Fool's Paradise Read online

  When dinner and speeches were over, a writer new to the area approached Arva Moore Parks, Miami’s grande dame historian, author, and publisher, who played a central role in the $55 million renovation of the Biltmore Hotel that culminated in 1987. Ms. Parks warned the writer that the great pitfall of writing about Miami Beach would be to make a factual error and that the watchdogs of the city’s legacy would be lying in wait. She gave the visitor a pop quiz: Who was the architect of the hotel in which he was sitting? The visitor guessed Addison Mizner. Ms. Parks adopted an “I told you so” look, and then informed the visitor that the architect/builder was Schultze & Weaver. Ms. Parks’s abashed petitioner used his last moments holding her attention to pose a question. “If the guests tonight in this ballroom constitute Miami society,” he asked, “who is Miami Beach society?”

  Ms. Parks thought for a moment, scrunched up her nose, and said, “There isn’t any.”

  Then she got up and did a mean Charleston with her husband.

  “MIAMI BEACH evolved into a nonsociety,” Micky Wolfson said, a bit dolefully. “Miami Beach is one of the few society-less cities in the world. There is nothing sacred. No tradition.”

  Wolfson, sixty-seven, was dressed in a European-cut, belted sports jacket and dark slacks, looking very spiffy. He was not in Miami Beach but in Manhattan, in one of the two apartments he keeps in a building on Park Avenue South, one for himself and one for guests. The peripatetic collector passes through Manhattan often on his travels to Europe, where he lives half of the year, busy acquiring objects for a second museum he is creating outside of Genoa, Italy, this one called Wolfsoniana, which will specialize in Italian, Austrian, and German decorative and propaganda arts. When he is in residence in Florida he no longer stays in his hometown of Miami Beach. Years ago he felt compelled to move away from Miami Beach to a duplex in a high-rise apartment building in Miami, where he can look at the hurly-burly of the city across the bay without actually being there. He feels a sense of loss by what has happened across the bay. After all, he named the reminiscence he wrote (with the artist Michele Oka Doner) about growing up in the city Miami Beach: Blueprint of an Eden.

  A Princeton graduate with a degree in art history, Wolfson considers tradition, civility, conviviality, and good conversation essential elements in any society. “But there is no conversation now in Miami Beach,” he said. “There are monologues. There are diatribes. But there is no conversation.” He shrugged. “Nowadays people identify themselves with a sports team.

  “There used to be society in Miami Beach,” he continued. “The kind that would be recognized as society in other parts of the country. But all the society that was there, that celebrated itself, and was grudgingly admired by others, their circle and their clubhouses do not house them anymore. Those people are gone. I think I’m the last of a generation, the last of the old-timers. There is no continuity,” Wolfson said. “The people who had been coming to Miami Beach since the forties began to die out and the town was left forlorn and open to all kinds of takers and comers. It completely lost its identity. Its identity died. It died with a generation, and its identity was renewed by Yankees who saw the marketing possibilities.”

  The society who Mickey Wolfson was referring to were the local men and women of “Old Miami Beach,” citizens who had lived there since it was incorporated in 1915 and had been active in the community and church in the 1920s and 1930s but had no wealth. There was also a seasonal meritocracy of “tradesmen millionaires,” men who were wealthy but without position, or, as Time magazine described them, of “unspectacular fortune.” A 1936 Fortune magazine portrayed the winter residents of Miami Beach as “the sediment of middle-class society” and “minor capitalists” and called the resort “What God had left over when he created Palm Beach.” Miami Beach was, as author Polly Redford called it, “a second-rate WASP resort.” Jane Fisher, the first wife of the creator of Miami Beach, the real estate developer Carl Fisher, wrote in her autobiography, Fabulous Hoosier, that “Palm Beach society … thought we were scum.”

