Madness Under the Royal Palms (15 page)

They came to Palm Beach because that is where you came if you had great wealth, and there they created a new aesthetics of wealth where everything had to be bigger, and more grandiose. Size mattered, and if that meant they had to bulldoze some of the finest, most unique homes of the past, that was a small price to be paid. Their idea of freedom was to do whatever they wanted to do on their property, and to prevent their obnoxious neighbors from developing their land in a noisy and spectacular fashion.

One such mogul is Sydell Miller. Her story is not unlike that of Estée Lauder, who had begun her business concocting cosmetics in her kitchen. In her hometown of Cleveland, Miller had gone into the neighborhood beauty parlor for a perm, where she met the man who became her husband and partner in Matrix Essentials Inc., a beauty products company that brought the widow to the Forbes 400.

Estée had lived in a 13,000-square-foot oceanfront home where her son Leonard and his family now spend time in the winter. That home had once been the ultimate of Palm Beach living, but in terms of the gilded new money, it is hardly big enough. This group seeks huge houses.

In the mid-nineties, there were still good empty lots dotting the island, and Miller began by buying a major oceanfront lot in the estate section for $4.9 million. The roughly two-acre property was ample size for a major residence, but it was not big enough for Sydell’s vision. So two years later, she purchased the 16,200-square-foot house next door from Ralph and Alice Muller. The discriminating ten-year-old home had eighteen-foot ceilings and two wine tasting rooms, one for red wine and the other for white. The first thing Sydell did was to tear the home down so she could appropriate the two acres of land.

This was not the first time the Mullers’ prized home had been destroyed. The publishing heiress Betty Scripps had purchased their previous home to demolish it to make room for her garden. When the Mullers’ real estate agent told the couple that their beloved house was once again to be pulped, he reported that “they laughed—they thought it was funny.”

It was a perverse example of economist Joseph Schumpeter’s “creative destruction” of capitalism, taking a good solid wallop out of somebody’s dream house so somebody else can have her dream. As the bulldozers ripped through the luxurious ceilings and tore away the marble bathrooms, it was all to make way for Sydell’s reverie.

A ten-bedroom, nineteen-bathroom, 84,626-square-foot monolith rose out of the clearing, shadowing everything around it. The house is beyond what once was considered human scale. It is so monumental that the mind can barely accept that this is a
home
looming above the skyline, not a railroad station or state library. The colossal structure stands behind a barrier of high shrubs and walls that could have hidden a prison. The lady of the house, who had once been a salesperson, traveling from beauty shop to beauty shop, is now living by herself in a home so large that it takes an hour to walk through all its rooms.

A house like this needs a company of workers, constantly repairing, mowing, polishing, refurbishing. The water required to run it is overwhelming, over a million gallons a month. It takes two hundred thousand gallons to maintain the Har-Tru tennis courts, and tens of thousands more to feed the nozzles that every day automatically hose the salt off the 128 windows, not to mention the watering of the two-acre lawn.

In addition to professional security twenty-four hours a day, there is a staff of maids, cooks, and gardeners, a small army. It is in essence a minor principality all to serve the needs of one aging woman.

Less than half a mile from Sydell’s monolith stood “Four Winds,” the historic 1937 home built for financier E. F. Hutton by Maurice Fatio, who, next to Mizner, was the most celebrated early Palm Beach architect. The Bermuda-style mansion was a sterling example of Fatio’s style, and one of the last remaining of his houses.

The house was purchased in 2003 by Barbara Wainscott’s former boss Steven A. Schwarzman, who is to this era what Hutton was to the twenties. Schwarzman is an emperor of the virtual age, a financier whose Blackstone Group stands at the forefront of infinitely complicated leveraged deals that make him one of the wealthiest men in the world. It was almost inevitable that he would have his own place on the island.

Schwarzman wanted to expand the house by adding a second story, but it was a complicated, subtle task to renovate these exquisite aging mansions. The restoration work had to be done with nuance and respect. Only a few architects have the sensitivity to do so.

