Madness Under the Royal Palms (23 page)

In March 2006, after a dinner at Eles’s honoring Marylou Whitney and her new husband, John Hendrickson, Peter headed home to his condominium at the Palm Beach Towers. As he drove into the parking lot, he rammed his Red Chrysler into a Ford SUV, which in turn hit a Honda. When the police arrived, Peter was still sitting behind the wheel with his seat belt on and the motor running. He could hardly walk and smelled of liquor, and after taking a blood sample, Fire Rescue took him to Good Samaritan Hospital. In the morning, Peter woke up and realized he was lying in a bed with all kinds of tubes and wires attached to him. He knew that when the test came back, there might be a dispute whether it was blood or burgundy, and indeed it proved to be more than three times the permissible alcohol level.

Peter tore the paraphernalia off his arms and legs, put his clothes on, and ran out. When he called Eles, she came over immediately and went with him to see a criminal defense attorney. Eles wrote out a five-thousand-dollar check for a retainer, and the attorney set out to make sure that Peter did not go to prison.

When Eles called later that day, wanting Peter to escort her to a party that evening, he reminded her that the attorney said that if was caught again, he would surely go to prison. If she wanted him to go out with her, she would have to have a driver. Eles was not going to stay home, so she hired a chauffeur who took them to dinner parties, gallery openings, cocktail parties, and other events.

Peter was a party animal, but he found the narrow elite circles of Eles’s world tedious beyond measure. After a while, no drink was big enough to deaden the boredom of it all. He started making excuses and going out with a friend on his boat. Nobody had ever dumped Eles, but in his unseemly way, that was precisely what Rock was doing.

I know Peter, and when Eles told me she was going to sue him for the lawyer’s money and the chauffeurs’ charges, I said no good would come of it for anyone. I told her that the
Palm Beach Post
keeps track of suits and as soon as she filed, it would find its way into Jose Lambiet’s Page Two gossip column. The more I talked to her, the more I thought that instead of dissuading her, I had given her another reason to go ahead.

The moment Eles’s attorney filed the suit, a story about it appeared in Lambiet’s column: “According to paperwork filed in a West Palm court, the multimillionaire Gillet says she lent Rock $5,500 to pay for his legal bills. What’s more, she wants another $3,300 for allowing him to use her chauffeured car for nearly 16 months while he was banned from driving himself. Steel and shipping heiress Gillet actually described Rock as her walker—using Palm Beach parlance to refer to him as the kind of oft-hired escort who squires rich unmarried or widowed women. ‘It’s worse for a female to go to a party unaccompanied,’ she said when asked about the practice. ‘Now that he has another keeper, he needs to pay me back.’”

Eles did not care how she looked. She cared about vengeance, and she got it once in the pages of the
Palm Beach Post
, and a second time when the story ran in Peter’s hometown newspaper the
New York Post.
Eles liked fine food and vintage wine, but nothing tasted quite as refreshing as an overflowing goblet of revenge.

I
n those trying months before Barbara Wainscott and David Berger’s divorce, practically the only place David and Barbara felt comfortable had been Club Colette. Dan Ponton was not only a genial host at his private dinner club, but he was endlessly solicitous to the needs of his members.

Palm Beach is a place where a sixty-year-old man is considered middle-aged, and a man in his twenties is viewed as a childish intruder. It was almost unthinkable, then, that at the age of twenty-three, Dan could have been the impresario of an exclusive private club. From day one, the revived Club Colette worked brilliantly, largely because almost no one thought of it as Danny’s club. Everyone considered it Aldo Gucci’s place, and Dan little more than a lackey and errand boy to the man who was not only Dan’s landlord but the celebrated moniker of Italian fashion. And Dan was shrewd enough to realize that was not a putdown, but a blessing.

Since his parents’ arrival in the United States from Argentina when he was six, Dan had spent much time in Palm Beach, where his mother ran a women’s clothing store on Worth Avenue. His father owned various restaurants, and by the time Dan had reached thirteen, he was working as a busboy. His father spent more time with his mistresses than in the kitchen, and when the couple divorced, Dan’s mother opened a boutique in the very building on Peruvian Avenue that also included the private Club Colette. Dan was fully Americanized and spoke without an accent. While attending college, Dan was already running a bar in Nantucket, and had the shrewdly congenial manner of a salon owner or maitre d’.

When Dan graduated and returned to Palm Beach, Club Colette was closed and Gucci was looking for a new tenant. Gucci had turned the carriage trade into a vehicle for the mass elite and was Europeanizing American dress. He was the persona of Italian sophistication, a flamboyant, gregarious, womanizing bon vivant; the very model of what many on the island wanted to be.

At a dinner honoring the board of directors for the newly opened club, Gucci got up to speak before a room full of members. “I want you to know that I have absolute confidence in Daniel Ponton,” Gucci said. “He’s one of my favorite people. He’s nice, and you know I don’t sleep with men.”