  Even so, Fortune estimated that 600 millionaires had winter homes in Miami Beach, among them Elmer Maytag, the washing-machine manufacturer; Mark Honeywell, the inventor of the thermostat; Leonard Florsheim, who started a chain of shoe stores; William Hoover, who manufactured vacuum cleaners; Sebastian Kresge, who owned a chain of five-and-dime stores; and Harry M. Stevens, concessionaire. The wealthy included some Jews, such as John D. Hertz, the founder of the Yellow Cab Company and a car-leasing firm; and Julius Fleischmann, of the margarine company. There were also the men of what Polly Redford called “ oil-can society”: W. M. Griffin from Fort Wayne, Indiana, made “pumps.” W O. Briggs made auto bodies in Detroit. C. A. McCulloch was in the utilities business in Chicago. Moe Annenberg owned the Daily Racing Form.

  In his 1952 book The Last Resorts, Cleveland Amory described the difference between the “hotel society” of Miami Beach and the “cottage society” of Palm Beach. In Palm Beach the only place one wants to be seen is at “the club” or on the society pages of the Palm Beach “shiny sheet,” as it’s called. On the other hand, in Miami Beach, according to Amory, when a sightseeing boat pulled close to one of the small residential islands in Biscayne Bay so a group of tourists could eyeball some of the big mansions and expensive yachts, the owner of one of the houses came out on his dock, clasped his hands over his head as if he had won a prizefight, and posed for pictures.

  “It’s a city of characters,” commented Wolfson, “which is what drew writers like Damon Runyon and Walter Winchell.” Wolfson admonishes critics for expecting too much. “Miami Beach was founded on the idea that people wanted to use their money to pay for toys. So Miami Beach is a city of playpens and playfulness. It never had a pretense for anything more than being a celebration of playfulness. It wasn’t meant to be anything except one of the world’s greatest resorts.”

  Two

  THE ISLAND OF BROKEN TOYS

  Miami Beach is like a Dickens novel with a tan.

  —AFTER DARK: SOUTH BEACH ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT CHANNEL

  What is Miami Beach? The city is a chimera. In eternal flux. If you walk a few blocks in any direction and look at the buildings and at the faces of people on the streets or listen to the chatter, you could be in any of four or five different places— Tel Aviv; Saint-Tropez; Rio de Janiero; Berlin; Coney Island.

  People are in a good mood in Miami Beach. Visitors say they feel better just being there. It stays lighter longer in the winter in Miami Beach than in most other places because the city lies closer to the equator than any other resort in the continental United States, and daylight lingers. Some residents posit that all the rounded corners and curved buildings enhance a feeling of smooth well-being. Others say it’s simply the spectacular beauty, the palm trees and sunshine, the translucent sea, so many different hues of aqua and green that it looks like a canvas from a paint-by-number kit.

  Miami Beach’s original intent as a naughty playground for wealthy adults has been well served. It has a full-throttle, seven-days-a-week party in progress, as if the city is caught in some eternal spring break. There are thousands of bars, clubs, restaurants, and überhip hotels with jaw-dropping architecture and room rates that run anywhere from $100 to $10,000 a night. Perhaps most important, there is an ever-replenishing stock of good-looking young men and women who go there to party and have sex. Sex is the city’s favorite pastime. In South Beach two is never enough; the prevailing style of sport fucking is a ménage à trois— usually two men and one woman (although that’s not written in stone). This only slightly complicates the matter of pickups in a city where it seems there are a lot of bisexual women. It also helps that the preferred South Beach drug is Ecstasy, which floods the brain with serotonin, the feel-good neuro-transmitter that helps lubricate inhibition and stir the libido. You can buy a tab of Ecstasy in Miami Beach as easy as a pack of gum— or score a gram of cocaine with little more difficulty than ordering a mojito on Ocean Drive. “Everybody in
this town is on drugs and drinks almost every night,” notes Dr. Jeff Kamlet, the city’s primo drug counselor to the local glitterati. “This is a total party environment. It’s a mixture of easy availability of drugs and the nightlife. People who like to party come here to live and vacation, and they party like there are no consequences.”

  As much as the power faction that runs Miami Beach is enthralled by its international reputation as a seaside Sodom, behind the world-class facade it suffers are the insecurities, intrigues, rivalries, and bitchiness of an insular southern boondock. Its power structure is cliquish, gossipy, and xenophobic, terrified that under the shellac of sophistication Miami Beach is going to be revealed as second-rate. Although 13 million tourists spend their way through town every year, Michael Aller, the director of tourism and conventions, voices the generally held perception that “maybe only one hundred and fifty people run all of Miami Beach. Maybe even less. Everybody knows each other here. This is a very small town.” For a small town there’s a big fat money pie to carve up: the gross city product is $6.5 billion— per capita one of the highest in the nation.