There was another way to do it, and that was simply to tear the structure down and re-create it on a massive scale. As soon as Schwarzman received permission for his second story, the bulldozers arrived and razed the historic home to the ground.

When those concerned with the preservation of their island rose up in anger and dismay, Schwarzman said that he was only following the rules. The various permissions he had received were ambiguous, vague, and contradictory, and Schwarzman is a man used to doing all that the law allows. “My intent has been to maintain the Four Winds and comply with the law in a way consistent with community standards,” the financier told an investigative panel.

Architect Gene Pandula, the chairman of the Landmarks Preservation Committee, said, “My own philosophy is not to freeze buildings in time, and look at what has been, but to look at what can be.” As the architect looked out on the empty space where once the exquisite house had stood, he had ample opportunity “to look at what can be.”

The Shiny Sheet captured the reality in a powerful editorial: “Knocking a building to the ground and rebuilding it in the approximate image of what it once was isn’t preservation—it’s Disney World.”

From one end of the island to the other, the process ground on. Great mansions were going up by the score, overshadowing what once had been deemed great homes. In the North End, a village within the village, bungalows were coming down and aspiring mansions going up, nudging hard up against their more modest neighbors. In the score or so of midtown condominiums, units that had been purchased for a few hundred thousand dollars were being bought now for millions, almost always with cash, and almost always gutted and redone, so no touch of the older owner stayed. And whatever remnants of the middle class remained largely took their profits, packed up their belongings, and moved on.

By 2008 the market in homes ten million dollars or less had largely shriveled up into a hard nervous nut, but the high end soared. These megamansions, leviathans of the earth, grabbed up the most precious oceanfront, and destroyed everything in their wake, their buyers impervious to the vicissitudes of the stock market that bedeviled mere mortals.

No one is more understanding of the trend to megamansions than Dan Swanson, who is building the most expensive spec homes in history. Swanson calls his company Addison Development. In his office he displays one of the few oversized red leather-bound copies of Addison Mizner’s autobiography, but whereas the great Palm Beach architect was building fantasies largely for women, Swanson is constructing business deals in which the man is usually the primary player.

“Maybe it was more a woman’s thing then, but today, though women really want to be involved, the guys are really paying attention,” Swanson reflects. “Not only are these gorgeous homes, but they’re a hell of an investment. There’s a whole mind-set if you buy the best diamond, it’s not going down in value. If you buy the best of things, normally they’re free at the end of the day. That’s how the rich stay rich and get richer. In 1993, I sold a 33,000-square-foot house for thirty-five million dollars. Eleven months later, the owner turned down sixty-five million dollars. I felt like an idiot. It’s like the old saying, pigs get slaughtered.”

These are usually the buyers’ third or fourth homes, and they view them as pleasant additions to their financial portfolio. The scent of almost certain profit has brought new people to the island, at least a dozen of whom are searching for homes in the $100 million price range. Swanson is currently building four spec homes, one of which has already been sold. There is almost no land left in the most desirable locations, and Swanson is building one of his homes on the lake side just south of Eddy Louis’s home. It has an unenviable view of an island in the Intracoastal Waterway and behind that the spire of several West Palm Beach condominiums. The house is a shell. Swanson is willing to sell the mansion now for sixty-five million dollars or eighty million when it is finished.

W
hen things were bad, Eric Purcell’s rule was to get out and move on. He was under indictment for aggravated battery and false imprisonment for allegedly attacking his Argentinean girlfriend in their Miami apartment. He could not flee the country for good, but at least attend a wedding in Aruba with his mother, Monique van Vooren. Eric flew first to San Juan, where he met his celebrity mother flying in from New York, and the two of them flew on together to the hundred-acre St. James Club on a private bay on the Caribbean island. New York socialite Denise Rich hosted the glittery event.

