Madness Under the Royal Palms (11 page)

It often took a year or more to sell a house in Palm Beach. Marylou had done it in a wink at a fabulous premium. Given all that, it might have seemed that the heiress could have sprung for a bash honoring the new owners. Instead, in March of 1994, Barbara and David invited Marylou back to her former house for their first major Palm Beach party. She could hardly turn them down, and some of Marylou’s closest friends arrived to spend an evening with David and Barbara. Marylou then invited the new owners to visit her at the Whitney summer camp in the Adirondacks, an invitation Barbara made sure others were well aware of.

A
ll I’m asking for, Fred, is what any other European woman would have in her marriage,” Rose Keller said, speaking in German into her husband’s ear. “Half of
everything
. I deserve that.” It was two o’clock in the morning, and thirty-year-old Rose had just awakened her sixty-four-year-old husband, Fred Keller, in the master bedroom of their 8,000-square-foot home to drone her message into his ear. It was a scenario repeated several times a week.

Rose thought of herself as doubly foreign, both German-born and alien to the social dramas of the island. She did not have the sense of history or psychological insight to realize that she was far closer to the lives of the women she read about in the
Palm Beach Daily News
than she possibly could have imagined. Many of these women pictured in the Shiny Sheet had married far older men, for reasons that were at least partially mercenary. Many of them had gone through the same struggles that Rose was having now. They had been much like her at one time, and they had applied plastic surgery not only to their faces but to their pasts, snipping away at the unseemly and unattractive, exorcising the mean and the low. There was no reason why Rose could not do the same.

H
ENRY
F
LAGLER, WHO FOUNDED
the island, had also taken a much younger wife. Flagler was the son of an itinerant upstate New York minister. After Flagler and his partner John D. Rockefeller built Standard Oil into a monolith, the industrial baron embarked on the second act of his life, creating the basis for modern Florida by building railways, ship lines, and hotels.

Flagler had initially come to Jacksonville during the winter of 1878 with his tubercular first wife, Mary Flagler. Except for the narrow northern tier, Florida was then a largely uninhabited region, as wild as the remote areas of the West. South Florida was inhabited by former slaves, white renegades, frontiersmen, and those who sought only to hide.

Flagler’s wife died three years later, and he married her nursemaid, Ida Alice Shourds. It was a marriage appalling to his son, and an insult to the haute world to which Flagler’s money gave him entrée. Ida Alice was eighteen years his junior, of lower class status, in every respect a socially embarrassing match.

Flagler’s wife changed in a matter of months from a modest servant to a wife of endless extravagance. Her husband worried that Ida Alice was going mad. Flagler was unused to problems he could not solve, but this was a conundrum.

In January 1891, sixty-one-year-old Flagler met twenty-three-year-old Mary Lily Kenan on a Caribbean cruise on a friend’s yacht. Mary Lily hailed from Wilmington, North Carolina. Born after the Civil War in 1867, Lily had the gracious, eyelash-fluttering femininity of the antebellum Southern Belle, tempered with the tough spirit of survival of Reconstruction.

After the cruise, Flagler sent a train pulling his private railroad car, the Arcadia, to North Carolina to bring back Mary Lily and his other new friends to St. Augustine, Florida. This was a royal passage in a luxurious rail car that deposited the passengers at a rail siding at the magnificent Spanish-Renaissance-style hotel built by Flagler. At a ball that evening at the Ponce de Leon, Mary Lily danced with Flagler. He was over twice her age, and by the reckoning of his time, an old man. Yet he still cut a fine figure.

Flagler had several mistresses, as well as his intimate friendship with Mary Lily. He vested a million and a half dollars on Mary Lily in Standard Oil stocks. He was also generous to Mrs. C. W. Foote, whose estranged husband presented papers and affidavits documenting that Flagler had maintained his wife in a New York City apartment from December 1896 to June 1897. Mary Lily had sacrificed her opportunity to find an appropriate match to settle for the morally untenable but lucrative role as mistress to an unfaithful lover and married man.

There was no masking Ida Alice’s debilitating mental illness, and Flagler was not about to have an insane wife dogging his steps. He had his wife committed to an asylum in Pleasantville, New York, where she spent the rest of her life.