  The place is not just small psychologically but physically, too. The author David Rieff described it as a “toy city.” It takes less than half an hour to cross Miami Beach on foot from bay to ocean. It’s little more than a barrier reef, 7.1 square miles, half of it dredged out of the ocean floor to give it more landmass. The full-time 95,000 residents— among them Cubans, South Americans, Spaniards, Russians, Israelis, and Germans— make Miami Beach the second most densely packed city in America next to Manhattan. Oddly, the city government isn’t quite certain what the 95,000 population figure represents. Many parttime residents live somewhere else but declare Miami Beach as their primary residence because of tax advantages: there are no city or state income taxes for full-time Florida residents. In the 1960s and 1970s the city had a better idea of the size of its population when seasonal renters had their electric meters turned on and off. Before then the city used to weigh the garbage to estimate how many tourists visited in the winter.

  Contrary to the indelible impression that Miami Beach is still a ghetto for old Jews on pensions, fewer than 20 percent of the 95,000 residents are Jewish, according to surveys conducted by the University of Miami. Some 60 percent of the population of Miami Beach are Hispanic, and the average age hovers around thirty-seven years old, not ninety. The Jewish decline began three decades ago, not because old people moved away but because old people died off and were not replaced with the next generation. The last kosher hotel closed in 2005, and the one large reform synagogue, Temple Emanu-El, has been struggling financially for over a decade. Although there are still pockets of Orthodox Jews, and the Talmu-dic University remains in evidence on Alton Road, the fruit stores, kosher butchers, shoe-repair stores, and bakeries that used to line Washington Avenue have been replaced with slice-of-pizza joints, motorcycle-wear shops, Thai restaurants, and discount shoe stores. Wolfie’s, the legendary delicatessen where the waiters put silver bowls of pickles and cole slaw and a basket of freshly baked onion rolls on every table, is now just a childhood dream to a bunch of aging baby boomers. But Miami Beach is not about staying the same.

  What remains unfailingly constant is the extraordinary weather. Between the trade winds softening the air and the Gulf Stream warming the waters, it’s paradise in the winter months. It’s one of the few places on the mainland in which subtropical plants and fruits will grow all year round. The weather cooperates with tourism in that it rains mostly out of season1*— 75 percent of the average annual rainfall occurs between May and October. In winter the average daytime temperature is 76 degrees, but in summer, when the temperature hovers in the mid-90s, the broiling intensity of the sun is intolerable. The air is so wet and thick that you can perspire just sitting still. People move very slowly. Even drivers in cars stopped at traffic lights take their time moving when the light changes to green. (Perhaps this is not due to the languid pace but to the fact that so many drivers are on their cell phones. Miami Beach has the largest concentration of cell phones in America, and there’s no local law that prohibits driving and dialing. Everybody in Miami Beach seems to be talking on a cell phone, and there is a joke that you can tell an Israeli from a Latino in Miami Beach because the Israelis are talking on two cell phones at once.)

  Although most tourists never differentiate between the two, Miami Beach and South Beach are not synonymous. South Beach is the lower third of Miami Beach where most of the hotels and clubs are located. Also, Miami Beach is not a part of the city of Miami but a distinct and separate municipality, with its own government and tax base, as well as its own culture. The city of Miami has long lived in the shadow of the little sandbar across the bay. Sixty years ago Time magazine noted that “one of Miami’s claims to fame is that it is the city near Miami Beach.” While Miami city has gained prestige as the financial center of Latin America, it still has the third worst poverty rate in the nation, and for cities with a population of more than 250,000, Miami has the lowest median household income in the country— only $24,000. Meanwhile the city of Miami Beach, whose median gross income is $89,000, longs for its own respectability, like a hooker who wants to be asked to stay for breakfast. In a town where the firefighters wear uniforms courtesy of Izod, body image is a preoccupation, and Shaquille O’Neal is a reserve police officer, residents are sensitive about being thought superficial.

