Madness Under the Royal Palms (6 page)

As soon as Victoria Schrafft was born, Brownie started having her own affairs. It is unclear whether she started dating John Jock McLean II when she was still technically married to George, or after she had filed for divorce. In any event, Jock was everything George was, only bigger and better. He was richer. He was better looking. He was taller, born for a tuxedo, and a spitting image of Brownie’s father. He bore a far more distinguished name. His late mother was not the owner of a chain of déclassé luncheonettes, but Evalyn Walsh McLean, whose father had discovered the legendary Camp Bird gold mine in Colorado. And he was in love with Brownie in part because he found in her his mother’s fire and life.

Brownie got her divorce, and in May 1953 she married the twice-divorced, thirty-seven-year-old Jock in Las Vegas. Immediately afterward, they flew to Paris for their honeymoon.

T
HE WEALTHY ELITE DO
not talk publicly about money, but privately it is largely what they reflect upon. Jock’s mother had blown her inherited fortune. What remained was primarily the estate of Jock’s paternal grandfather, newspaper magnate John R. McLean, set in an impregnable trust.

Trusts are the way great old families hold on to their money for generation after generation. With a trust fund, one profligate generation cannot dissipate the wealth. In this instance, the interest on the fortune went first to McLean’s son, Ned, then to his grandchildren, to be distributed in full only twenty years after the death of Jock, the youngest surviving grandchild. The old man was an astute judge of the family’s spendthrift ways, but what Jock took away from his mother’s example was that money should be spent; frugality was unseemly.

Brownie acted as if she were marrying a man of legendary wealth. Thus she cavalierly walked away from the alimony and child support that her first husband owed the mother of his child. She did not quite grasp that she was becoming the third wife of a man living on a monthly allowance—an extraordinary allowance, but an allowance nonetheless. She did not consider that if Jock died, the trust would shut its vault to her, and its doors would never open again.

Brownie and Jock set out to indulge themselves in unrelieved pleasure. “I never had a child with him,” Brownie says. “I was dumb not to have, for I would have had a third of the estate.” Brownie was not a great mother, but there were many terrible mothers who had children just so they could not be denied a major slice of their wealthy husband’s estate. Her own daughter, Vicki, attended the private Palm Beach Day School, and in her teenage years she was sent to Hewitt School on East Seventy-fifth Street in Manhattan, out of the way of adults.

The social glitterati follow the fads, and if they are not at the right places at the right time, they are considered to be nowhere at all. During the late fifties and sixties, Brownie and Jock were almost inevitably in attendance at one of the best tables at precisely the right time at the most desired of occasions. They sped down from Palm Beach to Miami on the dirt State Road 7 to a little club in Miami where a fantastic black singer performed at two in the morning. They drove to the Golden Ox on Wellington Road in the sparsely settled western regions of the vast county, a restaurant that through Brownie’s patronage turned into the place to be. On Saturday afternoon Brownie again drove west to their stables, where she and Jock kept horses, and Vicki could ride on her pony.

This pleasured world of the wealthy in Palm Beach is overwhelmingly a woman’s world. “Men are lost here,” Brownie reflects. “Most of the men didn’t work. They didn’t have to. And they had no interests. That’s why I would hear them say that it’s no place for a man to survive, other than on alcohol. They just burn out down here.”

Jock enjoyed intimate dinner parties sparkling with frivolity, but abhorred the balls and cocktail parties that Brownie loved. They reminded him too much of his mother’s overwrought life, his memories primarily of a woman in a ball gown wearing the Hope diamond kissing him good night before heading off to that evening’s ball. He was not about to become a mere prop for his wife’s pleasure, but she was not going to stop attending social functions.

“Now, you may sit here and drink martinis and smoke all night,” Brownie said, looking down at her seated husband, “but I like people, so I’m going out. We can get divorced, or we can stay together. But I’m going to do that.”

Jock said nothing. He was a three-pack-a-day man, and he sat puffing away on his Camel. Smoking was so chic that the non-smoking Brownie used a cigarette as a prop when she was photographed. “If you don’t,” Brownie said finally, “I’m going to be going with somebody else and you will read about it and you’ll be upset.”

