Madness Under the Royal Palms (4 page)

The same was true with Eric’s younger brother. Paul worked for his dad for close to a decade. Then, against his father’s wishes, Paul ordered an expensive fishing chair for Fred’s seventy-one-foot Hatteras yacht. Nobody pulled a stunt like that on Fred, particularly since this act was in essence Paul’s asserting his own independence. Fred ended up suing Paul to get back properties he had placed in his son’s name. It broke his relationship with his son. It was sad, but it wasn’t Fred’s fault.

I
T WAS ONLY YEARS
later that I got to know Fred and saw how totally I had misread him on the tennis courts. He was disdainful of the Palm Beach world and said that he only lived there because it was safe and beautiful, a rich man’s haven. He remained, however, an exaggerated version of a type of man common on the island.

Fred believed in only one God, and that God was himself. He had no use for what most people called morality, the pathetic homilies around which most men attempt to build their lives. Everyone who surrounded him was in his service: wives, women, his sons, employees. Most of them hungered for the one thing he could not give: his love. He treated them well enough as long as they did not try to subvert his sovereignty, but if they dared to attempt to circumvent him, he struck them down.

It was as if the part of Keller’s brain governing moral concerns had been lobotomized. He laughed at the absurd conventions by which supposedly good people tried to live, and how they wiggled and twisted to adhere to some silly list of rules devised by priests or philosophers.

If Keller needed further proof that he was correct in his disdainful view of humanity, he could have pointed out that he played the same tricks again and again because there was an endlessly gullible audience unable to catch his sleight of hand. And each time his gambits worked, it only reinforced his belief that what most people called trust and morality was only the most pathetic credulity. It was a world of dupes out there, and he was going to play them, exploiting their naiveté and stupidity.

Y
OU CAN EMBELLISH IT
with all your pretty words, perfume it anyway you like, dress it up in gowns and jewels, but Palm Beach is a marketplace of flesh. Every man and every woman has his or her value, and the game is to trade up as best you can. Keller understood that as well as anyone. He was a shrewd businessman, whether it was commercial properties or women who took his fancy. He was as brazen and bold in asserting his own value as a man could be. He met nearly all the women in his life through personal ads in various magazines and newspapers, which stated that he was a millionaire—and now a Palm Beach millionaire—seeking young women no older than thirty who were tall, well built, and pretty (“Palm Beach Millionaire seeks slim, attractive playmate to share a lifestyle of the rich and famous”). As he saw it, it wasn’t a bad trade-off. He had the money, they had the youth and the bodies he liked, and anyone who replied understood the deal.

Fred had the cynical view of women and their mercenary ways common among many men in Palm Beach, views that were borne out by the women who approached, drawn by the lure of luxury. Thus it troubled him not in the least that had he crossed the words
Palm Beach
and
millionaire
out of his ads, his mailbox would have been empty. He did not worry about them lining up like gold prospectors in front of a rich new vein. He wanted women who appreciated and deferred to his wealth. What he also got were young women with a lack of self-worth and terrible vulnerability.

Keller approached women the way he did commercial property, looking at the comparables, checking out every inch of the asset before making his first low bid. When they were local women, he arranged for blind dates three or four at a time, and had them meet him in different rooms at the enormous Breakers Hotel. That way he could peruse them first, and meet only the one who was the most attractive.

On one of the sheets that he used for keeping track of possible lovers, Fred listed thirty-two women who had contacted him, many of them through his ads in
USA Today
. They came from as far away as Pennsylvania and Massachusetts, and he did considerable investigation before he invited them to Palm Beach for a visit. Most of them were in their mid-twenties, but they ranged in age from a twenty-year-old to a forty-five-year-old. They had given him their heights and weights and almost all were tall and thin. Only twenty-year-old Heidi had given her bra size, 34C. A D cup would have been better, Fred acknowledged, but it was hardly a deal breaker.

Keller liked one of the women he invited down so much that he asked her to live with him. Her name was Shari, and she flew back to Silver Spring, Maryland, quit her job, and hired a moving company for $1,100 to ship her furniture and other belongings to South Florida. Shari was ecstatic at her change in fortune. She went out and bought expensive new clothes to look great for her Palm Beach millionaire. Then, just as Shari was preparing to fly down to West Palm Beach, Fred called and said that he had met another woman, Fran, and he was going to live with her instead.

