All the rivers of the very worst taste twisted down to the delta of each lobby in each grand Miami Beach hotel …
—NORMAN MAILER, 1968
Ben Novack never stopped pursuing Bernice from the night he met her at La Martinique nightclub. He phoned whenever he was in town, he begged her to come out to dinner at 21, and he sent her extravagant gifts from Miami Beach, including a Joe's Stone Crab dinner on dry ice. At one point she was told by her modeling agency that she was booked on a photographic shoot in Havana. A few days later she was flown to Cuba with another model, a photographer, and a makeup artist. “But when I got there,” she said, “it was Ben! He had set up the whole thing to look like a job, just so he could spend time with me.” She was taken with his romantic, soft side, although she was one of few people to see it. “He used to write poetry,” Bernice said, “and he played the piano for me and he loved romantic musicals, like Brigadoon.”
Eventually Novack divorced his wife, and the divorce so depressed him that he had what Bernice described as a “ner vous breakdown” and he went away to Arizona for a time to recuperate.1* The Novack family contends that Harry Mufson helped perpetrate Novack's psychological break with a mean practical joke. Evidently Mufson was getting a little sick of Novack's shrill grandiosity, and Mufson emptied all the furniture out of Novack's office at the Sans Souci and changed the locks to goad him. When Novack arrived to find the door to his offices locked and his furniture gone, he panicked and thought he was going crazy. When the practical joke was revealed, Novack was humiliated. This prank inflamed the growing one-upmanship and enmity between Novack and Mufson. Yet it was Harry Mufson who called Bernice in New York to tell her how sad and forlorn Novack was without her and that she should call to cheer him up.
In 1952, seven years after they met, and after Bernice's marriage to her soldier husband had been annulled and an engagement to another man had been broken, Bernice and Ben were married by a justice of the peace in a small ceremony at the Essex House in New York. Then she packed her belongings and moved to the Sans Souci hotel.
It was a tough transition. The Sans Souci was booked solid, the lobby overflowing day and night with guests and gawkers. There were days Bernice didn't feel like leaving her room. While some hotel owners kept a separate residence, “Ben always lived in his establishments,” Bernice said. Novack was happy living in a big impersonal transient place, where the lobby was like his living room only it had strangers wandering through it. He had learned from his father's hotel in the Catskills that being a hotelier was not a nine-to-five job. “A hotel owner is always on the premises and he must be a good host,” Novack told a reporter. “He must have a warm, pleasant manner. Otherwise he has no business being in the business.”
For Bernice, life in a hotel was aimless. She had given up her modeling career and all she had was time on her hands. She didn't know a soul in Miami Beach except for the spouses of Ben's partners. “The wives and I didn't get along,” she recalled. “They were very cold to me and so much older. Here I was, a model. They wanted to sit in a cabana and play cards all day and I wasn't interested.” So she sat by herself most of the time and wondered what she'd gotten herself into.
In any event, she didn't live at the Sans Souci for very long. In July of 1952, Ben Novack announced to the Miami Heraldthat he and a syndicate had made a deal with the heirs of Harvey S. Firestone, the late chairman of Firestone Tire and Rubber Company, who died in 1938, to buy his oceanfront estate on Collins Avenue and 44th Street for $2.3 million, a considerable sum in the 1950s. The estate had 950 feet of oceanfront, the largest privately owned piece of oceanfront in Miami Beach. Harry Mufson told the Miami Herald that they would demolish the thirty-year-old mansion and replace it with a behemoth hotel— 550 rooms— at a breathtaking cost of $10 million (which would escalate to $16 million by the time the job was done). The new hotel “would be gigantic,” Mufson bragged to the Herald. “Twice as big as anything on the Beach.”
Nobody was cheering. Novack had at first said he was going to buy the Firestone estate to conserve the land as a public park and prevent another hotel from being built on it. The Firestone estate was figuratively and literally a line in the sand in Miami Beach. It was the curtain raiser on Millionaire's Row, a cavalcade of ocean-front mansions that lined Collins Avenue from 44th Street to 59th Street. Harbel, as it was called, was a stately Mediterranean villa bounded by palm trees, built in 1919 by James Snowden, a partner in Standard Oil. It was the setting of elegant parties at which Thomas Edison and Henry Ford and other notable men of their day joined Firestone's table. Harbel had become a showcase for Carl Fisher's vision of Miami Beach's luxurious lifestyle.
