Madness Under the Royal Palms (29 page)

Eric had been in New York, and as soon as he got back that day at the end of May, he called Sonny to see what was happening. Since his friend had become involved with Amity, the two had not been going out much together, and Eric was anxious to reconnect. Sonny was in an exuberant mood. “Let’s get together around eight o’clock,” Sonny said. “I’m doing some yoga with Amity, then I’m going to do a little sexy time with her, but I’ll be free this evening.”

T
HE LAND ALONG THE
western shore of the Intracoastal Waterway could have been an irresistibly inviting mix of restaurants, shops, and midsize buildings that would have matched up well with the community across the water, and made West Palm Beach and Palm Beach truly one community. Instead, developers have taken a stranglehold on the city government, and the skyline has been darkened by so many massive condominiums that at some places the small city looks more like Manhattan than South Florida. The buildings have gone up so quickly and in such profusion that with the real estate market collapse, many of them are half-empty.

A number of the condominium projects have become rental buildings. One of these is the Slade, and that is the building that Sonny wanted to see when he called real estate broker Jonathan Mann. Sonny arrived in the lobby around five p.m., not in island garb, but in a black short-sleeve shirt, matching black shorts, and running shoes. The two men chatted as they took the elevator up to the eleventh floor to see a penthouse apartment.

“Gee, this is nice,” Sonny said as he made a cursory tour of the apartment. The two-bedroom apartment would have been perfect for a hip, thirty-four-year-old single fellow—if only Sonny had the money. It was not just the two pools and the health club, but the awesome view. In a similar apartment in Palm Beach, the oceanfront view is nothing but a line on the window. Here the whole expanse of Palm Beach is out there; the Flagler Museum, the Biltmore, the entire world that Sonny made his own each evening. It is an incomparable view, and Sonny unlocked the sliding door and walked out onto the balcony.

Party planner Bruce Sutka lives in a spacious apartment next to the Slade, and the impresario of parties and events happened to be looking out his window that afternoon. As Bruce stood there, Sonny fell through the afternoon sky and thudded against the concrete, the body twisted and contorted. It was so nightmarish a vision that for a time Bruce placed screens across the window and took an antidepressant.

Eric was having a hard time charging his cell phone. It was eight o’clock by the time he got it working, and saw that he had an incredible forty messages, many of them from Jonathan Mann. He called the real estate broker back, and when he heard that Sonny had committed suicide, he went over to the Slade. The body was gone, and all that was left was one police car and several officers.

Eric decided that it might be a good idea to go over to Sonny’s apartment and see if he had left a suicide note. Eric and a photographer acquaintance drove south half a mile to the historic El Cid area. Eric had picked Sonny up many times, but he had never been to his place. He had not wanted to embarrass Sonny by seeing how modestly his friend lived. He knocked on the door of the main house, and after hearing the tragic news, the landlord led them to the back to the tiny apartment. When the landlord opened the door, the song “Everybody Hurts” by R.E.M. was playing.

Sonny may have had almost nothing, but the little he had, he kept neatly. There was no suicide note on the desk, and everything else looked in perfect order. The cover on the daybed was a little rumpled, and Eric realized that there was someone under the covers. He figured it was probably Amity, so distraught that she had returned to mourn her lost lover and had fallen asleep. As he pulled back the quilt, he saw a head so bloodied and bludgeoned that if not for the nude female body to which it was attached, he would not have known that it was a human head.

A
t the second annual Turquoise and Denim Ball at the Breakers to raise money for ovarian cancer research, Brownie had her own table, and was dressed in her inevitable black gown, for her the color of gaiety. No longer living in a ratty efficiency in West Palm Beach, Brownie had moved into a one-bedroom apartment in the massive Palm Beach Towers, a largely Jewish condominium on the very grounds where the Royal Poinciana Hotel had stood. One of the men who had been Brownie’s escorts, the late Philip Rauch, gave her the apartment as a life estate.

In recent years, Brownie has learned that she cannot always romp with the most spirited and upscale of crews, and tonight she was stuck with a relatively motley group, though they never guessed that she had taken their measure. She found the whole idea of dressing little better than farmers—given the ball’s Western-style dress code—terribly outré, and she was counting the minutes until she could politely leave.

A country music band was playing Hank Williams’s “Your Cheatin’ Heart,” and scores of Palm Beachers were dancing to music that was as peculiar to them as Gregorian chants. Out on the dance floor, all eyes focused on one handsome couple in perfectly matched outfits. They danced, dipping and whirling, immersed in each other’s arms, moving gracefully in a style unique to them. They looked like two movie stars from the thirties who had driven their roadster down to the Racquet Club in Palm Springs on a winter weekend and had duded themselves up in country-and-western garb.

At first I did not realize that it was Eric Purcell dancing with Jasmine Horowitz. Eric had met Jasmine a few months after his friend Sonny murdered Amity and committed suicide. Jasmine is as much the woman of Eric’s fantasies as Amity had been Sonny’s. Jasmine has the semi-emaciated look favored in haute circles and a five-million-dollar wardrobe fitted to the smallest nuances of her frame. She maintains her rail-thin body with astounding discipline. She does not drink, looks at dinner rolls as if they are an illegal drug, and eats only a few string beans or a couple pieces of cantaloupe before pronouncing herself full.

Jasmine has the figure of a teenager, the face of a matron in the full bloom of her beauty, and the hands of an old woman. She has an accent that is as difficult to define as her age. At times she says she is Swiss, though she looks vaguely Middle Eastern, and in other moments says that she is Polish, which is probably the case.

As a young divorcée she married Manfredo Horowitz, who was decades her senior. “I needed a man who would be a god, whom I would admire, and who would be my father image,” Jasmine reflects. Manfredo had been one of the primary jewelry dealers in the world, the European representative of Harry Winston. He lived in Monte Carlo but traveled the world. He looked like an ugly Humphrey Bogart, if that is not redundant. He was so stunningly ugly that if he had been a woman he would have been shunned. But with men sexual aesthetics sometimes turn around, and women found Manfredo irresistible.

Manfredo had been married three times before, but when the aging diamond dealer married Jasmine in the mid-seventies, she was his sweet sparrow, his Pygmalion. To him a beautiful woman was the most spectacular of diamonds, and he polished her to perfection and placed her in settings where she shone brilliantly.

In 1994 the couple purchased a large house in the North End. It was here they came each winter, and it was here after the death of her octogenarian husband in November 2006 that Jasmine came alone.

Manfredo had been Jasmine’s father, lover, and friend. Eric could be her lover in a way her elderly husband could not be, but he could not be her father, and he was not so much her friend as an ever solicitous manager, watching out for the myriad details of her life. She had lived in a social world where nuance was everything and she knew that Eric was charming and attentive but also that he was a man with a spotted past and a dubious present.

“But you see, now I’m a single lady in Palm Beach,” Jasmine says. “People like to gossip about me. Right? And they gossip so much more if sometimes I appear in public with somebody who might really be controversial.” Although Eric was Jasmine’s escort to the great balls, she did not go with him to the Everglades or to certain parties among certain friends.

Jasmine wanted to worship a man like a god and Eric wanted to worship a woman like a goddess, and emotionally they warily moved around each other. Monique’s emotional absence from her son had caused Eric to love her beyond all women with awestruck wonder, and it was that same love that he now pushed upon Jasmine.

Eric is not a man who likes to think about the past, but a shadow of yesterdays hangs over him. He had not even stayed in town for Amity’s memorial service, and he shrugged in disregard when Sonny’s brother Samuel shot and killed a man during a routine traffic stop and then, when he was likely to face charges of manslaughter, put his service revolver to his head and killed himself.

Eric had gotten a real estate license. He said that he had paid four thousand dollars to have his picture flashing every few minutes above the bar on a television screen for the season at the Italian restaurant Bice. It seemed less an advertisement for real estate as for Eric himself. He probably did not have the dogged determination to succeed in the mercilessly competitive world of high-end real estate, and was far more attuned to a role as paramour of a wealthy, glamorous widow. He stopped drinking and lost twenty pounds and became a perfect physical match for Jasmine.

Thanks to his Belgian mother, Eric was fluent in French and loved to chatter away with Jasmine in that language especially when others were listening. He took her to see Marianne “Mimi” Strong, an agent in New York, with thoughts of having Jasmine do a reality television series on her life, but the agent pooh-poohed the idea. He thought of helping her write her memoir of her life with Manfredo. He hovered around her, seeing in her a future that he saw nowhere else.

T
HE
C
ANCER
B
ALL IS
one of the major events of the season. On the morning of the fiftieth annual gala, Eric and Jasmine got in an argument, and she arrived that evening with another of her standbys.

Events such as this are as much about self-aggrandizement as about charity. Each guest received a 124-page book with 65 full-page color portraits of the benefactors of the evening, starting with the Golden Anniversary Chairmen Patrick Park and Diana Ecclestone, followed by the Honorary Chairman/Chairman Emeritus/Platinum Benefactor Dame Celia Lipton Farris. Then there were the Ambassadors of Hope Mr. and Mrs. Simon C. Fireman, and the Leading Benefactors Mr. and Mrs. Robert G. Gordon. The Gordons had also purchased two other pages to display pictures of their trip to Europe and the Orient and photos of their grandchildren.

Fifty-four-year-old Park has been living in Palm Beach since the late nineties, but he remains one of the few social innocents in town. His weakness, and it is an enormous one, is that he is almost mindlessly generous and good. He is so far from being a showoff that the only speech he ever made in his life was at his daughter’s wedding. He works in a family-owned company with his father, Raymond P. Park, and his brothers, Daniel and Kelly. In 1997
Forbes
called Patrick’s father a “classic entrepreneur” who had “built a billion-dollar fortune recycling yesterday’s industrial wonders.”

Patrick is a big, husky unprepossessing man, a good thirty pounds overweight. Put a whistle around his neck and he could have been a high school football coach. He loves the beauty of Palm Beach, and he likes doing good big charitable things with the family money. “God has given us a lot,” he says, though he is not a man to facilely evoke God’s name. “And I feel that wherever we live, we should give to the community and do those things. You know, it would be terrible to move into an area where a charity is one of the biggest industries and not do anything.”

Patrick knew that most people did not come to the Cancer Ball because they cared about the charity. They had paid a thousand dollars a ticket for a good time, and as chairman he intended to show them one with food and wine they would not forget.

The evening began with a tour de force of a cocktail buffet almost unprecedented even in the excessive world of Palm Beach charities. Wherever one looked either inside Mar-a-Lago or outside around the pool, there were food stations featuring one incredible delicacy after another: black mountains of caviar, shrimp as big as fists, a sushi boat that could have sailed the seven seas, and oysters, stone crab, and clams in endless assortment. There was such an array of desserts that it could have been a confectioner’s convention.

Shannon and Robert Janjigian, from the Shiny Sheet, were both here this evening, as they were at almost all the major social events. The fashion editor noted that “the standouts were the high-drama dresses that glistened in the night” and took photos of ladies in their gowns by Oscar de la Renta, Caché, Giorgio Armani, and Vicky Tiel. When he was finished, he put his camera away and left the party, while Shannon stayed for the evening.

Outside around the pool was an ice sculpture of an enormous martini glass, the perfect symbol for the evening. The guests were eating and drinking with such abandon that they were reluctant to move on into the golden ballroom, but as soon as they did the waiters were there to pour them the first of several fine wines.

The wines that Park served at dinner were even better than those during the cocktail hour. Each was more exquisite than the last, including a 2005 Rocca Bernarda Pinot Grigio; a 2004 Zenato Ripassa; a 2005 Louis Latour Puligny Montrachet, and a 2001 Lafite Rothschild Pauillac that sells in restaurants for as much as $1,200 a bottle.

Park was the impresario of the food as well and had come up with a unique idea. He would take a signature dish from the leading restaurants to be delivered to the ballroom at the precise moment it was needed. Dinner would start with a green and white vichyssoise from Jean-Pierre, followed by timbale of crabmeat with grilled shrimp from Café L’Europe, the two most celebrated restaurants on the island. Then Café Sapori would prove that West Palm Beach was no culinary slouch either with cavatelli all’aurora, a cheese pasta dish. The main course would be beef tenderloin, a specialty of Mar-a-Lago’s chef. Park planned to top it off with a populist dessert, lemon coconut cake from Palm Beach’s own Hamburger Heaven.

In the midst of this wine drinker’s Oktoberfest, Mr. Las Vegas himself, Wayne Newton, walked out on the dance floor to perform. His pompadour looked as if he had been picked up and dunked head down in an enormous vat of black ink. He wore heels so elevated that they made it seem as if he might topple. His face was so well preserved that one was tempted to offer condolences. His voice had not been as well maintained as his hair, but he was a consummate performer ready to sing a set that would have people on their feet in any lounge from Atlantic City to Vegas. But he was facing one of the more difficult audiences in America.

Palm Beachers are democratic in their rudeness, treating the greatest and the most mediocre equally badly. Newton soldiered on while half the crowd continued talking. One of those listening was Shannon, who little more than a decade ago was not even invited to stay for dinner at the major social events. Now she not only was invited, but she was sitting at the head table alongside chairman Park and Newton who sang a song in her honor.

At 11:20 when dessert had not yet been served at our table and the bottomless glasses of wine had lost their appeal, my wife and I got up to leave, and walked out among the staggering elite of Palm Beach. Droves of people had already departed. As the guests got up, many of them realized that it would be a more difficult journey home than it was getting to Mar-a-Lago. One woman at the head table wandered back up the pathway held up by her husband like a drunken sailor returning from shore leave. Some of the men were so disheveled that their cummerbunds popped up around their midsections and become so twisted that they looked like tourniquets. It was
Animal House
meets
Cocoon
.

T
HE ANNUAL
C
OCONUTS
N
EW
Year’s Eve party is the one event of the season where the hidden aristocracy of the island makes a quasi-public appearance, and is one of the oldest, most revered traditions in Palm Beach. The 2008 event took place not in the ballroom at the Whitehall mansion, where so long ago the Coconuts had cavorted, but at a new glassed pavilion at the Flagler Museum whose centerpiece is Flagler’s private railway car running the whole course of the eastern side of the building. Some of the Coconuts had grandparents who had come down to the island in such cars. The twenty-five Coconuts had each contributed $5,000 to put on this evening. David Koch, one of the three Coconut billionaires, anonymously added $250,000 more to pay for fireworks. Each year people dropped on and off the guest list, but to keep the party a reasonable size there was a list of regulars, plus each Coconut could invite four other couples.

Most of the guests began filtering in at around quarter to eleven, many from private dinner parties and private clubs, and some from their homes. The room is a perfect setting for a brilliant party. The Earl Smith Orchestra played wonderfully danceable music. On each table there were party hats and noisemakers. The waiters moved gracefully through the crowd with champagne and chardonnay.

This evening began as a meeting of the tribal clan, a ritual of greeting. Most of these early arrivals knew each other, the twenty-five white-coated Coconuts greeting men in fitted black tie, and women mainly in black gowns.

Shannon stood at the wide entrance to the pavilion with a photographer directing him whose picture to take. Her son, Ian, and his girlfriend stood nearby. Shannon’s son is the one deep, true love of her life, and Ian had agreed to come as long as he could leave these Palm Beachers no later than midnight. The Coconuts had invited the
Palm Beach Daily News
society editor because this was the one event where most of them not only tolerated publicity but solicited it. An invitation here was social imprimatur that lasted a season, and even some of the most media reclusive of the Coconuts and guests wanted their picture in the Shiny Sheet.