The Prince of Paradise (14 page)

N
INETEEN

“I AM MR.
FONTAINEBLEAU”

On Saturday, November 19, 1983—after being forced out of the North Bay Village Racquet Club in a lengthy legal battle—Ben Novack Sr.
auctioned off his personal collection of Fontainebleau furniture, furnishings, and memorabilia to raise money.
Nearly six years after losing his beloved hotel, the seventy-six-year-old iconic hotelier was a shadow of his former self.
And he had little sentiment for all the French Provincial furniture and furnishings that had once adorned the Fontainebleau.

All his debts had now been paid, so the profits from the auction block would be his.

The preview for the auction was held on a chilly Thursday morning in a shabby warehouse on the outskirts of Miami.
Bernice Novack attended, along with Ben Sr.’s other two ex-wives, Bella and Janie.

“After losing the hotel,” Bernice said later, “the fire wasn’t in him.
He was older and wasn’t well.”

At the warehouse, a visibly ailing Ben Novack Sr.
slowly escorted reporters on a tour of several hundred of his Fontainebleau treasures.
His once-fashionable clothes had been replaced by plain peach-colored slacks, a short beige jacket, and a matching hat.

“You’re looking at the end of an empire,” he announced.
“These are the shreds of an empire.
The courts took all the sentiment out of me.
These, these are things.
Just things.
Why should I be sad?”

But it was sad to witness the now-frail senior citizen, cane in hand, trying to recall some of his treasures, helped by auctioneer Jim Gall.

“God bless the people who acquire some of these things,” Novack reflected.
“Let them enjoy them.
I never really enjoyed them.”

Miami Herald
reporter Mary Voboril accompanied Novack on his unsentimental journey.

He passed by a smallish Russian clock flanked by little onion domes [Voboril later wrote], marble desks fitted with gilt inkwells and bronze lions but no pens, lampstands fashioned out of gamboling bronze nymphs, rows of delicate crystal.

“I had more glasses,” Novack said.
“Lots and lots of glasses; boxes of glasses.”

“I think they were Lalique,” said auctioneer Jim Gall.

“A lot of what?”
said Novack, bending closer.

“His hearing is not as good as it once was.
Neither is his memory.”

During the tour, he suddenly lashed out at Miami Beach for not doing more to help him save his Fontainebleau.

“I did enough for Miami Beach,” he snapped, “but I did not get them to reciprocate.
They got what they deserved.
Decline.”

His mood only brightened when he proudly told the
Herald
reporter and photographer how he had won a retraction from their newspaper after it dared accuse him of Mafia involvement.

“
The Miami Herald
tried to bury me as Mafia,” he declared, “until they apologized to me in the front section of the paper.
The Knight Boys apologized.
Hah.
They said, ‘Ben, don’t go to court against us.’”

When asked how much money he expected to make from the weekend auction, Novack replied he hoped to get just enough to buy Bernice a lavalier that she particularly wanted.

“I hold my weight down,” he suddenly said out of nowhere, “because I have no money to buy food.”

Then, a few minutes later, he announced that he had enough money to last him for the rest of his life.

At the end of the tour, Novack was asked if he would like to be remembered as the man who built the Fontainebleau.

“I
am
Mr.
Fontainebleau,” he replied, after a brief pause.
“Look, I have it right here.”

Then, reaching into his shirt pocket, he pulled out a miniature replica of the crescent-shaped Fontainebleau on the end of a heavy gold chain.
Somebody then asked how he had got it, but he could only scratch his head, unable to remember.

The following day, Ben Novack Sr.
was admitted to the hospital with dangerously high blood pressure, and was too ill to attend the auction.

*   *   *

On Saturday morning, almost five hundred people turned up to bid on the Fontainebleau treasures.
Bernice Novack came with some friends, immaculately dressed in white hose and tan heels, her trademark red hair perfectly styled for the occasion.
She appeared indifferent, downplaying any feelings she might have had about witnessing the final nail in the Fontainebleau’s coffin.

“You lose the sentiment for it,” she told a reporter.
“They just become objects.
I hope the people who buy them find great happiness with them.”