“I am hoping that you will take part of the responsibility for my financial ruin,” Shari wrote him. “I am one step away from filing for welfare. I have exactly $74.92 left to my name, without a job, and no place I can go. Please Fred, can you find it in your heart to help me out financially, because had it not been for your decision, I would not be in this awful mess. Please, Fred, help me.”

But Fred was on to his life with Fran, and he could not be bothered with the past. Fran did not last either, and afterward he flew in a woman named Pene Latham, whom he had met in Texas, and who wound up moving in with Fred. He was in his late fifties and Pene was in her mid-thirties, and that was a problem because he had never dated anyone so old. She was more intelligent than many of his previous women with a wry wit and painful sensitivity. She left him once and when she returned, Fred suggested that they play a joke on his masseuse. He took out his pistol and pointedly seemed to remove all the bullets. He handed Pene the gun and said that when the masseuse arrived, she should come bursting in through the door pointing the gun at him, shouting, “You’re not ever going to leave me or treat me badly again!”

It didn’t feel right, and Pene gave him back the gun. He turned around and fired a bullet into the wall. Only several days afterward did it occur to her that if she had gone along with his joke, Fred would have claimed that she was serious, and when the police came, nobody would have believed her.

When Pene was about to turn thirty-five, Fred put an ad in the newspaper. “I’ve never been with anyone over thirty-five, and I’m not going to start with you,” he told her. He soon had somebody new, a blonde in her early twenties. Fred liked young, statuesque women with large breasts and thin waists. If they did not fully meet his standards, he would get rid of them or retrofit them with breast implants. If he could have done it, he would have engineered his perfect woman, taking the breasts of one, the waist of another, the hips of a third, filling out the various body parts before he added a geisha-like personality.

The blonde was perfect except that her breasts were too small. He told her he would pay the four thousand dollars for the implants, but he wanted her to sign a note so he could take it off on his taxes as a bad debt. When he soon grew tired of her and asked her to leave, he sued her for the money—and moved on to somebody new.

The results from the ads in
USA Today
had started thinning out, and Fred had one of his relatives in Germany place an ad in a newspaper there, hoping to find some worthwhile prospects in his parents’ homeland. Fred did the best he could do to winnow out the undesirables, but it was hard. The first woman who arrived at Miami International Airport was a biochemist. She was nice but a little plump, so he sent her packing. Then there had been a young dental hygienist who wanted to stay, but she cried constantly and was depressed and homesick. That would not do either. Fred had talked to the third prospect for hours on the phone. He had seen her photo, and he thought she might be the best of the lot. Her name was Rosemarie “Rose” Keil, and she said that she worked as a model. She was in her early twenties, from the small town of Dorlar, near Düsseldorf in northwestern Germany.

Although Rose had Fred’s picture in her hand, when she walked into the international arrivals lounge at Miami International Airport, she sailed right past him and out the door to see if her patron was waiting at the curb. Fred told his chauffeur that they should wait and see what she did. Fred studiously observed Rose, concluding that she was the best looking of the German women, with the obligatory thin waist and ample breasts. She was tall and had a fresh, youthful attractiveness. She had paper-thin lips, a long, aquiline nose, small eyes that angled slightly downward, and a quiet, intense voice.

Only after he had checked her as best he could did he follow her out the door and touch her on the arm. “Are you waiting for someone?” he asked in German.

Fred was aggressive in his pursuit of women, but once he met them, he could be chivalrous to the extreme, not caring if it took days before the woman chose to sleep with him. It was an immensely shrewd gesture, for along with his understated demeanor, initially he came across as a man of utmost graciousness. In this instance, Fred did not have to wait long, for he told me that very evening Rose spent the night with him in the master bedroom in his Palm Beach home. His newest paramour—not unwitting in her own right—had her own agenda.

