Madness Under the Royal Palms (10 page)

While my friend and his son-in-law warmed up hitting balls at the driving range, I started talking to the caddy, a garrulous, entertaining man who had been hauling golf bags for years. Like his associates, he did not work for the club but was paid directly by each golfer. He had seen it all, and in some measure he had seen too much. It was beyond him why so many of the members were so intensely dissatisfied. Nothing pleased them. They fought over tee times. They complained about the food. The hot water wasn’t hot enough or it was too hot, and the cold water was lukewarm. They whined about the pathetic, meandering foursome in front of them, and raged about the belligerent, threatening foursome behind.

The course itself is incomparable, with mini mountains and lakes, and all sorts of obstacles fascinating to a golfer. If not for the concrete spire of the county jail rising above everything, one could easily be playing at a top club in Nantucket or Santa Barbara. The caddy said that Trump was a compulsive perfectionist who every time he played golf on the course found something else to be improved and new work for his employees.

When we reached the seventeenth hole, I exclaimed how exquisite it was, a verdant oasis with a pond full of swans. That was when the caddy told me the story of what had happened there in 2004. These swans, like most animals and indeed like humans, are proprietary. If they feel their nesting area is threatened, they hiss and raise their wings. Apparently, a rare black swan did so to Cyril Wagner, a guest from New York. With one mighty swing of his titanium driver, Wagner killed the rare bird. He claimed self-defense—just him and the bird fighting for their lives—and was sentenced to thirty hours of community service.

As we walked back to the clubhouse, the caddy told me a story of an accident far more serious that had largely been covered up. In February 2007, club member Irving Stein was driving a golf cart that hit a caddy, Tyler Buchanan, knocking the man down and causing serious injuries. Stein drove on and apparently initially refused to pay the caddy’s medical bills. It was a frightening occurrence, for Buchanan and for the other caddies, since they have no insurance or benefits, and in April 2008, Buchanan filed a suit against Stein.

For the caddy with whom I had been talking, it was all disconcerting and inexplicable. These club members that he saw every day had what he considered everything, but nothing was ever good enough. Even swans and caddies were not safe.

T
here was something overwhelmingly nouveau about David Berger, from his two Mercedes-Benz 560Sls, the white car for day, the gold one for evening, to the books on his shelves, including
The Very Rich—a History of Wealth
and
True Greed.
Barbara had convinced David to give enough money to charity so that he now had a public image of generosity, but as much as she had tried to educate him into spending his fortune, Barbara saw David as philosophically cheap. She had to pry money out of him; and she could only do so by making him believe that he had spent it of his own volition.

There is no more crucial act in Palm Beach than buying the right house on the right street. It is important to have the proper Realtor who will champion one’s social advance. Just before Barbara began living with David, he had moved from a one-bedroom to a penthouse apartment at overwhelmingly Jewish Breakers Row. That was a step up, but to Barbara, it was still ghetto living.

W
HEN
D
AVID AND
B
ARBARA
received an invitation for dinner at Marylou Whitney’s home on Jungle Road, David was ecstatic. He had never had such a prestigious invitation in Palm Beach, and he was almost childlike in his excitement.

Until the last few years, Marylou and her husband, Cornelius Vanderbilt “Sonny” Whitney, had stayed each season with the Gillets. Although Marylou never spent more than a few weeks on the island, she had an almost unequaled prestige there.

“When the Whitneys get here, it’s like the Duke and Duchess of Windsor arriving,” a Palm Beach socialite told
Town & Country
.

Like her close friend Brownie, Marylou had arrived in New York City from the provinces right after World War II. The Kansas City native was just as pretty as Brownie, and ten times as shrewd. Marylou hired her own theatrical press agent, Teddy Howard, who shepherded the sensational-looking petite blonde around town, introducing her as a cattle heiress. One evening she rode a horse up to El Boracho, hitched it outside as if the restaurant were a Montana saloon, and walked inside.

Marylou married Fred Hosford, heir to the John Deere agricultural equipment fortune. Hosford dissipated his fortune in drunken excess, and they divorced, leaving Marylou a single mother with four small children. On a blind date, Marylou met fifty-seven-year-old Whitney, almost twice Marylou’s age. This dark, moody, complicated son of privilege was nicknamed Sonny. Rarely has a moniker been so misapplied. This difficult, unpredictable man called his book of autobiographical sketches
High Peaks,
and that was how he lived—high peaks and deep depressions.

Whitney was a tall, well-built man of courtly manners and a diffident, almost deferential demeanor. When he was younger, he had been only a few yards short of handsome, but as he aged, his chin receded unattractively.

When Marylou first came to New York, she had not dated far older men, but her prospects had changed. She was a single mother approaching middle age. To marry one of the wealthiest men in America, even one who was cantankerous and almost twice her age, was an enviable attainment.

