Madness Under the Royal Palms (20 page)

Rose arrived at the offices a few minutes before the man who was still legally her husband, and waited outside until Fred arrived before entering. The offices of Keller Trust could have been the premises of a seedy Boca Raton boiler room selling penny stocks. There were chartreuse carpets, wooden pine paneling, and cheap knockoff office furniture, much of which had been accumulated from commercial real estate clients late on their payments. Bourgault trailed off to go to his desk while Keller and his three guests walked into Keller’s large private office. Keller asked Easton to leave so that confidential matters could be discussed. As the masseuse departed, Rose shut the door behind him.

About five minutes later, a series of shots rang out from inside the room. When the police and paramedics arrived, they found Fred in an outer office sitting on the ground with his back propped up against a wall. He had been shot in the face, and was holding paper towels to his bloody left cheek. They then came upon Wolfgang lying nearby with three bullet wounds in his body. A gun lay near him. Finally, they reached the inner office, where Rose rested in a pool of blood, shot in the head. Even before they reached her, they knew that she was gone.

The paramedics strapped Fred on a backboard and transported him to St. Mary’s Hospital in an ambulance. He was immediately taken into the trauma room, a compacted space with only enough room for an X-ray machine between the two beds. Fred had been there scarcely five minutes before the nurses wheeled Wolfgang in and placed him on the other bed. Fred painfully turned his head toward the other bed, and breathing heavily, exclaimed, “Get the police, that’s the man who shot me.”

A few minutes later, Wolfgang realized who was in the bed next to him. “Get the police,” he said. “That’s the man who shot me.”

C
athleen McFarlane-Ross stood in the intimate, romantic living room of her Mizner house at the western end of Worth Avenue beneath her full-length portrait as a beautiful, ebullient blonde in an exquisite gown. Water lapped up close to the windowsills, and out beyond the Intracoastal Waterway, the spires of West Palm Beach rose up like a picket fence.

Cathleen turned and looked out on a room that had taken on the appearance of an aviary. Several white swanlike bonnets sailed gracefully from the living room to the patio. A couple of robin-red panamas flew across the dining room in search of canapés and chardonnay. Then without warning, a dark hawk-like pillbox swooped down on the spiced shrimp and stuffed mushrooms.

These ladies in their extravagant hats were there for the annual tea of the Ladies’ Auxiliary of the Lord’s Place. The Lord’s Place began in 1979 as a soup kitchen in West Palm Beach. The charity feeds the hungry, shelters the homeless, and succors those on whom society has turned its back.

While the ladies were kibitzing merrily, a photographer from the Shiny Sheet entered the room and lifted his camera up. The ladies fluttered in front of his lens. As soon as the man packed up his camera, several women flew out the front door, having taken care of the important business, and unwilling to squander this sunny afternoon listening to morbid tales of the homeless.

Many of those remaining were there primarily to have an opportunity to see one of the most exquisite homes on the island. When Cathleen purchased the decrepit mansion, it had been broken up into four long uninhabited apartments. As she began restoring the Mizner mansion, staircases appeared out of the void, and when a plaster ceiling came smashing down, it revealed an astonishing frescoed ceiling.

That afternoon Cathleen cracked one joke after another as she moved through the sixty or so ladies. She was the epitome of a grande dame; strong willed, larger than life. She appeared the master of this womanly domain. What none of the guests grasped was that this extravagant performance was exactly that—a performance. She was saddened at the travesty the auxiliary had become, and how far it had journeyed from the ideals it had once espoused. It depressed and sickened her, for this profound unconcern mirrored what she considered a growing inauthenticity about so much of life in Palm Beach.

Cathleen was one of the earliest volunteers. In the early eighties for three years once a week she drove a scruffy, non-air-conditioned van to pick up day-old food from Publix and stale donuts from Dunkin’ Donuts, and then out to the migrant labor camps in the western part of the county. She came upon waterless shanties not that much different from those lived in by Florida frontiersmen over a century before. She saw unimaginable human need.

Cathleen decided that the Lord’s Place should have a fund-raiser on the island, and it should be something unique that resonated with her own experiences driving that van every week. In April 1984, Cathleen chaired a dinnerless dance at the Beach Club, a cheaper and less prestigious setting than the Breakers. The guests were served only champagne and dessert. That was unusual enough, but what truly set the event apart was that everyone donated their services, including the orchestra, the waiters, the bakers, the cooks, the grocery store, the club staff, even the valet parkers. They ran for each car, hustling for yet another donation into their tip jar that would all go to the Lord’s Place.