More important to many, it marked the zoning demarcation between residential and commercial buildings. Conventional wisdom was that the nearly four hundred existing hotels below 44th Street were enough for Miami Beach, and there was still hope that the northern part of the Beach would retain its residential aspect, like Palm Beach, instead of becoming a commercial quagmire, the ocean view lost to a wall of hotels. Harvey Firestone's heirs disagreed; they wanted the right to sell the property at the highest price for the best possible use, and beginning in 1943 they challenged the zoning ordinance in court, initiating a series of lawsuits that took seven years to wend their way to the State Supreme Court, where in 1950 the Firestones were awarded a commercial rezoning. Novack and his partners bought the estate two years later.
Or so his partners thought.
Shortly before the closing— just two or three days before the terms of the deal would expire, according to some versions of the story— Mufson discovered that the seed money Novack had used to bankroll the Firestone property— $15,000— came out of the coffers of the Sans Souci hotel and that the Sun N’ Sea Corporation's name wasn't on the deed to the Firestone estate, only Novack's name. It was a double cross. Bernice and Ben Jr. don't remember the details except that “Ben didn't get along with Mufson,” according to Bernice. Novack and Mufson nearly came to blows at the Sans Souci, and the next day Mufson and the other partners consulted a lawyer.
With Mufson and his partners’ money gone, and just twenty-four hours before the day of closing, Novack worked the telephones late into the night, calling old friends and acquaintances, trying to raise the funds before the deal fell through. According to Ben Jr., his father called just about everybody he ever knew in his entire life, begging, “Trust me, just send me the money, I'll send you the contracts later.”
Said Ben Jr., “He put together the most unusual partnership of people you ever heard of. Some of the people he got weren't his choice, but they were willing to cough up the dough.” Among the eleven original partners in the new hotel were Herbert Glassman, who made millions in the taxi and limousine business; auto dealer Joseph Cherner, who opened the first shopping center in the United States in Shirlington, Virginia; Abe Rosenberg, the owner of a large spirits distributor called Star Liquor; Jules Gorlitz, the president of the Sea Nymph bathing suit company in New York; and possibly a few unnamed investors, such as Sam Giancana from Chicago. In Miami Beach there was a joke that Novack had about as many partners as his hotels had rooms.
Novack also secured a $5 million building loan, the largest such loan in the history of South Florida.
Before the end of the year Harry Mufson and five other stockholders in the Sun N’ Sea Corporation filed suit against Ben Novack to halt the construction of the new hotel. The court refused to stop construction, but in settlement Novack divested himself of his Sans Souci stock and the partners paid him $1.5 million for the land he owned upon which the Sans Souci stood. Harry Mufson hated Novack from then on. It wasn't just about the money; in the Wild West world of Miami Beach hotel owners, there was blood of honor spilled on Collins Avenue.
IN DECEMBER of 1953, when Novack was asked who would be the architect of his new hotel, he claimed he blurted out the first name that came to him— Morris Lapidus. But that wasn't true. By the time Novack uttered the name Lapidus, the hotelier had already consulted with several prominent architects whose design fees for a $12 million building were in the range of $500,000. Some architects refused to work with Novack, putting him in the life-is-too-short category. So when pressed, Novack said Lapidus's name. It certainly was news to Lapidus when he read in the New York Times that he was going to design Novack's new hotel. Hardly a flattering way to be offered a job, but in truth Lapidus was so grateful to be able to design an entire building from the ground up that he was willing to suffer almost any of Novack's indignities. Since his work on the Sans Souci, Lapidus had been in demand as a “hotel doctor” who put the frills and finishing touches on half a dozen hotels on Collins Avenue, among them the Nautilus, Delano, Biltmore Terrace, and Algiers, which featured a semicircular glass-walled lobby that hung out over Collins Avenue and bellhops dressed in tunics and fezzes. But none of these buildings carried Lapidus's name as the architect, and he got little public credit for his work.2* “I had never been the architect for a complete new building,” he lamented.