In January 1958, Marylou and Sonny flew into Carson City, Nevada, to take their vows. Marylou had wanted a vastly wealthy husband, and she had gotten a real one this time, albeit a man twenty-six years her senior with psychological difficulties that had bedeviled his previous wives. The day after their wedding, Sonny’s daughter Gail Whitney eloped with Richard Cowell, a young man Marylou had dated in New York.

Marylou was such a socially unacceptable match that for a decade Sonny was cast out of the
Social Register
. In the end, Marylou was not so much a social queen as a social superstar who loved to stand in the spotlight glare of publicity while Sonny stood in her shadows. At times, said a family friend, she employed “at least five press agents” to trumpet her praises in the society pages.

In her years with Sonny, Marylou turned herself into almost as much a Whitney and Vanderbilt as was Sonny himself. Marylou spoke in nasal tonalities, as if a surgeon had implanted corks in her nostrils. Hers had become an old-fashioned patrician accent rarely heard west of the Mississippi, or even on the West Side of Manhattan.

Marylou was a geishalike wife just over half her husband’s age. Sonny was an aging man-boy with an overweening, blinding ego. She was devoted to his pleasure, from spectacular sex to home-cooked meals, and all of it delivered with the most refined flattery.

Marylou created an elaborate, exaggerated fantasy for her husband. Only a man with the crippling conceit that sometimes comes with inherited wealth would have thought it all true. Sonny had been a crack polo player as a young man, and he still fancied himself an athlete and sportsman. He challenged his young wife to footraces, and he always won. He was an avid angler, particularly on the private lakes that were part of his 55,000-acre preserve in the Adirondacks. No matter how many times the couple cast their poles into the cool blue water, he always caught the bigger fish. “You know you have to let a man do everything first,” Marylou once said. “Men have to have their egos built up.”

Sonny adored sitting in the kitchen watching as his ravishing wife prepared yet another gourmet specialty. “He loved for me to pop hot croissants or cookies in his mouth,” Marylou says. “He was like a beautiful bird opening his mouth to be fed.”

Marylou had brought Sonny moments of happiness, but he still had the same manic-depressive mood swings, the darkness descending on him like a full eclipse of the sun at high noon. She continued the same shrewd approach that she had applied from the evening she met him. “If he was morose, I’d say, ‘I’m so sorry, it must be awful.’ I’d cry and say, ‘Oh, I feel awful too.’ And he would be completely back to normal. That was the only way to handle it, to say, ‘It’s my fault.’”

Sonny was not only moody but also extremely jealous and suspicious. He still fancied himself something of a playboy, flirting outrageously with any attractive woman who came near. But woe to any man who dared to talk too much, to laugh too loud, or to dance too long with his wife. Sonny did not care who it was. One evening he berated Henry Kissinger as he had raged against scores of others. “I know you’re a friend of mine,” he said in a steely voice of contained fury. “But I just want you to know one thing. This is my girl, and I own her.”

Like many of his contemporaries in Palm Beach, Sonny thought that by marrying a much younger woman, her youth would spill over to him, and he would cheat the gods of grayness and decline. But instead, every time he saw his vital young bride dancing with a man half his age, he felt even older. Increasingly, he admitted, “the frightening spectre of old age came to haunt me. All the more in my case, as I am married to a younger lady.”

Sonny behaved with a crude possessiveness that would have crushed a weaker woman. But Marylou saw herself as a person who paid her debts. She accepted her husband’s behavior because she was overwhelmingly thankful to him for the world of luxury and exclusion that was now hers.

In 1984, eighty-five-year-old Sonny suffered a serious aneurysm and sunk into a state of increasing dementia. From then on, he was in a wheelchair overseen by omnipresent nurses as much as by his wife. Sonny had always loved the bracing frigid weather of the far north, but now he cringed at even a breath of cold air. Nor did he like to go to the Adirondack camp that had always been his favorite retreat but now only reminded him of his disability. So the couple began spending more time each winter in Palm Beach.

Eles Gillet loved Marylou’s company, but she found it exhausting having her as a houseguest. Marylou always had a glass of champagne in her small, manicured hands, although she drank little more than a sip. Late at night, she had the chauffeur drive her in a convertible up and down South Ocean Boulevard holding a champagne flute, past the estates, past Mar-a-Lago and the Bath and Tennis, past the great open beaches, with the moon hanging up there like stage lighting.

Marylou would arrive back in the house at four in the morning with her chauffeur. She would set her glass on the piano as the chauffeur played for hours before everyone greeted the dawn by finally heading to bed.

Eles was doubly happy when one day, Marylou said, “I’ve had so much fun here, I want to buy a house.” That was cue enough to her husband, Warry Gillet, who that very afternoon showed Marylou two houses, including one a few streets away on Jungle Road that she bought without much ado or negotiating, as aristocrats weren’t supposed to haggle or bargain.