There was no shortage of buyers, as item after item was eagerly snapped up, raising a total of $200,000.
A Chinese palace vase on a rosewood pedestal went for $6,750, while a cigar box given to Ben Novack Sr.
by former Cuban president Fulgencio Batista fetched $125.

Among the other items for sale was a montage of photos of Ben Novack Sr.
with movie star Ann-Margret, going for $25, and a chamber pot for $75.

However, some of the most valuable Fontainebleau items had long since found their way to Bernice Novack’s Fort Lauderdale home, where they were now housed in a special museum.

*   *   *

Three weeks after the auction, Ben Novack Sr.
bounced back, sinking more than $1 million into a brand-new nightclub in Boynton Beach.
He had now relocated to the scenic oceanfront community sixty miles south of Miami Beach, vowing to transform his club into a world-class resort.

“It looks like a lovely area for good clean exploitation of nice people,” Novack explained to
The Miami Herald
.
“We’re here.
We’re full of ego and ready to go.”

His latest idea was Alcatraz, a prison-themed entertainment park.
He had transformed an old A&P supermarket on South Federal Highway into an entertainment prison, complete with a restaurant, bar, and disco.

After entering through a velvet rope, guests were first “booked” by staff dressed as prison guards, before having their mug shots taken.
Then they were escorted to individual cells, either to be seated on toilet seats behind bars, or to be placed in a mesh-screened booth to prevent “contact visits.”

Dinner was served by waiters in full warden outfits.
Afterward, “inmates” were directed outside into “the Yard,” to play on a huge pool table dug into the ground, using croquet mallets instead of cues.

At the December grand opening, a wheelchair-bound Ben Novack Sr.
was so confident of success that he was already planning franchises in three other Florida locations.

“People don’t want to spend the big prices anymore,” he explained, as his former Miss Uruguay girlfriend looked on admiringly.
“We built something we think will be for the everyday public.”

Bernice Novack also attended the Alcatraz opening, with her personal hairdresser, Emmanuel Buccola, and his partner, Guy Costaldo.

“It was very exciting,” Costaldo recalled.
“Ben was ill and in a wheelchair at the time, but all these people from the Fontainebleau were there.
It was a very unique place.
There would be alarms constantly going off, like someone was escaping.
It was different.”

*   *   *

While his father was devoting himself to Alcatraz, Ben Novack Jr.’s convention business was going from strength to strength.
He had now renamed his company Convention Concepts Unlimited, and was starting to make big money.
His training at the Fontainebleau hotel had proved invaluable, and he was now using every trick in the book he had learned from his father.

In late 1984, Mark Gatley, who ran the Niagara Falls Convention and Visitor’s Bureau, received a phone call from Ben Novack Jr.
out of the blue.
“He said he had an Amway program for us,” Gatley recalled.
“Do we have dates and space to do a meeting in the Niagara Falls Convention Center?”

The meeting was a success, and over the next few years Gatley would host many Amway conventions for Ben Novack Jr., getting to know him well.

“Well, Ben was a very difficult, tough businessman,” Gatley said.
“He argued about the price … and got what he wanted.
But he was a gentleman who paid his bill on time.”

The president of Convention Concepts Unlimited often demanded that a preconvention meeting be held on Thanksgiving or other major holidays, with little thought for anyone’s family obligations.

“That was unusual,” Gatley explained, “and I think he did it because he wanted to make a deliberate entrance into a community.
It was very unorthodox from an industry standpoint, and would unfortunately set a tone in many cases.”

Ben Novack Jr.
soon gained a bad reputation in the tightly knit convention industry as being difficult to please.

“[Everyone] found his character interesting,” said Gatley, “because he would be complimentary, and then he would add that ‘but’ in the second sentence, and there would be something wrong.”

Ben Jr.
also played up his Fontainebleau heritage, using it to reprimand any convention center that failed to measure up to his demanding standards.

“He was extremely hands-on,” said Gatley.
“And you look at his history.
We knew he grew up in the hotel business.”

