Madness Under the Royal Palms (9 page)

D
AVID WOULD HAVE BEEN
a natural for Mar-a-Lago. If membership would have advanced his social position, he would have slapped down the $100,000 admission fee immediately. But in the society into which he was seeking entrée, joining would have signaled that he was hopelessly nouveau.

Trump had purchased the club in 1985 for eight million dollars, plus three million for the furnishings. By the early nineties, everything was falling apart, including his marriage to Ivana Trump. He had about nine hundred million dollars in personal debt, as well as three to four billion dollars in corporate debt, which led to three business bankruptcies though Trump never declared personal bankruptcy. He had not paid the mortgage on Mar-a-Lago for about two years, and sought to subdivide the seventeen-acre property into lots for eight other homes. The previous potential buyer of Mar-a-Lago had received permission to divide the property, but the Landmarks Preservation Commission turned the New York mogul down cold. That left Trump with an incredibly expensive salmon-colored elephant costing him not only his unpaid mortgage, but also about two million dollars a year in upkeep.

In 1992, as he was trying to decide if he should sue the town, Trump had dinner with Paul Rampell, a local trust estate attorney. The Princeton graduate had grown up in a section in the North End of the island that was largely Jewish, and he had an astute understanding of the social dynamics of Palm Beach. When Rampell suggested that Trump consider turning Mar-a-Lago into a private club, the real estate mogul immediately rejected the idea.

A few days later, Trump called the attorney to talk some more. “I’ll tell you another reason why the club isn’t a good idea,” Trump said, arguing as much with himself as the Jewish attorney. “The memberships will never sell.”

“You don’t understand the demographics of the island,” Rampell replied forcefully. “The town of Palm Beach is probably about half Christian and about half Jewish. There are five clubs right now. Four of those clubs are restricted. No Jews. No African Americans. And there are about four or five thousand members. There’s only one club where Jewish residents can go, and that’s the Palm Beach Country Club. It only has three hundred membership slots. They’re all full, and it’s very expensive. So you’ve got an island with a lot of Jewish residents who have no club to go to.”

“Well, maybe,” Trump said, ending the conversation but buying into the idea.

Trump could get no recognized attorney to take on his case to win permission for a club. So reluctantly, but with a large retainer in his pocket, Rampell agreed to represent Trump, even though he says it cost him half his practice.

When it comes to politics, Palm Beach is like the former Soviet Union. The truths that matter are whispered, and even then only among those who share one’s views. Everyone conversant with Trump’s plan knew that the club would be largely Jewish, but no one said so publicly. And everyone knew that in the crucial vote in the town council, the three Christians would almost certainly vote no, the two Jews would vote yes, and Trump would be turned down. But nobody said that either.

Trump was the new Palm Beach; a loud, assertive, energetic force that overwhelmed the well-tended garden of entitlement. The WASP elite could fume and fuss over their vodka martinis at the B&T, but there was nothing they could do about Trump. He was the future. He was the herald of a gaudy gilded age of power and privilege that would sweep over the genteel old world of the island. He said what he had to say and did what he had to do, to get what he wanted to get. He had no problem suing the town for fifty million dollars for turning down his previous plan, all the while having his minions present his new plan for a club at the town council meetings. He could be civil and endlessly polite when such conduct served his purposes, but behind his courteous manner was an implied threat. He and the world he represented were not to be stopped by the meek, conciliatory leaders of the island.

In the end, the town council voted four to one in favor of the club. Mar-a-Lago became largely a Jewish club, though nobody called it that. It changed the social dynamic in a way nothing had in the hundred-year history of the island. Mar-a-Lago was anathema to much of the gentile gentry, some of whom refused to set foot in a place that they thought rightfully was theirs. And there were Jews like David Berger who wanted no part of it either; at Mar-a-Lago, they would have had intimate contact with their religious brethren, and in doing so be identified by their faith.

There is nothing the old elite hates so much and fears so profoundly as Donald Trump’s club. The Everglades Club and B&T had been the enclave of the social elite. Those who sought to enter the sanctified portals slavishly copied the manners and mores of the members—but that is no longer true.

Mar-a-Lago is a pure plutocracy open to anybody who has the $100,000 membership fee, the $5,000 annual dues ($125,000 and $10,000 in 2008), and enough money to ring up hefty bills each month. The overwhelmingly Jewish club represents the most important social development in Palm Beach in decades. It broke the back of the old gentile establishment, and turned the island into a community where Jews could feel themselves no longer members of a gilded ghetto, but full participants in the most privileged activities on the island.

There are many Mar-a-Lago members who match those at the restricted clubs in grace and culture, but a vociferous minority sets the tone. Not only do they not intend to copy the WASP elite, they are largely unaware how far removed their behavior is from what once was considered civilized. Unlike previous generations of nouveau, they do not mimic the behavior of their social betters, but bring up their children with the same studied lack of what once were called manners. They are so insensitive to the world beyond them that they are unaware of the scenes they make and the disarray they often leave in their wake.

Most of these nouveau are Jewish, and no one is more embarrassed by their conduct than other Jewish islanders who call them “New Yorkers.” The term is not geographically accurate, since most New York Jews do not qualify, and a good number of “New Yorkers” are not even from New York; but that is the term that is used. Jews from Pittsburgh and Toronto cringe at the behavior of their fellow Jews, but no one spoke more forcefully or more angrily than other Jews from New York City who hate to be associated with such gaudy guests. They had blown into Palm Beach on the high tide of money, and do whatever pleases them.

One day two “New Yorkers” came strutting into the luncheonette at Green’s Pharmacy as if it were a theater and they the stars of the drama, and sat down at the counter. It is one of the few downscale places to eat on the island, and for locals, one of the most popular.

Nanci Hewitt knew that if she did not serve the men immediately, they would start kvetching loudly, and Nanci turned from other customers to take their orders. When the waitress set the hamburger special before the men, one of them looked down on it as if observing a crime. “There aren’t enough French fries!” he screamed, his voice reverberating through the luncheonette. “You’ve cheated us!”

As Nanci walked back to the two men, almost anyone would have recognized that she was furious, but to them her momentary pique was of no matter. By now everyone in the little restaurant had stopped eating. Nanci leaned over the counter and with her index finger no more than half an inch over the plate began loudly counting French fries.

“One…two…three…four…five…six,” Nanci counted, her finger moving across the plate. “Seven…eight…nine…ten…eleven…. Eleven!!! There’s one too
fucking
many!!!” She plucked a fry off the plate and threw it on the floor. If this had truly been a theater, Nanci would have received a standing ovation.

T
he Great Donald may have been the son of a wealthy real estate developer, but the Protestant mogul is the uncrowned king of the “New Yorkers.” If the more difficult of the Mar-a-Lago members aspire to be like anyone, it is not one of the pallid WASPs next door at the B&T, but the Donald himself. Many of them call to see if he is flying in on his jet for the weekend, and if he is, they make reservations for brunch or dinner. If he is elsewhere, the club is often half-empty.

Trump is not some prissy, reclusive mogul like the late John D. Rockefeller, but a man of the people who on special occasions greets guests at the door like Uncle Ho at Uncle Ho’s all-you-can-eat Chinese buffet. He has the social skills of a populist politician, calling members by their names as his butler walks behind him whispering them to him, backslapping and joshing as he glad-hands his way through those having lunch on the veranda.

The Donald is not only about money, he
is
money; to the nouveau, the one sure sign of human value. And like many of his fellow New Yorkers, the Donald believes that wealth does not require one to be laced into a cultural straitjacket. It means you can do what you want to do, when you want to do it. When Trump feels like playing the democrat, he is a man of the people, and when he wants to be alone, he sends off signals clear to all but the most foolhardy. When he is angry at a member of his staff, he is perfectly capable of berating him in front of club members. And when he is hungry, he does not want the gussied-up cuisine on the Mar-a-Lago menu. At such moments, Tony Senecal, his butler, carries a silver platter full of cheeseburgers and French fries as big as small bananas to Donald’s suite, and returns a few minutes later with a volcano of vanilla ice cream erupting in chocolate sauce.

The butler is the soul of Mar-a-Lago. Tony loves the estate with passionate, detailed concern and he is the true guardian of its past and its spirit. Tony has seen the movie
Remains of the Day
at least twenty-seven times, and would like nothing more than to be the American version of the classic butler played by Anthony Hopkins, but he will never quite make it. It is not only that he is too witty, too opinionated, and too lively, but unlike the Hopkins character, seventy-six-year-old Tony has had a richer life than most of the people he serves. He was a young man when he came to work for Marjorie Merriweather Post as a footman in 1959, and in the off-season he also worked as a teacher, restaurant proprietor, country club manager, and a radio talk show host. He had been on top of his world, and at the bottom, bankrupt. He had two children and one divorce.

Working for Mrs. Post, Tony saw a world of order, propriety, and organic concern that he found exquisite. Her father had not begun his life as a wealthy man, and she could easily be called nouveau, but she had a sense of manners and grace that largely died with her and her generation. She not only knew her servants’ names, but their wives’ and children’s names and everything about them, and they generally stayed with her forever. She watched over them, almost as much as they watched out for her. When they retired they received what they thought were pensions, but when she died the monthly checks died too.

