The Palmy Beaches (And the “Other” Miami)
Mountain lovers, loyal though they remain, face a discouraging fact: mountains have been steadily going out of fashion. Furthermore, for at least thirty years, summer resorts of all varieties have been declining. The summer vacation has become an increasingly middle-class preoccupation. Perhaps, just as the first Mrs. August Belmont made Thursday (“maid’s night out”) the fashionable night for the opera—“to show her superiority to household cares”—the rich now prefer to vacation in winter, thereby showing their superiority to the normal, seasonal cares of business. Practically coincidental with the languishing “Edwardian dream” of the Adirondacks began the ascendancy of an equally romantic dream: Florida.
The social history of Florida was largely the invention of a post-Civil War tycoon named Henry Morrison Flagler, whose fortune sprang—as did so many others of the era—from his profitable association with John D. Rockefeller and the Standard Oil Company. Flagler’s special enthusiasm, however, was building railroads and vast hotels. Just as the Main Line was a railroad-real estate venture, so was the somewhat larger state of Florida—a four-hundred-and-forty-seven-mile-long peninsula seldom more than two hundred miles wide and rarely more than six feet high, which extends as though a giant rolling pin had been applied to the southeast corner of the country, and Florida had been artfully pressed out from the continental pie.
Mr. Flagler was a man of few words, or rather of briefly worded commands. He started, in the 1880’s, pushing his Florida East Coast Railroad southward; from Jacksonville, Flagler’s order was “Go to Saint Augustine,” and there, in 1889, his railroad landed and, with it, the gigantic Ponce de Leon Hotel, the first of his chain. Overnight St. Augustine became a fashionable winter resort—the first, really, of its kind and, to many, the most fashionable of them all. The Ponce de Leon (locally pronounced Ponsideelion”) is a vaguely Moorish confection of minarets, domes, spires, and vaulting archways, filled with rococo sculpture, tapestries, carpets, chandeliers, stained glass, frescoed ceilings, marble fountains, staircases, and embossments, which sprawls over six acres of downtown St. Augustine, a grandiose reminder of a more naïve time. How it continues to stay in business is a mystery, for St. Augustine has long since lost any shred of its former chic. Each year, though, a small but diminishing band of the ancient faithful returns to the hotel and gathers to sit, in drafty elegance, in the huge public rooms.
Flagler continued to extend his railroad southward, establishing resorts and building towns as he went. He built an equally imposing caravansary at Ormond Beach, now equally passé—his Ormond hotel has become a retired folks’ residence—then on to Daytona where, aided by the influx of such Flagler friends as William K. Vanderbilt and John Jacob Astor, Daytona seemed about to outshine St. Augustine. From Daytona, he moved on to Titusville. Then, in 1890, at the age of sixty, Henry Flagler made a trip to a narrow sandspit consisting mostly of swampy jungle, known as Palm Beach. (A Spanish vessel, bound for Barcelona with a load of coconuts, had been wrecked offshore a dozen years earlier; its cargo had washed ashore and coconut palms had sprouted prettily from the sand.) Here Flagler had what must have amounted to a religious experience; he had a vision of his Ultimate Hotel.
Prior to Flagler’s arrival, the area around Palm Beach had gained a certain local reputation as a social resort. A narrow-gauge railroad made an eight-mile trip from the town of Jupiter, stopping at the towns of Mars, Venus, and Juno—just north of Palm Beach Shores—and was known, not surprisingly, as “The Celestial.” It was a gay little train in a Scarlett O’Hara mood, filled with ladies in flounces and crinolines on “dance days,” and it made impromptu stops along the line so that gentlemen could leave the train for hunting forays in the woods. Arriving in Juno, the engineer tooted out “Dixie” on his whistle and sometimes, when the spirit moved, little groups took off for picnics on the “Palm Beach,” while “The Celestial” waited for the spirit to move them to return.