It was a superb device to quash the rumors of a sexual relationship between a wildly heterosexual Italian and a wildly homosexual Argentinean American. Dan’s mother had been overwhelmingly hurt by the divorce, and her only son felt alienated from his own father. In Gucci, he found a second father and a mentor. Gucci was in a lawsuit against his own son, Paolo Gucci, and that made Gucci and his young acolyte even closer.

Whenever Gucci was in town, he hung out at Club Colette, and when he was there, just as with Trump at Mar-a-Lago, the members wanted to be there too, by osmosis imbibing the gloss of European class. Gucci was so important to the image of the club that potential members often arrived for their meetings with Dan with their arms full of Gucci bags fresh from Worth Avenue, hoping that would be an unimpeachable recommendation.

But Gucci had evaded over seven million dollars in American taxes, and in 1986 he was sentenced to a year in prison. Everything was closing down on the man, and he sold the building to Dan on the most enviable of terms.

Here, then, was this young man not yet thirty, owning the premier private club in the premier elite resort town in America. Club Colette is basically nothing but a restaurant, but that is like saying a Gucci slipper is nothing but a few strips of leather. Dan understood that he was selling not dinners and fine wine but exclusivity. He made his living by being what some would consider a merciless snob. That was not the role he played when he drove down to the gay world of South Beach, but when he returned, he was once again the young Palm Beach gentleman overseeing the exclusive club.

Dan convinced a list of eminent islanders that it was a marvelous entitlement to be allowed to pay a $7,500 nonrefundable membership fee plus $1,500 annual dues to enter a dark nightclublike room and buy some of the most expensive dinners in town. During the day when he walked around the club in his shorts and T-shirt, he often looked more like a busboy than the owner.

Ponton had a shrewd sense of the social dynamics among both Christian and Jewish communities, and he fancied himself the impresario of the one place in town where the WASP and Jewish elites mixed—though most of them did not so much mix as sit side by side in a manner that reminded one of the cliques in a high school cafeteria. And there were probably more Jews than WASPS.

The Boston Jews fancied themselves a more intellectual, charitable lot than their New York brethren, and preferred to be among themselves rather than to attempt social intercourse with those they considered their inferiors. The New Yorkers knew that they were still kings of the world, and they generally preferred not to squander their evenings with Bostonians affecting Brahmin airs. The WASPs did not sort themselves out so much into geographically desirables and undesirables, but they too sorted themselves out, and although they pretended that it had to do with social graces, interests, or pursuits, it often had as much to do with money as anything else.

Dan made his living playing the professional snob. He could spot a false Hermès Kelly bag from twenty yards, hear a “dem” and “tose” from ten yards, smell a pretender’s sweat from five yards, and when he touched a hand callused from work seeking to join his club, he jumped back in revulsion.

Let them try to enter, just let them try. “There are these people who join Mar-a-Lago,” Dan says as if describing a particularly foul breed of humanity. “They buy a Bentley, get a house on the lake, have all their body parts reassigned, chair a B-grade charity ball twice, then run out of either money or stamina, or realize they’re not getting anywhere and disappear.

“If you spent the first sixty-five of your years making money, that doesn’t tell you that on your sixty-sixth birthday when you move to Palm Beach, you’re going to know what’s right. It isn’t that way. If you’re lucky enough that you’re very socially aware, then it’s possible you’re prepared to show up here. You also rise to the level of your last interior decorator. When you go to someone’s house that was designed by a seventy-five out of a hundred scale designer, then your house and anything that happened before in your life immediately is worthless.”

That was all wondrously philosophical stuff, but Dan had a few members who were embarrassing to behold, and their presence was at times like a drop of vinegar in a glass of Lafite Rothschild 1949. He was offered fancy cars and bags of cash for membership, and said that he always turned them down. “People who walk in the door think they know what’s going on,” he reflects. “They say things like, ‘Why is that one here and I’m not?’ And some people say, ‘Well, you should really be more careful of who you take as a member, because I saw XYZ there and if that person can get in, my friend should get in.’ Well, okay, that’s fine, but first of all, you don’t know if that person sitting in the chair is actually a member.”

Dan prided himself on serving meals as good as Café L’Europe or Jean Pierre, the two best restaurants on the island, but here was the paradox: The wealthier the members were, the most exalted their social placement, the thinner they tended to be and the less they ate. If he ever reached a membership only of the most privileged, he could have served a bunch of grapes each evening, one grape to a plate.

“People think that eating should be extraordinary, but then they take out all qualifiers that make it extraordinary,” Dan points out. “If you use butter, don’t use butter. If you use salt, don’t use salt. If it has skin, take the skin off. If you have dessert, of course no dessert. So what you end up eating is the lowest possible common denominator. And if you do that and you come to the place for dinner three or four times a week, then you’d think that all we know how to do is blowfish and chicken.”

Dan stood at that door barring the riffraff and the pretenders, but he felt he was part of an honorable tradition, and nothing had changed in a hundred years, nothing at all.

