Les Standiford - Palm Beach, Mar-A-Lago, and the rise of Americas Xanadu

Center of Dreams

Water to the Angels

Desperate Sons

Bringing Adam Home

The Man Who Invented Christmas

Washington Burning

Meet You in Hell

Last Train to Paradise

Les Standiford

Copyright 2019 by Les Standiford

Cover design by Gretchen Mergenthaler

Cover photographs (front): Mar-a-Lago gate, Library of Congress; Henry Flagler Alamy; Mrs. Joseph P. Kennedy, Mrs. Merriweather Post, and Joseph Timilty at the Red Cross Snow Ball in Palm Beach, 1965 (State Archives of Florida/Morgan); Marjorie Post Hutton courtesy of University of Michigan Library Digital Collections. Bentley Image Bank, Bentley Historical Library. Item number HS13908 (public domain); Worth Avenue, Palm Beach, 1941 Alamy

Cover photograph (back): Mar-a-Lago, 1967

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FIRST EDITION

Published simultaneously in Canada

Printed in Canada

First Grove Atlantic hardcover edition: November 2019

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data is available for this title.

ISBN 978-0-8021-2849-2

eISBN 978-0-8021-4645-8

Atlantic Monthly Press

an imprint of Grove Atlantic

154 West 14th Street

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For image credits, see .

This is for Kimberly and for Jimbo.
I could not have done it without you.

Western facade of Mar-a-Lago as shown in a 1928 issue of American Architect.

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan

A stately pleasure-dome decree:

A savage place! as holy and enchanted

As eer beneath a waning moon was haunted

By woman wailing for her demon-lover!

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 1798

Aside from the White House, there may be no more prominent private residence in the United States than Mar-a-Lago, the nearly eighteen-acre Florida estate spanning southerly Palm Beach island from the Atlantic Ocean on the east to Lake Worth on the west. Mar-a-Lago, designed by Joseph Urban and built between 1924 and 1927 by cereal-empire heiress Marjorie Merriweather Post, contains 115 rooms in its main buildings and covers 62,500 square feet. It cost about $8 million to build, which equates to somewhere between $160 million and upwards of $1.5 billion currently, depending on whose conversion figures are used.

Admittedly, there are more expansive mansions to be found. The Biltmore Estate, near Asheville, North Carolina, built in 1895 by George Washington Vanderbilt II, is said to be the nations largest, with well more than twice the square footage of Mar-a-Lago. And perhaps nearly as famed is Hearst Castle, the former home of William Randolph Hearst, completed in 1947 and dominating a mountaintop near San Simeon, California. Hearst Castle comprises 68,500 square feet and ranks seventeenth in size to Mar-a-Lagos twentieth, which is just ahead of the Breakers, the getaway built by Cornelius Vanderbilt in Newport, Rhode Island, and covering 62,482 square feet.

But size and dollars alone are not what set Mar-a-Lago apart. The others mentioned are known today primarily as museums and tourist attractions, even the Biltmore Estate, which remains in the hands of Vanderbilt descendants. Mar-a-Lago continues its use as a residence. And for all the days of its history, it has held the attention of the public because of those who have lived there, why they have chosen to live there, and what goes on within those formidable walls. Notably, even those who have chosen not to take up residence at Mar-a-Lagoand their reasons for turning down the opportunityhave consumed the attention of the nations citizenry and its media, fomenting debate in both houses of Congress and demanding the attention of several U.S. presidents long before the current lord of the manor arrived.

As it approaches its hundredth anniversary, Mar-a-Lago has assumed a stature in the collective consciousness far larger than its physical bounds. Even on the relatively small island of Palm Beach, eighteen miles long and anywhere from five hundred feet to three-quarters of a mile wide, any number of grand domiciles and structures remain, including the still-standing Whitehall, the meticulously restored seventy-five-room, sixty-thousand-square-foot former home of Palm Beach founder Henry Flagler, as well as still-lived-in homes built for the Kennedys, the Du Ponts, and many other social luminaries. Also standing are the ornate 538-room Breakers Hotel, restyled by Italian craftsmen in 1926 after Romes Villa Medici; the sprawling other-era Bath and Tennis Club, another Joseph Urban creation; and the fabled Everglades Club, the Paris Singer/Addison Mizner undertaking that sparked the islands emergence as the favored winter retreat for the ultraprivileged.

But none of those comprises the character of Palm Beach to the extent that Mar-a-Lago does. Mentioning Mar-a-Lago to a European, for instance, conveys an immense amount of cultural information instantaneously. This writer has experienced the same phenomenon only once before, during a tour of the Continent in the 1980s. All it took to dissolve cultural and linguistic barriers, even in the most forlorn hamlet, was the mention of Miami. Ah, Miami, the listener would respond, puzzlement vanished, hand and forefinger quickly forming the universal likeness of a pistol. Bang-bang! Miami Vice, ha ha!

* * *

Fabulous Mar-a-Lago was from the beginning the perfect centerpiece for the community it anchors, a modern-day Xanadu symbolizing wealth and privilege and exclusivity. Unlike other retreats for the ultrafortunate, Palm Beach has been in existence for a relatively short time, having taken its shape over the course of little more than a century. And, unlike Newport or the Hamptons or Palm Springs, Palm Beach is relatively far-flung, having become what it is in a place where there previously was nothing but sand and sea and sky, located at the time of its founding in literal terra incognita.

Furthermore, what has taken place at Mar-a-Lago and in Palm Beach redefines our very concept of class distinction in the United States. There may have been a time when one demonstrated the blueness of ones blood by tracing the family lineage back to the Mayflower