Charming though all this might seem, it was the consensus in 1890 that Flagler had suffered a severe loss of business judgment when he announced plans to develop Palm Beach. But when word got around that Flagler was buying land at Palm Beach, the first Florida land boom was on. Jungle acreage which had been selling for a hundred dollars an acre skyrocketed to over a thousand. (Today, in defense of the boom, Palm Beachers point out that this same land now goes for as much as a hundred thousand dollars an acre.) In 1893, Flagler broke ground for the Royal Poinciana Hotel. When it was finished, nine months later, it had cost a million 1893 dollars, and was the largest hotel in the world. It had two eighteen-hole golf courses, tennis courts, motor boats, wheelchair carriages pedaled by Negroes (called “Afromobiles,” and invented by Flagler himself), bicycles, afternoon tea dances, and evening cake walks. At the opening of the hotel, it was remarked that Flagler would be remembered by Florida the way the entire world remembered Noah. The place had rooms for eight hundred guests at the beginning, but in the wake of its immediate success it was enlarged to house four hundred more; sixteen hundred people could be seated at a time in the dining room. From the air (which few could get to in those days) the acres of the hotel were arranged in the shape of a giant letter F, not for Florida but for you-know-whom.
Vanderbilts, Whitneys, and all sorts of foreign royalty abandoned the northern Florida resorts and descended upon Palm Beach. Mrs. Edward Stotesbury—teaching her husband “how to play,” as she put it, in Society—arrived to be the colony’s social leader. Today, though the Royal Poinciana is no more, Flagler’s second Palm Beach hotel, The Breakers (smaller than the Royal Poinciana but enormous by any other standard, and originally called, more modestly, the Palm Beach Inn) still stands, maintaining an exclusive guest policy, and is still very much a center of the resort’s life, though there are now such clubs as the Everglades which count, socially, for more. And Palm Beach itself remains the most durable of all Henry Flagler’s notions. Primly, at certain street corners, there stand receptacles for the deposit of old clothes. Periodically, the old-clothes collectors find ball gowns, tuxedoes, and outworn suits of tails, deposited there as offerings for the deserving poor.
Flagler had no sooner planted his large initial on Palm Beach, where everyone thought he would surely stop, when a severe frost blighted the area. From balmier Miami, a lady friend named Julia Tuttle coyly sent Flagler a bouquet of orange blossoms, by way of showing him how much better Miami had fared during the cold snap. This prompted another of Flagler’s terse orders: “Go to Miami.”
Once in Miami, Flagler said, “Go to Key West.” He built, at great expense, an elevated roadbed on pilings from Key to Key across the water. He had originally planned to build a solid causeway, but was stopped by a curious threat. The waters of the Gulf Stream move clockwise around the Gulf, gathering speed as they near the Florida Peninsula, and are forced rapidly between the Keys. There this water meets the northward-moving Antilles Current, and the Gulf Stream swings northward, then westward across the Atlantic. If, it was argued, Flagler dammed the Keys for his railroad, the Gulf Stream might be diverted southward, thereby considerably altering the climate of northern Europe. A European engineer was, in fact, dispatched to try to persuade Flagler to reconsider his plan and, faced with the awesome possible consequences, Flagler settled for his pilings. This project took seven years, and cost him fifty million dollars. In 1912, at eighty-two, Henry M. Flagler rode his train to Key West where, with characteristic simplicity, he said, “Now I can die happy. My dream is fulfilled.” Shortly thereafter, characteristically true to his word, he did die. The Miami-Key West Railroad operated until 1935 when the great Labor Day hurricane swept it away, and a whole train with it, and along the Keys more than four hundred lives were lost.*
Meanwhile, another millionaire railroad man, Henry Plant (who once asked Henry Flagler, “Where is this place you call Palm Beach?”), was laying tracks and building hotels along Florida’s West Coast. Plant was a less flamboyant personality, and his resorts—such as Clearwater—were less spectacular—cozy, homey, family-centered places. One exception was his Tampa Bay Hotel, headquarters of Teddy Roosevelt’s Rough Riders during the Spanish-American War, and currently the chief eyesore on the campus of the University of Tampa. While Flagler concentrated on luring celebrities and international Society to the Atlantic shores of Florida, Plant was satisfied with attracting quieter money to the Gulf. The difference between the two men’s visions is responsible for the most striking difference in atmosphere between the East Coast and the West. The East Coast is glossy and gay, while the West Coast remains relaxed and easygoing. The East Coast goes in for polo, squash racquets, and a bit of discreet gambling; the West Coast prefers fishing, golf, badminton, and bridge. Such glittering figures as Mrs. Marjorie Merriweather Post Close Hutton Davies May are polarized around Palm Beach, while less publicized Society women, such as Mrs. Joseph R. Swan, co-founder of the Junior League, have traditionally wintered at Boca Grande, on the West. As one West Coast woman, with an eastward wave of her hand, puts it, “We enjoy ourselves here without trying to be snazzy.” Palm Beach, says the West Coast, is for climbers, and “always was.” The West Coast also hints that in Palm Beach the alcohol consumption is particularly high, that marijuana, LSD, and other drugs have become commonplaces of Society life, and that such traditions as marital fidelity are now utterly ignored.