“Oh, darling, if I would go to one ball a year with you, would that make you happy?” Jock asked.

Brownie looked at Jock. “No, darling, you can’t do that because they’d call you ‘One Ball McLean.’” So Brownie went to the balls with other escorts, who deposited her home in the early-morning hours.

I
n 1957, Jock and Brownie purchased El Solano, one of the great estates on South Ocean Boulevard. The 10,600-square-foot-home had nine bedrooms, a 40-by-26-foot ballroom, and two swimming pools—one that caught sun in the morning, one that caught it in the late afternoon.

Addison Mizner, the most important creative figure in the history of Palm Beach, built El Solano in 1925. When the forty-six-year-old largely self-trained architect arrived on the island in 1917, Palm Beach was still part of a hotel culture. Most visitors stayed at either the Royal Poinciana Hotel on Lake Worth, or the Breakers on the Atlantic Ocean. It was not until the twenties that the Army Corps of Engineers created the Intracoastal Waterway. In these years, the western shore of the island fronted the freshwater Lake Worth. The island was largely jungle, and most guests rarely ventured much beyond the confines of the hotel grounds except to go to watch Alligator Joe wrestling alligators in a dusty pit in his great thatched hut.

When Mizner died in 1933, on the grounds where Joe had fought alligators stood the magnificent Mizner-designed Everglades Club, the center of the social life of the island. Along Worth Avenue rose other Spanish/Moorish-inspired Mizner buildings, including a five-story villa with a turretlike room at the top that was his studio, like a lighthouse above the village. Beneath was a twisting narrow passageway full of small shops that evoked an image of medieval Spain. In the surrounding streets stood about a hundred homes designed by Mizner, including great mansions and petite villas. Interspersed around them were estates and homes that blended into the architect’s fantasy, designed by several other notable architects, including Maurice Fatio and Joseph Urban. It was a magical scene; a bit of Spain, a dash of Morocco, a hint of Paris, a flourish of Hollywood, and something of exotic, jungle Florida as well.

The sick, rotund man who arrived in Palm Beach during World War I was an unlikely candidate to transform not only Palm Beach, but also the whole ethos of South Florida. Mizner had such a varied, contradictory existence that it was as if he lived an encyclopedia of lives. His father was a successful lawyer in Benicia, a town in northern California. His son had the soul of a bohemian and the tastes of an aristocrat. Addison was the seventh of eight children, and when the boy was sixteen, his father was named ambassador to Guatemala.

In his year there, Mizner imbued much of the cultural life of old Central America, an influence that years later he would draw upon in his own architecture. Six foot three and weighing close to three hundred pounds, he would have been an imposing figure, even without his vibrant, outgoing personality. After desultory studies in California and Spain, he set up an architectural practice in San Francisco. When that did not work out, he prospected for gold in Alaska, published a calendar in Hawaii, painted slides in Samoa, boxed in Australia, and eventually worked his way back home selling casket handles. He ended up in New York, surviving as much on his enviable charm, which he employed on wealthy ladies, as his abilities as an architect. One day in 1917, he picked up three hitchhikers in Long Island. They beat him half to death, leaving Mizner with a severely injured leg that was in danger of amputation.

In New York City, the invalided Mizner met Paris Singer, whose life was its own richly ornate biography. Singer was the next-to-youngest son of Isaac Merritt Singer’s twenty-four children. The sewing machine magnate had left his son enough money so he could indulge most of his whims, including a lengthy affair with the celebrated dancer Isadora Duncan, with whom he had a child. Singer was as tall as Mizner, and was an elegant gentleman with a rakish mustache.

Singer planned to use some of his wealth to build a convalescent hospital for officers in the jungle of Palm Beach. When the new friends arrived in Palm Beach by train, Singer took the hobbling Mizner around the island. The architect was appalled at the yellow and white of the two Flagler hotels. Flagler’s colors were also slapped on everything from train cars to benches.

Mizner came upon a New England–style colonial plopped down in the middle of the jungle, forlorn and bizarre, three thousand miles away from its natural northern habitat. He observed the stilted, artificial hotel life with its patrons changing their clothes five times a day, and wearing layered clothes inappropriate for the summery clime.

