fool's paradise: n. a state of delusive contentment or false hope.
THE AMERICAN HERITAGE DICTIONARY, 2000
The tw o great shocks of So uth Beach,” said Brian An toni, “was when V ersac e was kille d, and when w e found out that C hris Paciello was an accused killer.”
The Italian designer Gianni Versace was killed the morning of July 15, 1997, as he was returning to his mansion on Ocean Drive from the News Café, where he went every day to buy the newspapers. A spree killer from San Diego named Andrew Cunanan, who had spent the night dancing at Liquid trying to pick up men, put two bullets in Versace's head on the front steps of the house, for no discernible reason other than for the notoriety and thrill of it. This particularly horrible murder cut close to the bone in South Beach; notoriety and thrill was partly what South Beach was selling.
Versace felt he was in some mystical way connected to South Beach. “Every happiness is a masterpiece, and that is what I think of Miami,” he wrote in a book he published in 1993 called South Beach Stories. He had fallen in love with the city during a stopover at Miami International Airport on his way to Cuba. He had had a few hours to kill, so he got into a taxi and said to the driver, “Show me something fancy and fun,” and the driver took him over the causeway to Ocean Drive. Versace sat at a table at the News Café and looked out at the beach and the Art Deco buildings, and watched tanned young people in their bikinis and Speedos on Rollerblades and bicycles, and before he could finish his Cuban coffee he had sand in his shoes.
In 1992 he paid $2.9 million for the old Amsterdam Palace apartment building on Ocean Drive and 11th Street and another $3.7 million for a ramshackle tenement next door, and lavished $30 million on the properties to create a dazzling 16,000-square-foot palazzo with a leitmotif of Medusa heads— some of them created out of the 5 million pieces of pebble tile used in the mosaics that sheathed the floors, walls, fountains and courtyards. The house had thirteen bedrooms, a Moorish gang shower for six, and a revolving observatory dome with a telescope from which Versace could watch the Cuban boys on the beach. Versace gave South Beach enormous cachet and attention, and his mansion came to embody all the glorious excess and overheated desire that was the pride of South Beach.
Three years after Versace's death, forty-two-year-old Peter Loftin, a drop-out from North Carolina State University who made $250 million buying and selling cell phone time, bought Casa Casuarina from the Versace family for $19 million and turned it into a venture more in line with the new Miami Beach— a private club, with membership starting at $30,000 a year, which included the opportunity of sleeping in Gianni Versace's baronial bedroom for $4,000 a night. Outside the locked gates of Casa Casuarina on Ocean Drive there is always a knot of people, mostly Japanese tourists, taking photographs of each other on the limestone front steps where Versace died, making it the single most photographed place in Miami Beach.
“Versace was excited about the exact same thing in South Beach that everyone was excited about,” Antoni said. “There were a few brief years when all the creativity and beauty and wealth came together. Versace was living off the same energy we all felt, and when he was killed the whole thing changed. It became something else. It was like when Adam ate the apple.”
South Beach may no longer be the Eden that Antoni remembered, but its beaches of mammon remain a powerful brand that sets cash registers ringing around the world. “Yes, South Beach is for sale now,” Antoni lamented. “Back in the 1980s and early 1990s there were parties for the fun of parties; now there are only parties to sell something. Back then there was art for the fun of art; now there's Art Basel.” Indeed, a Google search brings up over 3 million responses for products cashing in on the South Beach name, most with little to do with the resort, including perfumes, cosmetics, vitamin supplements, self-improvement tapes, and bed canopies. Among the more successful uses of the name are The South Beach Diet book, written by Arthur Agatston, a local cardiologist, which sold 23 million copies and launched a line of frozen diet foods, and the “healthy” South Beach Beverage company (located in Connecticut) that was sold to PepsiCo for $370 million.
It's no small irony that one South Beach product that isn't selling very well is South Beach condominiums. The building, selling, and buying of condominiums and homes is the second-biggest industry in the Miami area, next to tourism. One out of every seven hundred people has a real estate license. The Wall Street Journal reported that the housing inventory rose by 245 percent between 2005 and 2006, and that another 75,000 condominiums were scheduled to come on the market by 2008, a supply that would take five years for a healthy market to absorb. When giddy developers were forced to sober up in the real estate crash of 2008, Miami-Dade was left with a glut of condominiums second only to that in Las Vegas. In only one year, condominium prices declined by 30 percent— this in a state with a low population growth rate and a housing market wholly dependent on retirees and second-home buyers. It's what Time magazine called a real estate “pyramid scheme” that needs a thousand newcomers a day to keep it from crumbling. Equally as threatening to the real estate market is the fact that an estimated 40 percent of the new condominium apartments were purchased preconstruction by speculators, who bought up units with only a small deposit down and the balance due upon completion. Speculators were counting on the value of apartments to rise by the time of closing for a quick flip and fat profit, but by 2008 there were so many desperate speculators trying to get out of real estate deals for unsalable apartments that a cottage industry sprang up of lawyers specializing in breaking preconstruction contracts.