T
he illusion of sex has always been the most useful commodity to trade in Palm Beach, but those who seem most obviously to be trafficking in it are shunned. When I arrived in Palm Beach, Eddy Louis was married to Vera Lukin, thirty-one years his senior. He was highly controversial. Even the police treated him like an undesirable, stopping his car for the most minor of matters, making it clear that he was not welcome. “The people in Palm Beach look at the externals, and nobody took the time to get to know me,” he says. “They see the old masters that I paint or hear me on the Steinway. They don’t believe it. I’m a genius, a successful entrepreneur, and a decent honest man. And all these bastards think it’s my good looks and I’m nothing but a slut or gigolo.”

When I played doubles with Eddy the first time at the Breakers, I had already heard the rumors that he had been a Moroccan waiter in Paris and had paid his way to Palm Beach with money gained from living off one woman after another. Eddy was a tall, handsome, swarthy man of strutting sexuality. He had a heavy, vague accent, and small, round eyes that darted back and forth even as he sat Buddha-like. He was naturally dark, but spent so much time sunning himself that his skin was the color of a well-done steak. He wore old-fashioned short tennis shorts and a shirt so tight it fit like a bodysuit. Eddy was obsessed with cleanliness, and his body was sleek and hairless. He had impeccable manners until he lost his temper, and then he erupted in a mindless stream of invective in one of half a dozen languages.

Eddy was also an elegant tennis player. Although he was competitive, he appeared more concerned about his perfect technique than winning. This day, he and his partner, Joseph Idy, a French-American who was Eddy’s friend and stockbroker, were giving my partner and me a battle. Idy liked to lob. Time and time again, he sent the ball high up, landing at the deepest part of the court. After an endless barrage of these missiles, Idy sent the ball above the level of the palm trees before it dropped, falling just outside the back line, giving us the game.

“Out!” I yelled with definitive pleasure. Eddy let forth a stream of French invective, accusing me of cheating on the line call. He spoke in gutter argot that I had not heard since I was a student in France, and that I’m sure he thought I couldn’t understand.

Eddy’s French accent is impeccable, but I knew what would set him off. “
Mon vieux,
” I shouted back.
“Je parle Français aussi, mais moi, je le parle comme un français de France.”
(I speak French too, my friend, but I speak it like a Frenchman from France.)

I had hardly finished my sentence before Eddy charged. He was about to jump over the net and start punching me, when his partner held him back. Neither of us were pugilists, and we doubtlessly would have flailed away relatively harmlessly, but it would have made for a memorable morning at the Breakers.

Eddy was the scion of a well-to-do Lebanese Maronite Christian family, and had been brought up on an estate in Mount Lebanon above the Mediterranean Sea. The family built major construction projects, and his father insisted that his son attend USC to study engineering. After graduation in 1967, he got rid of his Arabic family name and changed it to the French-like “Louis.” When he returned to Beirut he had a soupçon of French culture, some traditional Arab ways, and American brashness. He fancied that he would be a citizen of the world, but he discovered that the world is not one place, but an endless series of enclaves, in none of which he felt fully at home. In Lebanon, he no longer could abide the hoary traditions of his family. In Beirut, his father raged at his son’s excesses. In the end, he threw Eddy out and sent him away with a tiny Fiat 125 convertible and a few Lebanese dollars. By the time Eddy arrived in Paris, he was broke. He found meals in restaurant garbage cans and slept in his Fiat. He had grown his hair down to his shoulders. He looked like an American hippie, and he began singing for coins on the street corner.

It was a long, twisted journey that led him from there to developing squash clubs in France, becoming part of the glittery world of European jet setters, and from there to life in the North End of Palm Beach married to a German heiress. He had left that relationship with nothing except Desirée, a daughter he had fathered with a surrogate mother. Although Eddy came from a wealthy family and said that he had access to their money for any of his projects, he appeared to have only modest means, and escorted elderly widows to balls and parties, where he attempted to sell investments. He was not a licensed broker; in essence, he was steering them to those who were, and getting a fee for doing so.

These rich old ladies wanted male companionship. As a single, heterosexual male, Eddy was a more valuable commodity than one of the gay “walkers.” The term is a mildly derogatory one generally affixed to gay men escorting elderly ladies, though it equally applies to a motley array of heterosexual cops, auctioneers, real estate agents, and ageless adrogynes. Although the category can include practically any man owning a dinner jacket, it is largely a gay avocation. Palm Beach is nearly as gay as San Francisco, but until the mid-nineties, except for a few dress designers and gallery owners, nearly everyone stayed in the closet, a conspiracy of silence that allowed the social system to go on unchanged for decades.

Eddy wasn’t gay and if he was going out with an elderly lady, he wanted to be paid in stronger currency. What was it to a wealthy lady to throw some of her money to an investment suggested by this charming gentleman?

Palm Beach counts only in twos; to be alone is social death. When Eddy met Vera Lukin, her husband had recently died in 1990. She was seventy-nine years old, doomed to join the widows escorted by gays or middle-aged stockbrokers and real estate agents, who used the occasions to press their business cards into reluctant hands. Vera could have entered their ample ranks, but that was an admission that all that she lived and loved for was over.

When Vera started dating Eddy, her sons and friends thought that she had reached an unspeakable nadir. Despite what people said, Eddy had not scooped Vera up like a treasure stumbled upon on the beach. She had wooed him, and exuding her youthful gaiety and joy, brought him closer and closer.

Eddy’s greatest strength and his greatest weakness is the same quality: an immense, unfettered pride. Before the couple moved in together in Vera’s house, he signed a precohabitation agreement separating their assets. That way no one could accuse him of pursuing Vera for her money.

When the couple married, Vera had everything that most women on the island desired. She had a spectacular far younger husband. She had a mansion on the Intracoastal Waterway left to her by her late husband. She had a maid, a Rolls-Royce, exquisite silver and china, and a living room so full of fine old furniture that it looked more like an antiques store than a place of habitation. She owned expensive jewelry and had enough money to attend the most fashionable balls. And she now had something else that no woman of her generation had, an adorable little child: Desirée. Although Vera did not adopt Eddy’s daughter, she mothered Desirée with tenderness, teaching the girl the rudiments of manners and grace.

Vera’s greatest expense was keeping up the house. Eddy saved her thousands of dollars each year by acting as a general handyman. In the damp heat of the island, the one thing that lived and thrived naturally was the jungle vegetation. Everything else rusted and rotted, steel oxidized, and wood became plagued with termites and decay.

I
ALSO MET THE
six-foot-two Eric Purcell on the tennis courts at the Breakers. Eric was living with a married woman, but nobody thought badly of him, and he was accepted in circles where Eddy would not have been welcome. “I wasn’t really a gigolo because that isn’t my style,” he says. “But I was sort of in the role of it. I was trying to have fun with it, and in some ways I did.”

Eric was a few years younger than Eddy and was a strong, defensive player who kept the ball in play forever until his opponent made a mistake. Like Eddy, whom he idolized, Eric was also handsome, but fair-haired, with a dapper manner and looks that exuded a sense of superiority and perhaps even a touch of cruelty when he smiled. He walked onto the courts with such authority that few would have guessed that he was not a member and had scarcely a dollar to his name.

Eric was a formidable opponent, an intriguing conversationalist off the court, and we became friends. Eric was a natural-born actor, even if he rarely performed on stage. And, like so many actors, he was introverted, though no one would have guessed it.

His thespian skills came naturally enough from his mother, Monique van Vooren, a gorgeously flamboyant actress whose major creation was herself. The Belgian-born siren with the celebrated forty-inch bust was pregnant with Eric in 1953 when she was acting in what proved to be her biggest part, playing half the title role in
Tarzan and the She-Devil
alongside Lex Barker. The role was hardly autobiographical, but Monique had a she-devil quality, a wanton sexuality that glowed overly brightly, and an obsession with stunning clothes and jewels.

If it is a curse to be the son of a famous man, it may be more of a curse to be the son of a sensuous celebrity mother seeking from each man who passes a tribute to her youthful beauty. It was impossible that a woman seemingly so young, with such an awesome figure, could have a growing child, so Monique had Eric knock a few years off his age. For a while it worked, but even Eric was not good enough an actor to convince people he was five when he was pushing ten, and at that age his mother shipped him off to school.

