Madness Under the Royal Palms (18 page)

As I wandered looking at his art collection, I was astounded. Koch said once that he used his collection as his “fantasy world.” It was a beautiful, passionate, erotic, heroic world. I stood in front of Winslow Homer’s 1873 painting
Three Boys in a Dory,
which evokes the most idyllic moments in a boy’s summer. There was a Renoir; not a buxomly fresh-faced maiden, but
Ice Skating in the Bois de Boulogne
. There was a reclining nude by Modigliani that Koch had a hard time looking at during his divorce. “I liked looking at it when I was happily married, right before I would go to bed with my wife,” he told Jan Sjostrom of the Shiny Sheet in December 2000, right after his divorce was finalized. “You can’t tell what she’s feeling. Is she pensive? Is she happy? Bored? Is she looking to get out of there? In a way, this painting combines the sensuality of women and the elegance of their bodies with the mystery of their souls.”

When Bill was a boy, Koch’s father had sent him out west to work as a ranch hand, and he developed an appreciation for the historic West. His art includes Frederic Remington and Charles M. Russell. In addition, he has collected some of the greatest artifacts of the Old West, not only Jesse James’s gun but also that of Robert Ford, who shot him to death; General Custer’s rifle; and Sitting Bull’s pistol.

In every room, cold-eyed men silently watched the partygoers. They were not the ten-dollar-an-hour rent-a-cops who stand outside the jewelry stores on Worth Avenue, but professional security people. Only a few men in Palm Beach had such elaborate, serious protection. It was as much a mark of wealth and exclusivity as flying a Boeing 727.

I walked down into the basement, where a room housed models of all the America’s Cup winners. They evoked the epic history of the sea, as well as the struggle of men to journey on the boundless oceans.

Next to the room with the ships was Koch’s wine cellar, where his rarest eighteenth-century bottles were locked away behind bars as if they were precious jewels, which in a way they were. Only about half of his 35,000 bottles were stored here.

Beyond the wine cellar in one direction was a gym large enough for a commercial enterprise, and the only bowling alley on the island. In the other direction was a gigantic Western bar that looked as if Koch had shipped it here from Deadwood City, or at least from a Hollywood movie lot. Beyond that was a perfect replica of Lord Nelson’s stateroom. The make-believe lanterns swayed back and forth on the ceiling so that the vulnerable might get seasick if they stayed too long.

When I came upstairs, I looked again at Koch’s art. No matter how great the individual pieces, most art in Palm Beach is decorative, fundamentally an assertion of class and taste. Perhaps it was self-indulgent, but there was something magnificently different about the vision.

In 2004, Koch had loaned much of his collection to the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, and paid for a major part of the show. The title of the show was “Things I Love,” and that’s precisely what it was, as if Koch was loaning part of himself.

The leading culture reporters in Boston criticized Koch and his collection in an unusually personal, vindictive way. The museum had placed two of the America’s Cup racing yachts outside on the lawn. That they ridiculed as a pathetic gimmick to draw in the unwashed masses. The
Boston Globe
’s Cate McQuaid criticized even the name of the show, calling it “narcissistically titled.” The critic condemned the exhibit itself as a “big sycophantic bouquet.” At the
Boston Herald,
Keith Powers savaged the “unrepentantly lowbrow” exhibition from Koch’s “monumentally egomaniacal collection.”

I decided that I should at least say hello to Koch. The host stood as one guest after another took turns making a few moments of small talk and moving on. With his thick swatch of white hair and his generally benign demeanor, sixty-eight-year-old Koch looked more like a kindly grandfather than the father of one adult son from his first marriage and the four young children who play together in the house on given weekends.

I seized my moment and went forward to say hello. I learned long ago that most people are more introverted than extroverted, and half the extroverts are cured introverts. Koch was pleasant, but he was hardly expansive.

“I can’t tell you how moved I was by your collection,” I said.

“I’m glad,” Koch said, seemingly genuine enough in his response.

“I can’t believe it,” I sputtered onward. “I mean, every other house on this island has the sensibility of either women or decorators. How did you do it? This is a man’s place. It’s the only man’s place on the whole island.”