If history is any measure, Miami Beach's cycle of crash and recovery comes about every twenty years, which would mean the city is due for a rude awakening. It already suffers from the toxic syndrome of its own ubiquitous success. Its glamour has faded with its overweening popularity. Certainly it still attracts rap stars and tabloid queens for dirty weekends, but that's not what's happening on the streets and in the clubs. The experience of the average tourist is that two of the city's greatest attractions, Ocean Drive and Lincoln Road, have deteriorated into a Middle America mall, with drunken fraternity boys and tourists in velour sweatpants and undershirts on Ocean Drive, and purse snatchers and cross-dressers on Lincoln Road. If Miami Beach renews itself again, its future as a resort probably lies in more Las Vegas–like, self-contained mega hotels, like the new Fontainebleau, with myriad restaurants and an in-house nightclub to give the visitor an alternative to the two main streets. Perhaps Miami Beach's last best hope is to revisit the issue of legalizing gambling, which would lift the resort to a whole other level of appeal. Yet legalized gambling would be the end of the last vestiges of Miami Beach as a small community.
Brian Antoni is frustrated by what he sees happening to the city to which he is so dedicated. “I kind of want to kiss it and slap it at the same time,” he said. He laments that many of the creative people who helped build the place into what it is today are fleeing South Beach for the city of Miami, where real estate is more reasonable and life is quieter. He can imagine a day soon when all the uniqueness and all the old-timers will be gone. “Will the last person who leaves South Beach,” Antoni said, “please turn off the disco ball?”
ONE LAST piece of unfinished business.
Michael Capponi never stopped thinking about Francesca Rayder.
“I remembered that when we were living together she was paying my rent,” he said, and in December 2003 he decided to send her a check for $5,000 along with a long letter of apology. “I said I knew she didn't need the money, but I felt that I owed it to her. I told her that I was finally content, and that I was extremely happy for her success, and that I would always love her and I hoped our paths would cross again.”
A week later Francesca called him. “She was going to be in Miami Beach the next day on a photo shoot and she was staying at the Shore Club and she wanted to see me,” Capponi said. He was thrilled to have the opportunity to show Francesca how successful and stable he'd become. He got a haircut and went to a tanning parlor and bought a new suit. He had his Range Rover washed and detailed. He rehearsed in his mind what he was going to say to her and how he was going to say it.
At seven the next night he drove his Rover up the driveway of Shore Club, and handed his keys to the valet, and just as he was entering the lobby he saw her. She was sitting on an upholstered white chair with her long tanned legs crossed, smoking a cigarette. She was still the most beautiful woman he had ever seen.
He knew it just like that. The spell was broken. Released. Michael and Francesca had dinner and they reminisced about old times, and later they kissed good-night and he never saw her again.
The next year he met Erin Henry.
Erin loved Michael. He was kind and generous and full of ambition, and it certainly was exciting to be living with the King of Nightlife, but it was draining too. “He has people around him all the time,” she said. “I don't know how he can bear it. Even on a Sunday there are twenty people there. I just can't be around people all the time. It's amazing that it doesn't suck all the energy out of him.” She was also troubled that she hadn't made any close friends. Even people she felt a special bond with, like Ambika Marshall, were in and out of her life all the time. She had been trying to sell real estate and not done very well, yet in the two years she had lived with Michael his career had skyrocketed. His name had become such a recognizable brand in South Beach that he began to design and manufacture a line of upscale furniture, called Casa Capponi, and his real estate development company, Capponi Properties, had become one of the area's most successful builders and renovators of luxury homes. He sat on the boards of several charities, and every Thanksgiving he organized a drive to feed two thousand homeless people. Some days Erin hardly ever saw him.
In January 2007, tired of competing for his attention and disillusioned with life in South Beach, Erin broke up with Michael and moved to New York. She found an apartment in SoHo and resumed her modeling career full-time. It was bitter cold in New York that winter, and she wrote in an e-mail to a friend, “It's funny, because after all that complaining about Miami, I am getting a bit homesick. I could really use a weekend on the boat. It made me think of something funny I wanted to share with you. You may have witnessed it, I can't remember. Every weekend Michael loved to pack the boat and get on either his surfboard or a Jet Ski and show off for as long as he could last, spraying the biggest surf on the surfboard or jumping the highest boat wake much to the captain's annoyance. This was both his sole form of exercise and a little ego stroke to start the weekend off right. Michael would never say anything, but if everyone didn't watch he would be a little hurt. I always made sure everyone gave their full attention and acknowledged how much air he caught. We called this the Michael Cap-poni Show. I don't think he knows that, but it is kind of like his life … The Michael Capponi Show on South Beach.”
Six months later, unable to get the Michael Capponi Show out of her mind, Erin went back to Miami Beach and married him.