Lapidus made what he called a “ruinous” deal with Ben Novack. He agreed to design not just the building but the entire hotel, inside and out, including landscaping and lobbies, wall sconces and wallpaper, chandeliers, sofas, and staff uniforms— all for only $80,000.
At the start of their collaboration on the Fontainebleau, Lapidus presented Novack with twenty-six drawings for the hotel. “These are for me?” Novack asked sweetly. “May I do anything with them I want?” When Lapidus said of course he could, Novack ripped up the drawings and tossed the pieces in the wastepaper basket.
Lapidus decided that since any idea that wasn't Novack's own would be rejected out of hand, he would nonchalantly mention concepts to Novack in passing, like a posthypnotic suggestion, and then wait for Novack to regurgitate the idea back to him a week or two later, at which time Lapidus would act as if Novack was a creative genius.
As for the big question of whose idea it was for the now world-famous shape of the hotel, Lapidus claimed it came to him while riding the BMT subway in New York. To prepare Novack, he kept telling him that every hotel on Miami Beach was boxy and square and that Novack should think of “curves and circles, curves and circles.” Lapidus said that weeks later when Novack showed him a sketch for a curved building, he commented, “That's terrific,” and kept his mouth shut.
Bernice tells a different story that she claims is the gospel about the design of the Fontainebleau. One day when she and Novack were living at the Sans Souci, Ben borrowed her sketchpad and charcoal and took it to the bathroom with him, where he sat on the toilet sketching. A long time went by— over an hour— and Bernice finally knocked on the door and said, “Ben, are you all right?”
And Ben said, “I'm all right. I'm designing the Fontainebleau.”
When Lapidus heard this story he countered, “Ben Novack couldn't design a toilet.”
WHEN THE war with Harry Mufson erupted, Ben and Bernice fled the Sans Souci and moved into the abandoned Firestone mansion, which became the construction headquarters for the new hotel. Novack used the large formal dining room for the general contractor's office and the adjoining breakfast room as his inner sanctum, guarded by a secretary named Miss Gabby. Bernice sequestered herself in one of the large bedrooms and watched in awe while around her a hotel was created from the foundation up. The concrete trucks lined up all down Collins Avenue, while a crew of 1,200 men3* worked dawn until dark, swarming over a seventeen-story skeleton composed of enough steel to build a skyscraper one hundred stories tall. Finally the Firestone mansion itself had to be bulldozed to make way for seven acres of formal gardens designed after the petit jardins of the Palace of Versailles, at their center a fifty-four-by fifty-four-foot fishpond. Novack was on the job site every morning, dressed in work clothes, supervising each bolt and nail. Years later when Conrad Hilton asked Novack how he managed to build such a massive hotel in less than a year, Novack answered, “Put on a pair of overalls.”
Novack wanted a big hotel, and big it was. Truckloads of materials were delivered in quantities so large they were measured in miles: 25 miles of carpeting at a cost of $600,000; 1 mile of fluorescent tubing; 140 miles of electrical wiring; 50 miles of tele phone wires. There were also 8,000 lightbulbs; 2,000 mirrors; and enough plumbing fixtures for 800 homes. More than 100 miles of plumbing pipe connected the swimming pools, fountains, kitchens, 1,000 toilets, and 40 bidets. Truckloads of white and pink and black marble for the lobbies and public spaces were unloaded on forklifts. It seemed as though the hotel was being glazed in marble. In the main lobby alone there was half an acre of white marble on the floor, inlaid with repeating black marble bow-tie shapes.† “We're full of marble,” Novack proudly told a reporter.