“I was between marriages,” Koch said.

I
F MONEY IS THE
measure of all things, then the greatest estate on the island is a gargantuan 81,738-square-foot property in the North End that in 2008, Trump sold for $95 million to Dmitry Rybolovlev, a Russian fertilizer billionaire. It is reportedly the highest price ever for a residential property in the United States.

The Russian was making a currency play, having announced he had no intention of living in the mansion but had purchased it as an investment. Those close to the deal said that Rybolovlev was planning to tear down the titanic house and build three or four homes in its place, most likely walking away with a $50-or $75-million profit. That was a sweet, enviable piece of work, and no one condemned destroying the incredible mansion as immoral and profligate. Profit was god, and this was a blood sacrifice to the golden calf.

A few weeks after the sale, I walked up the beach past a number of megamansions that from a distance looked like faux Mizners topped off with a quasi-Oriental grandiosity. The homes are blocked off on the oceanfront by concrete floodwalls that keep the ocean waters at bay and intruders outside. Then there stood a property three times as wide with a broad expanse of impeccably kept lawn running down to the beach sands.

On the lawn stood a colossal, cream-colored structure that on the ocean side was elliptical and looked like a football stadium. A series of tall, oval-shaped windows ran the length of the humongous edifice. As I walked around the building, I was sure some sentry or guard would confront me. But no one ever bothered me, and there was an eerie quiet about the place, an emptiness that went beyond the vacant rooms.

The only man who had ever lived in the house, and almost certainly would ever live there, was Abraham D. Gosman. The building was overwhelmingly his architectural vision. The previous owner of the property, Leslie Wexner of the Limited Stores, had demolished the historic Wrightsman estate that stood on this property, giving Gosman an enormous six-and-a-half-acre plot on which to build. His dream was not a great home for there were only three bedrooms in the humongous 61,744-square-foot main building. Everything focused on two incredible rooms, a ballroom larger than that found in many hotels and a glass-enclosed 4,100-square-foot veranda that housed full-grown trees. Here in these two rooms, Abe could invite guests who would be endlessly awed.

Abe festooned the walls with copies of the masterworks of art from Rembrandt to Goya, having the copyists paint to a precise size to fit the space available on the wall, and to provide a neat symmetry. And then he invited all kinds of people, from Mario Cuomo to Luciano Pavarotti. Abe was worth $500 or $600 million but he had a lifestyle beyond any of the billionaires on the island. None of them had their name on a pavilion at the Kravis Center in exchange for their contributions. None of them had dinner parties for 400 on their estates. And none of them had his 131-foot yacht
Octopussy,
the fastest luxury boat in the world, roaring through the ocean at sixty-one miles an hour.

Gosman had grown up a poor kid in Manchester, New Hampshire, with a knack for making a buck. He went from selling fake alligator skins to building an empire of nursing homes, shopping centers, hotels, banks, whatever he could buy cheap and sell high. He had no great vision except for making a buck, and if he wanted to take over your business, he was one tough customer. He had an instinct for what was happening, whether it be nursing homes or intrastate banks, and he was often in and out before other players even figured out the game. In 1986, he sold his Mediplex Group of nursing homes and rehabilitation centers for two hundred million dollars. Four years later, he bought it back for the bargain basement price of fifty million. Four years later, he sold Mediplex once again, for more than three hundred million dollars. No wonder he thought that whatever he touched turned to gold.

In 1990, Abe pensioned off his first wife, Betty, after a twelve-day trial for thirty-five million dollars and their Boston suburban home. He had taken up with Lin Castre, a real estate agent in Palm Beach nineteen years his junior, and he soon was suffering the perennial problem of a trophy girlfriend, a constant nagging over money. He eventually settled one million dollars on her in a palimony agreement and cursed her presence by getting her to agree to appear in the county only seven days a year. But he missed her and asked her back and in 1996 on the
Octopussy
he married her.

