Madness Under the Royal Palms (24 page)

Sutka’s approach is to become more and more shocking until the screams of dismay drown out the squeals of pleasure. One Christmas, he had Bruce’s mechanical Santa Claus dressed up like a pied piper of wealth in gold lamé from head to foot, holding a gold cup, panhandling with a sign: “Support the Rich.” That was hardly the vision of Santa Claus the gentry wanted to explain to their children and grandchildren as they strolled down the avenue, but since there were no picketing Episcopalians, Sutka escalated. Three years later, he twisted poor Santa around, bent the old man over, pulled his pants down, emblazoned a tattoo on his buttocks, and set him out in the window mechanically mooning passersby. That led to a threat by the Civic Association to shut Bruce down, intimidation that made the shop owner stand firm. All that holiday season, Santa kept on mooning.

The most savage joke of all was considered by many of those who saw it as a tribute to them and their fortunes. At the National Bank, Sutka began conventionally one year with a gingerbread house that would have brought a tear to Scrooge’s dry eyes. The following year, Sutka put up another holiday house, but this one covered with dollars held together not with sugary white frosting but mortar made of coins. To Sutka, it was a visual representation of Palm Beach, but almost no one got it, particularly not the grande dames coming in to get their diamonds out of their safe-deposit boxes for the Christmas balls, nor the worthy gentlemen wiring thousands of dollars into other accounts.

In 1977, a youthful executive at the National Bank, Loy Anderson Jr., and a group of what passed as the jet set in Palm Beach decided to have a New Year’s party, and asked Sutka to do the decorations. Their underwriter was Sally Fenelon Young, who was interested in promoting her pharmaceutical company. In her honor and to distinguish the New Year’s event from the annual Red Cross Ball at the Breakers, the event was called the Young Friends of the Red Cross Ball.

Everyone wanted to go to an event in which mere attendance defined you as youthful. Friends and the friends of friends flew in from New York and elsewhere, and the event sold out that first year at the Flagler Museum, the enormous mansion Henry Flagler had built for his bride, Mary Kenan Flagler. For “An Evening of Paradise,” Sutka placed birds of paradise bouquets and live goldfish on the tables, and splashed the rooms with strobe lighting. It was hardly inspired, but the event was roundly acclaimed, and became the place to be New Year’s Eve.

As Sutka moved on to a career of event planning, his signature party became the annual Young Friends Ball. The event came into its own in 1981 when Sutka designed a New Year’s ball with a circus theme. He brought in an elephant, llamas, and a camel, and tethered them odorously near to the Palm Beach Towers, a high-rise condominium where once the Royal Poinciana Hotel had stood. He rented circus costumes from Ringling Museum in Naples, and he flew down a group of ballet dancers from Atlanta to wear them. Sutka chose a garish spangled outfit, a clown’s red rose, and an unruly mop of hair.

As the performers began feverishly putting on their elaborate outfits, Sutka was apprised that the leopard costume had a splendid head and gigantic paws, but the body was missing. The dancer who was to wear the costume stood before Sutka, dressed only in a black studded G-string. The impresario told him to put on his head and paws and go out among the formally dressed crowd. The leopard leaped upon a table and began dancing, shaking his G-string in the faces of a number of enchanted young Kennedys.

That was all fine, but the elephant almost stampeded when a rescue truck sped by, its siren blaring, and some of the guests decided that they were high-wire artists themselves, scurrying up a rope that had been used by a student aerialist group from Florida State University, the Flying High Troupe. Other guests were flying high themselves, stoned on grass and coke. There were over eight hundred guests jammed into the rooms by midnight, and hundreds more roaring in later. The windows in the old non-air-conditioned building were so steamed up, it was as if Flagler’s ghost did not want anyone to see what bacchanalian revels were taking place in the home that he had envisioned as a royal palace.

The Coconuts held their celebrated event on New Year’s too, but who wanted to be with the old guard? “Choosing one of the two events is a little like deciding between marrying the woman you love or staying in the Everglades Club,” Agnes Ash wrote in the Shiny Sheet. “Everyone wants to stay on the list, but all are reluctant to miss the mad scene at the Flagler.”