As the two men stood on the shores of Lake Worth a mile north of the Royal Poinciana Hotel, Singer asked the architect, “What do you see on this site?” He was not asking a practical architectural question. He was asking the man for his vision, and that was how Mizner replied. “It’s so beautiful that it ought to be something religious—a nunnery, with a chapel built into the lake, great cool cloisters and a court of oranges; a landing stage, where the stern old abbess could barter with boatmen bringing their fruit and vegetables for sale; a great gate over there on the road, where the faithful could leave their offerings and receive largesse.”

Mizner took what was little more than a visceral reaction and with Singer’s money turned it into a dark orange fantasy that spiritually anchored the island. This dream stood far above the highest of the royal palms. Unlike most architects, Mizner was as much concerned with the interior decoration as the outside. He built a series of studio shops in West Palm Beach where he trained craftsmen to make ceramic tiles, pottery, furniture, and whatever else he needed to complete the last physical details of his vision.

Stoneworkers created discriminating objects and Mizner had them broken apart with hatchets and patched back together again, so they would appear to be old. He trained carpenters to drill wormlike holes in chests of drawers. He taught painters how to create peeling effects to make wood appear ancient. He was creating fake antiques, but to him they were not fraudulent pieces but poetic artifacts that blended seamlessly with the old to be set down in this ageless environ, outside of history, stumbled upon in the mysterious jungles of South Florida.

When one looked up at the ornate painted beams, then down at the Spanish tiles that festooned every room, at the ornate Spanish furniture and the rich damask, all that was missing was human architecture of the same vision and grandeur. The war was over and there was no longer a need for a convalescent hospital, so Mizner and Singer decided to turn the building into a private club. They named it the Everglades. Mizner and Singer were wildly opinionated men, and they ran the club like a dinner party for which they chose the guests. These five hundred members were rich and well placed, and along with their wives, they found a new quality of social intercourse at the club.

For decades, the Everglades was so much a center of life on the island that some people made the purchase of a home contingent upon becoming members. The club had its own superb golf course and fine clay tennis courts. That was part of Mizner’s vision too; he envisioned that people would wear sports clothes during the day, and evening clothes at night. So they did, and their dress became both more casual and more formal.

Most of the leading characters in Palm Beach were middle-aged. They exploded in gaiety once they were released from the stuffy world of Flagler’s monumental hotels. They did not walk through their evenings in humorless social minuets; they danced through them. The season lasted only six weeks, starting after Christmas and ending on George Washington’s birthday in February. The brevity of the period made every day seem like a vacation.

When the obese Mizner waddled down Worth Avenue with his monkey Johnnie Brown on his shoulder, he looked out of place in the world that he had created. That was partially true. He was a gay man who was a virtual centaur, half creative genius, half hustler. As an architect hired to build their homes, he was treated as a servant of the wealthy, though he was superior in intellect to most of them. He got even by asserting his artistic arrogance, playing the prima donna. He sometimes expanded the size of a house far beyond that which his client ordered, or seemingly forgot rooms or staircases, or acted as if he cared nothing for the details of his projects when he was obsessed by them.

“Say anything you want about me,” he told one interviewer. “I’ll help you to the best of my ability, but remember that I am very good at faking anything.”

Mizner was in the business of making fake real and real fake; of elevating the mundane into the ethereal. Mizner had an astute social sense that helped him obtain commissions from wealthy clients, and he knew that the women ruled, albeit often by seeming not to. “I aim to please the woman,” he told the
Palm Beach Post
in 1926. “The man pays for the home, yes, and that is important, but it is the woman’s background, and she is the one who should determine what it should be.”

Mizner went on to begin to build an American Venice south of the island in Boca Raton, a planned community on a series of man-made canals. It was the greatest of all Mizner’s visions, and if it had been successful, it might have changed the whole nature of South Florida history. But it was pulled down in the Florida real estate crash of the twenties, taking Mizner’s fortune with it.

Mizner is not only the greatest architect in the history of Florida, but the one true architect of the Palm Beach experience. His brilliance has been bastardized and cannibalized into a Florida style found in everything from tract homes to strip malls, and the orangey hue that he favored has become practically the state color.

