The Season

Ronald Kessler

• Publisher: Harper
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9780062047656
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Popular Culture
• Index: Social Sciences

Palm Beach is known around the world as the most wealthy, glamorous, opulent, decadent, self-indulgent, sinful spot on earth. With their beautiful 3.75 square-island constantly in the media glare, Palm Beachers protect their impossibly rich society from outside scrutiny with vigilant police, ubiquitous personal security staffs, and screens of tall hedges encircling every mansion.

To this bizarre suspicious, exclusive world, New York Times bestselling author Ronald Kessler brought his charm, insight, and award-winning investigative skills, and came to know Palm Beach, its celebrated and powerful residents, and its exotic social rituals as no outside writer ever has. In this colorful, entertaining, and compulsively readable book. Kessler reveals the inside story of Palm Beach society as it moves languidly through the summer months, quickens in the fall, and shifts into frenetic high speed as the season begins in December, peaks in January and February, and continues into April.

When unimaginable wealth combines with unlimited leisure time oil an island barely three times the size of New York's Central Park, human foibles and desires, lust and greed, passion and avarice, become magnified and intensified. Like laboratory rats fed growth hormones, the 9, 800 Palm Beach residents—87 percent of whom are millionaires—exhibit the most outlandish extremes of their breed.

To tell the story, Kessler follows four Palm Beachers through the season. These four characters—the reigning queen of Palm Beach society, the night manager of Palm Beach's trendiest bar, a gay "walker" who escorts wealthy women to balls, and a thirty—six-year-old gorgeous blonde who says she "can't find a guy in Palm Beach"—know practically everyone on the island and tell what goes on behind the scenes.

Interweaving the yarns of these unfor-gettable figures with the lifestyle, history, scandals, lore, and rituals of a unique island of excess, The Season creates a powerful, seamless, juicy narrative that no novelist could dream up.

SUMMER/FALL

PRELUDE

1. Pretenders

In early June, just as Barton Gubelmann, the grand first lady of Palm Beach’s Old Guard, was explaining how Palm Beach society works, the phone rang.

“Oh, shit. Let the maid take it,” the eighty-year-old scion said in a gravelly voice. Behind her, beyond the lily ponds and the burgeoning sea-grape trees, the Atlantic glistened.

An invitation to one of Gubelmann’s gala dinner parties is coveted more than acceptance by the Everglades Club or the Bath & Tennis Club, the two WASP clubs that dominate Palm Beach social life and conversation. For her last party of the season, on May 9, Gubelmann dressed as a milkmaid. The invitation billed the party “Operation Deep Freeze” and explained: “Barton Is Cleaning Out the Freezer and Wants the Cupboard Bare.” Dress called for “Flip Flops and Aprons.”

The seventy-eight guests, who dined on pheasant pie, ham, and cold beef tenderloin, included Palm Beach mayor Paul R. Ilyinsky and his wife, Angelica; Lesly Smith, the town council president whose late husband, Earl, was ambassador to Cuba; Durie Appleton, a girlfriend of John F. Kennedy who was erroneously said to have been married to him; Prince Michel de Yougoslavie, ousted Yugoslav royalty; Chris Kellogg, an heir to the Wanamaker department-store fortune; Angela Koch (pronounced ‘coke’), wife of near-billionaire William Koch; Princess Maria Pia of Italy; Jane Smith, from Standard Oil Company of New Jersey money; and Cynthia Rupp, an heir to the Chrysler fortune.

Unlike many other Palm Beach socialites, Gubelmann has no publicity agent and no bio to hand out. Why should she? She is Palm Beach society. After social queens Mary Sanford and Sue Whitmore both died in 1993 (Whitmore having succeeded Sanford as queen), the Palm Beach Daily News handicapped Gubelmann eight to one to rule over Palm Beach society. She said she didn’t want the job.

Self-deprecating, irreverent, and publicity-shy, Gubelmann is a contrast to Palm Beach’s plastic shivers. She is the widow of Walter Gubelmann, an America’s Cup financier whose father, William, invented handy gadgets like the bicycle coaster brake and the basic mechanisms used in adding machines, typewriters, and early calculators. If she wasn’t already rich, Gubelmann would make a good CEO. Shrewd and smart, she exercises her authority deftly and like a good boss rarely reveals her true powers.

Like other Palm Beach socialites, she shuttles back and forth among her homes. During the season, she lives in Palm Beach, where she has what she calls her “very small house” on South Ocean Boulevard, just two houses north of the home John Lennon and Yoko Ono owned. Assessed at $2.9 million, Barton’s house is a gray-shingled contemporary with a pagodalike roof. At the entrance is a lily pond with a fountain, and in back is the requisite pool, rarely used. Inside, on an upholstered chair, sits a green pillow embroidered with the words IT AIN’T EASY BEING QUEEN. Outside, the vanity plate on her Mercedes reads GLAMMA.

Now, in off-season, Gubelmann was preparing to make her annual pilgrimage to her palatial home in Newport, Rhode Island. Gubelmann would fly there with one of her maids, her dog, and her cat, having bought tickets for each of the animals. Her assistant, Arthur “Skip” Kelter, a graying man with a perpetually bemused expression, would drive up in her Mercedes. A Chevy van with another driver would haul a twelve-foot trailer containing her clothes and Skip’s computer.

J. Paul Getty said, “If you can actually count your money, then you are not really a rich man.” Asked how much she is worth, Gubelmann responded in kind: “I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t sit home and count it. I have no idea. Someone must have it on some piece of paper. We have lawyers and accountants and bookkeepers.” But Gubelmann is said to be worth close to $100 million. When asked about that, she said, “Is that what it is? I’m glad to know it. I’ll spend some money today.”

Palm Beachers hold Gubelmann in awe, and many doubted she would ever meet with me, much less be candid. I first came to Palm Beach four years earlier to conduct research on Joseph P. Kennedy for my book The Sins of the Father. Residents like Dennis E. Spear, the caretaker of the Kennedy estate, and Cynthia Stone Ray, one of Rose Kennedy’s former secretaries, filled me in—not only on the Kennedys, but on the secrets, lore, and rituals of Palm Beach. Spear took me to Au Bar, where Senator Edward M. Kennedy had been on the night that his nephew William Kennedy Smith picked up the woman who would later accuse him of raping her—a charge that a jury found to be without basis. Cynthia gave me a tour of Palm Beach’s mansions.

I was drawn to this bizarre town. Like most people, I hadn’t realized that Palm Beach is located on a fifteen-mile-long subtropical barrier island, of which twelve miles is Palm Beach. On the rest, the southern tip, are the towns of Manalapan and South Palm Beach. The island’s width varies at different points from five hundred feet to three quarters of a mile. Lake Worth, a coastal lagoon that is part of the Intracoastal Waterway, separates the island from the mainland about a half mile away. In 1870 settlers cut a ditch between the northern end of Lake Worth and the Atlantic. The inlet was later enlarged, and another was cut at the southern tip of the barrier strip, turning it into an island.

With only 9,800 residents, Palm Beach is inherently a very small town—only a few times larger than Gilmanton Iron Works, the New Hampshire village where Grace Metalious’s Peyton Place was set. Here, on $5 billion worth of real estate, live some of the richest people in the world. For many tycoons, Palm Beach is a reward, a realization of life’s pleasures in a self-contained paradise. For the heirs of old wealth, Palm Beach offers a synthetic society that reveres lineage and breeding rather than accomplishment. The celebrities who gravitate to Palm Beach ratify the residents’ sense of their own importance.

It was Edmund Burke who said, “It is, generally, in the season of prosperity that men discover their real temper, principles, and designs.” When an unimaginable concentration of wealth combines with unlimited leisure time on an island not quite three times the size of New York’s Central Park, human foibles and desires, lust and greed, passion and avarice become magnified, intensified. Like laboratory rats fed growth hormones, every resident becomes an oversized actor in an exaggerated drama.

With vigilant police, ubiquitous personal security staffs, and screens of tall ficus encircling every mansion, Palm Beachers protect their impossibly rich society from outside scrutiny. Behind the hedges, the games that Palm Beachers play—their affairs, scams, murders, snubs, intrigues, jealousies, pretenses, bigotry, and occasional generosity—make Dynasty and Dallas look like nursery tales. From the steamy divorce of Roxanne Pulitzer to the rape trial of William Kennedy Smith, the beautiful island is celebrated for its scandals. Glitzy as it is, Palm Beach is a town lost in time.

The climax of the rituals that draw characters like Barton Gubelmann to Palm Beach is the season, a frenetic rush of glittering social events. Everyone has his own definition of the season, but most say it begins after Thanksgiving and extends until the end of April. High season—when the most prestigious social events take place—runs from January through March. During these balmy months, when most of the country is suffering through the winter, the black-tie society balls that are Palm Beachers’ raison d’être take place. Tourists descend on the island, and the population swells to more than 25,000. The season is the lens through which everything else is viewed, the standard that measures the rest of the year and, by extension, life itself.

After my research for the Kennedy book, I returned to Palm Beach for a vacation with my wife, Pamela Kessler. Nearly every year after that, we have come back. During the most recent visit, we went to Testa’s, one of Palm Beach’s best restaurants. Having consumed a bottle of Chardonnay during dinner, we walked around the block. I said to Pam, “Wouldn’t it be great to do a book on Palm Beach?”

“That’s the only book I would collaborate with you on,” she said.

As a former Washington Post reporter and author of Undercover Washington, about the spy sites of the capital, Pam brought a professional perspective. Suddenly, the subject of idle chitchat became a serious concept.

Having penetrated the CIA, the FBI, and White House detail of the Secret Service for some of my previous books, I didn’t think unraveling the story of Palm Beach would be too difficult. I wasn’t prepared for some of the unique impediments I would later encounter.

In contrast, Barton Gubelmann turned out to be more than forthcoming. Before we sat down in her living room, she looked me in the eye and asked, “So what is this all about?” I returned her gaze and said I was interested in the wild stories, the colorful tales, the bizarre characters, and how things work.

In a town of pretense, directness is prized. It establishes trust and encourages candor. She responded in kind. When I asked about Palm Beach parties with nude men or women as centerpieces, Gubelmann allowed as how she hadn’t been to one but said, “You got an address?” When asked about gigolos, she said, “How do you define gigolo? I mean, I think every single man around here is a gigolo.” When asked what members of society do, Gubelmann replied, “Most of the people that are my age don’t do a damn thing but play cards, go to art classes, have dinner parties.” As for hidden honeys, she had this to say: “Mistresses have their own houses, or they’re at the Breakers Hotel or have a chic apartment.” In any case, they’re of no interest to her. “Either the men are sleeping with somebody else’s wife or they aren’t,” she said. Gubelmann previously lived next to the Kennedy estate. “Jack was my next-door neighbor,” she said. “I was having a baby, and he was having back trouble, so we did not have a romance, okay?”^*

Her shih tzu, Gertie, sauntered past, then came back and turned belly-up to be petted by Pam, who was with me. “You can take him,” Gubelmann said, her enormous blue eyes never blinking.

Gubelmann belongs to both the Everglades Club, which has an eighteen-hole par 71 golf course, and the Bath & Tennis Club, which is on the beach and has a freshwater and a saltwater pool. “They were looking for members,” she said. “They were desperate.” Until a year ago, neither club allowed members to bring Jews even as guests, according to Gubelmann. Now, she said, Jews are allowed in as guests but not as members.

“The one club nobody can get into is the Palm Beach Country Club,” she said, referring to the Jewish club. “I don’t think they have a dozen Christian members. The only person I haven’t seen [at the clubs] is a black person.”

The way to be accepted socially is to organize fund-raisers, Barton explained. “There are two or three new charities each year. New diseases. We have ball tickets and parties to raise money. That seems to be the stepping stone into what they call Palm Beach society. You get tired of running balls. I’m afraid I have run some. The Heart, Hospital, Four Arts balls. I ran one for that unfortunate social disease. What’s it called? AIDS. A good way to start is to give a lot of money to the Preservation Society of Palm Beach. This is the way these girls work it, you see. I know how they do it. I put them on the board.”

The younger women are on the prowl, maneuvering to be accepted by the older ones. Someone is “always on the make. There are pretenders to the throne,” Gubelmann remarked. One example is Celia Lipton Farris, who is worth several hundred million and has chaired key Palm Beach charity events. “Celia Farris is not Old Guard,” said Gubelmann. “She is an amusing lady. But Celia Farris has never had what I would call social standing. But who am I to say?”

Going to the study of her cypress-ceilinged mansion, Gubelmann brought out a black book called The Social Index-Directory and handed it to me. Under each family listing are addresses for as many as five additional homes, in places like Monte Carlo, Paris, London, New York, and Newport, along with the names of their planes and yachts.

“What does it mean to be in the social index?” Gubelmann said. “Not a goddamn thing. It’s just a phone book.”

Having learned from other sources that the directory, known as “the black book,” is now owned by the family of Robert Gordon, who is Jewish, I asked Gubelmann if she knew who owns the publication.

“I’ll be damned if I do know who owns it now,” she said. “Would you like to meet him? I don’t think that would be any trouble at all. I can pick up the phone and call him.

“Skip,” she called to her assistant. “Let’s see who runs this thing.”

A few minutes later Skip reported back.

“Robert Gordon owns the index,” he said.

“Oh, my friend Arlette’s husband?” Gubelmann said. “Well, bless his little cotton heart. I’ll be damned. That’s why it’s gotten bigger.” She was referring to the fact that dozens of Jews have been added. Gordon, who has an advisory board that helps make selections, was already in the black book with gold lettering. But now the Old Guard refers to it as “the Sears catalogue.”

Gubelmann gave me a twelve-by-sixteen-inch card listing some three hundred names. The Fanjuls, a prominent Palm Beach family of sugar growers, send the card out each year as a Christmas greeting. “The hell with the index,” Gubelmann said. “This is what everyone wants to make. This is the enviable list. The new people want to be on that card. It’s perfectly ridiculous, you know.”

^*Occasionally, quotes from one event or interview have been shifted to another.

2. The Good Hustler

A few days after my meeting with Barton Gubelmann, on a bank of Lake Worth, an egret poised languidly on one leg, watching a school of fish coast by. It was too hot to fly, and it was too hot to fish. And for people in Palm Beach, it was too hot to swim—and anyway, the sand fleas were biting. Some days in June it’s even too hot to go outside—a sweltering, tropical miasma, without a breeze. But...