The hotel's interim name was “Estate,” but before long Novack settled on “Fontainebleau,” although the correct French pronunciation eternally escaped him. He, and everyone in Miami Beach, pronounced the name FOUN-tin-blew. Novack first became aware of the Royal Château de Fontainebleau in 1951. He was on a driving vacation in France with Bernice and they accidentally came upon it. As it happened, the Château de Fontainebleau was an apt inspiration for Novack's new hotel. Originally built in the twelfth century, with architectural makeovers through the centuries by Henry II, Catherine de Medici, and Napoléon Bonaparte, it was always considered the height of gilded glamour, and its mannerist interior design inspired the expression “Fontainebleau style” in France. Ironically, Ben and Bernice never actually laid eyes on the château. “We didn't stop to look at it,” Novack said, “but we liked the name, kind of catchy.”
When Novack told Lapidus he wanted the interior of the modern hotel to look like a French château, Lapidus showed him pictures of a château in a book. “Not that French château,” Lapidus recalled Novack saying; “I want a modern French château.” Novack wanted to invent his own “Fontainebleau style” called “Modern French Provincial,” otherwise known as “Miami Beach French.” How faux French Provincial furniture was going to mesh with— and fill up— a modern building that size was anybody's guess. Lapidus actually went on a $100,000 shopping spree along Manhattan's Third Avenue, then lined with expensive antique stores, and had the furniture shipped back to Florida. When he returned he found the marble statuary being used by workmen as sawhorses. It hardly seemed to matter how the statues were treated, because eventually many of the antiques were stripped to their wood and painted with gold paint because they hadn't been shiny enough.
Nearly a year passed of having to deal with bellicose Ben Novack, and Morris Lapidus was exhausted and broke. He estimated he'd already worked double the amount of time he had allotted for his fee of $80,000. He was supporting two residences— an apartment in Miami Beach and his house in Brooklyn— and his creditors up north were hounding him. Without telling his wife, Bea, Lapidus emptied out their savings account to pay the bills and borrowed money from friends. According to his version of events, faced with personal bankruptcy he met with Novack and asked to renegotiate his fee. After some haggling, Novack agreed it would be fair to pay him an additional $40,000— but only if the other investors consented.
In November of 1954, a few weeks before the opening of the hotel, Novack gave a grand tour of the new hotel for all the partners, which ended on the deck of the impressively large 6,500-square-foot swimming pool. This was the moment that Lapidus chose to take Novack aside and ask if it would be a good time to tell the partners about the additional $40,000 that Novack had promised.
“I don't understand what you're talking about,” Novack said. “What forty thousand dollars?”
“You remember, Ben,” Lapidus recounted saying. “The forty thousand dollars’ extra fee that we agreed would be paid to me. You said to wait until the partners saw the hotel.”
“I can't understand you, Morris,” Novack responded. “What are you talking about?” Novack looked incredulous. “I never said I'd pay you another forty thousand dollars.”
Lapidus lost his mind, literally. He wanted to kill Novack. As Novack turned to walk away, Lapidus picked up a three-by-six piece of construction lumber lying on the pool deck and began to chase after Novack with it, swinging the lumber at Novack's head. Lapidus recounted, “I had no control over myself— running— screaming— flailing the length of timber … I only knew that I wanted to crush that timber on my client's skull.” Novack ran from Lapidus as the startled guests stared in disbelief while Lapidus chased him around the pool, waving the lumber and loudly chanting, “He must die! He must die! He must die!”
The next thing Lapidus remembered was that he was on his back on the deck pinned down by several of the investors while a man splashed pool water in his face. He was so distraught that, he recalled, “It took about three of the partners to restrain me.”
The architect was eventually paid the additional $40,000, but only after he was made to apologize to Novack for trying to kill him. Novack maintained that he had never promised the money to Lapidus in the first place and that because of his hearing problem, or faulty hearing aid, he must have misunderstood the conversation.
“I can't say anything good about the man,” Lapidus said. “Bad, bad, bad.”