One particular trick Ben Jr.
had learned from his father was especially exasperating to the industry.
He always refused to sign any contracts requiring payments up front, which gave him an escape clause to back out at any time without having to pay a cent.

T
WENTY

“A DREAMER AND A CREATOR”

After Club Alcatraz predictably bombed, Ben Novack Sr.
scaled things down.
He took over the concessions for the City of Hollywood public golf course, paying the city $84,000 to run the clubhouse restaurant and bar.
Within a few months this, too, tanked, with Novack’s company going out of business.

“Terrible,” said his former Fontainebleau manager Lenore Toby.
“It was mortifying.
Horrible.”

On the thirtieth anniversary of the opening of the Fontainebleau, Ben Novack Sr.
was now living in exile in the Boynton Beach neighborhood of Ocean Ridge.
Although the former Miss Uruguay Juana Rodríguez Muñoz, now thirty, was his constant companion, his ex-wife Bernice visited daily, ensuring that he took his medication and ate properly.

“They couldn’t live with each other,” explained Maxine Fiel, “and they couldn’t live without each other.
Bernice would go and see Ben with Miss Uruguay there, to see that he was okay and that he had his soup.
It was the strangest thing.”

Maxine believes her sister still carried a torch for her ex-husband, and wished they had stayed together.
“Toward the end,” said Maxine, “Bernice said, ‘I never should have divorced him.’”

To mark the hotel’s thirtieth anniversary, Ben Sr.
granted an interview to
Miami Herald
writer Mike Capuzzo, revealing that he had never returned to the hotel since losing it six years earlier.

Published on Sunday, February 19, 1984, the story, carrying the headline “The Sand Castle,” painted a sad portrait of a beaten old man still fighting for his just credit for designing the Fontainebleau.

“I entertained kings and queens and presidents all over the world,” Novack told Capuzzo.
“The glory I got being Mr.
Fontainebleau will go on forever … but there was no glory in building a failure.
Miami Beach went from being one of the most gorgeous places in America to the dumps … including the Fontainebleau.”

The article wryly noted that “old friends” were becoming concerned about Novack’s often erratic thinking.
“[He] says he’s a millionaire in one breath,” read the article, “a pauper in the next.
On its 30th anniversary, Novack sometimes wishes he had never built the hotel.”

In the article, Novack again bitterly attacked Morris Lapidus for daring to take any credit for the Fontainebleau’s iconic design.
“It was my idea to have the curved building,” he declared.
“It was my idea to decorate it.
It was my idea to build it.
It was my idea to pay for it.
He helped.
He was part-and-parcel of me.
We worked together.
He did a lot of the décor.
He’s a very clever man.
But Ben Novack designed that building.”

For balance, Morris Lapidus was also interviewed for the article:

“This is an illiterate man who thinks he designed the Fontainebleau,” said the now-world-famous architect.
“He has grand delusions.
He had no more to do with it than a man sweeping a street.
He’s the greatest egotist in the world.
He’s a man I once tried to kill and almost succeeded.”

Ben Novack Sr.
lashed out: “He’s full of crap.
The idea came to me in a bathroom.
When I thought of the Fontainebleau I was in the john and sitting on it.
My wife was witness to it.”

At the end of the article, Novack attempted to articulate his life achievements:

“They say Ben Novack built Miami Beach,” he said.
“I don’t know.
I gave it all I had.
Everything I’ve ever done was on a grand scale, and it was all successful.
My heroes are the famous people of the world.
I always loved winners.
Those are the heroes—winners.
When you lose, you’re not a winner.
I did my duty.
They can never destroy the Fontainebleau.”

*   *   *

In October 1984, Ben Novack Sr.
signed over his power of attorney to his twenty-nine-year-old son before being admitted to a nursing home after leg surgery.
Two months later, Ben Jr.
filed a suit seeking the return of money and jewelry from his father’s young girlfriend, Juana Rodríguez Muñoz, including a $100,000 loan, a $15,000 ring, a gold bracelet, and a money clip.
He also sought an injunction barring her from communicating with his father.