The two railroad men succeeded, in other words, in defining a familiar line of battle—which place was nicer, the Gold Coast or the Gulf Coast. The Gold Coast used to begin at Jupiter Island, and extend south to Miami. Now, the first signs of fashionability are encountered somewhat north of Jupiter, at the sleek little community of Vero Beach. Vero Beach likes to call itself “the little Palm Beach,” and to hint that its smallness is to its distinct advantage. On the opposite coast, however, the little town of Naples scoffs at Vero Beach’s claims. True, much of Naples’s winter money comes from fortunes made in such Middle Western cities as Cleveland and Louisville, but a number of Easterners—who always help things socially—have built houses there too. Along Gordon Drive is “Millionaires’ Row,” proudly pointed out to all visitors. “Very few people know about Naples,” says a Connecticut woman who spends her winters there. She echoes a popular, and increasingly erroneous, Naples belief. Many, many people know about Naples now, and motels are springing up all around it, and the town is becoming increasingly tourist-oriented as, indeed, the whole Gulf Coast from Cedar Key south is becoming. Still, Naples considers itself exclusive in the strictest sense (no Jews, please) and, though Naples needs Negroes for house servants, up until quite recently Negroes were not permitted to own houses in the town. “They had to rent their houses,” one woman explains. “That way, we could control the class of colored people in Naples. Anyone who caused trouble could be evicted, you see.”
Back on the Gold Coast, meanwhile, roughly halfway between Palm Beach and Fort Lauderdale, glitters Boca Raton. Boca Raton was the brainchild of another spectacular Florida personality, Addison Mizner. Before going broke—as so many Florida developers before and after him have had a habit of doing—Mizner built the gigantic Boca Raton Hotel and Club which, like the town itself, has had a varied social history. It was first a hotel, then a private club, then a hotel again. Now its chief target is the convention trade. Several years ago the late Arthur Vining Davis—who came to Florida as recently as 1948, and whose Arvida Corporation became one of the most powerful forces in Southern Florida real estate—bought the hotel. Soon it was pulling out of its slump. Davis built the Royal Palm Yacht and Country Club, now one of the most expensive residential clubs in the country. With additional financial infusions from men like J. Myer Schine and his son, G. David Schine, the former McCarthy lieutenant who operates Schine hotels in Miami Beach, Boca Raton’s fortunes are definitely on the upswing. Schine interests are building high-priced houses in the area and, though Old Guard Society tends to think of Boca Raton as “ruined”—and with Miami Beach money, of all things—those who are building and moving into costly houses there are laughing fondly at this attitude.
Fort Lauderdale for years was considered Florida’s nicest, quietest, most comfortably family-centered upper-class resort—“really better than Palm Beach,” as one old Lauderdale resident explains. “We all knew each other, and our children all knew each other—from the same schools, and from Edgartown in the summers. Oh, it was heaven in Fort Lauderdale.” Fort Lauderdale was a yachtsman’s place, and the Bahia-Mar Marina is said to be able to accommodate enough yachts to jam New York harbor, shore to shore. Fishing, cruising, boat-buying, and boat talk remain Fort Lauderdale’s most popular pastimes. Though a number of large, tall, pastel-hued luxury hotels have arisen along Lauderdale’s ocean front—hotels of a style that becomes increasingly familiar the nearer one gets to Miami—their presence was tolerated by property owners, since the hotels did not obtrude on the expensive residential districts along the canals, inlets, and island shores.
