Madness Under the Royal Palms (12 page)

Fred was a strict disciplinarian with pedagogical techniques that had no room for childish weakness or laxity. If Fredchen did not drink his glass of milk or finish his meal, he had to stand in the corner. He did not allow Fredchen to watch the silly children’s programming on television. And when he was with his son, he was always teaching him something, exploring a science problem, testing him with vocabulary flash cards, or teaching him a bit of history. He almost never hugged or kissed the boy, or told him he loved him. That was womanly stuff. He and Fredchen had serious business to pursue.

Rose was a far more emotive, nurturing parent; she saw herself as working in tandem with Fred. As in most marriages, Rose was the primary caregiver, spending far more time with the little boy than her husband. She also convinced Fred to bring over from Germany two of Rose’s brothers, Wolfgang and Klaus, and a few years later, her sister Angelika “Angie” arrived. Rose set them up in a house in Palm Beach with their own car. Rose’s mother, Brigitte, was a frequent visitor, and Fred paid for the young men’s college education. Fred’s intention was that, upon graduation, Wolfgang would go to work for Keller Trust, where he would manage the business and build it up until young Fredchen was ready to take over what was rightfully his.

The rest of the Keils treated Fred as the patriarch and noble patron. By any measure, Fred’s largesse to the Keils was one of the most generous acts of his life. In the evenings, they got together for dinner and had long, laughing conversations in German.

Despite her young age, Rose was the
mater familias
of the Keil family, the benefactor and mentor who had orchestrated this incredible change in their fortunes. She was closer to her brother Wolfgang than to any of her siblings. He was devoted to her, and in awe of what she had accomplished. Fred had a special liking for Wolfgang too. Rose’s sister Angie also went to work for the real estate trust company as a bookkeeper.

Rose realized that her elderly new husband was not part of the Palm Beach scene that she desired to explore. Fred wanted to please his young wife, and arranged to take her to the Boys Club Ball at the Breakers. The event was for charity, but he insisted upon a less expensive junior ticket for Rose and himself. Even so, he thought the Palm Beach social circuit was too expensive and boring, and that was the end of the Kellers’ experience with it.

Rose, however, was enamored with the glittery social world on this island, and like so many of her predecessors, after her elderly husband passed on, she might well have become a Palm Beach matron, celebrated for her style and wealth. Yet despite what Rose wanted, Fred was not going to join the Beach Club or the Breakers either, squandering tens of thousands of dollars to spend time around people he did not like.

The closest Rose and Fred got to rubbing shoulders with the elite of the island was their walks along Worth Avenue, in those years still one of the most formal shopping streets in America. Even on the hottest days, many of the women wore designer dresses and heels, accompanied by men in sports coats and perfectly pressed trousers. Rose liked to dress up, though not quite to the standards of Worth Avenue, but Fred sauntered past Tiffany’s and Gucci in his inevitable shorts, T-shirt, and sneakers. He felt that he was treated with snobbish disdain by shop girls who lived in the outer reaches of West Palm Beach.

As Rose grew comfortable in her role as the wife of a millionaire, she affected an imperious, dismissive manner toward her inferiors, and that meant most of the world. “Rose ended up becoming one vicious bitch,” asserts Jeff Diamond, who worked for Fred as a leasing agent. Rose treated waiters as if they were in bondage. She considered herself far superior to the women who would have been her natural friends, and she lived largely among Fred and her German family. She was overpoweringly influenced by her husband, who was the one American with whom she had daily contact, her guide to the world and its ways. He was father figure, husband, mentor, and critic.

Rose had her own infrequently visited desk at Keller Trust. When she did stop by the office, she saw that to Fred, business was war. He used the law as a bludgeon. He had sued hundreds of people, and he almost always won. “Lawsuits are Fred’s weapon of choice,” said his attorney, Bennett Cohn. If it cost ten thousand dollars to win a thousand-dollar judgment, that was money well spent for the sheer pleasure of it.

Fred preferred triple net leases where he could pass on increased costs such as higher taxes, insurance, or utilities. It was a sweet device to raise the cost of the lease dramatically by shuttling all kinds of expenses onto the tenant, sometimes buckling a small business under the increased costs. Nobody cheated Fred, and if a tenant fell behind a month or two in his rent, he tossed them out.