At eleven a.m. on the days of her frequent formal dinners for thirty-six, Tony helped set the table with priceless silver and magnificent china, and he stood behind that one chair all during the evenings. The servants were a collegial group who helped each other, and saw that when their colleague did well, they did well too. It was unlike what it has become, each employee out for himself, no loyalty to anything but their own advance. “If you made a mistake in front of Mrs. Post in the morning, you would hear about it by noon, but never from her,” Tony recalls. “It would come down the chain. These people sort of took you in and made you the best that you could be. There was no ‘Well, if he falls, he falls.’ They wanted to make sure you never failed.”

Mrs. Post died in 1973, and Tony returned twenty years later to become Trump’s butler. During the first year he helped oversee the restoration of the estate and the preparation to turn Mar-a-Lago into a club. One day Trump was making a tour of the facilities with Tony and Frank Moffet, the steward who oversaw the kitchen. When they walked into the kitchen, Trump noticed a big safe.

“What the hell’s in it?” Trump asked.

“Well, the gold and silver,” the steward said.

“Does anybody have the combination?”

The steward opened the wall safe and it was full of a treasure that because Post’s heirs had not claimed it was now Trump’s property.

Just before the club opened, Tony learned that he was going to be the concierge, a lucrative, prestigious position. He was serving breakfast to Trump when his employer brought up the new job. “Well, you don’t sound too happy about it,” Trump said, amazed at Tony’s reaction.

“Of course I’m not happy about it.”

“What the hell do you want to do?” an incredulous Trump replied.

“Well, I figured until I was too feeble to carry a tray that I would stay your butler.”

“Are you serious?” asked the man who thought he had heard everything.

“Of course,” Tony replied, as if how could there be any question.

Trump got up and hit Tony on the arm with a comradely swipe of his fist. “Well, then, goddamn it, the butler you’ll be.”

Tony would have stayed living in Mar-a-Lago until he could work no longer, but Trump could make good money renting out his room, and after a few years he asked his butler to live elsewhere.

T
RUMP MAY BE A
self-created caricature, but no one understands the psychology of the new gilded age as well as he does, and no one is both as emulated and as despised in Palm Beach. He hired and fired chefs until he had a formidable menu and an alert, personable staff. When Donald opened a great golden ballroom in 2005, it soon became the most desirable venue for charity events on the island, bringing streams of people onto the island most evenings during the season.

Palm Beach residents had always assumed that when they drove to the B&T or the Everglades for dinner, they were entering the most desirable venue in town, but at Mar-a-Lago, the entertainment is more exciting, the scene more energized. To the dying WASP breed next door, it is unthinkable that a group of pathetic parvenus should have taken over the greatest estate on the island and turned it into such a place.

Nothing more irritates members of the B&T than that Trump purchased beachfront land first offered to their club, and built a beach club there that dwarfs and diminishes everything next door. The two-story cabanas at Mar-a-Lago are gorgeous, whereas the old beachfront wooden cabanas at the B&T could sit comfortably next to the Bates Motel in
Psycho
. At Trump’s club, the members lie on lounges next to the Olympic-size pool where white-coated waiters serve them piña coladas and shrimp salads; while next door, the B&T members stand in a cafeteria line for lunch.

One day in the late nineties, the black hip-hop artist Puff Daddy walked across the beach from Mar-a-Lago to the B&T with a white woman who was not his wife, and took up residence in a mini cabana on the beach. Puff Daddy began performing coitus on his willing partner. In possible deference to the conservative sentiment of the club, he employed only the missionary position. When a security guard approached and suggested that he stop, the rapper raged that the official had ruined his “concentration.”

When the rap artist returned to the safety of Mar-a-Lago, he told Trump how rude the WASPs at the B&T had been. Trump was the Wizard of Publicity, sitting behind his little machine sending out vast clouds of bright, dark, malevolent sandstorms, hail, mist—it did not matter how it looked, as long as it made him more famous. He was picking up the phone to call a gossip columnist, when Senecal says that he gently suggested that perhaps Mr. Trump should wait a few minutes to learn just what had happened. In the end, when Trump heard in detail about this
From Here to Eternity
moment on the beach, he realized that it was not to his benefit to have a story out there about his weekend guest having sex within a few feet of children and non-consenting adults. The story got into the newspapers only because a member of the B&T conversant with public relations called a gossip columnist to tweak Donald and his déclassé Mar-a-Lago. When the story made
Time
, the rapper’s spokesperson said that it could not have been Puff Daddy but must have been an imposter.

The final dénouement was a bitter drink for the gentry at the B&T to choke down. Estée Lauder was one of the great names of modern American merchandising, and a social fixture in Palm Beach for years, but she was one of “them.” In the wake of the founder’s death in 2004, her company signed a licensing agreement with Puff Daddy, now metamorphosed as Sean Combs, for what became the company’s best-selling perfume line. The initial fragrance was
Unforgiveable
, a sentiment with which the gentlemen and ladies at the B&T would surely have agreed.

Even the most passionate enemies of Trump’s club had never envisioned that the day would come when a man of color would fornicate on the beach in front of the B&T, or that millions of Americans would wear his perfume. These well-brought-up scions of wealth were bewildered, even shattered, by the incomprehensible changes. They heard the sounds of Tony Bennett and Wayne Newton wafting through the night air from the enormous Mar-a-Lago ballroom. They read about the celebrated pros playing tennis with Donald at the annual pro-am on the Mar-a-Lago courts. They saw Donald sailing in his yacht along the coast in front of the club as if to taunt them. They observed young beauties parading down the beach in the thongs and bikinis outlawed at the B&T.

One day a woman arrived at the Mar-a-Lago Olympic-size pool, took off her wrap, and strutted around the pool nude. She was a member’s lover, but this day, she was decidedly by herself. No one was more surprised and upset than Steve Greenwald, an attorney who had retired while still in his forties after a heart attack. As he lay back on his chaise, Steve pretended to read the
Palm Beach Post
, but his eyes kept darting back to the woman who was prancing around the pool, ignoring the entreaties of one couple to cover herself. She appeared to be in her late thirties, and had a body that could have been built by Boeing.

The woman jumped into the heated water and swam back and forth, most of the time on her back. “Why don’t you take off your trunks and come join me, Big Boy,” the woman said. “You’re kind of cute.”

“I’m married,” Steve sputtered, although even if he had been a confirmed bachelor, he would have stayed put.

“You’d better do something about this,” Steve half whispered to one of the waiters.

The woman finally got out of the pool, lay down on a chaise, and ordered a hot dog. When the white-coated waiter brought the dish, she doused it in mustard as if trying to put out a fire. She devoured the food in three bites, leaving her face swathed in yellow like a mudpack.

After about forty-five minutes of frontal nudity, Bernd Lembcke, the German-born manager, arrived. No matter what Lembcke saw or heard, he had the same courtier’s demeanor that hovered on the border of servility. By now, the chaises were full of members, and Lembcke went up to each one and greeted him or her with small talk, arranging it so that the last person he greeted was the nude woman. He stood before the nudist, looking uninterestedly at her breasts. Within a few minutes, she donned a beach wrap and sauntered away just as casually as she had arrived, and the members returned to their shrimp salads garnished with the gossip of the day.

T
RUMP’S GREATEST TRIUMPH IN
Palm Beach is not Mar-a-Lago but the creation of Palm Beach International Golf Club. There was no land for another golf course in Palm Beach and scarcely any in West Palm Beach. Only Trump could envision 214 acres of wretched scrub land south of Palm Beach International Airport, next to the Palm Beach County Detention Center, as a world-class golf course. And only Trump could figure a way to acquire the land at a bargain price while mitigating one of his most pesky problems.

When Marjorie Merriweather Post owned Mar-a-Lago, there was a tacit agreement that planes flying in and out of the airport would not pass directly over her estate. That agreement was long gone and PBIA was now a major facility with hundreds of planes every day during the season. On a Friday afternoon, playing tennis at Mar-a-Lago was like standing on the subway platform in Times Square. That was the time of day that often one heard a roaring, ominous sound in the sky above. That one of the noisiest planes in the air arriving for the weekend was Trump’s own Boeing 727 did not prevent the real estate magnate from raging against this outrageous incursion.

Lawsuits were Trump’s Kalashnikov, a cheap and effective weapon to kill his opponents. In June 1995 he ordered his attorneys to sue Palm Beach County for a whopping seventy-five million dollars for noise and air pollution and “visual intrusion.” The following year he settled the suit overwhelmingly in his terms. The county promised to avoid flying over Mar-a-Lago and agreed to lease him the scrub land for $438,000 in annual rent for a minimum of thirty years. Upon that land he built his golf course, and charged those who wanted to play $300,000 memberships separate from Mar-a-Lago and $10,000 a year dues. The 2007–2008 member handbook lists 276 members willing to have their names and phone numbers listed. Those members alone likely netted Trump over $80,000,000 plus close to $3 million in annual dues.

I am not a golfer, but one day I drove out with a friend and his son-in-law in his Bentley to walk around the course while they played eighteen holes. The Bentley is the Volkswagen, the people’s car, of Trump International, and the circular driveway was lined with valet-parked Bentleys. The clubhouse looks as if it had been built by a sultan who had seen too many Indiana Jones movies. There are massive kneeling bronze gladiators who had never had a golf club in their hands. The entire place is fastidiously rendered in similar taste.