In fact, though the city was growing, Fort Lauderdale might have gone on its leisurely, boat-loving way had it not been for a curious and sudden annual event: Easter Week. How it happened to spring up there no one knows. In the thirties and forties, Easter Week—or College Week, or Rugby Week—took place in Bermuda, which was the favorite spring retreat for well-off college boys and girls. Then, shortly after World War II, it moved to Fort Lauderdale. As used to be the case in Bermuda, college students from all over the East suddenly descended on Fort Lauderdale—camping six-to-a-room in hotels, sleeping in parked cars or on the beaches. In the beginning the city was amused. As the lemming-like migrations grew larger, it became dismayed. Bermuda (the British have long been better at dealing with colonials than we Americans) used to manage to keep College Week under some semblance of control. But when Fort Lauderdale tried to crack down on, or at least, organize, the event, it sometimes disintegrated into riots and bloodshed and trips to the lockup. Police toughness did not discourage the youthful invaders; if anything, it added an element of excitement to the whole thing. But the teens are a fickle age, and other Florida resorts—Daytona, Pompano Beach, Hollywood-by-the-Sea—have begun to attract College Week crowds, and recently an impressive number have been making their way to Puerto Rico. Fort Lauderdale is relieved and, during its season—traditionally the months of February and March—is trying to regain its old composure.
As one approaches the vicinity of Palm Beach, one nears the storm center of more controversy. Palm Beach is at war with Hobe Sound, a fashionable upstart to the north. There is also a Palm Beach versus Delray Beach argument and, of course, one between Palm Beach and Fort Lauderdale. (The Palm Beach versus Pompano Beach feud is considered a side issue.) The Palm Beach versus Miami Beach battle has been going on for years, and a cease-fire no longer seems possible.
The chief (if perhaps not the most able-bodied) contender in all this strife, Palm Beach, has the advantage of age; she is now the grande dame of all Florida’s still-fashionable resorts. Despite the aspersions cast at her through the years, she has kept her jeweled head high. And, it must be admitted, she wears her age surprisingly well. Whether one drives past the miles of trimmed lawns and pruned shrubbery in front of the mansions on Ocean Boulevard, or strolls in and out of the dainty, expensive, and “fun” shops and restaurants along Worth Avenue, the same sense of unity and control is apparent. It is as though Palm Beach were the creation of a single set designer.
Actually, there have been several. Following Henry Flagler, the extraordinary Addison Mizner—artist, miner, prizefighter and self-schooled architect—did as much as anyone else to crystallize the personality of Palm Beach. Along with Paris Singer, son of I. M. Singer, the sewing machine manufacturer, and famous as the traveling companion of Isadora Duncan, Mizner took Flagler’s creation, face-lifted what was there and added a great deal more. Mizner’s taste is responsible for Palm Beach’s Mediterranean style of architecture which has been called “Walt Disney Castilian.”
In the early 1900’s, prior to Mizner’s arrival, Palm Beach exhibited a strong tendency to gingerbread; Mizner got rid of all that and replaced it with the grandeur of fountains, pebbled walks, and topiary. He would certainly have approved of the presence of so many French poodles today, which look as though they had been clipped to match the place. Later architects have followed the Mizner pattern, though they have added a bit of the white-roofed Bermuda Colonial style, with which Mizner-Mediterranean blends more or less comfortably. “We are not fond of so-called ‘modern’ architecture in Palm Beach,” one woman explains. Some of that has got in, apparently by mistake, but most of it is on the side streets and out of sight.
The things that are most impressive about Palm Beach—its manicured perfection and air of well-being—are the things which, after a while, become most oppressive about it to many people. Palm Beach has been accused of being full of nouveaux riches—those who, traditionally, are said to find a stiff and formal attitude more reassuring—and it is true that some of the older wealth has forsaken Palm Beach and gone to the much smaller community of Hobe Sound, where the atmosphere has become more relaxed and old-clothesy, and where tourists are given a chilly, if not openly hostile, reception. Palm Beach, meanwhile, counters by pointing out that it is not fond of tourists, either; it is proud of its police force which is credited with knowing, at any given time, just who belongs in Palm Beach and who does not. “We,” says one loyal winter resident, Mrs. Edmund Lynch, “say that it’s Hobe Sound that’s become nouveau.” So there you are.