In the years since, the auxiliary had lost its way. Cathleen was not sure just how it had happened. The dinnerless dance had been a phenomenon. But after a few years, the orchestra wanted to be paid, the waiters needed to make a living, the valet parkers were not going to be denied either, and slowly the annual dinner dance turned into just another evening on the ever-lengthening social calendar. As for the auxiliary, at first a number of Cathleen’s friends were involved who volunteered along with her. But after a while, most of the ladies who showed up for the teas had no true interest in the Lord’s Place.

The annual tea party had become so disconnected from the cause it presumably served that after 2006, Cathleen had given up not only offering her home but having anything to do with the auxiliary that she had founded. She had a good excuse for not going to the December 2007 event at the home of Rena and Vic Damone; that very evening she and her fourth husband, Walter Ross, were giving their “Seven-Year Itch” dinner dance at the Everglades. If she had gone, she would have found it a good example of why she had walked away from the auxiliary.

Rena Rowan Damone, wife of singer Vic Damone, had offered her elegant home in the estate section for the tea. Rena was a socialite of some standing, and it would not do to have anything less than a first-class event. She spent what she said was five thousand dollars on caterers, valet parkers, and security.

The development officers at the Lord’s Place would have been far happier if their benefactress had simply written them a check, but when they arrived on the island with their begging bowls, they took whatever was tossed their way. No more than forty or so guests, the majority of them women, wandered among stations set around the pool and in various rooms for quesadillas, wine and champagne, massive blocks of cheese, and an enormous table laden with desserts. Since prepared foods could not legally be donated to the clients at the Lord’s Place, most of the mountains of uneaten food would not go to those who would have appreciated it the most. A Lord’s Place representative gave a spirited and overlong speech about the organization’s efforts, her voice echoing across the swimming pool, and when she finally finished, the guests began departing, not wanting to be late for their next event. A number of the guests were in black tie, many of them going to Cathleen’s dinner dance.

A
T THE DOT OF
seven, the guests started arriving at the Everglades Club, a parade of Rolls-Royces, Bentleys, BMWs, and Mercedeses slowly moving down Worth Avenue. Unlike most of the Mizner buildings in Palm Beach, which have either been torn down or so mercilessly renovated that the spiritual essence has been squeezed out of them, the Everglades has been fastidiously, even reverentially preserved. It is here that the genius of Mizner resonates most profoundly, not simply as an architect, but as a set designer creating fantasies that dare its inhabitants to don wardrobes, language, and styles commensurate with the magical world of his conception.

The guests entered the club through two enormous old wood doors leading into a labyrinthlike passage. After several twists and turns, the formally attired couples waited in a long, serpentine line to greet the host and hostess.

Unlike in most receiving lines, Cathleen McFarlane-Ross and Walter Ross did not welcome their guests to their “Seven-Year Itch” party with a perfunctory salutation before quickly moving them on, but had active conversations with almost everyone. As she stood there exuberantly greeting the guests, Cathleen was the personification of a lady born to this life. She was a perennial optimist who thought practically anything in life was possible, but even she found her life journey improbable. Her father, James Cox, was a big, boisterous Irishman who made his living setting up Singer sewing machine stores around the Midwest. Of her eight older siblings, Cathleen was closest to her oldest sister. Edna Margaret Cox had run off to join a chorus line, and as Margie Hart became a burlesque queen. She is sometimes credited as the first burlesque star to perform nude.

When seventeen-year-old Cathleen arrived in New York in 1947, Margie had already left both the city and her profession. She was living in Los Angeles, where she married John Ferraro, the city council president. Unlike most of the women who arrived in New York in the immediate postwar era and eventually made it to Palm Beach, Cathleen was not part of the café society world. She kept to herself, her work, and her girlfriends, and rarely dated. Like her sister, she was a sensational redhead with a provocative body. “I was probably the only girl who danced, traveled in a road show, worked in a nightclub in New York, and was still a virgin,” Cathleen says. “I was a virgin until I got married the first time. I’ve made up for it since.”

On a trip back to Kansas City, where her mother had gone to live after the death of Cathleen’s father, she met an old high school flame, and a crush turned into love. He had already been married, and they said their vows in a civil ceremony. She became pregnant and when she lost the child, they adopted a five-day-old baby whom they named Melissa.
*
Her husband went off to fight in Korea, and Cathleen made a life for herself in Los Angeles. The couple annulled their marriage soon after he returned from Asia, and she went into business with Margie. The two sisters renovated homes and sold them at big profits. They also had dress stores and other business enterprises.