Fred’s leukemia seemed to be controlled, and for the first time in his life, his situation seemed ideal. Real estate in South Florida was exploding, and he was buying warehouses and strip malls, his net worth rising by the tens of millions of dollars.

Fred purchased a major estate for his little family on the Intracoastal Waterway in the North End, at almost the precise spot where he had once looked across from West Palm Beach, vowing one day to live on the island. He was not about to waste money hiring an interior decorator, so he furnished the sprawling mansion with things he already had. He squeezed a pool table into a room so small that there was hardly room to play a game, and left the library half-empty.

Fred had helped create Rose in his own image, but while he was detached, she was emotive; and while he had everything he wanted, she had nothing that was solely hers. After the birth of their son, he started giving her 10 percent of new properties and having her cosign loans with the bank. What she did not know was that each time he “gave” her 10 percent of a property, Fred was actually the beneficiary of the gift. There was a seemingly innocuous little phrase in the prenuptial about each partner being “responsible for one-half of any obligations jointly incurred” to which neither Rose nor her lawyer had paid any attention. It meant that when she was given 10 percent of a property, she also received half the debt.

By controlling the amount of debt used to finance a property, Fred could completely determine the value of his wife’s separate property. If he wanted to give her nothing, the debt needed to be 20 percent of the value of the property. If he wanted to take money away from her, he could opt for more debt. Then if she and Fred divorced and the prenuptial held, she would owe her ex-husband millions of dollars. Fred thought it was the height of cunning, kept just within the boundaries of legality.

These should have been glorious years for Fred, but Rose’s hectoring was relentless. She was not satisfied with what she considered a mere sliver of Fred’s fortune. Nor was it sufficient that Fred said that he had rewritten his will to give his fifth wife all of his assets when he died. She did not want to be dependent on largesse that could be withdrawn. She was driving Fred to despair with her ceaseless badgering. She had a bad temper, and popped off for no reason at any time. And night after night she nagged him to give her half of his assets.

“I’m a German wife,” she cried in the middle of the night, collapsing next to him in tears. “A German wife! Don’t you understand?”

“But what about my sons, Rose, my sons?” Fred asked, though he had no intention of giving the ungrateful older offspring anything either.

Rose knew her husband well enough to realize that he was emotionally impenetrable, and disdainful toward most people, including all women. She had not an inkling of the legal predicament in which he had placed her, but she felt unsteady. As he refused to compromise, it became an obsession that had no limits.

What she did not know was that if he divorced her, he would strip her of all her pretensions, and leave her worse than when she had arrived. The nagging never stopped. Always before in his relationships, Fred had unassailable emotional boundaries that no women had ever violated, but Rose had wormed her way within.

Fred was playing tennis with Rose’s brother Klaus one afternoon at the end of March 1999. While most men his age played two sets of doubles with their contemporaries, Fred sometimes played five sets of singles against opponents often half his age. When he was walking to the other side of the court, he felt so dizzy that he thought he would collapse. He dismissed it as nothing and finished the game. Then he told Klaus that he did not feel right, and his brother-in-law drove him to the emergency room at Good Samaritan Hospital in West Palm Beach. When he was lifted upon a table for an EKG, his heart started thumping two hundred beats a minute and the medical team scurried around trying to save him. “That was the first time I felt close to death,” Fred recalled. “I felt so quiet, and so peaceful.”

Fred had the heart of a young man, and the doctors kept him in the hospital several days trying to figure out what had gone wrong. It did not seem to have been a heart attack, and they were not sure what had caused it. As Fred lay there, he thought he had a better answer than the doctors. Rose and her pitiless pestering had caused his near death. She had come to the hospital and had been wondrously solicitous and caring, but he knew she would soon be back to her familiar self.

As soon as he got out of the hospital, Fred drove to the office and asked his secretary to bring him all of the land trust documents. He took each one, and where the documents listed the ownership 90 percent Fred Keller and 10 percent Rose Keller, he changed it to fifty-fifty and signed his initials. Then he called Rose and told her, “I changed all the properties to fifty-fifty. You can go into the office and check it out.”

Fred thought he would be able to sleep through the night again, with sleep that was doubly blessed. Since he had not signed a crucial second document, nothing had changed. “I misled her, no question about that,” Fred admits. “My purpose was not to convey it to her, but to placate her, so hopefully things would be okay on the home front. I thought it would placate her, but it did not.”