SHEATHED IN a veneer of 85,000 square feet of aquamarine glass that took on the color of the sky during the day and shimmered in the sultry air at night, the arcuate Fontainebleau Hotel dominated everything around it, the sky and ocean merely a backdrop to its beauty. It was so instantly recognizable around the world that for the first twenty-four years of the hotel's existence it never had a name sign. It opened on December 20, 1954, with a party for 1,600 people, including New York mayor Robert Wagner, who flew to Miami with a contingent of international press. There was such a crush of people on opening night that much of the carpeting was ruined and had to be replaced. Patti Page sang the “Fontainebleau Waltz” in the La Ronde Room, and above the hotel whenever an Eastern Airlines jet arrived or departed Miami International it tipped its wings in salute. “Everything was in French,” reported the Miami Herald, “including the confusion.” (The rest-room doors were marked MESSIEURS and MESDAMES.) The guest of honor was the mayor of Fontainebleau, France, who was stupefied by the hodgepodge of style and furniture and the twenty-four different colors Lapidus had mixed together. The nicest thing he could say about the hotel was that while the outside was very strong, the inside was a “bouillabaisse.”
Fish stew or not, it was as promised “a monumental show-place … that … dazzled visitors,” said the New York Times, but only in retrospect. When the hotel first opened, it was the subject of great ridicule. To comment that the hotel was overdone or garish was beside the point. The Fontainebleau wasn't built for traditional aesthetic reasons. It was shameless, built to amuse the senses, to shock and surprise. “I wanted people to walk in and drop dead,” Lapidus said. He created a world that “would represent for [guests] the dream of tropical opulence and glittering luxury, influenced by the greatest mass media of entertainment of that time, the movies … So I designed a movie set! I never for a moment let Ben Novak [sic] know what I was doing. For him I was expressing his ideas of what a luxury hotel should be.”
The sheer volume of open space in the main lobby, with its eighteen-foot ceilings, was as marvelous as was the ridiculous incongruity of marble statues and busts on pedestals placed throughout it with no particular design scheme, so it seemed— Greek statuary mixed with terra-cotta cherubs and marble Roman busts, potted palms, a faux nineteenth-century grand piano, ornate wall clocks, then stretches of open marble with black inlaid bow ties almost as if there was not enough furniture to fill it, until another furniture setting appeared next to a paneled wood wall. The central lobby was supported by majestic columns that had no base or capitals, and recessed into the lobby ceiling were four crystal half-ton chandeliers that Lapidus had had fabricated in Belgium, each made of 1,800 pieces of crystal that needed to be disassembled by hand twice a year and individually washed in soap and water.
The Fontainebleau was the only hotel on the Beach that had a formal nighttime dress code; women wore cocktail dresses with mink stoles and men wore suits with ties. The doorman, Floyd “Mac” McSwane, who worked there for twenty years, kept extra jackets and ties in his locker. Getting dressed up for a night at the Fontainebleau was part of the fun, and Lapidus cleverly gave the guests a dramatic way for them to display their finery with the “staircase to nowhere.” The white marble staircase hugged a curved wall painted with a scene of the ruins of the Roman Forum. It allowed hotel guests the opportunity to take an elevator to the mezzanine and walk down the staircase, stopping at the “return,” where the staircase changed direction and women could pivot while everyone in the lobby watched, as if they were at a fashion show. Watching people walk down the “staircase to nowhere,” the women in gowns and diamonds and furs, was one of the hotel's most popular attractions.
As Ben Jr. pointed out, the staircase to nowhere “didn't go nowhere.” It connected the lobby with the mezzanine, where there were hotel offices; a writing room with comfortable chairs and desks, an important part of every hotel in the 1950s, where guests could send home postcards and letters on Fontainebleau stationery; a “TV Theater,” which featured one of the earliest large-screen television sets and rows of chairs for people who didn't want to watch TV in their rooms; and a large card room, full of smoke and gamblers, with high-stakes pinochle and poker games. On an average day in season, hundreds of thousands of dollars would change hands, on the weekend sometimes a million, and when the mobsters and movie stars were playing, a folding wall would be drawn to separate the VIPs from the more public tables.