Sutka thought he was being true to the traditions of Mary Kenan Flagler, who had given masked balls in these very rooms, and on occasion, felt he was communing with her spirit. “It wasn’t like a voice from somebody speaking. It was from another dimension,” Sutka said.

Mary Kenan Flagler was a devoté of elaborate costume parties, and would have appreciated the extravagant detail of these evenings, but in her era it was the guests who came in costumes. If her ghost had walked through the old Flagler mansion dressed as Marie Antoinette, she would have seemed just another character fitting in with ersatz human sacrifices, Greek statues with television sets as heads, perverse Rapunzels, specimens adorned in silver lamé, fifteen-foot-tall Alice in Wonderlands, Grace Jones look-alikes arriving on gigantic gorilla paws, and Peter Pans zooming down from the heavens on a wire at midnight.

After a number of years, the jaundiced islanders expected to be titillated with calculated decadence and outrage, folly and perversity, all to be observed in black tie and formal gown. At the 1990 “Fall of the Roman Empire” event, the haven of sanity in the midst of the madness was the VIP Emperor’s Orgy Room protected by Roman Centurions who looked as if they had been dipped in silver lamé.

Ah, but it was a struggle each year to outdo himself. “Bruce will have to come up with something good next year to make up for this,” one Young Friend commented to the Shiny Sheet after the ho-hum 1991 event in which Cupid came sailing through the room at midnight to smash into a gigantic wedding cake. Good, but not good enough.

When in doubt, drag queens are always the answer, and the following year Sutka flew down a whole troupe from New York City and dressed them as cavemen to people the prehistoric setting. “What do you want us to do?” they asked, seeking some guidance. “Scandalize Palm Beach,” Sutka said, and being literalists, they took him at his word.

The drag queens headed out among the elite of Palm Beach and the life-size dinosaurs. This was supposed to be Fred Flintstone’s comic prehistoric world, but they performed skits that would have caused Mae West to blush and sang sweet little ditties that may have been meant as poetry, but sounded like pornography (“I have a little kitty, I have a wet, juicy kitty”).

There was no hotter New Year’s ticket than the Young Friends in 1995, which included movie stars George Hamilton and Don Johnson, and infamous arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi. The theme was “The Twilight Zone,” and Sutka hired a number of strippers and male dancers to go with the drag queens. One of the drag queens stood at the entrance, gently paddling the guests as they arrived. This was greeted as a delightful bit of wildness until one discomfited man slugged the congenial drag queen, sending her running into the kitchen in tears. The drag queens reconnoitered and headed out into the party in full force, but they were upstaged by some of the other performers who had stripped naked and were performing certain acts that are usually done in private. “Oh my God,” screamed the chairwoman, seeing her social status in Palm Beach burning away. “She’s got his thing in her mouth on stage!! And my mother!!! My mother’s here!!!”

Sutka hurried over and told the dancers to end their performance and put on some clothes. One of the revelers was so impressed with the activities on the stage that he wanted to give his son a gift. He offered one of the performers his Rolex watch if she would perform oral sex on his son. The woman left with a Rolex in her purse.

The clock had finally run out on Sutka’s legendary New Year’s Eve parties, and he never put on another event at the Flagler Museum.

Still, Sutka’s company had become the leading party planner in Palm Beach. He caters entertainment, caters sociability, and caters wit. He might charge $25,000 to put on a dinner party for twenty-four on the balcony of a lakefront condominium, or $250,000 to put on a barbecue for 400 under a tent in an oceanfront mansion. Yet whatever the brilliance of some of his themes and settings, most people leave his events with barely a snapshot of memory. Sutka is like the art on the wall, or the Bentley or Rolls-Royce in the garage—merely one of the costs of doing social business.

“You know, you would think that this island would be just bubbling over with happiness and joy,” Sutka says. “And it’s not. There’s this dirty energy. And a lot of people feel that. Dirty energy. They’re avaricious and all the things that are bad human qualities just show up here for some reason.”

