jonathan and Daniel, whom she felt had done so little with so much. She was convinced that they looked at her with jaundiced, suspicious eyes. David was so distant from his sons’ upbringing that Jonathan could not conjure up a single childhood memory of his father.

David had stayed separated from his wife, never formalizing the divorce, because he did not want to be pressured into marrying again. He was drawn to Barbara because she was a wellborn WASP, but that was also the very aspect of her that he found most unsettling, even unacceptable. As he grew older, he distanced himself from the Jewish world in public, yet grew ever closer to it in private. Three times a day, unbeknownst to almost anyone, behind a closed door, he donned a prayer shawl and said prayers in Hebrew. He was like one of the
conversos
of Spain, practicing his faith in secret.

A
S A
J
EW,
D
AVID
was part of a tradition that went back to the earliest years of the island. In the first part of the twentieth century, the Lehmanns, Warburgs, and Seligmans were among a number of prestigious New York German Jewish families who wintered in Palm Beach. In their public contact, they were as proper as the Windsors. They may not have been members of the Christian Everglades Club, but they were largely accepted into the exclusive society.

All that changed in 1944 when a Jewish entrepreneur, A. M. Sonnabend, purchased a major group of properties from the estate of Henry L. Doherty for $2.4 million. There was a hotel complex including the original Flagler mansion, and an attached twelve-story addition that together made up the Whitehall Hotel; the imposing Biltmore Hotel; a modest beach club called the Sun and Surf; and a moribund golf course and country club in the North End.

Sonnabend spoke the language of the Palm Beach elite. The Boston businessman had gone to Harvard. He had been an aviator in World War I, and was a champion squash player. But the town fathers feared that Sonnabend would not abide by the gentleman’s agreement that kept the island a Christian community. An emergency meeting of the elite gentry of the town met at
their
club, the Everglades, in an atmosphere of near-hysteria. “We must at any cost keep those people out of this community,” they agreed. “We must not allow the town to become a second Miami Beach.”

The broker Claude D. Reese, who had put the deal together, was from one of the old frontier families. Threatened with losing his commission, Reese came up with a proposal. He knew that Sonnabend had not put up much money yet; if ten people in the room came up with forty thousand dollars each, they could take over the deal and send the Jewish businessman packing. But true to their WASP heritage, not one defender of Christian Palm Beach was willing to put up a nickel. The following year at the beginning of the postwar era, Sonnabend reportedly sold the Biltmore Hotel for more money than he had paid for all the properties.

The remaining properties became what the committee of the “select 100” had feared: a Jewish ghetto within the precincts of the island. These new arrivals were not the sophisticated German Jewish gentry from New York coming down on their private railroad cars. These were striving, successful provincial businesspeople like the Bergers from Pennsylvania and before that from some obscure European background; proud to be in such an exalted place, and delighted to return home and brag about it. They stayed at
their
Whitehall Hotel. They drove over to
their
Sun and Surf Beach Club, and up to
their
Palm Beach Country Club. They risked suffering no rebuke or rejection, as long as they did not venture off that one straight road.

Most of his adult life, David Berger had wanted to move beyond that one road. As Barbara set out to advance David, she was almost despairing at how inept and misguided he had been. David had tried to move up socially by renting a one-bedroom apartment at Breakers Row, part of the Breakers Hotel complex. Until the mid-sixties, Jews could not even stay at the hotel. In early 1965, the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith sent out twelve letters requesting reservations: six with Jewish-sounding names, and six with WASP names. When the responses arrived, there was room for all the apparent Christians, none for any of the supposed Jews, and plenty of room for a lawsuit.

Rather than furthering their public embarrassment, the management agreed to see that there was no discrimination. Before long, the old halls were full of Jewish families. When the hotel built extraordinarily expensive rental apartments, a largely Jewish clientele paid what to almost everyone else seemed willfully exorbitant. David belonged to the Breakers Club, which was not a true club but an adjunct to all the commercial activities of the hotel. Although David did not like to see it as such, it was almost as Jewish as the Palm Beach Country Club.

As a highly regarded attorney and a leading Democratic fundraiser, David almost certainly would have sailed through the onerous application process at the Palm Beach Country Club. But he had no interest in joining the Jewish club, for that would have ended any chance of his being accepted at the B&T or the Everglades.

Many members of the Palm Beach Country Club snub those they consider unworthy of entering the sacred portals of their club in a manner that replicates and even exaggerates the way the restricted clubs treat
them.
Candidates for membership go through an even more rigorous vetting process than at the Everglades and B&T. Their backgrounds are seriously checked out, and they have to have made significant contributions to charity, especially to Jewish institutions and to Israel.

There are Jewish billionaires and others with great fortunes building thirty-or forty-million-dollar mansions that sometimes put the homes of the old WASP aristocracy literally in their shadows. The old WASP elite see these new arrivals as superior to them only in wealth. They refuse to recognize that the most sophisticated, cultured, philanthropic people to arrive on the island in the past quarter century are largely Jewish.

Across in West Palm Beach, a major cultural edifice, the Kravis Center, had risen. Not only is Raymond F. Kravis, the building’s namesake, Jewish, but so doubtlessly are most of the donors whose names are emblazoned on the marble wall outside the major theater. Nearby stands the Norton Art Museum, which has been built into a world-class museum overwhelmingly with Jewish money. Every few days in the Shiny Sheet there is the story of a Jewish philanthropist giving millions of dollars to a hospital, university, or other organization. There are other major contributions that by choice go unheralded and largely unnoticed.

Many of the wealthiest Jews outdo the WASPs in their haughtiness, creating a hierarchy within the Palm Beach Country Club based largely on wealth, and looking with disdain at their co-religionists inside Palm Beach but outside the club. There are so many wealthy Jews arriving in Palm Beach that there are far more outside the Palm Beach Country Club than inside.

“You guys have a lot in common,” one member of the club said, introducing a fellow member to Dick Nernberg, a friend who is not. “Dick here flies his own jet.”

“Why would I want to fly my own plane?” the man said dismissively. He had already decided that this new arrival was unworthy of his interest. “
I’ve
got two
big
jets and
pilots
to fly them.”

A man is defined by his toys. A man only plays with other men who have the same toys. That is only reasonable, because when you are not playing with your toys, you are talking about them, and one does not want to squander time trying to explain things to those incapable of understanding.

People sort themselves out into the group in which they belong based largely on how much money they have. If they go into the wrong group, they are elbowed until they get into the right one. At the Palm Beach Country Club, there are four or five distinct levels. Other than sitting in the same dining room and playing on the same golf course, those at each level rarely have much social contact. If one wants to put together a committee for a charity and invite someone in the bottom tier to link up with someone at the top, the committee fails before it begins.

Those with the misfortune of not being wealthy enough to join the club look enviously at their social betters and their glittering evenings. Yet joy proves elusive, even for the country club members, because there is always someone richer or better socially connected. Joy is driving out of your 25,000-square-foot mansion in your Bentley and tooling up to the entrance of Mar-a-Lago for your tenth ball of the season, the valet parkers salivating at the chance to take your car and the prospect of a twenty-dollar tip. Joy is having a wife wearing a diamond necklace once owned by the Aga Khan, or so it is said. Joy is having a wife younger and thinner than any of the other wives at your table. Joy is subtly announcing during dinner that your hedge fund scored 33 percent last year, while that of the arrogant son of a bitch across the table with the fat wife scored only 17 percent. And joy is heading home early and stiffing that smart-ass valet parker.