At the 1960 Democratic convention in Los Angeles that nominated John F. Kennedy, Cathleen met fifty-year-old Rep. James C. Healey, an Irish American widower with four children. She calls marrying the Bronx congressman “the dumbest thing I ever did.” A few years afterward, Healey had a stroke, and she was left caring for an invalid and his four children. When the politician recovered, he celebrated his newfound health by drinking twenty-four beers at a time and womanizing at roughly the same rate. In the end, he divorced Cathleen to marry another woman.

As soon as Healey left, Cathleen went back to Manhattan as an interior decorator. When a friend tried to set her up with a businessman named Norris McFarlane, she almost said no. But it was St. Patrick’s Day 1970, and she decided what the hell. After her annual lunch with her girlfriends to watch the parade, there was no harm in having a drink with McFarlane at the Plaza Hotel, where he held court at a table at the Oak Room. Fifty-seven-year-old McFarlane was seventeen years Cathleen’s senior, but he had been an athlete at the University of Pennsylvania and was not only good-looking but in great shape. His company was the biggest producer of ferrochrome in the United States, a crucial item in the production of cars.

“What do you do?” Cathleen asked, the American hello.

“I’m a metallurgist,” he said.

“Oh, that’s wonderful!” Cathleen exclaimed. “We’re meant for each other.”

“Why’s that?” McFarlane asked.

“I’m a gold digger,” laughed Cathleen.

Cathleen was unwilling to marry again, and an older man at that, and it took her five years to agree to become Mrs. Cathleen McFarlane. She gave up her own business, and for the first time in her life lived in luxury. The couple had a great estate outside Buffalo, where McFarlane’s company had a plant. They had an apartment in New York City, another one in Southern France, a home in Charleston, two apartments in Fort Lauderdale, and a plane to fly them wherever they chose to go. Cathleen had dreamed of living in Palm Beach, and Norris added to the collection of homes by buying a luxury apartment on the island and spending the season there. “You know, I thought we were old and rich, but goddamn, we’re young and poor,” he told Cathleen one evening returning from a dinner dance.

McFarlane was a reticent, taciturn man not given to socializing. He enjoyed a couple of drinks in the evening more than lengthy conversation. He flew across America in his plane visiting his various plants, and generally spent only the weekends in Palm Beach.

The couple joined the Everglades. Catholics had once been almost as outré as Jews in Palm Beach, and to gain acceptance, most of them had become mock WASPs, cloaking whatever ethnicity they had in buttoned-up mannerisms. Not Cathleen. Off-color was her favorite hue, and she took pleasure in turning faces crimson by the simple expedient of a joke that could have been spoken onstage at Minsky’s Burlesque. In an era when it was almost unthinkable, she brought Jewish guests through the doors of the Everglades Club, almost daring the management to send her a letter of complaint.

One morning in August 1994 in their estate outside Buffalo, eighty-one-year-old Norris just up and died. Cathleen knew that she would miss her husband profoundly, but she did not know in how many ways and in what profundity. “You’re married to a guy who’s dynamite,” she says. “I had always been on my own and able to handle everything, but I had just sort of relaxed and let Daddy Warbucks take care of me, which he did so beautifully.”

For a number of years she dated a Palm Beach lawyer with whom she at times argued in public. She was stuck in a Palm Beach widow’s melancholy condition in which a man is always better than no man, although she was beginning to have her doubts. She set out in a systematic way to meet a man, not a boy-toy, not a gay pretender, but a man of her age and class and interests.

That was how Walter Ross flew into Palm Beach for a blind date. Every evening that Walter suggested, Cathleen said she was busy. She was hardly the coy maiden; more the overbooked matron. They settled on dinner at Café L’Europe, and Walter arrived from his Houston home. He was a Scottish gentleman with a brogue that had not been broken in all his years in Texas. He had a wry wit that matched neatly against Cathleen’s broad humor. He had headed one of the largest property equity companies in America. Both of his wives had died of cancer, and those struggles had marked him.

In their wedding reception at the Everglades, Cathleen gave a talk that will forever after go down in club annals as one of the more unforgettable moments. She said that after her blind date with Walter, she had only accepted his invitation to fly to his Houston home because he had sent her a first-class ticket.

Cathleen recalled how, on the first evening of her visit, Walter had prepared a bedroom for her, but she had marched down the hall to his bedroom, jumped in bed with him, and had never left. She did not go into the details, but there were nonetheless more gasps than giggles.

Walter greeted his guests dressed in a plaid kilt that he wore with perfect aplomb, unlike several of the other younger guests, who looked like men in drag. Once past the hosts, the couples moved down a few stairs to the outdoor Marble Patio for drinks and hors d’oeuvres. Cathleen had invited a wide cross section of the elite of the island, and most of those present were either Everglades members or often frequented the club.