W
hen I arrived in Palm Beach, Phillip Beam and Terry Nun
*
were one of the very few openly gay couples on the island, and they were not only out, but out there. Phillip came from an aristocratic family and had a fey, supercilious manner that often disguised his wit and insight. Terry was from what he called “hillbilly trailer trash” and spoke with a languid Southern Appalachian accent.

They were astute businessmen who had made a fortune in a chain of fast-food restaurants. Now, while exploring other ventures, the two were flipping homes, buying one place after another, fixing them up, and moving on with a profit of many hundreds of thousands of dollars. They are wealthy men, and I saw it as a strange preoccupation, time and again fixing up what appeared to be homes but were really just marketing devices.

Phillip and Terry also gave parties like no one else on the island. The guests included any number of men as macho as Arnold Schwarzenegger, a prominent real estate agent about to leave his wife and two kids to join the chosen people, lawyers, businessmen, billionaires, and street punks—as widely varied a group as imaginable, except they were mostly gay men.

Phillip and Terry gloried in having costume parties—a toga party one year, a Hawaiian party the next, and then a celebrated Western theme party where everyone came as either cowboys or Indians. Only in their masks could some people spend an evening unmasked. At the entrance was a basket of makeshift costumes, feathers, and bandannas, so those who came in standard party clothes would not seem merely pathetic voyeurs but full participants in the orgiastic fantasy.

Palm Beach’s proper citizens have not always had the best of experiences with gay society. One evening Eles Gillet was arriving at the Everglades Club when she looked up in the window of a classic old house and saw a totally nude Christ on the cross. The elderly owner of the house is a member of the B&T who cruises around town in his Rolls. His living religious tableau was not appreciated. The gentleman in question arrived at one of Phillip and Terry’s parties with a gorgeous Brazilian who looked like a mannequin who had just stepped out of a Worth Avenue window. The Brazilian was too well dressed to be hung on a cross. The man’s English was barely good enough to sweetly convey that he was the gentleman’s slave.

It is just barely thinkable to have a gay man in the B&T or the Everglades, but not a gay couple. Even at Mar-a-Lago, it had not seemed a sure thing until Phillip and Terry. When they wanted to join, they thought it imperative to go through a gay intermediary already a member to ask Trump if he was comfortable with his first gay couple. They heard back through their friend that Donald had said that they could pay their hundred thousand dollars as a couple and become members.

“I don’t have any problem with it, but you don’t want to yell fire in a crowded theater,” he reportedly said. It was doubtless the first time that Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes’s famous opinion had been used to tell a gay couple that they should not flaunt their sexuality. And so Phillip and Terry became the first openly gay couple not just in Mar-a-Lago, but almost certainly in any club on the island.

When the two had a child with a surrogate mother in California, their lifestyle totally changed. They stopped going out at night; they ended their parties. I would see them along the ocean sidewalk with their nanny walking their baby in a Rolls-Royce of a carriage. They were dedicated parents. They were poster boys for gay marriage, exhibiting the very sort of lifestyle that conservatives might have applauded. But there were those appalled at this technological tinkering. Phillip and Terry had no idea how much they were the focal point of spirited debate and condemnation among the Old Guard.

Phillip and Terry are harbingers of a new island where gays are no longer primarily the servants of the wealthy, but the wealthy themselves. There are any number of immensely affluent gay couples moving to the island, living in a gay community that is another separate subset of the island. Along with the opening of Trump’s club at Mar-a-Lago, the emergence of this gay community is the single most significant social change in Palm Beach in several decades.

The two men said that now that they had a child to protect, they did not want to be in my book. I understood and agreed to give them pseudonyms, but I was startled by the response of much of the gay community. Person after person turned me down, wanting nothing do with a book dealing in part with gay life on the island.

I had known the gay dress designer Arnold Scaasi and his partner, Parker Ladd, a retired publishing executive, for years before I decided to write this book, and they could hardly refuse my interview request. They have been coming to the island since 1967, when Scaasi had a trunk show at the Colony Hotel. For decades, he was the favorite dresser of elite Palm Beach ladies. A Scaasi ball gown might be worn only twice in a lifetime and cost upward of twenty thousand dollars, but women such as Eles Gillet had their closets full of Scaasis. Arnold has dressed most of the women in this book, including Marylou Whitney, Eles Gillet, Brownie McLean, and Pauline Pitt.

The diminutive designer became famous for provocative designs such as the apparently see-through black net pants that Barbra Streisand wore in 1969 to receive a best actress Oscar at the Academy Awards. He has also dressed first ladies Laura and Barbara Bush, but he has made his living largely creating handmade unique dresses for immeasurably wealthy American ladies. He can disguise the un-disguisable, diminish the deplorable, and make princesses out of practically anyone.

During his heyday in the seventies and eighties, the most stunning part of the ambience at the most exclusive Palm Beach balls was not the food or the music, but a dance floor full of Scaasi creations often far more extraordinary than some of the women wearing them. He spoke wistfully of those years when gentlemen wore black tie to private parties, and ladies were far more ready to pay a prince’s ransom for a Scaasi gown.

Arnold has a wit so acidic that it is a wonder it does not burn his tongue. He can be curtly dismissive of those vulgarians unworthy of wearing a Scaasi gown or too cheap to outlay the money, categories that in his mind are much the same. But in our interview, I was talking to a man I did not know. It was as if he was running for office in a district where the best way to win was to hold no opinions.

When I discussed Phillip’s feeling that gays were eternal outsiders in Palm Beach, Arnold bristled. He was both appalled and dismissive. He did not like being pigeonholed either as Jewish (
Scaasi
is
Isaacs
spelled backward) or gay, neither of which he said had anything to do with his talent. He said he had never suffered discrimination and he could not understand why I was obsessed with such a foolish matter. “In my whole life anywhere in the world, Paris, London, New York, anywhere, I thought I was always accepted for myself,” he said. “Okay?”

Arnold’s partner of forty years sees matters differently. “Gays are never truly accepted,” Ladd said sadly in a separate interview. “You’re always an oddity, a freak.” When he and Scaasi started coming to Palm Beach regularly beginning in the late sixties, the elite regarded them as a bizarre curiosity set upon the island to amuse and distract. Parker realized that and while being civil, was ceaselessly observant. “Many rich women from families of cars or asbestos or oils or things had middle-aged gay husbands who were discreet,” Parker recalls.

When Arnold and Parker wanted gay society, they drove south to Fort Lauderdale or South Beach, where there was a frenetic nightlife. They do not have to do that any longer. A full, open, sophisticated gay life has come to the island. The couple had been regulars at the most uninhibited of Phillip and Terry’s parties, but that was only a canapé to the main course of gay life on the island now.

What the gays in Palm Beach have produced is largely a society that replicates the straight world with the same preoccupations and the same narrow preconceptions and judgments. They play the same games with charity and go through the same struggles to get their Botoxed features in the Shiny Sheet. They are probably more promiscuous than their heterosexual brethren, or perhaps simply less devious in disguising it. They suffer far less onus hanging out in the back rooms at the gay stripper and go-go boy male sex club Cupids in West Palm Beach than married men do stuffing twenty-dollar bills into G-strings at Rachel’s. And they probably are even more obsessed with creating the illusion of youthfulness than the straight society.

Gay men are as segregated by money as any other group in the island, and the megawealthy hang out with each other. They have extravagant parties at their mansions and fly off for long weekends together in the Caribbean. And like their heterosexual counterparts, they too have trophy wives. “Most gay trophy guys are more boring than straight trophy women,” sniffs Parker. “They don’t seem to have any hobbies or any intellectual pursuits. They’re very subservient to the interest that the rich partner has.”

M
ARK
B
RENTLINGER WAS THIRTY-NINE
and his partner, Bryan McDonald, two years older—infants in Palm Beach terms—when they first came to Palm Beach in 2004. Brentlinger has an unassuming Midwestern demeanor that effectively disguises a brilliant businessman who along with his mother runs Midwestern Auto Group, foreign car dealerships in Columbus, Ohio. The plump investor has impeccable instincts, and almost everything he touches makes money. He is a scion of the Ohio establishment, and as a young man was married for ten years to an Eli Lilly heiress.

If Brentlinger had arrived on the island with his wife on his arm, the couple would have been welcomed into the B&T and the Everglades. Instead, long after his divorce, he arrived with McDonald, and the clubs did not beckon. His ripped lover is a classic trophy spouse who over the years has had seemingly every body part replaced, redone, built up, toned down, strengthened, or refined. Bryan is a muscular hunk. The couple divert themselves at Bice or Café L’Europe watching married men casting furtive glances McDonald’s way.

The two initially sailed into the Palm Beach docks on their ice-class blue yacht with bulletproof glass and steel sides and professional security team. Mark and Bryan already knew Phillip and Terry, along with another gay couple in Palm Beach, and they had such a good time they never wanted to sail away. Mark was too old and too rich for the gay Catskills in South Beach. Palm Beach fit, and the couple locked into the vibrant gay community from day one. They became known as “the car boys,” their blue boat one of the best party scenes on the island.

Soon after the couple arrived, I met them at one of Phillip and Terry’s parties. Bryan is flamboyant, outgoing, and provocative, a type of gay man I have often known in my life, though not in Palm Beach. He is far from an intellectual, but has an engaging protectiveness toward his partner. Mark has a sincere, unpretentious, open manner that I think of as being the essence of the Midwest, and one of the reasons that both Mark and his state are often rudely underestimated.

Palm Beach is an education for almost anyone, and Mark and Bryan began their PhD course when in 2004 Mark purchased an old mansion on Jungle Road up from where David Berger was still living out the last years of his life. But the $8,800,000 home was in sad condition. Construction and reconstruction is one of the perennial curses of Palm Beach life. Mark and Bryan considered perfection only barely acceptable, and after two and a half years, most of their neighbors had had quite enough of the Ohio couple. One of their few friends was their next-door neighbor, Donald Trump’s ex-wife Ivana, living there in recent years with her own trophy boyfriend. But from one end of Jungle Road to the other, there was one common denominator. “There is so much money and ego on this street, it’s surprising it hasn’t blown up,” Mark muses. “So, people have to pick a way of differentiating themselves because everybody’s rich.”

When the last truck finally left, in December 2007, Bryan and Mark decided to make amends to one angry couple across the road. The “car boys” delivered to their neighbors Pepe and Emilia Fanjul a two-thousand-dollar case of Cristal champagne. Two days before Christmas, one of Mark and Bryan’s guests parked his Vespa on Jungle Road facing the wrong direction. This apparently so outraged the Cuban-American sugar mogul and his wife that they called the police. Then a servant delivered the case back to the offending couple with a curt note stating that it had not been given in the true sprit of Christmas. The true spirit of Christmas apparently is to park your Vespa in the correct direction on the street.

The Fanjuls are members of the B&T, where they do not have to worry about squandering their time among gay riffraff, but even here the “car boys” occasionally intruded. On his one visit to the club, Mark sat outside having dinner. He is largely deaf, but is such a superb lip-reader that many people do not realize his disability. His eyes moved from table to table, where members were raging about how such people could be allowed into the rarefied precincts.

Mark never returned, but Bryan was struck from stronger stuff. He came back to go swimming one afternoon in the pool wearing tight little trunks with fish on them and a tank top. He was provocative enough with his clothes on, but strutting around the pool in a swimsuit in his outrageous tan and sculptured body, it was as if a plague of gay sexuality had been unleashed. What Bryan was wearing was not a violation of the rule book, but damn the rule book, and his hostess for the occasion received a stern letter of reprimand.

In the same way that to be accepted Catholics had toned down their ethnicity, so gays who coveted invitations to the Everglades and the B&T mimicked the manners and mannerisms of the straight elite. Mark and Bryan were not going to copy anyone or be anything but what they were. Damn the cost and consequence. They joined Mar-a-Lago, where a whole contingent of wealthy gay couples now sat around the pool.