Madness Under the Royal Palms (16 page)

My wife and I liked Meaghan, and one night we took her to dinner at Trevini on Worth Avenue. After dinner, we were already in bed when she called, saying that the police had stopped her on South County Road. There was one squad car in front of her, and another behind. She was driving a used Audi that she had recently purchased. The car was dusty and had temporary plates, and she did not have her insurance papers with her. The officers said she could not drive. We dressed, and when we arrived, I drove her car across the southern bridge, followed by my wife in our car. Once into West Palm Beach, Meaghan got in her car and drove back to Wellington.

Several nights later, I got a phone call from Eric. He said that the previous evening he had been so drunk that he did not know where he was. The police had stopped his Bentley, driven the car home, and tucked him into bed. The police say they have no record of either one of these incidents.

T
he men who once came to Palm Beach generally had such a sense of fulfillment in their careers that they were happy playing golf and tennis, and left the intricacies of social life to their wives. The men who now came to Palm Beach have often made killings, not livings. They seem not to have the profound sense of accomplishment of many of their predecessors, and a number of them seek it by entering what had largely been a woman’s social world and muscling their way into prominence.

One of the first men to do this was Simon C. Fireman, who made his fortune in plastic pool toys. Fireman had been shamed by his 1996 conviction for illegal campaign contributions to Senator Robert Dole, for which the Jewish multimillionaire received a million-dollar fine and six months under house arrest. That was a humiliating fate for a seventy-one-year-old businessman who fancied himself a public servant and philanthropist.

Fireman was neither stylish nor learned, nor did he have any other gift to set him apart except for his wealth and his willingness to part with a portion of it. Whenever I spoke with him, he exhibited a dual personality. He either displayed an arrogant grandiosity or an extremely ingratiating humility. He proclaimed his own good works, and insisted that he be celebrated for his philanthropy.

Shortly after his conviction, Fireman came to Florida and began a bold campaign to restore his reputation. Fireman was not going to make it into the Everglades or the B&T, and unlike men such as David Berger, he had no illusion that he ever would. He was far too controversial to pass muster with the Palm Beach Country Club either. But he thought that publicity celebrating his largesse could elevate him into the social heights.

Fireman understood that at charity balls, a public relations representative stood at the door signaling to the Shiny Sheet photographer the couples who had given enough money to merit being photographed. The next day, Shannon Donnelly went through the pictures, choosing the anointed. It seemed unfair to those members of the old WASP elite who mistook cheapness for frugality and figured it was enough to pay for a ticket. But to the nouveau like Fireman, it was a wondrously fair device to get your picture in the paper.

At the 2000 Cancer Ball, Fireman came bounding up to the podium to announce a surprise one-million-dollar gift. “That’s right—$1 million, right out of the blue,” Shannon wrote. “Maybe the can-can dancers did it. Ball chairwoman Alicia Blodgett was at first stunned, then grateful. Then the whole place burst into applause.” Fireman had invented the headline-grabbing act of standing up and announcing a spontaneous, huge contribution. For Shannon and the Shiny Sheet, it was exciting news, taking the game to a place it had never been.

When Fireman began his social ascent, the International Red Cross Ball was the most prestigious event of the season, and was protected from the vulgar hordes by an icy wall of manners and mores that intimidated even the most intrepid of the wannabes. For two decades, Sue Whitmore ran the ball like a private party, underwriting much of it herself, inviting the elite of the island, and welcoming the guests at the entrance to the Breakers Ballroom.

Whitmore had come to Florida for the first time in her parents’ private railroad car in 1914, when she was only six months old. Her wealth came from her great-grandfather Dr. Joseph Lawrence, who had been the co-inventor of Listerine, an astringent concoction that was peddled with wild success as a cure for “chronic halitosis.”

At the annual ball, the rotund Whitmore dressed in voluminous gowns that looked like circus tents. The matriarch wore her diamond and ruby tiara as she was led into the ballroom on the arms of two U.S. Marines. Everyone applauded Whitmore and competed for the honor of her company, and no one blurted out that the whole thing had become exceedingly tedious and redundant.