Flagler wanted to marry Mary Lily, but the law was quite specific: A man could not divorce his wife simply because she was insane. Yet Flagler convinced the Florida legislature to pass a law so that he could divorce his institutionalized wife.

Mary Lily married seventy-one-year-old Flagler on August 24, 1901, ten days after the divorce became final. Flagler had aged dramatically and his thirty-four-year-old bride was not the youthful, buoyant belle of a decade ago. His son Harry described her accurately as “rather plain of face, but had red hair of an attractive hue and a beautiful figure.”

For his bride, Flagler built a 55-room, 60,000-square-foot marble palace next to the Royal Poinciana Hotel that Mary Lily dubbed Whitehall. Here, the couple ruled as the sovereigns of the island. Eighty-three-year-old Flagler died in 1913, leaving forty-five-year-old Mary Lily the wealthiest woman in America. Worth over a hundred million dollars, the widow closed down Whitehall, moved to New York, and traveled restlessly on her private train car.

The wife of her youthful beau, Robert Bingham, had died at the same time as Flagler, and three years later, the former sweethearts decided to marry. Four and a half years younger than Mary Lily, the handsome Bingham was a trophy husband, pure and simple. Before marrying her, he signed a prenuptial agreement. Seven months after their November 1916 wedding, Mary Lily signed a codicil to her will, giving her husband five million dollars. Two months later, she was dead. Bingham took part of his money and purchased the
Louisville Courier
, starting one of the great newspaper dynasties of the twentieth century.

There were whispers that Bingham had murdered his wife, but the most authoritative researchers believe that she likely died of syphilis given to her by Flagler, though possibly by Bingham.

R
OSE HAD MET
F
RED
Keller through an ad in a German newspaper in the fall of 1991. Rose lied to Fred and said she had graduated from high school, when she had left one year short of graduation. At twenty-three, she had known that her most precious asset, her looks, was already diminishing. She called herself a model, but that was more an aspiration than reality.

Rose had lived for a while with a German Polish man in Bangkok, and then she had moved back to her hometown of Dorlar, near Düsseldorf in northwestern Germany. She was the oldest of six children. Her parents were divorced. She could not abide her father, and had nothing to do with him. Her mother ran a little dress shop, and Rose had accompanied her to Milan on a buying trip, where she had met a man who promised to help her with her modeling career. However, she had felt uneasy with him, and she had returned to Germany uncertain of what to do with her life.

Rose had sent a picture and a letter to Fred, and he had done the same. The bearded man seemed ancient, but she had been impressed by her talks with him on the phone. He spoke a courtly, old-fashioned German that he had learned from his immigrant parents, and could switch seamlessly from an almost fatherly role to that of a potential lover. He invited her to go on a worldwide trip with him. That gave her no exit if she could not abide him, and she turned that offer down. Instead, she accepted an airline ticket for a weeklong visit, and arrived at Miami International Airport in March 1992 with a hundred dollars in her purse. She was, in her estimation, “young, beautiful, the whole world in front of me, and a brain in my head too, even though I didn’t have a diploma hanging on my wall.”

Rose was impressed with her Palm Beach millionaire. Fred had all the accoutrements of wealth, including a spacious residence in the center of Palm Beach, a pool, a guesthouse, a maid, a yacht, and a car and driver. A true aficionado of wealth would have realized that almost everything was a little off, from the mismatched furniture and knockoff china to the inexpensive prints on the wall, even the cheap décor of the yacht. But Rose noticed none of these subtleties and found life with her millionaire magical.

The couple hit it off so well that it was unthinkable for Rose to leave. Fred had been diagnosed with chronic lymphocytic leukemia. They flew to Houston, Texas, to the M. D. Anderson Cancer Center. Rose drove Fred to doctors’ appointments, waited patiently in the outer offices, and heard the good news that Fred might live far longer than the two or three years he thought he had left. Fred did not seem like a sick man, and Rose felt that with his close-cropped gray beard, he looked like the actor Sean Connery. He may have been in his late fifties, but he was in superb physical condition, enhanced by his almost daily tennis games, his rigorous diet that included a tuna fish sandwich for lunch each day, a moderate dinner, no smoking, and almost no drinking.