Abe was a little old man with a younger wife, a characteristic that is boilerplate for half the moguls on the island. At his estate, he mixed masterpieces of art with copies and he seemed neither to know the difference nor to care. He was not only remarkably devoid of taste, but of even knowing who had a modicum of taste, and seeking to elevate himself with that knowledge. He did not care because his business instincts had always been impeccable, and people loved to invest in Abe Gosman’s companies because he was minting money. He could not lose and he got wilder and wilder, buying the Santa Anita racetrack and its assets for $458 million and rolling that into his company of health-care properties, and then adding five Texas golf courses to the gumbo. But his magic touch went bad. He had overextended, and it all started crumbling. There wasn’t too much he could do about it, and as quickly he had risen, he fell even quicker. First, there was corporate bankruptcy, then personal bankruptcy.

Nothing meant as much to Abe as his palace in Palm Beach, and he tried to shelter that by making his wife the coowner. But it turned out that she was a bigamist. She had never gotten finally divorced from her previous husband, and so he lost even that. Trump bought the estate for $41.35 million in a 2004 auction, much of his art and furnishings went for next to nothing in another auction, and Gosman ended up living by himself in a leased property on the Intracoastal Waterway in West Palm Beach. He was no longer apparently even living with his wife, and I would see him sometimes having dinner alone with his dog at Trevini on Worth Avenue.

When I started the research for my book, I called Abe and asked for an interview. I told him I was interested in knowing what he had gone through, how he had gone through it, and what he had learned. Abe was proud to be a member of the Palm Beach Country Club, and he invited me to lunch one day. After I gave my car to the valet, I was told that he had been unable to make it and I should meet him in his apartment.

The Watermark condominium is ultraexpensive. It is a concrete fortress with security that makes it seem a spiffed-up version of the Palm Beach County Jail. I took the elevator up to Gosman’s rental apartment, where his secretary showed me into the living room. Abe had decorated it as if he had pulled out a few pieces of little value from his Palm Beach home and placed them randomly on the cold marble. Abe shuffled into the room and introduced himself almost shyly, and said he was working on a business deal and would have to reschedule.

I called Abe the next day and he told me he was going away and to try him in a week. When I called he said something else had come up, and I should contact him again in about a month. This went on for over a year. I finally became more insistent, saying that if we were going to do this, we would have to do it soon. Two more times I drove over to his apartment and two more times he cancelled.

Finally, I was finishing the writing of this book, and I figured I would give it one last shot. I called and pressed him and he said to come over the following Sunday afternoon at three. I was visiting a friend in Boca and on the drive back, I called him to confirm but nobody answered. A few minutes later, Abe called back and said that some friends had shown up and we would do it the following morning, but I should call beforehand. I did and nobody answered. I had had it by this time, but that afternoon he called and told me to come the following afternoon at five o’clock.

As I drove over to West Palm Beach, I kept thinking about Arthur Miller’s
Death of a Salesman.
I have seen the classic American play many times, and each time I see it, I see it differently. The tragedy takes place during the last days of Willy Loman, that boastful braggart who has made his last sale. He has filled his bold, strong sons, Biff and Happy, with his dishonest palaver and they are empty vessels, albeit in different ways.

The first time I saw the play, I was a fire-breathing young liberal, and I saw it as a parable on capitalism that makes salesmen of us all. Poor Willy was nothing more than a cog in a gigantic machine. As I grew older, I saw it more as a psychological family drama, how emotional dishonesty distorts and destroys. In recent years, I have come to view it as a profoundly conservative play. “Pop! I’m a dime a dozen, and so are you,” Willy’s son Biff tells his father. “You were never anything but a hardworking drummer who landed in the ash can like all the rest of them!” The perverse egalitarianism of America has convinced Willy that he can be anything, but he cannot. He is just a drummer.

Living in Palm Beach I see something else in the play now.
Death of a Salesman
takes place in a lower-middle-class milieu, but Willy’s life could have been different. Willy could have been peddling a different product. Willy could have had a better territory. Willy could have been selling in a different era. Willy could have ended up in a great mansion on the ocean, and he still would be Willy. Willy would still be selling himself, selling a product he did not believe in.