The composition of Palm Beach’s winter population has changed considerably in the last thirty years. Palm Beach used to feel that it more or less belonged to New York, or at least to Eastern United States, Society. But lately there have been invasions from Middle Western cities, and from the oil lands of Oklahoma and Texas. Delray Beach used to be a Detroit community, like many other Florida communities which were originally settled by people from a particular city in the North. Now, Detroit money is represented in Palm Beach also, and millionaires like Charles B. Wrightsman, the Oklahoma oil man, have come to Palm Beach. There is no longer just one Palm Beach “set” but several—including the Old Guard, the Jet Set, and what is known as The Kennedys and Their Friends.
There are at least two other Palm Beach phenomena that are worth comment, and in certain ways the two are connected. One is the resort’s recent sudden and avid interest in art, artists, and art galleries. Galleries have sprung up all along Worth Avenue, and young painters have discovered that they can often sell their paintings faster, and for higher prices, in Palm Beach than in New York. The market here is for paintings that are strictly contemporary—the more advanced and daring, the better they sell. At the same time, according to one artist, Palm Beach people don’t really seem to care about art; they just want to buy it, which makes a Palm Beach gallery opening somewhat less satisfying to the artist than one in Manhattan. “These Society dames buy pictures the way they buy diamonds,” he says. “For status.”
The other phenomenon—not unique to Palm Beach, certainly, but explicitly apparent there—is the emergence of what might be called the Kept Man as a fixture of Society. The Kept Woman has certainly undergone a great decline—how many men have one of her kind today?—and the Kept Man has risen to fill her place. He performs, of course, a somewhat different function. One sees him all over Palm Beach at parties—never alone, always in a group, always impeccably tailored, yet always in some elusive way looking rather “extra.” Usually homosexual (one assumes), he is usually handsome. He is usually young, or at least not specifically old, or even middle-aged. A middle-aged dowager may have several—a little retinue who follow her and flatter her and amuse her, wherever she goes. Each has a room in her Palm Beach house and, as a rule, in all her houses elsewhere. But the Kept Man is not exclusively an adjunct of women without husbands. Many married couples have one, even several, of their own. The Kept Man’s function is to be decorative, attentive, and—most important—amusing. If he belongs to a couple, he is the wife’s particular pet and toy—and is merely tolerated by the husband who recognizes that this man, while not a sexual threat, supplies his wife with something that he cannot. “He makes her laugh,” one man says. “And they do things together—go shopping for antiques or clothes—that I’ve never really enjoyed doing with her.”
France, Italy, Spain, and Greece seem to supply the greatest share of Kept Men to American women—who prefer men with a “Mediterranean look”—though England, too, has sent a number to these shores. Many Kept Men have titles—some bona fide, others not. Often the Kept Man will have some occupation or other, vague or specific, such as interior decorator, or he may be a hairdresser, a clothes designer, or a painter or sculptor or photographer needing sponsorship. But often as not his profession is uncertain, his antecedents dim, his source of income hard to find. He must be available for parties and be able to travel; few men can do all this and work, too. Sometimes, the Kept Man will actually be on his protectress’s payroll, in which case he may be called a private secretary, though his duties extend far beyond the secretarial and his working day does not end at five o’clock. In several cases, the Kept Man has become an actual, permanent, “live-in” member of the household.* As far as can be discovered, the wages paid to such an individual are astonishingly small. One young man reveals that his employer—he calls her by her first name, of course—pays him only two hundred dollars a month. “Isn’t that a bitch?” he asks with a wry gin. But of course, there are other compensations—fringe benefits such as meeting and being entertained by the rich, famous, and beautiful wherever he goes; having, when in Paris one autumn, his lady surprise him with a brown velvet suit—a fabric he had helped her choose for a sofa—run up by Christian Dior. When in Madrid one spring, he was presented with a matador’s full “suit of lights.”