Denise invited her friend Meaghan Karland, who she saw a lot of in New York until Meaghan moved down to Palm Beach, where she lived in a house in the North End with her husband and two children. She was a sophisticated woman of mixed Arab and European background who mingled well in the café societies of New York and London. She had gained weight and fought depression living with a husband who paid her little attention and was often gone. Her mother was staying with her, but she rarely got away from the endless chores of mothering her two young children. The wedding celebration was a return to what her life once had been, if only for three days.

Meaghan was having a drink when a friend introduced her to Eric. “The reason I like you is you don’t wear secretary jewelry,” Eric said as his entry speech, looking at her huge diamond-and-ruby-encrusted bangles.

“What the hell are you talking about!” replied the abrupt Meaghan.

“Come on, you’re not wearing gold chains with little hearts, all that cheap stuff that tries to be something it’s not.”

Meaghan took Eric’s comments as a compliment. Only later did she think that he had picked her out as somebody with money and cut to the chase even before the game had begun. She had not come to Aruba for a tawdry holiday affair before heading home to her clueless husband, but it had been so long, and Eric was so smooth. He was a master in the bedroom. Women did not forget their encounters with him. “I didn’t want to be with my husband any longer,” Meaghan says. “I had never had an affair in my life, and it just happened. I must have been blind, but he was paying attention to me. I didn’t have men looking at me for sex, but he was.”

Meaghan had been back in Palm Beach a few days when Eric called. He told her he was in trouble. He had to get out of Miami, and asked if he could stay in her guesthouse. She was in love, or what seemed like love, and she said yes. Eric had almost no wardrobe, and surely nothing appropriate for Palm Beach. Meaghan went out and filled his closet with fine suits, Italian shoes, sports jackets, and pants. He told her nobody in his life had ever done anything like that for him. That was one thing Eric told her that was the truth.

Except for the nasty business of the criminal charges, Eric began enjoying himself more than he had in years. That was when Eric started playing tennis at the Breakers. Eric did not have the exalted social ambitions of David Berger; he just wanted to survive and to give the illusion that he was a man of substance. Eric understood luxury goods, vintage wines, and fine hotels, and had everything a wealthy man should have except for money. As he strolled down Worth Avenue, he rarely bought anything, but he walked with such a peacock’s strut that no one ever seemed to notice.

Eric traveled two hours south to Miami occasionally to keep his elevator advertising business afloat, but most of the time, he stayed with Meaghan. She was overwhelmingly generous to Eric, loaning or giving him by her estimate over $120,000. “Not only does she know what I’m facing, she’s putting out money too,” Eric recalls. “I have to go to court because of the child support. So she puts up money to help me for that. And I’m living at her house. She’s in love with me, and I’m great with her kids. I’m basically the camp counselor.”

Eric knew that he would probably have gone to jail for back child support if Meaghan had not written out a check to the court. And she wrote another check for five thousand dollars to Eric’s lawyer. He did not mind living in Meaghan’s guesthouse, but it got dicey at times when her husband came home from business trips. He pretended that nothing untoward was happening, but eventually he was bound to say something, and even if he didn’t, her mother was roaming the perimeters. “You know, it would be a better idea if you get a little single,” Meaghan told Eric one day, and he moved over to a tiny apartment in West Palm Beach.

That was even better because Meaghan was still funding him, yet he now had the kind of wiggle room he desired. He could comfortably go out with other women as well, including Martha Reed, an elderly matron with a red sports car and invitations to exclusive dinner parties, and to events out at the polo grounds in Wellington. There was still plenty of time for tennis with Eddy Louis, and several others. I had many conversations with Eric, but I knew almost nothing about his background. I thought he was just another spoiled rich man measuring out his life in cocktail parties, dinner invitations, and afternoon tennis matches. He was a consummate actor, and he played a wealthy gentleman far better than most wealthy gentlemen played the role.

The unfortunate criminal matter had been going on for months, nothing but an endless stream of continuances and meaningless hearings. Every time Eric walked into the courtroom, he had his trump card at his side. “Meaghan’s always with me,” he says. “And when I come into court with Meaghan, she comes in with the two kids, you know, dressed with jewelry, and I come in a suit. No one is going to prosecute me on this charge, especially when we tell the judge I’m living in Palm Beach with Meaghan.”

After close to two years, Eric grew tired of his life in Palm Beach. He was an actor, after all, and it was time to move back to New York and start auditioning. That did not mean that he had ended things forever with Meaghan and the others, but for now he had other interests.

In June 1997, Eric arrived back in Manhattan. He had hardly unpacked when his lawyer called to tell him there was a new judge, and the case was going to trial in Florida. A few days later he flew to Miami, and when he walked into the courtroom in his fancy suit, he no longer had Meaghan and her two kids as his props. It was just Eric and his lawyer, facing a female prosecutor, a female judge, and a heavily Latino jury.

“So I come walking in the door like, ‘What’s going on? Oh, there’s a trial,’” Eric recalls. “I say, ‘Oh, let’s have fun with this.’ I’m like, ‘This is theater.’ Well, it’s going to be my word against hers, there were no witnesses.”

The jury found Eric guilty on all charges, and the deputies took him away to jail. As soon as she heard about the verdict, Meaghan drove down with bail money. In the weeks before the sentencing, a number of people wrote letters calling for probation. In August, the judge sentenced Eric to forty months in prison. When the sheriff deputies came to take him to jail, they thought he was a duded-up lawyer. Eric had to tell them he was the one they wanted.

Once the guards delivered Eric to the enormous 3,098-bed Metro West Detention Center, Eric became just another prisoner in a gymnasium-size room with rows of bunk beds. There were almost no upscale white men in this room; he quickly cased the large room, looking for the prisoner who ran things. It took him no more than twenty minutes to spot the man, an African American who had killed two employees in a jewelry heist gone bad.

As soon as Eric learned that the murderer played chess, Eric walked up to him and asked him for a game. Eric had made the most important friend in the room. It was the summer that the improbable Florida Marlins won the World Series, and for Eric it was a good time. “I’m enjoying it,” Eric says. “I’m having this experience. I’m in the moment. And in many ways, I’m happy. I’m laughing, I’m having fun with these guys, I’m playing cards, I’m watching television. I don’t have to worry about the rent or this or that. I have sports. We go outside for rec. I’m weight lifting.”

It livened things up when Meaghan came to visit, and when he was lonely, he called her collect. Then everything changed when Meaghan told him her incredible scheme. “Terry Von Pantz has died,” Meaghan said. Von Pantz was the widow of Eric’s paternal grandfather. McConnell Sr. had divided his will in three, giving a third to Eric’s father, who had blown everything; a third to Eric’s uncle, Neil McConnell; and the interest on a third to his widow. Neil McConnell had died previously, and the estate now passed to the next generation of grandchildren. “Listen, you’ve got to get out of there,” Meaghan implored, “because there’s millions at stake here, and you are a grandson.”

Eric would get nowhere without money to pay his new lawyer, and money to pay Medina. “His mother was crying to me, and his stepfather wouldn’t give him anything,” says Meaghan. “He wanted fifty-five thousand dollars to pay his lawyer. I had my diamond ring, which was appraised for sixty-nine thousand, and he made me give it to some pawnbroker down in Plantation.”

Eric could not let anyone in the judicial system know that his contrition had nothing to do with remorse, and everything with his one chance to catch the golden ring and to live as a true Palm Beach millionaire, not simply an impecunious middle-aged man playing one. “Your Honor, I see the past and the present very clear now,” Eric wrote Judge Ellen Leesfield in late November 1997. “I promise only that one day—should you hear my name again, you will say—well, I’ll be damned. He did amount to something, and I gave him a chance at a time in his life that was critical. Your Honor please, I have learned. I have grown. In a way, I have been gifted.”