Novack showed himself to be the consummate hotelier. Behind the scenes the Fontainebleau was a huge, complicated piece of machinery with dozens of components that all operated under his command. There were 847 full-time employees— 1 employee per 1.4 guests— and hundreds more in parttime help. Behind the walls of the lobby were banks of switchboard operators manning phone boards with plug patches for the hotel's hundreds of telephones, and since there was no voice mail at the time, messages were written by hand and one of the hotel's small army of bellhops, dressed in impeccable Fontainebleau uniforms, slipped a copy under the guest's door, with a second copy left in the room box. For more urgent calls, one of the page boys would wander through the lobbies and out by the pool and beach summoning guests by name.
Because there was constant wear and tear on the furniture in the 550 rooms, Novack outfitted the basement with its own furniture repair shop and hired two full-time craftsmen to run it. There was also a full-time television repairman; four staff gardeners; and a team of laundresses who worked round-the-clock in an industrial-size laundry plant bigger than that of most metropolitan hospitals, washing thousands of sheets and towels a day. The amount of mail in and out of the hotel was so voluminous that Novack had to create an in-house post office to deal with it.
The food service and cuisine of the hotel's seven restaurants was overseen by a septuagenarian maître de bouche with the suspiciously grand name of René de la Jousselinière de Villermet de la Godsrary To store food for its hungry boarders, the hotel maintained six walk-in freezers the size of trucks. The Fontainebleau also had its own bakery and its own butcher department with a staff of full-time butchers; Novack would no doubt have raised the cattle and chickens to supply his kitchens if he had had the chance. It took a total of 80 cooks working in eight kitchens over 30 gas ranges to prepare an average of 2,000 meals a day, including food for 24-hour-a-day room service.
The main dining room, the Fleur de Lis, was pure Lapidus magic. It looked like the set of a Jean Cocteau movie, with high gray walls and giant bisque and papier-mâché figurines of Louis XV and his courtiers on pedestals, interspersed with bizarre electrified candelabra fashioned from tree branches and antlers. Patrons entered the Fleur de Lis room by stepping up on a raised carpeted platform bathed in pink light so they could be seen by everyone in the dining room before descending a few steps onto the restaurant level to be seated. The pixilated ambience of this restaurant so amused John Jacob Astor that he gave several dinner parties there instead of at his nearby mansion, and the chairman of Revlon cosmetics, Charles Revson, once held a party at the Fleur de Lis that depleted the hotel's entire caviar supply.
Novack created the Fontainebleau to be self-contained, so that a guest would never have to leave and spend money elsewhere. The hotel's lower level was named the Rue de la Paix, and it had more than thirty retail shops, including a shop for women's formal wear where live mannequins modeled Dior evening gowns; a linen shop with $2,500 lace tablecloths and $50 napkins; a stock brokerage so guests could keep an eye on their investments; a furrier, who did such a good business in selling mink stoles late at night that he stayed open until dawn every day; and a barber shop where a down-on-his-luck former lightweight boxing champ named Beau Jack shined shoes. The lower level also featured a spacious “elegante” coffee shop/Jewish delicatessen called the Chez Bon Bon, which was intended to look like an Old World Viennese pastry shop, with plastic hedges along the walls and alcoves in which bisque figures balanced cornucopias of food on their turbans.
One of the hotel's most popular amenities was simple compared with all the rest— a “gymnasium” with schvitz baths, both Turkish and Russian, where a heavyset old man hosed you down after a good sweat with water so icy cold it was a miracle more men didn't have heart attacks. Up on the roof there were separate men's and women's solariums, human broilers where guests could lie naked in the sun coated in suntan oil, or get a naked massage from a bulky eastern European type dressed in white pants and T-shirt. There was also, although not advertised in promotional materials, a mikvah, or ritual cleansing bath, for Orthodox Jewish women in the basement.