Fred had thought by pretending to give Rose Keller half his extensive business properties, he would buy some peace. Instead, he had created a wife who thought herself a woman of independent means worth over twenty million dollars. Rose fancied herself not only her husband’s financial equal, but his superior in her youthfulness, health, energy, and ambition. Fred had created a monster, a wife in his own image, who gave him no quarter and considered herself the dominant partner.

Rose and Fred could hardly look at each other any longer without bile and rage rising within them. In July of 2000, after eight years of marriage, Rose filed for divorce, and set off a three-year-long legal and emotional struggle of enormous magnitude. Like almost everything else in Palm Beach, this drama was overwhelmingly about money. On one side stood Rose, who thought that for starters she was entitled to one-half of what at the end of the litigation was a seventy-million-dollar fortune. On the other side stood Fred, who thought that his estranged wife was entitled to less than nothing, and in fact owed him about ten million dollars.

D
avid Berger was delighted that he was not a member of Mar-a-Lago and had no part of observing the antics that went on there. Now that he lived at Elephant Walk and had Barbara on his arm, he was convinced that he would soon be walking into the great houses as a welcome guest. He envisioned himself as the first Jewish member of the Everglades and the B&T. The closest to the WASP world Berger had ever gotten was reading about it in the
Palm Beach Daily News.
For decades, he had opened the Shiny Sheet in the morning to read of places in Palm Beach he had not been and people he did not know.

Barbara could see that David was obsessed with getting his picture in the Shiny Sheet. Even if he had been unconcerned, she knew that the paper was one of the keys to her and David’s ascent. People got up in the morning and read the daily as a social stock market, tracing the rise and fall of an ever-changing group of high-profile characters. The society stories were mere snippets of words surrounded by what the paper called “peeps,” diminutive photos of couples shot at events that may have taken place a week or even a month or two previously. These pages looked more like a high school yearbook than a daily newspaper.

Shannon Donnelly, the society editor of the Shiny Sheet, was the daughter of an Irish cop in Newport, Rhode Island. The reporter had nothing in common with Palm Beach society. Nor when she arrived on the island did she have any understanding of the patois of privilege. Unlike previous society editors, Shannon was rarely invited to sup at the tables of those about whom she was writing. Like her ex-husband, a bartender at Café L’Europe, Shannon was treated as an amiable servant of the well-to-do.

Shannon had the respect for the upper class that cops have in rich resort towns, where what is a crime for a poor man is merely an indiscretion for a gentleman. She also had a savage wit, but when it raised its wicked head in her copy, she immediately yanked it back. She understood that her job was to celebrate this world, and to chronicle the golden fantasy of Palm Beach that the
Daily News
had been extolling for a hundred years.

When Shannon stood next to these matrons in their designer dresses, the ladies fluttered around her, giving her the bons mots that they hoped would find their way into her column. It took a while for Shannon to learn that these ladies were not her friends, but acquaintances who wanted to use her as she wanted to use them. The one person in this world she considered truly a friend was Barbara. They were of the same generation. Shannon was a divorced mother bringing up a son; Barbara was a divorcée living with a man who was not her husband. Barbara had her own weight problems. The two women became the best of friends, chatting for hours on the phone, with Barbara sometimes staying overnight where they could sit around half the night in their pajamas talking.

Although Shannon was loath to see it this way, it was useful to her career to be around Barbara. Her older friend had much to teach her. Beyond that, Shannon covered parties the way a movie critic reviewed movies, and there were as many clunkers in Palm Beach as bombs in Hollywood. Barbara gave spectacular parties, models of taste and decorum, and Shannon went home and wrote about them in detail.

Barbara had befriended Shannon in part because of what the reporter could do for her. She flattered Shannon and gave her gifts. One of the first things Barbara did when she moved into Elephant Walk was to invite Shannon to think of the house as hers, where she could come and go as she liked. Shannon told her associates how she swam nude in the protected pool, and it became common knowledge in Palm Beach that the two women were friends. No one wanted to offend Shannon, and that meant that no one wanted to offend her new friend and her escort, whose pictures had started appearing regularly in the pages of the Shiny Sheet. Barbara was always aware of the subtlest detail, standing behind David so he looked taller.

New arrivals to Palm Beach announced their presence by attending charity balls. Barbara had David buy tickets to the most exclusive WASP events, including the annual hospital and Red Cross balls. David would have bought two tickets to the balls and risked being shuttled into some obscure back table at the Breakers seated next to a rubbernecking dentist from Pittsburgh and his gabby wife. But Barbara told him that he had to buy whole tables, and so he did.

When Barbara walked into the Red Cross Ball, the Cancer Ball, or the Heart Ball at the Breakers Ballroom with her aged Jewish lover on her arm, she was aware of what she was doing. Even that was not statement enough. She needed to fill those tables, so she included Jewish couples and society reporters like Shannon who previously had been invited only for the cocktail hour. “I knew it was a step wrong socially, but a step right for David Berger,” she reflects. “It was obvious he needed help. I had them as my guests, and it changed everything.”

It was a coup of major proportions when thanks to his contribution, David was named corporate chairman of the 1996 annual Red Cross Ball at the Breakers’ Venetian Ballroom. The ball was the ultimate symbol of the old Palm Beach. On this evening, the most publicly reticent ladies and gentlemen from the Everglades and the B&T arrived at the golden ballroom in their floor-length gowns, tiaras, and tailored white tie and tails, and celebrated not so much the Red Cross but themselves.

Barbara’s close friend Eles Gillet was there, looking stunning in a purple gown. Marylou Whitney attended too, in white with a tiara crowning her blond hair. Brownie McLean was a fixture at the event as well. Many of these women were adorned with priceless diamonds, not so much symbols of romantic devotion, as the shrewd investments of the ultrawealthy, a means to pass on wealth without paying inheritance taxes, and an unfailing hedge against inflation.

As the guests arrived that January evening, they were anticipating yet another flawlessly presented event with a contingent of ambassadors flown down from Washington, invoking a prewar European diplomatic world; handsome marine escorts; and a hail-fellow-well-met sentiment wrapped up in red, white, and blue patriotism.

Chairwoman Betty Scripps danced the opening Viennese waltz with the debonair Hungarian ambassador, leaving her eighty-six-year-old husband at their table. That was a matter of much discussion until the Spanish singer Julio Iglesias got up to earn his $125,000 fee. Scripps had hired the international star to give a truly international flavor to the event.

Julio did not seem to grasp that he was appearing before a generally elderly, conservative audience that believed English the natural language of song, and the cha-cha-cha the most exotic and daring of dances. Julio gyrated his hips in a frenzy of mock copulation. The guests were not sure if he was singing Spanish-accented English or English-accented Spanish, or perhaps some bizarre third language, but they could not make out a word.

“Here we are in Palm Beach when just a few days ago we were playing for people whose eyes looked like this,” he said, gesturing with his fingers like angled chopsticks. There were shudders and gasps at his brazen audacity. The ladies in the room did not know that the singer had just returned from an Asian tour; they thought he was critiquing them for their eye lifts.

“It doesn’t matter what language I sing in,” Iglesias said accurately, since no one had any idea what language it was. “I just want you all to go home later and make love. Maybe some babies will be made tonight.”

Given the age of most of the ball-goers, that was an unlikely aspiration, and they heard his words not as the tired routine of a performer, but as a vulgar insult. One of the few to take it philosophically was Mary Underwood, who, as Shannon listened attentively, turned to the gay couple sitting next to her. “So, which one will it be?” she asked innocently.

As corporate chairman of the ball, David had nothing to do with hiring the Spanish singer, and for him the evening was an unrelieved triumph. His name and picture were prominently displayed in the book given to the attendees, an advertisement seemingly of his acceptance in the rarified circles of the island.

David had lived most of his life dealing with complicated, often groundbreaking legal and political issues. No way did he find fascinating the banalities and obvious truisms that passed as conversation at many of the events on the island. But it was unthinkable not to attend the most prestigious balls and parties. The pleasure was in knowing that you were there, not the evening itself, nor the conversation that ran the full Palm Beach spectrum from what gown did you wear yesterday, to what gown will you wear tomorrow.

Barbara knew that although Palm Beach pretended that it was about class, it was about money. When two women met for the first time, they chattered benignly while sizing each other up—shoes Gucci, dress Galanos, handbag Lieber, teeth capped, hair coiffed, accent understated, homes Park Avenue and Everglades Road—so that within five minutes they had precisely pegged each other.

Barbara was particularly brutal in her judgments. She had her own vision of how life should be lived. She felt that many of these people she was meeting had no individual taste at all. They had catered lives, not only the repasts at their dinner parties, but the clothes selected for them by vendeuses on Worth Avenue, the artwork on their walls selected by consultants, and pictures in the Shiny Sheet placed there by public relations hacks kept on monthly retainers. Barbara was trying to ingratiate herself with many people whom she privately disdained.

The Gillets were the couple whose company Barbara and David enjoyed the most. As the two couples arrived at Café L’Europe or Club Colette, they referred to themselves as the “four bears.” The two “big bears” were Barbara and Warry, and they looked a race apart from their diminutive companions. Barbara was so big that she dominated any place where she stood. As for Warry, he was well over six feet tall, weighed close to three hundred pounds and looked like a gigantic teddy bear. Like his wife, he drank as if he had just opened the last bottle, and ate his meals the same way.

David was a brilliant, sophisticated man, but he knew little about the WASP world of wealth to which Barbara was his guide. She began his education by teaching him to spend money, especially on her. “He was not the kind of man who gave gifts,” she reflects. “I encouraged him to buy me jewelry. He did not celebrate birthdays and anniversaries. I said, ‘I do.’ I said, ‘You’re going to get gifts and you’re going to give gifts.’ I said, ‘David, what would you like to give me for Christmas?’ I said, ‘David, isn’t this a lovely pair of ear clips in the Christie’s catalog? Wouldn’t that be a lovely Christmas present?’ And he said, ‘Wah, wah, wah, you can spend up to so much.’”

David fancied himself a spiffy dresser, but Barbara taught him that he was not even close to looking like the gentleman he aspired to be. Even in Palm Beach, many men stopped buying clothes at a certain age; one could tell the decade they had arrived in Florida by whichever forlorn, dated style they wore. Barbara thought of David as “very off the rack,” a characteristic not only of his clothes, but of the man himself. She took him to a Savile Row tailor for his suits, and to Turnbull and Asser in London for his custom-made shirts. Every year they went back, and if David’s size had changed even a quarter of an inch, he either ordered new clothes or had them remade.

David soon dressed as well as any man in Palm Beach, but Barbara was less successful in remaking the rest of him. David was a member of the private Club Colette where he distinguished himself by secretly bringing a flask and surreptitiously mixing his own drinks. No untoward act goes unnoticed in Palm Beach, and David’s apparent manifestation of cheapness was duly noted in the virtual book of miscreants. No one realized that he was only doing this during Passover, and the flask was full of kosher wine.

If David had been a WASP, his living with a woman other than his wife and his raft of minor vulgarities would have been ignored, and he might well have won admittance to both the B&T and Everglades. But as a socially aspiring Jew, David was held to a far higher standard, and he did not quite pass muster. In the locker room at the Everglades and B&T, there was a manly patois full of joshing, but it was the most subtle parts of the WASP lingo, and at the Breakers and elsewhere, David did not come close to capturing it. He had his manly talk too, but to ears used to the WASP argot, he seemed crude and disrespectful, and those were taken as his true colors.

A man did not brag about having sex with his wife, but he might well brag about having sex with his mistress. Barbara had no idea that David loved boasting about the particulars of their love life. He liked to tell one acquaintance how much he liked to nestle his head between her ample breasts after lovemaking. At the Ritz-Carlton in Palm Beach, during a dinner honoring Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, David turned toward Barbara and engaged in an animated, whispered discussion. Then he turned to the late James Sheeran, the publisher of
Palm Beach Society
. “I told her I wanted to get a room and go upstairs and fuck, but she said with Maggie here, we can’t,” he bragged, though Barbara asserts that he never asked her such a thing.

There had been few thank-you notes or even calls after the dinner dance for Prince Edward or for most of the events at Elephant Walk, and Barbara was appalled. She thought that she had a flawless sense of protocol. In a way she did, but that very strength blinded her from what was truly happening. Barbara was right that these people were rude, but they were calculatedly rude. In their boorish way, they were telling the couple that they were fortunate that they had even deigned to attend, and that Barbara and David were not even close to being accepted.

David was well preserved, but he was in his eighties, and on the most profound levels of human intercourse, Barbara could hardly confide in him. She was spending most of her time with people far older, so her few contemporaries tried to get her out; off to a crazy, casual party, or down to Delray Beach a half hour south for dinner at a hip new restaurant. Then she returned to the uncertainties of life with an old man who would not marry her, and whom she was not even sure she wanted to marry.