In the years since Whitmore’s death in 1993, the chairmanship had been passed on to a number of members of the old elite, until Diana Ecclestone took over in 2001. Ecclestone had been what in the hoary prefeminist days was called a secretary, and had since evolved into an executive assistant. She had become the third wife of a far older, wealthy developer, and in the traditional way, was using charity work as her means of advance. She was hardly more a figure of the old establishment than was Fireman. She was in some ways a mercurial, difficult woman, but she had turned the ball from a social occasion that threw off some money, to a charitable function in which the bottom line counted.

In January 2004, Ecclestone was chairing the event for the fourth year in a row. For Fireman, it was not enough merely to have his own table at the forty-seventh annual ball. He had to make a move so dramatic that Shannon would have little choice but to make it the lead of her story.

Early in the long evening at the Breakers, Fireman had one of his minions walk up to Ecclestone to ask her to come over to his table. She was busy resolving table mix-ups, so Fireman had to walk over to her.

“Young lady, do you know who I am?” he asked, as if there could be any doubt. “I’m going to give a million dollars this evening, and I want my friend Dick Robinson to announce it.” Instead of being grateful for a gift that would have almost doubled the amount raised, Ecclestone told Fireman that she could not publicly thank him. She had other donors who expected to have their contributions celebrated this evening, and was not about to upstage their gifts.

Ecclestone may have had her sound reasons, but Fireman was rightfully upset that his huge gift was rebuffed, even if she suggested that they plan to announce his contribution at another event. As far as Fireman was concerned, there was only one event worthy enough to publicly celebrate his largesse, and that was the International Red Cross Ball.

Although Ecclestone had once again run a successful evening, she was in dispute with the Red Cross over other matters, and was fired. She learned about her dismissal secondhand, deepening her bitterness at the organization’s ingratitude.

The Red Cross turned to spurned donor Fireman to ask him to run the celebrated function. After pledging $750,000, Fireman was named the chairman of the 2005 ball. It was a moment of overwhelming satisfaction to go in less than a decade from a convicted felon to the chairmanship of the highest status ball in Palm Beach, the first man ever single-handedly to steer the historic event.

Even in the beginning of his chairmanship, Fireman had problems that his predecessors had not had. What set the Red Cross Ball apart from other charity events was not only the white tie–tiara ultraformality, but the slew of ambassadors Trump flew down in his private plane from Washington. However, Trump now said that he was not doing it any longer. He had his shrewd reason for the turndown: He had a brand-new ballroom at Mar-a-Lago. What could be better for business than to host the Red Cross Ball? His plane became available the moment the Red Cross moved the event to his new facility, in which everything except the waiters was gilded gold.

Revenge is best when served piping hot, and Ecclestone became a crucial figure behind the International Centre for Missing and Exploited Children’s first annual gala. Ecclestone and her associates decided to have the ball in the Breakers Ballroom the same evening as the Red Cross Ball at Mar-a-Lago. She was not a grande dame like Sue Whitmore, but she was decidedly preferred to an interloper like Fireman, who was not even the right faith, and most of the old elite and those who aspired to their company bought tickets to the new event.

Fireman had to come up with a new crowd enamored of the idea of spending an evening at legendary Mar-a-Lago. In his first decade in Palm Beach, he had stepped on so many toes that it was like a ritual dance, but the biggest toe he stepped on and the one that stayed eternally stubbed was Shannon’s. “The enemy I had was Shannon Donnelly because Ecclestone was her close friend,” Fireman said.

Shannon saw Fireman as the worst aspect of the crude new money, and she set herself against him. She promoted those who gave most generously to charity, and Fireman had gamed the system. She had no choice but to write about him, but she did not like it. He was going to feel the merciless sting of her wit, and she was going to try to stop his ascent.

“I took the executive director of the Red Cross chapter to lunch and I said, ‘Don’t get involved with this man. You’re making a mistake,’” Shannon says. “He didn’t listen to me. It was obvious to everybody pretty much what this man was. And everybody’s kissing his ass because all these charity people care about is getting the money so they can get a big bonus. And I knew what this man was, and I felt terrible that the Red Cross suffered. They took a real black eye because of him. They’ll never recover from it.”

In writing about the January 2005 ball, Shannon embedded her zingers in a standard journalistic account of the evening. She wrote that “the crowd was made up mostly of out-of-towners fleeing the cold Northern climes,” which to the cognoscenti meant that the ballroom was full of hapless outsiders. “Fireman took the microphone for a speech that started out graciously, but soon turned too long and not a little catty,” she continued.