The Fontainebleau proved to be a spectacular background for dozens of films and television shows, including Jerry Lewis's 1960 film The Bellboy, with actor Alex Gerry playing the part of the obsequious “Mr. Novak” [sic]. The hotel's Boom Boom Room was the hangout of Sandy Winfield II, the dashing young detective played by actor Troy Donahue in the 1960–62 hit tele vision series Surfide 6, and the opening scene in the 1962 James Bond movie Goldfinger took place in one of the hotel's 250 double-decker cabanas, in which Margaret Nolan gave Sean Connery a massage while outside a team of shapely female water-skiers skied on the six-lane, Olympic-size swimming pool.4* The Fontainebleau also made appearances in the action movie The Specialist, with Sylvester Stallone and Sharon Stone; The Bodyguard, with Kevin Costner and Whitney Houston; and Scarface, with Al Pacino as Tony Montana, a Marielito Cuban drug dealer who looks out from the magnificent hotel's rear terrace and murmurs, “This is paradise. This is paradise.” Yet the hotel— and Miami Beach— probably never had any better publicity than from 1966 to 1970 when each week a CBS TV announcer uttered the words, “From Miami Beach, the sun and fun capital of the world, it's the Jackie Gleason Show!”
The Fontainebleau boasted yet another distinction: It was the most robbed hotel on Miami Beach, a candy store for thieves. The hotel was rife with room burglaries. Even Novack reported to the police the theft of his “piggy bank,” which, he said, was filled not with loose change but with $15,000 worth of $100 bills. Since guests brought their best jewels to wear at the Fontainebleau, each room had its own safe-deposit box in a wall behind the cashier's desk in the lobby, but not every guest took advantage of the locked box, and in two years over $250,000 worth of jewelry was stolen from guests’ rooms, including a $70,000 jewelry heist that took place while a clothing manufacturer and his wife were playing canasta by the pool. Novack hired twenty plainclothes men to patrol the hallways twenty-four hours a day, commanded by former New York City Police Department lieutenant James Gillace, whose remedy for the thievery was to suggest that if the women didn't wear so many diamonds at night, there'd be less stolen.
THE FONTAINEBLEAU turned Lapidus into an object of ridicule from both critics and peers, winning him the sobriquet “The Lib-erace of architecture.” The reviews were unmerciful. The New York Timess Ada Louise Huxtable called the Fontainebleau “aesthetic illiteracy.” Architect Robert Anshen described it as “a monument to vulgarity.” Art in America decried that the building was “hedonism's vacuum in a materialist culture.” A friend of Lapidus who was an editor at Architectural Forum called him and said, “Morris, what the hell did you do? You created a monstrosity,” and the magazine went on to label the hotel a “building of sucker-traps.” Look called it “a mammoth dental plate.” (Look also noted that there were “116 jokes in circulation about the Fontainebleau,” for example, “The Fontainebleau is the only hotel to have wall-to-wall carpeting on the beach.”) Even the architect Frank Lloyd Wright, usually reticent about critiquing his colleagues, described the Fontainebleau as an “ant hill.”5*
Belittle it as they may, the hotel took its place in American culture, but it would take thirty years for scholars to admit that the Fontainebleau inaugurated the postmodern movement in architecture. What began as “a condescension to the client,” as Lapidus called it, became an internationally known style.
“You asked who designed it?” Novack snapped to a reporter. “ I did. It was my idea to have the curved building, it was my idea to decorate it, it was my idea to build it, it was my idea to pay for it. Lapidus helped. He was part and parcel of me. He's a very clever man,” Novack said, lapsing into the third person, “but Ben Novack designed that building.”
BEN AND Bernice Novack's apartment on the fifteenth floor of the Château building at the Fontainebleau was known as the Governor's Suite. It was a four-bedroom oceanfront duplex with marble floors, formal dining room, billiard room, and piano bar— all with floor-to-ceiling windows. The view was a spectacular panorama of sea and changing sky. It was the kind of apartment you see only in movies (and sure enough, a scene in the 1960 movie Ocean's 11 was shot in its billiard room), yet after a short time it lost its luster for Bernice. The disquieting reality was that save for her clothing and a few pieces of jewelry, nothing belonged to her. “Everything was owned by the hotel,” she said— the Limoges dishes upon which she ate, the bed in which she slept. She didn't choose the sofa in the living room or the curtains for her bedroom. There was no grocery store at which to buy milk or shop for dinner, no laundry, no dishes in the sink, no beds to make. Instead there was room service and chefs cooking her meals to order, a bar that was automatically restocked, and fresh linens on the bed every day— life in a completely impersonal world.