Eric lived an itinerant, lonely life, at one point sleeping in a makeshift bedroom in the back of Monique’s latest husband’s office in Manhattan. In the winters during school vacations, Monique took her son down to Palm Beach, where they stayed at the Colony Hotel or with acquaintances. As a teenager, Eric was thrown out of some of the better schools in America before finishing at the Peddie School in New Jersey.

Eric was not a good student, but he could be articulate and convincing. He went down to Washington, and in his application interview for admission to Catholic Georgetown University, played the religious gentleman of impeccable morals and the highest intellectual pursuits. Once admitted, he stopped playing that role. It would have been a stretch with a mother who during Eric’s Georgetown years played the nymphomaniac Baroness Katrin Frankenstein in Andy Warhol’s X-rated
Frankenstein,
a film subsequently released with the more realistic title
Flesh for Frankenstein.

Eric became one of the leading actors in college productions. Celebrity is at its most intense in the tiniest of quarters, attested to in Palm Beach by those who think they are immortal because their picture appears in the Shiny Sheet. To be a stage star in college is celebrity of the highest order. In one production, Eric met one of the most desirable, most pursued of the coeds, Deborah Gore Dean, and fell obsessively in love.

Eric lusted after Dean’s life of wealth as much as he did her body, and he could hardly separate the two. Her grandfather owned Washington’s elegant Fairfax Hotel. She had been brought up at Marwood, a thirty-three-room mansion outside Washington. “It’s a big mistake not to allow boys to have experience with women until they’re eighteen, because a woman gets hold of them and sucks every ounce of innocence out of them,” Eric reflects, the wound still festering even decades later. “This was my seduction the summer of my sophomore year in college at the Gore estate in Potomac, Maryland. At that age, you can’t get enough of it. I was addicted to her. They owned the Sea Catch and the Jockey Club Restaurant. She had her own room in the Fairfax Hotel, and she was spoiled beyond belief.”

After two and a half years Dean dropped Eric. He could not forget her. She haunted him, and he couldn’t get over the life of luxury and privilege he would have had with her. In some ways, the rest of his life became little but an endless coda, one ineffectual attempt after another to replicate what he lost forever.

Eric was an emotional orphan. Although his last name was Purcell, his mother’s husband had never adopted him. In college, he learned that his real father was David McConnell, an heir to the Avon fortune, and part owner of the Colony Hotel in Palm Beach and the then Boston Patriots football team. Far from being devastated by the news, Eric thought his patrimony might prove a blessing. He met his father in New York City, and fully expected that McConnell would give him a few hundred thousand dollars as a graduation present to send his secret son out into the world in style.

McConnell sent him nothing, and Eric took his last dollars and flew down to Palm Beach to talk to his father. The Colony sits just south of Worth Avenue, a block from the ocean. The three penthouses, the Embassy, the Presidential, and the Vice Regal, have housed everyone from the Windsors to presidents and in the mid-seventies, the boutique hotel was the apogee of deluxe accommodations.

Eric checked in, and assuming that McConnell would both pay and acknowledge his son, started living the life of the spoiled scion. However, McConnell was married for the umpteenth time, and had five daughters. He was not about to admit dipping his wick where it should not have gone.

If Eric had been a jewelry thief, he would have gone for the easily pilfered cheap items in the front cases, rather than trying to open the safe. He did not play his father for the big money, but settled for ripping him off in piddling ways, bringing women he met at the pool up to his room and impressing them by calling room service, eating at the chic Pool Room Restaurant, and buying drinks all around and putting them on his tab.

Eric was playing a cameo role as his father, a self-indulgent heir who did pretty much what he wanted to do. Although Eric’s father was technically an investment banker, in actuality he was a man who, while not flying loop-de-loops in his own plane, divided his time between his two other great pleasures, Johnny Walker Scotch and Lark cigarettes. He was also used to having others handle unpleasant business for him. After a month of Eric’s living at the hotel and showing no sign of leaving, McConnell was faced with removing him. He gave the job to one of his minions, who struck a deal with Eric to get him to leave. Eric settled cheaply, heading out of the Colony with three thousand dollars of McConnell’s money.