“If you take this dynamic and go back twenty-five years or fifty years or seventy-five years, the topography has changed, the residence size has changed, the amenities have changed, but the people are the same. The war is the war. It’s not a war about religion. It’s a war about establishment versus anti-establishment. ‘I am a member of something, and I have been rich a long time. You haven’t. Pooh-pooh on you.’”

F
OR MOST OF
P
ALM
Beach’s history, there had been a dynamic struggle between the staid self-consciousness that Henry James had found so tedious and witless, and gaiety and daring that sought to enhance the original fantasy that had been created by those two master fabulists Flagler and Mizner. This has often been viewed as a struggle between youth and age, or sometimes immorality and virtue, but that is not what it is at all.

There are many people in Palm Beach whose names are rarely if ever mentioned in the Shiny Sheet, who live sincerely and passionately. But the banal, uptight world that Henry James chronicled is overwhelmingly seductive, and it is the dominant public mode. It is difficult not to be co-opted into the staid social life of the island. The new arrival is swept up in the initial excitement of it, the welcoming acquaintances in the charity world, the designer clothes that are the uniform of acceptance, the catered parties with the engraved menu and the priceless china, the mentions in the Shiny Sheet. There are never any cruel rejections; there is nothing but endless deference. It goes on night after night, year after year.

The fantasy has to be maintained and serviced. What passes as journalism about the island are largely tributes that pander to the pretensions of the wealthy. What passes as art in some of the galleries is often conventional and merely pretty; decorative pieces to complement one’s furnishings. What passes as ideas in lectures and forums are occasionally little more than florid hortatory, asserting boldly that all is right with the world. What passes as glamorous social occasions are often tediously stilted parties where the most exciting moment in the evenings are the good-byes.

Enter Bruce Sutka. In contemporary Palm Beach, Sutka comes closest to the impish, daring originality of Mizner. For a number of years, he brought back something of that joyous unpredictability that had made Palm Beach in the early years seem like an endless party, not just an endless raft of social obligations.

When he arrived in Palm Beach in the early seventies, Sutka had long hair, a beard, and a lean frame; he looked like a professional hippie who could have been on stage in
Hair
. He can appear to be a flamboyant extrovert, but he is basically a cured introvert, ever ready to snap his head back into his shell.

Sutka grew up in an Amish community in Ohio. Although he had not been a member of that faith, he was far different from most people who came to Palm Beach. As a young man, he married Stephanie Wrightsman from one of the most prominent families in Palm Beach. The newlyweds were part of a set, some of whom fueled their late nights on cocaine and other diversions illicit and otherwise. Those were not Sutka’s pleasures, and that was not why the marriage failed. He shared another secret pleasure with a number of the wealthy young men of the island: He was gay.

Sutka began in Palm Beach as a window designer who had aspirations of becoming an interior decorator. “But finally I realized that I was a stage designer and a person who liked to live out my own fantasy in front of a broad audience,” he told the Shiny Sheet in 1979, in words that Mizner could have spoken. “Also, I don’t think in small scale, only in large.”

The shop windows along Worth Avenue are hardly the venue for anything but luxury merchandising, but in the seventies and early eighties, Sutka turned them into an ever-changing fantasy, often more intriguing than many of the paintings in the galleries. In those years, there were mainly local shopkeepers on the avenue, and there was a quirky, upscale boutique feel to the street. Sutka was so original, so inventive that he eventually was doing most of the windows on the three blocks.

Sutka was always looking for an edge, and he was not beyond clipping his art from the headlines. The infamous 1982 divorce trial between Roxanne and Peter Pulitzer brought out all kinds of kinky allegations and the worst sort of tabloid publicity to the celebrated island. It exposed the salacious underbelly of Palm Beach, where the favorite sport is not three-hour-long, eighteen-hole games of golf but quick games of adultery in which the score is certain.

There was testimony that Roxanne had a trumpet swathed in a black cloth on her bed during séances with her psychic. This became transposed in the
New York Post
’s headlines as “
PULITZER
SEX TRIAL SHOCKER: ‘I SLEPT WITH A
TRUMPET
.’” Roxanne and the psychic sued for libel, but that did not prevent Sutka from creating a window featuring four female legs, a trumpet, a fur rug, and a champagne bottle. It was unclear whether this evoked a mythical attachment to a musical instrument, or some kind of bizarre sex act. “I want the people to identify with what is happening in the window, no matter how outrageous it may be,” he said, though the ladies standing there trying to make sense of the weird couplings were unlikely to identify with the peculiar scene. “People have dreams and fantasies, and I fulfill them by creating them in my windows.”

Sutka’s great patron for his épater le bourgeois moments was Donald Bruce, who ran a specialty store and gave his window over to Sutka’s most outré fantasies, including the trumpet montage. The shop owner had a droll nonchalance that most merchants on Worth Avenue did not have. Bruce sold everything, from $320 tins of caviar to polo shirts that would have been knockoffs of Ralph Lauren’s signature shirt except for the fact that the logo showed the rear end of a horse.