“I was never happy living in the hotel,” she asserted, and she asked Ben to buy a house nearby so she could make a life away from the hotel, but he didn't want to be away from the Fontainebleau— ever. “The Fontainebleau was his life,” Bernice said. “It was his baby, his wife, his mistress, all his dreams and ideas together.”
Bernice's part in this dream was as the beautiful trophy wife.
She was always on stage, an object of curiosity for the guests and the staff. She was expected to be the most fashionable woman in the hotel, as she was, impeccably turned out at all times, in an amazing array of outfits, even just walking to her cabana by the pool. “You are always in a glass cage when you're the wife of the owner,” she explained. “People stared at me. They'd say, “There's the owner's wife’ or “There's Mrs. Novack.’ I didn't care for it. I didn't like the “front’ of the house.” In her many years as the Fontainebleau's First Lady, she is remembered as the very pretty woman at Ben Novack's side who smiled and kept quiet. “It was not an easy life,” she acknowledged. “It was very difficult, believe it or not.”
Ben Jr. was born a year after the hotel opened, and like his mother he had his part to play in the drama that was the hotel— the dauphin. But being the little prince of the Fontainebleau was an especially tough role for a kid, particularly for a rambunctious boy like Ben Jr. “He was in everybody's hair,” remembered Lenore Toby, the Fontainebleau's longtime publicist. “We used to call him “Benjy’ because he was a little tyrant, and he hated it. “My name is Benjamin,’ he used to say. He had no discipline whatsoever, and his supervisors were the security guards in the hotel. They brought him up, and as a result that's what he wanted to be, a security guard.”
“Let me tell you, I never had a childhood,” Ben Jr. said. “I was always among adults. I had several nannies but I didn't know what it was like to be a normal kid playing in the neighborhood. I lived on the seventeenth floor of a hotel, and if I met some kids they were only around for four days with their parents on vacation.” Even a simple birthday party was a “major ordeal,” with a self-conscious artificiality that took away any real joy. The other children came to his birthday parties dressed in their best clothing and bearing expensive birthday gifts. They were brought to the hotel by their parents, passed through security, and ushered up into the private apartment. They ate a meal served by room service and a birthday cake made in the hotel's kitchens in an atmosphere of complete unease.
There was also a kidnap threat on Ben Jr., perhaps as a result of his father's tough stand against building and trade unions, or perhaps something else, it was never made publicly clear. When it happened Novack Sr. decided against telling Bernice and Ben Jr. and the Miami Beach police secretly trailed the youngster for weeks. “It was the worst environment for a child,” Ben Jr. admitted. “But I grew up very quickly. And now I wouldn't change anything.”
1* One thing that probably upset him was that Bella's family owned the land on which the Sans Souci was built, and because of the divorce he had to come to some sort of settlement that was probably not cheap.
2* Lapidus s son Alan, also an architect, claimed that his father took more credit for the total design of these hotels than he deserved and that the architects of record complained to the American Institute of Architects, from which Lapidus was expelled.
3* Novack was opposed to trade unions and the men who built the Fontainebleau Hotel were nonunion. Midway through construction one of the bearing pillars in the hotel was dynamited in a sabotage attempt, thought to be the work of the unions, but the building held firm.
†Morris Lapidus always wore bow ties, and most observers believe that the floor motif was the architects way of leaving his imprint. Ben Jr. denies that the bow-tie pattern had anything to do with Lapidus and claims that it was just a coincidence.
4* This entire sequence at the Fontainebleau was fabricated. Ben Novack Jr. points out that the scenes inside the cabana were shot on a Hollywood set and that the Fontainebleau's pool was not long enough for the water-skiers to gain enough speed to stay aloft, so they were superimposed into the shot. In the film James Bond calls the Fontainebleau “the best hotel in Miami Beach.”
5* When Lapidus finally met Frank Lloyd Wright years later, he was introduced to Wright as an architect who had “done some work” in Miami Beach. Wright said, “You've done some work down there? Well, if I was you, I wouldn't talk about it.”