  Local boosters point out with pride that since 2002, Miami Beach has been the host city to Art Basel, the American venue of the spectacular international arts fair that the New York Times called “a carnival of excess for anyone seeking a vaguely highbrow justification to head somewhere warm in the winter,” adding that art at Art Basel was sold with “ garage-sale efficiency.” It was efficient enough that $500 million worth of art changed hands at the 2007 exposition, much of it privately before the exhibition even began, piggybacked with two dozen other simultaneous satellite art fairs. Although the sexy, overwrought city, with its hundreds of dramatic hotels and party settings, is a worthy backdrop to Art Basel, the art fair is in reality just another of the conventions that pass through the 1.2 million-square-foot convention center and fill the city’s hotel rooms. When Art Basel leaves, it takes its culture with it. In 2007 an official of Art Basel denied persistent rumors that the organization was planning to move the fair to Los Angeles in 2010.

  Truth be told, in Miami Beach there are more tattoo parlors than libraries, more spray-tan parlors than schools. (There are seven public grade schools and one high school.) There are more bars per capita than in any other city in America, and there is one building referred to as “the clubhouse” that is dedicated solely to Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, twenty-four hours a day, alternating in English and Spanish.

  Miami Beach may be self-involved but it is not particularly self-examining. It has no indigenous newspaper, although the Miami New Times frequently casts its acerbic eye on it, the SunPost newspaper keeps an office and reports from there, and the Beach is somewhat grudgingly covered by the Miami Herald, the way the Wall Street Journalwould cover Asbury Park, New Jersey.

  It’s not much of a town for books, either; there’s only one bookstore/café, Books & Books on Lincoln Road. One would imagine that in a beach town there would be a big market for books, but sunbathers on the beach don’t seem to be reading. Rather, they’re all staring at the nearly naked bodies surrounding them. When Mitchell Kaplan, the owner of Books & Books and the founder of the Miami Book Fair, was asked by the Miami Heraldif he thought Miami was lowbrow, he replied, “We have an image that everybody here has fake boobs. Well, some people with fake boobs are very intellectual.”

  While a $446.3 million Miami Performing Arts Center has been built across the MacArthur Causeway in the city of Miami, the city of Miami Beach spent years debating whether to give a long-term contract to Cirque de Soleil in the Arthur Godfrey Theater, where touring companies of Broadway shows appear. Miami Beach’s major cultural calling card i
s justifiably the New World Symphony, an orchestra of brilliant young music students directed by the famous conductor Michael Tilson Thomas. The city is building a new concert hall designed by Frank Gehry for the New World Symphony, which will be the resort’s pride and joy. (Another prestigious architectural addition to Miami Beach in the works is a building by Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron— but this one is a parking garage.) Aside from the unique Wolfsonian Museum and a small Jewish museum in a preserved old shul dedicated to the story of the Jewish saga in Miami Beach, there is only one fine-arts museum, the Bass, founded in 1963 by Johanna and John Bass and refurbished from a former public library, with a collection of 3,000 works of art, including the living room furniture of the town’s most famous hotel designer, Morris Lapidus. Unfortunately, in 1968 a team of art experts declared seventeen paintings to be forgeries.2* There is a larger museum, the World Erotic Art Museum, which is 12,000 square feet and houses 4,000 pieces, run by Naomi Wilzig, the widow of a New Jersey banker with a penchant for historic dildos. “Let’s face it,” former Miami Beach mayor Neisen Kasdin said, “people in Miami Beach talk a lot about the Art Deco district, but to the rest of the world, Miami Beach is sex.”

  It is also a city with an “end of the world” mentality, or as W. Somerset Maugham said about Monte Carlo, “a sunny place for shady people.” In 1940 Time magazine characterized Miami Beach as “a prime destination for Americans on the make, on the lam, or on a pension.” The city has always enjoyed its outlaw reputation; it didn’t allow the Gideons to put Bibles in hotel rooms until 1948. Modern-day Miami Beach is a petri dish of regenerated lives, a nourishing environment for the dispossessed who need a second chance. The city itself has redefined its identity half a dozen times since it was incorporated in 1915. