Madness Under the Royal Palms (14 page)

What Barbara did not know was that Dixon had brought the matter up to the board of the B&T. They could have been his brothers, elderly gentlemen who had gone to Princeton, Yale, and Harvard, where they had been members of Porcellian, Skull and Bones, and the other elite Ivy League clubs. Dixon listened to their counsel, but he was a martinet who ruled the B&T like a Prussian general. The board usually did little but affirm his actions. Dixon said that it was time to relax the rules a little and to allow a certain kind of well-mannered Jew to come as guests. That would not lead to a deluge of them taking over, and they certainly could not be members, but times were changing.

The other board members knew that this was not about changing times but Dixon’s new son-in-law. To a man, they said the club should stay just as it was, and as far as they were concerned, just as it always would be. Even today, a decade later, Ellin Dixon is a member of the club, but her husband is not, and though he has sometimes entered the precincts with his family, he is not accorded the rights that his wife assumes as her natural due.

As Barbara listened to Dixon’s impassioned account of life with a Jewish son-in-law, she realized that he was not only talking about his own family, he was offering up a parable. Dixon was telling her that David might come to dinners like this, but he would never be allowed at the B&T on a normal day, even as a guest. This evening was as far as he would ever get. He would never be welcome in the private enclaves of the gentile elite. And if he was not welcome, neither was Barbara.

Barbara thought about Dixon’s comments many times in the months and years to come, but she tried to go on as if she never heard his words. She and David were regularly featured in the Shiny Sheet, where people like Dixon were hardly ever pictured. To the old guard, the society pages of the
Daily News
had become a rogue’s gallery of grand pretenders and hustling schemers.

Still, the Shiny Sheet was a crucial element in Barbara’s social strategy, and her prominence was due largely to her friendship with Shannon. Barbara had rarely had a pure motive in her life, and she surely did not have one with Shannon. The society editor was her friend, but she was also an incredibly useful device to get her favorable publicity. She gave Shannon gifts, talked girl talk with her for hours, and shared a savagely cynical take on Palm Beach that neither graced Shannon’s columns nor Barbara’s public utterances on the social scene.

One morning Barbara went to the door and found her latest gift to Shannon sitting there accompanied by a letter saying that she could not accept it because it would make her feel beholden to David. Barbara says that there was no antecedent to Shannon’s dramatic gesture, and it was a brutal slap in the face. “I’ve never in my whole life been cut dead by anybody, and by somebody to whom I’d been more than kind,” Barbara says.

Shannon has a fierce, retributive temper, but she usually does not get angry unless she thinks she has good reason. “Barbara called me and bawled me out because David’s and her photo was not in my story,” Shannon recalls. “There was a space problem. I had their names in the story and when I mentioned somebody, their photos often weren’t run. I thought she was my friend, but she was ordering me around, and from then on I never ran their pictures again.”

Barbara denies she ever made such a call, instead suggesting that perhaps it was David who confronted Shannon. “I would not be surprised that David said something,” reflects Barbara.

Whatever the truth, the result was indisputable. From then on, Barbara and David’s picture almost never ran in the daily, and if one did not know them, it would seem that they had abruptly departed from Palm Beach. It was a devastating result, especially for David, who thought that having your picture in the Palm Beach paper was the sine qua non of acceptance. Barbara knew better. She realized that the problem was not merely the Shiny Sheet, but that she and her husband had run into a wall that no matter her connections, his money, and all their considerable effort and planning, they could ultimately never climb.

S
hannon had never had a friend like Barbara, and she never had one like her again. This was a measure not of Shannon’s inadequacies, but of the nature of her job, the social world that was her habitat, and her painfully deep awareness of her role in life. She had been burned, and she was not about to put her scarred hand back where she might suffer further pain and disfigurement.

Barbara had taught her many things, the most important being that she could trust no one, and that even the warmest and seemingly most genuine of friendships was a calculated device. “I have no friends,” Shannon says. “If I leave my job as society editor, I will have no one except my son.” Those were not maudlin or self-pitying words. This was a woman who stared straight on at the realities of her life without flinching. In a town where almost everyone reinvented herself, choosing a new, elaborate costume, Shannon wore the same clothes she had always worn.

Shannon was the most powerful journalist in Palm Beach, and she had begun to realize it. This was a tiny island and a tiny paper with a winter weekday circulation of around 7,000, but her imprimatur was a formidable honor. She was treated with gingerly deference, calculated bonhomie, subtle flattery, flirtatious wooing, ingratiating joshing—anything to get her attention and goodwill so that one would find one’s name in her column and one’s picture beside it.

Her predecessors had been white-gloved ladies who fancied themselves the arbiters of what they considered
their
world, or gay gentlemen who took inordinate pleasure in describing elegant parties and balls. Shannon was different. In her childhood and youth, she had traveled places that almost no one in society had ventured, or if they had, would never have talked about it.

Shannon was the daughter of a Newport cop who had been Jackie Kennedy’s caddy when the young woman came to Newport in the summer to be with her mother and her new husband. Her father drank too much, and when she stood on a street corner waiting for him to pick her up at a given hour, he might not be there on time or he might never be there at all. He left much of the parenting to his wife, who believed that goodness could be beaten into a child. When Shannon was entering her teens, her mother divorced her father and married a rich man, but life did not get any better, at least for Shannon. And so on a frigid January morning in 1969, fifteen-year-old Shannon stuck her thumb out on Route 24, and hitchhiked to Providence. And she never returned home.

Shannon was a natural actress with a gift of mimicry. Lying about her age, she got a job as a waitress and a room in a boardinghouse. She ended up two years later working as a nanny for a doctor and his wife in Manhattan. Even though she did not have a high school diploma, she decided that she wanted to go to college. Her SAT scores were so good that she was admitted to Cazenovia College in upstate New York.

Shannon’s parents gave her neither money nor encouragement for her education, and she had to work to pay her way at the small women’s college. Every afternoon she hitchhiked the nineteen miles to Syracuse to work as a cocktail waitress at Uncle Sam’s on Erie Boulevard. She wore a tiny black skirt, a tight white sweater, and a bowtie around her neck, an outfit that not only guaranteed good tips but quick rides to and from Cazenovia. She was sexy, witty, and wild, with a gift for the quick riposte that could shrivel a male ego. She had many flings that ended the moment anybody tried to get too close to her.

At the end of her sophomore year, Shannon transferred to Randolph Macon College in Virginia. She got on her bicycle every afternoon to ride out to a country club, where she waited tables until midnight. Her roommates and friends had fathers who were oil company executives, neurosurgeons, and network journalists; when they went to a country club, it was to play.

I
N
P
ALM
B
EACH, A
single woman hardly accepts a canapé from a single man unless she has some sense of his financial wherewithal, and if he is an impecunious sort, she turns her head away and moves on. By those rules, Shannon would never have spoken a word to her first husband, Peter Charles Barrett. Peter had neither much of a past nor much of a future, but he had a gift of wit, and enough blarney to take him farther than a subway token. Peter looked like a handsome Irish tenor, and though he was eighteen years her senior, twenty-four-year-old Shannon fell in love and married him.

Peter’s one great moment in life had come years before when he played a quarter for the New York Giants before hurting his knee and ending his professional football career before it began. Everyone has a second dream, and at forty-four, Peter’s was to move down to Florida where he could play golf during the day and tend bar at night. Peter liked to drink so much that bartending was more like prep for his after-hours avocation than a job.

Peter got hired as a bartender at Café L’Europe, the premier restaurant in Palm Beach. Shannon needed a job too, and she became a proofreader at the West Palm Beach regional daily, the
Palm Beach Post
. She was so good at adding commas and subtracting typos that after three months she was offered a position at their sister publication across the Intracoastal Waterway, the
Palm Beach Daily News,
the oldest newspaper in South Florida.

Shannon had no social connections with the Palm Beach world, and no interest in its intricacies. As copy editor she was the scullery maid of the office, cleaning up copy, writing captions as the writers filed their stories and the photographers dumped their pictures on her crowded desk. After several months, the society editor needed some help. Instead of squandering another modest salary on a socially acceptable recruit, Shannon was sent out to cover the least desirable events.

Shannon covered the events that nobody wanted to cover, and in Palm Beach that often meant Jewish events. The Jewish philanthropies did not have aging socialites who demanded coverage with an imperious “we.” They had professional development officers who called well in advance, made polite requests, and studiously followed up. Knowing no better, Shannon brightly showed up at their gatherings to cover them.

One day when Shannon was still newly covering social occasions, she ran into publisher Agnes Ash at the Publix supermarket. “Every single picture in the paper today is Jewish,” Ash said, standing beside her reporter, thumbing through the six-page daily. “Look at this. It looks like the
Jerusalem Post
. There’s just too much.”

Agnes does not remember that incident, but she does recall another one involving Bob and Arlette Gordon, who probably would have been among those pictured. When the Gordons arrived from Boston to buy a house in late 1973, they asked the Realtor a profound philosophical question: “Which side is the better side, the lake side or the ocean side?” The Realtor replied, “The lake is better. The old families live on the lake. When they have to sell one house or the other, they sell the ocean house.” And so later that day, the Gordons bought a mansion on North Lake Way, thus becoming one of the first Jewish couples in that part of town.

Much of the Gordon family money came from rental property in the slums of Boston, a commercial sector that they shared with the Astors, but tainted money to many in the Jewish elite of the island. Despite their innumerable gifts to charity, they were not members of the Palm Beach Country Club. They were clubless and clueless, and sought to make their social mark through publicity.

Agnes recalls the Gordons’ appearances in the paper becoming a problem, and she thinks she may have told Shannon to stop printing their pictures so often. That led to a call from Bob Gordon, who asked the publisher if it was true. “Yes, it’s true,” she told him. “You can’t be on every page because we have to cover the general population. You’re at every party.”

That was the way the machine the paper had created worked. If you went to a charity event, and made a contribution beyond the price of the ticket, you could almost guarantee your picture in the Shiny Sheet. The Gordons were only playing the game, and they continued playing it night after night, season after season, year after year, always stopping to be photographed.

