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Addison Mizner - The Many Mizners: An Autobiography

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Book:
The Many Mizners: An Autobiography
Author:
Addison Mizner
Publisher:
Dean Street Press
Genre:
Books / Non-fiction
Year:
2019
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Remember, there were no maps, no travelogues, or any data whatsoever on this land that God and man had forgotten.

Born into an extraordinary family clan, this is the breathless, picaresque memoir of Addison Mizner: the great architect of Palm Beach, and other spots on the Atlantic coast of Florida. Following his early family life in affluent, late nineteenth-century California, we join the exploits of the intrepid young Addison - by the authors account the most remarkable figure of his age. We hear of his experiences in central America, then his truly hair-raising work as a gold prospector in the Yukon, where he becomes an unwitting midwife, and has to foil a murder plot against himself. He details further adventures in Hawaii, and ends up in the boxing ring in Australia, escaping via China.

When Addison finally arrives in New York, we see a more recognizable individual, re-entering the society life he was born to. All along we see his eye for detail and an obvious flair for design and architecture, something exploited wherever he happens to be, whether in Palm Beach or the Yukon.

Only in the touching last chapter, detailing the hilarious final months of his mothers life, does he perhaps realize what it means to be a Mizner.

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Addison Mizner
The Many Mizners

Remember, there were no maps, no travelogues, or any data whatsoever on this land that God and man had forgotten.

Born into an extraordinary family clan, this is the breathless, picaresque memoir of Addison Mizner: the great architect of Palm Beach, and other spots on the Atlantic coast of Florida. Following his early family life in affluent, late nineteenth-century California, we join the exploits of the intrepid young Addison by the authors account the most remarkable figure of his age. We hear of his experiences in central America, then his truly hair-raising work as a gold prospector in the Yukon, where he becomes an unwitting midwife, and has to foil a murder plot against himself. He details further adventures in Hawaii, and ends up in the boxing ring in Australia, escaping via China.

When Addison finally arrives in New York, we see a more recognizable individual, re-entering the society life he was born to. All along we see his eye for detail and an obviour flair for design and architecture, something exploited wherever he happens to be, whether in Palm Beach or the Yukon.

Only in the touching last chapter, detailing the hilarious final months of his mothers life, does he perhaps realize what it means to be a Mizner.

FOREWORD

He climbed into his roadster and settled his three hundred pounds behind the wheel. Ching, that incomparable Chow, nuzzled him questioningly. Nettie, the monkey who must be left behind, chattered an anguished farewell. He placed the electric fan securely; there would be hot nights in the desert and one must be cool. He sprayed himself with a Flit gun, as a last defiant gesture to the mosquitoes, stepped on the starter and he was away, away from that Palm Beach which he had found a sandy, jungly strip of land, and which he had transformed into the queen of all resorts.

Only himself and his brother remained of the many Mizners, but one was to be born of another name but of the Mizner blood, and he was off to San Francisco to greet the child who would carry on the fun-loving tradition of the clan.

As I write this, I can visualize him, urging the infant to hurry up and become old enough to hear of the hell that Grand-uncle Wilson raised from Nome to New York, and the ructions that Granduncle Addison created from Honolulu to London.

I wonder if he, the artist, the wanderer, the wit, the bon vivant, the gay Bohemian, the capitalist, the builder, will drop everything to help raise a child.

For where his affections are concerned, nothing else matters. He has given of his time, his great ability, and his money, to help others. His greeting has always been, Move in. He has entertained the great and the lowly, and made them all at ease. A great host and an equally great guest.

There are those, of vast ignorance, who would call him fat. He is merely large, of brain and heart as well as body, and every ounce of him is concocted of roguery and gayety and mischief and laughter. It needs a great frame to contain tremendous mirth.

Drop in at Palm Beach, some lovely February day, and listen for the sound of gayety. And where it is, you will find Addison Mizner. He will be ensconced in an enormous chair; there will be drinks; there will be hospitality such as you have never known.

Stay to dinner.

But there are twenty of us.

Stay to dinner.

And you will stay, and grow weak with mirth, as I have done a thousand times. And as you will now, when you read this gorgeous book about the Many Mizners.

ARTHUR SOMERS ROCHE.

CHAPTER I
THE MANY MIZNERS

I was neither the fattest nor the thinnest; the blondest nor the blackest; the oldest nor the youngest; I was just the next to the last; and the last was something that mother evidently had not put her mind upon.

Papa Mizner was the best wrong guesser the world had probably ever produced, and when he moved from San Francisco to Benicia (which was still the State Capital), he crowned his misjudgment with mud to the ears. God evidently made Benicia late Saturday afternoon, and must have had a tea date with a chorus girl and was in a hurry, for it was a mess.

He started sprinkling alum on it when we arrived. Mama and Papa Mizner tried to keep the population up by having the Many Mizners, but the shrinkage was so rapid that they sort of lost hope and gave it up with Wilsons birth.

I dont think anyone could describe the Mizner house. The original parlor, sitting room, hall, and three bedrooms had been brought around Cape Horn, each piece marked and set together by more or less unskilled labor. Additions were rapidly added at the back, each one larger than the first. From the air it must have looked like a telescope, with the smaller end toward the street. The porch was entirely covered with vines, and the planting of great trees and shrubs crowded it in on either side. After luncheon when the front door (with a coffin plate inscribed L. B. Mizner) opened and vomited forth the family, people must have thought it was a subway exit. Tons of the family oozed forth, and strangers passing must have gasped in wonderment as to where in hell they could have come from. As time went on, cottages sprang up in the shadow of the foliage.

When years later somebody asked me where I was born, and I told them Benicia, they said, For Gods sake, where was your mother going?

I think perhaps right here is the place to tell where mother came from, and how the Mizners came to California, because the only thing that could be of interest in this yarn is: that two dignified, respectable people could have been the parents of so many outlaws.

The first Mizner we know anything about was a tax collector under Henry the Eighth. He evidently got his fingers jammed in the cash register, for he seems to have left England for Ireland between two days. They came to America early in 1700.

To excuse Papa Mizners judgment of Benicia, the Mizners were among the first founders of the town of Elizabeth, New Jersey.

Lawrence Mizner must have been full of larceny, for he left a fortune of three hundred thousand dollars, which, in 1788, was considered very large. He left it all to my grandfather, who married Mary Bond, and moved to Illinois.

The family were always pioneers, and it makes one wonder if the police were not just behind them, because they were always moving West.

My grandfather died at the age of twenty-three, leaving two children; Lansing Bond Mizner (Papa Mizner), and Mary Mizner, who later became Mrs. Floyd-Jones.

My grandfathers widow promptly married one General Semple, who was appointed minister to the United States of Colombia, where Papa Mizner learned Spanish.

He left Shurtleff College in Alton, Illinois, at the age of seventeen, to go into the Mexican War, where he was made a major before he was eighteen. He translated the surrender of some of the most important battles.

The following letter was received from his uncle upon his return to Illinois:

San Francisco, California, January 4, 1847.

Dear Nephew:

I did not write to you last Spring, not for want of a disposition, but for want of time and paper.

Permit me now to remind you that California is under the United States Government, and that everything has changed much since I left St. Louis.

I arrived in California the twenty-second day of December, 1845, little more than one year ago, with one little horse , no money, and no clothes but a suit of leather.

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