In many ways, the phenomenon of the Kept Man makes a certain amount of sense and, as an institution, he should have far less trouble surviving than the Kept Woman. The Kept Woman, to begin with, was often shrouded in a certain veil of sin and secrecy whereas, with the Kept Man, no threat or possibility of scandal exists. To the woman whose husband is often at the office, or whose business takes him on trips to boring places, the Kept Man is a pleasant, nonsexual male companion. He is nearly always lunchable and otherwise available to hurry over and cheer her up with witty talk and a bit of flattery. He is someone to have a cocktail with. If the woman’s husband cannot—or will not—fly off to Paris for the Spring Collections, there is the Kept Man, waiting and ready with his passport up-to-date. In nearly every capital of Europe, it is considered inappropriate for a woman to appear on a street unescorted, and so the Kept Man fulfills this function too. And what woman—anywhere—enjoys going into a restaurant, or to the theatre, or to a party, except on a man’s arm?
There are other kinds of husbands, too, than busy ones whose wives Kept Men serve. In New York, one Society husband is an arrested alcoholic and is uncomfortable in the liquid atmosphere of New York social life. He is delighted that his wife has found an elegant and attentive man to take her everywhere he cannot go; without such a man, she would have had to withdraw from social life completely. There is also the husband whose wealth is so substantial and whose ambitions are so modest that he does no work at all. The cruel fact that those in Society seldom admit is that between the parties and the lunches and the committee meetings and the travels stretch long, dull hours. With servants to care for them, how is a couple like this to occupy themselves in the still and stony fastness of their house? For the husband, television may provide sufficient entertainment. For the wife, the Kept Man helps fill the yawning hours with gin rummy and conversation.
If a woman is rich enough, she will have her own Kept Man; if not, she will share him with a friend or two. In most cases, the relationship between each woman and her man is kept carefully superficial but, from time to time, strange things have happened and deep attachments have developed. There have even been cases of widows or divorcees marrying their young men. A more common problem, if a woman shares her man with others, is jealousy. In Paris not long ago, an American Society woman had begun accusing her young man of devoting an unfair share of his time to other women, of refusing to answer the telephone when she called, of making shallow excuses, and of other such hostile acts. The two began to quarrel bitterly. Walking along the banks of the Seine, the woman and her young man accused each other of the most terrible treacheries and, following a particularly pointed insult from the young man, the woman reached into her purse, took out a gold Cartier cigarette case he had given her, and hurled it into the river. “That case cost me two thousand dollars!” the young man cried. The woman hurried off. When the young man returned to his room, he found his floor littered with one-dollar bills. When he had picked them up, and counted them, there were two thousand exactly.
There are two other facts that make the Kept Man’s place in Society seem secure. The first is that except in extreme instances a Kept Man can be counted upon to treat a woman far better than most husbands treat their wives. Among the Kept Man’s greatest appeals is his flattering interest in feminine matters—the style of his lady’s hair, her clothes, her furniture—and his gossipy interest in the doings of her friends. Second is the fact that a Kept Man will usually take a good deal more abuse from a woman than a husband will willingly take from his wife. The Kept Man is also the woman’s whipping-boy—the target of all her fits of temper, her weepy moods, all her angst. The Kept Man will put up, from time to time, with flying crockery, and the husband is therefore spared. And, according to one such husband, “Since G——became a part of our household, she’s been a hell of a better wife.”
One young man not long ago smiled faintly and said, “It’s probably the only way in the world to get in Society without having money. But of course there are drawbacks. They have their ways of letting you know where you stand. A trip is planned, and they’ll say to you, ‘Of course you’ll need a ticket, darling, won’t you?’ The ticket comes—it’s delivered to you. It’s always First Class, of course. But it’s just a single ticket, charged to their Air Travel card. You travel with them, but you travel alone at the same time like a kind of—well, like a kind of … luggage.”
“Oh, what a shame you have to go to Miami,” says a Palm Beach lady. “You’ll hate it. It’s the most ghastly place, completely different from here.” Miami has become an international symbol of everything that is vulgar, meretricious, ostentatious and overpriced in the United States; Miami is Florida’s painted lady. What many believers in international symbols don’t realize, however, is that what they think of as “Miami” is actually Miami Beach. A series of long causeways joins the two places, to be sure, but it is still a considerable journey between them, and, traffic conditions being what they are, a formidable one. Guests at the spectacular hotels along Collins Avenue in Miami Beach seldom suspect that there is another Miami on the other side. And those who belong to the “other” Miami often confess that they have never laid eyes on, much less been inside, the Americana, the Fontainebleau, or the Eden Roc. The “other” Miami has remained sedate, unpublicized—exactly as it has seemed to prefer it.