Fred often appeared unassuming, but he had a ruthless core. He had made his fortune in commercial real estate and he had done so by giving no man any quarter. He felt that he was the perfect example of the master race, a man who had risen out of dust and disdain to build a fortune.

In these first weeks together, they talked often about their pasts. Rose did not have much to tell, but Fred had a trove of epic tales. Fred told Rose that he had been born in the United States in the thirties, when his father, Ludwig, had spent a few years in the United States, probably as a secret agent of the German American Bund before returning to join the Waffen SS as an officer and fighting in many of the bloodiest battles on the Eastern Front. Fred told Rose that, after graduating from high school, he had joined the army and became a Ranger. He said that he fought in some of the bloodiest battles in Korea, winning two Purple Hearts and a Silver Star, distinguishing himself in hand-to-hand combat.

R
OSE HATED IT WHEN
people called her “a mail-order bride.” She had chosen Fred. She loved him, and was always loyal to him. It was something that people never understood. From the day she arrived in Miami, they were with each other twenty-four hours a day. Although she had been in Florida only two months when they decided to marry, she felt it was as if they had known each other all their lives and as if their marriage was preordained.

Fred cared for Rose in his way, but business was business. Before he married her, he wanted a prenuptial agreement. He was an expert on such matters, having signed prenuptials with all but his first wife, when he had no assets to protect. With the help of an attorney, he poured all of his legal savvy and shrewdness into the document. It was fifteen pages of different ways of saying no. No community property. No alimony. No pension sharing. No payment of debts. It did not matter how long the couple was married or how many children they had, Rose would get nothing. At his whim, he could toss her out and she would have no recourse. As he saw it, he wasn’t thoughtless. In case the couple divorced, Fred agreed to give his ex-wife whatever amount was necessary so that she was not “likely to become a public charge.”

Keller did everything to make the document legally impregnable. The mistake most men make is to lie about their assets; in a divorce, that is the first thing the opposing attorney goes after. Fred listed his net worth accurately at $17,395,522. He had the prenuptial translated into German, and he gave Rose the Yellow Pages so she could hire her own lawyer to look over the document.

For Rose, the prenuptial offered a shattering insight into the man she was about to marry. However, she thought Fred would eventually change his mind, and that no husband who loved his wife would stand by such a document. So she signed it on July 2, 1992, and the following month, married Fred in a private ceremony.

Fred’s sons were not impressed by their father’s latest wife. Eric had been silently seething since he had learned from his brother Paul that the chauffeur had said that upon Rose’s arrival at Miami International, she had greeted Fred with the words “I love you” and called her “a real pro.” As if all this weren’t bad enough, now Fred and his bride had flown to Texas to have his twenty-year-old vasectomy reversed so they could try to have a baby. Fred was not home when Eric called in June 1993, but Eric had been drinking, and was so revved up that he left his diatribe on the answering machine.

“How’s that cunt marry a sixty-year-old man out of love?” he fumed in words recorded on the machine. “And then demand to have children? What kind of fool is he? How would you feel if I was twenty-five, and dated some sixty-one-year-old dried-up bitch just for money? Now how would that feel? Rose gets children and alimony and two-thirds of your estate…What would you think about that? Rethink, my man.”

Many times Fred had told his sons the story of how he had stood looking across at the island vowing that one day he would live there, and Eric recalled that in his harangue: “Is this what you thought of when you sat on that bench across from Palm Beach across the Intracoastal Waterway, ‘I want to live there.’ Was it just power, money, and sex? Or did you take us kids from our mother for a particular reason, such as love? Do you know what love is? Do you know what respect is? Or do you just know what leverage is? Who’s leveraging who with your new scrotum?”

E
RIC WAS OUTRAGED, HURT,
and jealous too, for his father was creating a family—something Eric had yearned for all his life, but he and his brothers were not part of it. Rose had become pregnant and Fred looked forward to their baby, vowing to be the kind of father he had not been to his three previous children. When a baby boy was born on February 15, 1995, the child was not only named after his father, Fred “Fredchen” Keller, but Fred sought to forge this son into an ideal version of himself.

Fredchen had to speak German, and not only did the boy speak German as his first language, but he had a slight accent when he first spoke English. Fred did not want the child to go to a preschool where his son might squander his time playing games with self-indulgent children, so instead he spent his time with his father.