Marylou’s new home had only three bedrooms, but there were spectacularly large rooms for entertaining, and that would be the setting for several splendid parties. She brought with her seventeen gowns, one for every formal occasion during the monthlong visit.

When Marylou drove into Palm Beach, she was stepping on a stage. “I feel like this is a Cinderella world,” she told the Shiny Sheet. “I go to all these balls and everyone looks beautiful. The music is fantastic and the food is glorious and everyone is drinking champagne. It’s like a movie set or something.”

Since Sonny was no longer in any shape to be out at social events, Marylou attended the major charity balls with an escort, usually James “Jimmy” Barker. Although technically Jimmy was a “walker,” the term hardly defined him. Jimmy was a gay Kentuckian of impeccable stock who owned a house on the island and ran a Worth Avenue art gallery. The septuagenarian bon vivant was such a devoté of Staffordshire Cavalier King Charles spaniels that he not only had a hundred or so porcelain dogs in his sitting room, but as many as sixteen of them running live through his house.

Barker was an endlessly solicitous escort, faultlessly amusing and full of light patter. At the 1992 Red Cross Ball, he held Marylou’s evening bag as she walked beside him in her pink strapless Scaasi, her hair adorned with a shimmering tiara.

“Jimmy, I guess I’m as bad at social climbing as anybody,” Marylou confided. “And I’m still climbing, J., but you know what, there’s nothing at the top.”

“Marylou, if you get to the top, there’ll be somebody there,” Jimmy replied, laughing.

“Jimmy, you mean you don’t think I’ve gotten there already?”

F
OR YEARS,
M
ARYLOU WATCHED
over the sadly diminished figure of her husband. She sat in his lap in his wheelchair, and hugged him like a teenager in love, but it was an exhausting, thankless regimen that had no ending and no relief. “When is it going to be my time?” she asked Parker Ladd, a gay publishing executive and lover of dress designer Arnold Scaasi. “Be patient,” he told her.

When ninety-three-year-old Sonny died in December 1992, Marylou did not don widow’s weeds and mourn for months. She celebrated his life, and then quickly moved on. Neglecting his own children in death as he had in life, he had willed his wife his entire inheritance of over one hundred million dollars. The probating of the will took time, and there was a possibility that his grandchildren would file a suit trying to overturn the will. Marylou faced the unthinkable: a cash flow problem. She had a solution that was equally unthinkable: to sell her Palm Beach home. As Marylou recalls, “My oldest son said, ‘You don’t need it anymore. You had it to take care of Sonny, and you have so many other places. Why don’t you think of selling?’”

Most sixty-six-year-old widows might have sold their remote Adirondacks camp, instead of an elegant Palm Beach home where a single woman of certain age would feel safe and wanted. If the glamorous widow had decided to spend more time in Palm Beach, she could have quickly become the acknowledged social queen of the island, but she did not want that. She had lived passively for too long watching over Sonny, and now she wanted to live adventurously. Friends such as Jimmy Barker told her that she was making a mistake, but she did not listen.

Scarcely a month after Sonny’s death, she set out to sell Elephant Walk, and to do so with Warry as her agent. She started out, not with boring open houses and ads in the Shiny Sheet, but by giving a party to which she invited a few potential buyers, including David Berger and Barbara Wainscott.

“I
T’S SO NICE OF
Marylou to invite us,” David said in enthusiastic anticipation as they drove over to the Whitney home on Jungle Road.

“Nice
nothing
!” Barbara replied. “She’s trying to sell the house. It’s in her name, and the will is going to take forever. She’s inviting everybody who has enough money to buy the house, and a few for window dressing. She wants to sell it furnished.”

“I just might buy it,” David mused.

“You’ll
never
buy it,” Barbara retorted, in both a realistic appraisal and an attempt to goad him into spending money that he did not want to spend.

Marylou spent no more than six weeks at Elephant Walk each year, and though the residential quarters were relatively modest, it was a fitting home for a couple who would be entertaining on a grand scale.

Marylou had spent her life pleasing men, and she knew precisely how to give a stylish dinner party that would appeal to David. That evening, he saw the life he wanted. The house had the social patina that David so profoundly desired. Like most major homes on the island, it had a name affixed to it, Elephant Walk, giving the cachet of a nobleman’s ancient estate.

The next day, David returned to meet with his hostess. Over champagne and caviar, he bought “the Whitney estate” from Marylou for $2.8 million. In a time of little real estate appreciation, David paid nine hundred thousand dollars more than Marylou had paid six years earlier. It was a difference so profound that it amounted to yet another of David’s many social gratuities. Then David bought the furnishings for four hundred thousand dollars and hired Marylou’s entire staff, in an act as close as he could come to buying her position and ambience.