This was not always so, of course, for the genesis of all Florida resorts is similar, heavily dosed with press-agentry and avarice. Miami, in fact, was the child of the Great Florida Land Boom, born around 1920, and the boom was the child of a man named George E. Merrick. Merrick had been a poor boy, the son of a clergyman, who inherited one hundred and sixty acres of South Florida land and for which his father had paid about a thousand dollars. Young George had a dream which seemed to verge on lunacy, or at least obsession—a dream of a beautiful city of beautiful homes, a city that would dwarf the then insignificant town of Miami, a city more magnificent than the world had ever seen, filled with the world’s most magnificent people. It was a dream on a larger scale than William Van Duzer Lawrence’s dream, which he brought to reality in Bronxville. Somehow Merrick managed to buy up some three thousand more acres, and to have some promotional brochures printed. Armed with these, he headed for New York, the money capital. Money turned out to be plentiful.
“He was an absolute spellbinder,” says Alfred Browning Parker, whose father became Merrick’s sales manager. “He had the kind of charisma and magnetism that the mad often have. He could sell anything.” Like Flagler, Merrick wanted a luxury hotel—and soon there was one, the Miami Biltmore, costing $10,000,000. He wanted a championship golf course and a country club, and these materialized. According to Parker, Merrick was fascinated by—without really understanding—the great cities of the Mediterranean and Adriatic. Naples, Venice, and Barcelona, which he had never visited, became his models, with a touch of the South Pacific thrown in for good measure. (When he opened a swimming place called Tahiti Beach, “real Tahitians”—so Merrick said—were imported for decoration.)
He built streets and he built canals—forty miles of them—patterned after those of Venice, and he imported Venetian gondolas and gondoliers. The gondoliers were supposed to do nothing but pole their craft up and down the canals, singing, but whether anyone heard them above the din of moneymaking is doubtful. The American rich—always eager to be first in any place that is expensive, different, and new—began buying lots and ordering palaces in Coral Gables (as Merrick named it) as fast as they were able.
In the first few months of his boom, Merrick sold $150,000,000 worth of lots; sales then tapered off to about $100,000,000 a year. All the houses built in Coral Gables naturally had to have gabled roofs, and all had to be in the Italian or Spanish style, with archways, courtyards, and bell towers. The minute there was the slightest sign of a slackening in business, Merrick came up with a new promotional gimmick. He built a pool with underwater caves, through which Johnny Weissmuller was hired to swim. Paul Whiteman and his orchestra were hired to play Merrick’s written-to-order theme song, “When the Moon Shines on Coral Gables,” standing waist-deep in moonlit water. William Jennings Bryan, then getting on and in need of money, was hired at $100,000 a year to sell Coral Gables real estate with his famous “silver tongue,” and Rex Beach, a popular writer of the era, was paid $25,000 to write a promotional brochure disguised as a “novel” called The Miracle of Coral Gables.
Meanwhile, faced with the miraculous example of George Merrick, other builders and promoters were rapidly “discovering” new areas and building new “cities”—Fort Pierce Farms, Key Largo City, Indrio, Moore Haven—on the swampy banks of Lake Okeechobee. Floridale was to be John Ringling’s city. Soon the speculators had taken over. It was the era of the “binder boy,” a colorful and popular boom figure in white knickerbockers who scurried around selling and buying “binders,” or down payments to bind deals. As the binders changed hands, sometimes hourly, their prices doubled, trebled, quadrupled. Everybody chuckled at the binder boys. If some of their methods didn’t seem quite on the up and up, it didn’t matter since everything else was going up.
In many cases, the binders represented actual building sites; in others, it turned out, they did not. There was the case of Poinciana, advertised as “The Miami of the Gulf Coast.” Poinciana, put on the Florida map by its developers, had to be taken off when it was discovered that it really wasn’t there. Thousands of unsuspecting souls had bought thousands of uninspected acres for a thousand dollars each, and most of the “lots” were under water.
“It was a glorious, kind of nutty period,” Alfred Parker recalls. Money literally seemed to grow on palmettoes, and everybody was making so much of it—and not only in building and real estate—that few bothered to notice what all the building looked like. If they had, they would have noticed that much of it was extremely ugly, haphazard, and that, with a very few exceptions (such as Mr. Merrick’s Coral Gables castles) most of the new construction was so makeshift that it looked as though a puff of wind would blow it all away.
In 1925, there was a sudden, sharp recession. Furiously, developers pumped more money into Florida land, attempting to shore up the economy and, when a few Miami banks quietly closed their doors, and a few others began calling loans, and a few Northern investors made nervous noises, Florida developers shouted, “Don’t sell Florida short!” The doubters were called worrywarts and killjoys. Glowing press releases, telling how a typical investor had paid ten dollars an acre for his land, and was now selling it at twenty-five hundred dollars an acre—were mailed northward to influential newspapers. Then, in the fall of 1926, the puff of wind came, at one hundred and thirty miles an hour.
One witness of the 1926 hurricane recalls seeing “sheets of steel flying through the air.” Afterward, such phenomena were recorded as that of a broomstraw driven through the trunk of a tree. Estimates of the hurricane’s damage ran as high as $105,000,000, and yet, in view of the financial disasters that followed, that figure is modest. Thousands of homes were destroyed completely and thousands more were damaged. Hundreds of lives were lost, and when Florida struggled out to see what the storm had done, it found that the boom was over, the glorious bubble had burst. Even the Wall Street crash that followed three years later came to Florida as a meaningless anticlimax.
With the vanishing bubble went George Merrick’s career as a millionaire entrepreneur and city builder. For years afterward, he was a sad and familiar figure around Miami—a dazed and shopworn man with an echo of what was once his winning smile, always willing to buttonhole anyone who would listen (and few would) and tell his story of the dream of Coral Gables.
But Merrick’s story has a belated happy ending. The tens of thousands of trees and shrubs he planted have grown to shade and embower the winding streets he so romantically named—Avenue Sistina, Avenue Paradiso, Avenue Jeronimo—and the fine solid houses that he built have mellowed and grown serene and queenly; with their handsome gabled roofs of Spanish tile, they smile from behind romantic gates and walls cascading with bougainvillea. With its parks and plazas and canals and splashing fountains in courtyards, with three golf courses and the campus of the University of Miami at its heart, Coral Gables is now considered not only a marvel of city planning, but one of of the most beautiful residential sections in the United States. Since Merrick wisely placed Coral Gables a few miles inland, away from the ocean’s edge, the area has been spared by Florida’s hurricanes.
Compare Coral Gables with, say, John Ringling’s Floridale. Nothing exists of Floridale today except streets—paved streets, but with no houses or other buildings lining them—running off in an orderly pattern into nowhere. In retrospect, George Merrick emerges a genius after all.
In Coral Gables live the best of Miami’s year-round Society, whose lives are led with quiet elegance, whose sons go north to New England prep schools, whose daughters come out at the Debutante Ball at the Surf Club, and who speak with the “social voice,” priding themselves that they do not—as Society does in Savannah and New Orleans—speak with Southern accents. Ever. Here, in other words, is Society organized much as it is in Northern cities, or in the smaller “social” cities of the West, such as Denver, San Francisco, and Portland.
Also to Coral Gables and nearby Indian Creek come a select group of winter visitors from New York, Philadelphia, and Boston. “The other Miami” is the term they use, affectionately and humorously, knowing that outsiders have absolutely no idea what it means.
One New York woman who winters in a huge, cool house in Indian Creek, says, “A lot of people think that we have to try to live down the fact that we spend our winters in Miami. They think that we must have to be constantly explaining that we go to this Miami, not that Miami, that we must always be having to apologize for it being, after all, Miami, which is a word which conjures up a certain image. Some people say to me, ‘Why do you admit to it being Miami? Why don’t you say Indian Creek, or Coral Gables?’ Well, all I can say is that only a climber or a very silly person would try to use a pretty label or disguise like that. We consider that sort of thing quite unnecessary. After all, those of us who know Miami know what we have here. We make no effort to cover up the fact that we winter in Miami, and always have.”
* Sections of the present Key West Highway still stand on Flagler’s original concrete pilings, and so that much of his dream remains.
* When the Kept Man does not live in, he usually returns, in the small hours, to shadowy lodgings on the other side of town.