If Fireman had walked away after that evening, he could have felt a measure of accomplishment. Instead he decided to chair the ball for a second year. The Red Cross announced that Fireman had promised that the Forty-ninth International Red Cross Ball would net at least one million dollars, and if it did not, he would make up the difference. To Fireman it was a goal, not a promise. He was a man given to acts of instant largesse, but he did not enjoy being played the chump. He was not about to write out endless checks to a Red Cross that did not truly appreciate his efforts. It was hard to get people to come out again, especially when the social cachet was threadbare, but he did it, and if he drew guests from obscurity, at least he filled the tables.

My wife and I were there that evening as guests of Chris Ruddy, who runs
Newsmax
, the conservative news site and magazine. Neither Chris nor I, nor most of the men, were in white tie. Nor did I see many tiaras either. During the cocktail hour, I talked to a police chief from northern Florida and other out-of-towners who seemed partially in awe, partially bewildered.

Most ambassadors in Washington had neither the time nor the interest to fly down to Palm Beach for three days of endless parties. Those who did were generally those from obscure, tiny nations who welcomed the chance to march into the grand ballroom to be fêted.

And so the ambassadors entered to a blare of show tunes, some of them so weighted down with medals that they looked as if they might keel over. Bulgaria. Costa Rica. Grenada. Liechtenstein. Lithuania. Slovenia. Sweden. When Fireman made his grand entrance, announced like the Sun King, there was only a smattering of applause.

Fireman was tired, and had had several drinks. He listened to the endless bouquets of praise spoken from the podium by his associate, Sumner Kaye. After Frankie Avalon finished singing, the guests began leaving. It was not yet eleven and the evening should have been in full sway. Fireman rose to seize a sixteenth minute of fame by directing the Michael Rose Orchestra. As he bounded up on stage, he slipped and fell off, hitting his head on the marble floor.

I jumped up and, along with Trump and a few others, stood over the crumpled body of Fireman lying with his head in a small pool of blood. There were many Red Cross employees in the ballroom, and during the evening, speakers had gone on endlessly about the healing hands of the organization. I thought there must be somebody to come forward to take care of the poor man, but for a while nobody did. The crowd did not seem terribly interested either, filing out to the valet parkers, paying no attention to the distressed chairman. Finally, several waiters lifted Fireman up and half carried him to an ambulance, which took him to Good Samaritan Hospital, where he was treated for a nose broken in three places.

For Shannon, it was a wondrous opportunity to ridicule Fireman. “There’s a lesson in timing here,” the society editor wrote after describing the accident. “Had this been the Animal Rescue League Ball, those first responders might well have been two beagles and a golden retriever.” Then she went on to pick apart the entire evening. “The color guard—bearing the American flag—marched from the ballroom without music,” she wrote. “There was no Marines’ Hymn, no Sousa, nothing but the undercurrent of conversation. This was more than a breach of protocol. It was a disservice to the members of the military, and a slight to one of the main missions of the Red Cross.”

Fireman did not pay up the money to net the Red Cross a million dollars from the forty-ninth annual ball, as the organization insisted the chairman had promised. In her account of the Fiftieth International Red Cross Ball, which was not chaired by Fireman, Shannon managed to tweak him again, calling the 2007 ball a “return to dignity and elegance,” as if Fireman’s guests had shown up in tank tops and cutoff jeans.

B
UT
S
HANNON HAD OTHER,
more important news to cover and lives to celebrate. Marvin and Edie Schur were one of the most admired couples in the Palm Beach Country Club. The Schurs lived in a great house on the Intracoastal Waterway. The businessman was largely retired, though he dabbled in philanthropy and had served on the board of the company that ran the two major hospitals in West Palm Beach. He and Edie had been married for fifty-one years, and were pillars of Jewish life in Palm Beach. Edie was a prestigious asset to her husband, and had been named Palm Beach Atlantic College’s “Woman of Distinction” for her fundraising and charity work.

Seventy-two-year-old Schur may not have had a shiksa trophy wife, but he had a Chinese mistress, and that was a toy that none of his friends possessed. Thirty-nine-year-old Dora Chong had been his lover for a decade. For Schur’s purposes, one of the wonderful things about the island was how insulated it was from everything beyond. Schur’s mistress lived first in a lovely apartment in the Trump Plaza in West Palm Beach, and then in a house in the El Cid section on the Intracoastal Waterway, across from the Schurs’ home.