Most of what remains of Mizner’s genius is found in Palm Beach. Many of his homes have been torn down, others have been spiritually gutted, and only a few have stayed true to his vision. These homes speak in a compelling, if lessening, voice of his dream of Palm Beach as an exquisite, timeless, sophisticated enclave.

B
ROWNIE WAS LIVING IN
Mizner’s world, and not simply because she was living in a house that he had built. In the fifties, there were no condominiums on the island, and the social life of Palm Beach centered on a few hundred homes, most of them lying between the two main clubs, the Everglades and the Bath and Tennis. Servants were the silent audience to most activities. It was a town of such formality that some couples staying home for dinner dressed formally, and an ordinance declared that it was “unlawful for anyone to walk, ride, or otherwise be conveyed over town streets without being properly dressed in customary street wear.”

Jock was a member of the Coconuts, whose sole activity was to give the most exclusive New Year’s Eve party on the island. The Coconuts began in the 1920s as elaborate costume parties. The invitees were as much performers as guests at these theatrical evenings. At the “Coconuts of 1924,” held at the same Flagler estate where the 2008 New Year’s party took place, the guests spent small fortunes both in money and ingenuity to ensure that they would have memorable outfits, most in some inspired version of a national costume. The men were as splendidly and eclectically dressed as the women, and from Pierrots to peacocks, Dutch maidens to rajahs, there was not an unimaginative costume in the room.

There was genial applause when each couple entered the French ballroom, but when the stunning, young Mrs. Gurnee Munn glided into the great room, there was an ovation celebrating the triumphant audacity of her costume. She came as a dream of an Indian princess, her whole body from the top of her head to her shoes wreathed in an incredible headdress of long white feathers tipped in azure coloring. When the applause died down and she danced with her husband, Mrs. Munn looked not so much like an Indian queen but a white bird floating across the room.

The guests danced and reveled for hours before around two in the morning, they walked in couples out to the patio, where under the palms and coconuts, they were served an elaborate supper while two costumed toreadors sang opera arias.

T
HE
C
OCONUTS EVOLVED INTO
an annual event in which a group of bachelors reciprocated for the many invitations they received over the season. Twenty-five of these young men created a more formal group of Coconuts and began a tradition of annual parties known for the status of their guests and the extravagance.

Most of the Coconuts married, but they stayed Coconuts and turned the event into a New Year’s Eve party. One year Brownie said that she was only accompanying her Coconut husband if her friend Estée Lauder was invited. The cosmetics magnate was the wealthiest, best-known Jewish resident on the island, but that did not mean that she was invited to the most exclusive WASP events. Jock was hardly interested in a rocking a ship that he thought was sailing along quite well, but Brownie was adamant, and Estée was invited that year and in following years.

Like most of his fellow males on the island, Jock played tennis and golf, kibitzed in the locker room and watched, bemused, as his wife traversed the island, practicing her social sleight of hand. She had her gloved ladies’ lunches, her afternoon hands of canasta, and in the evening, a dinner party or a ball. It would have become boring if it lasted too long, but by mid-February they were gone, the place shuttered.

In those few weeks in Palm Beach, no one gave better, more eclectic and daring parties than Brownie. At Christmas, she invited everyone from the hoariest of the aristocrats to the Palm Beach cops, a social mélange unlike anything else on the island, a good four hundred or more filling every bit of the downstairs of the mammoth home.

“Jesus Christ, where do you know these people?” Jock asked.

“They’re perfectly nice people. They have nowhere to go at Christmas, so I invited them.”

Jock made a few perfunctory greetings and then trundled upstairs to read a book.

After a decade and a half of marriage, Jock’s lung cancer was discovered and their last years together became a time of trial. Three years later, in 1975, Jock died, and Brownie was alone. “I’m sitting in this big house and I say to myself, ‘Well, I can sit here and let the world come to me, or I can go out and find it.’” The truth was that she could not sit in the big house for long, since it was her only major asset. In 1980, she rented it to John Lennon and Yoko Ono for $25,000 a week. They were enchanted with El Solano, and Brownie ended up selling the estate to the couple for $725,000. Lennon was murdered a few months later, and the singer never lived in his new house.