In the suit, Ben Jr.
claimed that his father had paid her for “companionship.”

Three months later, Ben Jr.
asked a Dade County Circuit Court judge to declare his father mentally incompetent, and appoint him and Bernice Novack as Ben Sr.’s legal guardians.

Ben Jr.
would later reveal that his elderly father spent the final eighteen months of his life hovering in and out of sanity.

“He would never want the world to know how he spent his last days,” said Ben Jr.

*   *   *

On Saturday, March 30, 1985, Ben Novack Sr.
suffered a major stroke and was admitted to Mount Sinai Medical Center in Miami Beach.
Five days later, as her seventy-eight-year-old boyfriend fought for his life in intensive care, Juana Rodríguez Muñoz’s attorney filed papers to stop Ben Jr.
and his mother from being appointed Ben Sr.’s guardians.
Her motion pointed out that as Ben Jr.
“may stand to inherit substantially all” of his father’s estate, appointing him guardian would be a “conflict of interest.”

She called for “a totally disinterested third party” to be made guardian, and a full investigation into how the elderly Novack had been kept “over-sedated,” and “held virtually incommunicado from his friends.”

Rodríguez Muñoz’s motion blamed Ben Sr.’s treatment for causing the stroke, alleging that his son had improperly obtained power of attorney and was now using it to “harass” her.

She claimed to have lived with Ben Novack Sr.
on and off for the last five years, calling their relationship “a labor of love” motivated by “genuine care and concern.”

*   *   *

On Thursday, April 4, Ben Novack Sr.
rallied and was taken out of intensive care, and listed as in good condition.

“Novack Improving, But Fight for Fortune Takes Turn for Worse,” read the headline in that morning’s
Miami Herald.

Then, on Friday morning, he suffered a relapse, and at 10:38
P.M
., Ben Novack Sr.
died, after his heart and lungs finally gave out.

*   *   *

Ben Jr.
handled the funeral, arranging to have his father’s body brought back to Miami Beach for a Saturday night viewing.

The next day,
The Miami Herald
carried a front-page obituary for the man who had changed the face of Miami Beach forever.

“I’ll only be stopped by God,” it quoted the hotelier as saying at his darkest moment, nearly eight years earlier, after losing his dream.

Further inside the paper was a death notice, paid for by Ben Novack Jr.

“Ben, 78,” it read, “debonair Hotelier and Entrepreneur, came to Miami Beach in 1940.
A Dreamer and Creator, he owned and built six hotels, including the San Souci and Miami Beach Flagship Resort, the Fontainebleau, which he owned and ran for twenty-four years.

“His greatest love was Miami Beach.
He is survived by his loving son Ben Jr.
and sisters Miriam Spier and Lillian Brezner.”

That Monday, a service was held at the Riverside Chapel.

“It was a whole big thing,” said Guy Costaldo, who went with Bernice.
“A lot of people from the hotel were there.
It was a mob scene.”

Later, Ben Novack Sr.
made his final journey back to New York, to be buried in the Novack-Spier family mausoleum at the Mount Lebanon Cemetery in Queens.

*   *   *

A month later, Juana Rodríguez Muñoz filed a $500,000 slander suit against Ben Jr.
for claiming she had provided paid companionship for his father.

“It could turn into a contest for the will,” speculated attorney Richard Marx, who now represented Ben Jr.
“It’s a very sad situation.”

In April 1987, Rodríguez Muñoz abruptly dropped the suit, after both sides came to an undisclosed agreement.

Exactly how much money Ben Sr.
squirreled away in offshore accounts or other hideaways may never be known.
His will left Bernice $2,500 a month for the rest of her life, and set up a $60,000-a-year trust fund for Ben Jr.
Maxine Fiel estimates that Ben Sr.
left his son around $1 million and all his possessions.
His sister Lillian was also well taken care of.

Ronald Novack, Ben Sr.’s long-forgotten adoptive son with his first wife, Bella, who was now suffering from mental illness and virtually homeless, received just one dollar under a codicil.
This ensured that Ronald could never contest his will.