Shannon had never cared about the nuances of class and status, and she had the ignominy of a husband who was a bartender in the very restaurant where many of the people she wrote about dined. “I was still so unsophisticated,” Shannon says, cringing at the memory. “People who invited me to these parties, I would think, ‘Oh my God, they were so wonderful to invite me.’ It was interesting to watch how these people lived. And I thought, ‘Well, this is just an aberration. People don’t really live like this.’ Then I realized that everyone in this town lives like that pretty much.”

In the early eighties, the
Palm Beach Daily News
looked like most small-town newspapers across America, albeit one with an overwhelmingly wealthy readership. There were news stories including some from the rest of the state. There was a plant column, an astrology column, a sports column, and so on. And there was the society section where photos illustrated the stories.

Within a few years of Shannon’s arrival, however, the paper had transformed itself into one of the most peculiar dailies in America. The paper no longer in any way covered events outside Palm Beach. People whose only source of written news was the Shiny Sheet woke up to the front-page headline: “EGGS OVER UNEASY: CAVIAR PRICES JUMP AS SUPPLY DWINDLES” or “MORE THAN 80 TO PLAY WHEN CROQUET INVITATIONAL BEGINS MONDAY.” There were often front-page stories about the latest major charitable donation. The rich mix of advertisers that had long been one reason for a local person to read the paper was largely gone, replaced overwhelmingly by real estate advertising. Some days the Shiny Sheet looked like a real estate brochure.

Most importantly, publisher Agnes had grasped the obsession with social publicity, and instead of photos illustrating stories, the stories had become little more than frames to feature endless rows of social mug shots. The “peeps” were the de facto social register of the island, a matter of life and death. And who was the final arbiter but Shannon, the daughter of a cop.

In 1982 Shannon gave birth to her son, Ian, and she had a whole range of new burdens. Eventually her marriage came to an end, and Shannon left Palm Beach for what she thought was good in the spring of 1985. For half a dozen years she lived in Newport and worked as city editor of the
Herald News
in Fall River, Massachusetts, covering murder and mayhem the way she had previously covered ladies’ teas and cotillions. Six years later, she was invited back by the new Shiny Sheet publisher and her close friend, Joyce Reingold, to take over as society editor.

The wealthiest strata travel to the island by private plane or at least first class. If flying tourist, they scurry past the passengers in the front cabin as if in a police lineup, hoping that acquaintances will not see them sitting ignominiously in steerage. On Thanksgiving 1992, Shannon packed up her clunker of an old car to the gills, set up her ten-year-old son in the back surrounded by pillows, watching a mini TV attached to the cigarette lighter, and headed south, hoping for the best.

When Shannon unpacked her black evening gown and headed out to cover social events, she was the poorest person at the ball. By 2007, when she had gotten several raises, she was making $47,210 a year, living in a humbly furnished ground-floor one-bedroom apartment a few blocks from her office. And she was interviewing the likes of hedge fund managers making a hundred million dollars a year, living in forty-million-dollar homes. And the black dress she was wearing was not a ten-thousand-dollar Scaasi that she might not wear again for a season or two, but the same black knockoff she would probably don the next evening about ten minutes after feeding her kid.

Despite all that stood against her, Shannon had a deeply honed savvy that elevated her to an unprecedented place not only in society journalism but in the life of the island. Shannon had arrived back at a watershed moment in the history of the island which elevated her role even further. “When I was at the paper before, I would call and ask, ‘Can I send a photographer?’ They’d say, ‘Oh, my God, no. We wouldn’t dream of having our picture in the paper.’ Now they’re calling me, ‘Hey, come here, send a photographer to my house, come to my party, stop by.’” For the most part, the new people were the ones obsessed with publicity.

Shannon anointed and took away. She defined the parameters of the social world, those who were elevated to its heights, and those who fell into the darkness of obscurity. In her episodic, often cryptic way, she not only chronicled the emergence of the new Palm Beach, but by her calculated choices of subjects, was one of its primary creators.

In November 2001, Shannon married for the second time, a sixty-six-year old former marine whom she had known for more than a decade. There was a rehearsal dinner, a civil ceremony performed by Mayor Lesly Smith, and a reception at Club Colette. Almost everyone in Palm Beach sought Shannon’s favor, and she was overwhelmed by gifts. Gossip is the only food that Palm Beachers gorge on, and there was an undertone of whispering that if you wanted to be covered in the Shiny Sheet, you’d better pay up, and a wedding gift was the easiest way of all.

There was no hard evidence that Shannon was accepting favors, and she passionately denied every last allegation. Shannon was hardly a newlywed when her husband moved back to Newport and was rarely heard of again.

A
T THE TOP OF
the milieu that Shannon covered was a new breed of billionaire and near-billionaire who set themselves apart and above the old elite. For the most part, they did not join the clubs, and they held themselves separate from the community. The gods of irony or unintended consequence had played a cosmic joke, giving them money beyond human imagination, money so grand that there were no pleasures expensive enough to be beyond them; yet in having everything, they risked caring for nothing.