In February 1998, after Eric agreed to pay thirty-five thousand dollars toward full restitution and waived his right to an appeal, Judge Leesfield granted Eric a furlough to raise more money from a list of friends that included his college girlfriend Deborah Dean, his socialite companion Martha Reed, and his tennis friend Eddy Louis.

Meaghan drove down to Miami to pick up Eric, and bring him back to Palm Beach. The couple stopped at Meaghan’s friend’s house to borrow a tuxedo, and then sped on to Mar-a-Lago for a major charity event attended by Donald Trump. Eric had never looked better in his life, and though his hair was only about an inch long, he cut a formidable figure.

After staying with Meaghan a few days, Eric flew up to New York to live with his mother and to work as a stockbroker earning about $300 a week. He asked his friends for money, but they turned him down, and he was desperate to come up with the $120,000 in total restitution ordered by the court. He managed to pull together $20,000, and after he agreed to pay $20,000 more, Judge Leesfield mitigated his sentence to the seven months served, and he was a free man.

The Van Pantz estate was worth $80,000,000, to be divided among nine acknowledged grandchildren. If Eric could prove paternity, he would be the tenth grandchild, and walk away with $8 million. There was no DNA evidence, so his lawyers negotiated an undisclosed settlement sealed with a pledge of confidentiality. Afterward, Eric purchased a condominium in Ibis Isle on the southern part of the island for $485,000, a 1993 Bentley Brooklands, and part ownership in a gym. And he began to live the life that he had always played at living. There were many young women, many late nights, and many tennis games.

One of Eric’s new friends was Dr. G. Heath King, a psychoanalyst practicing in Boca Raton. King had trained in Germany and taught interdisciplinary studies at Yale University before moving down to Florida. He was an immensely literate man and after talking extensively to Eric, King suggested that he might find it worthwhile reading F. Scott Fitzgerald’s classic short story “Winter Dreams.” The analyst felt that there was an extraordinary affinity between Eric and Dexter Green, the main character. Eric not only read the tale once, but again and again, as if in these pages he had found some meaning, some understanding that he had found nowhere else.

“Winter Dreams” is the story of a poor boy, Dexter Green, who falls in love with a rich girl. She is very much like the Debbie Dean of Eric’s youthful imagination. Dexter marries someone else, but the memory of Judy Jones and what could have been burns his soul. Years later he learns that Jones has married too. She is unhappy and has lost her beauty, and none of her magic remains. Dexter sees her plain and whole, and in that moment the solace of melancholy is gone. There is nothing left for him except a terrifying, chilling aloneness.

“He wanted to care, and he could not care,” Fitzgerald writes. “Even the grief he could have borne was left behind in the country of illusion, of youth, of the richness of life, where his winter dreams had flourished.”

I
N LATE
O
CTOBER
2006 Eric showed up at the hip Asian restaurant Echo, where a woman that he was seeing, Maria Pita, was having a late dinner. Pita accused Eric of possibly having an inappropriate relationship with a sixteen-year-old. Eric said that was ridiculous and when the woman said that she was going to call the teenager’s father, Eric became infuriated. Witnessed by one waiter, he reached over and grabbed her around the neck. He had reason to fear that another assault conviction would send him away again, and when Pita said she was going to call the police, she says that he squeezed her neck even harder.

When the woman did, indeed, call the police, Eric said that he may have raised his hand, but he had not touched her; he had merely told her that if she did not stop making the accusations he would “spit in her face.” In the end, the complainant refused to press charges, and except for an item in the
Palm Beach Post
’s gossip column, he suffered no harm.

Meaghan, who had put on even more weight, did not fit into Eric’s world. She had fallen on hard times after her divorce, and was living in a rental house on a dirt road in Wellington, fifteen miles west of Palm Beach. Eric saw how she was living, but he paid her back none of the money that Meaghan says she loaned him, and which he says was a pure gift. For a while, she was desperate. She says that she asked Eric for five thousand dollars; he said that he would be wiling to give her five hundred, which she accepted.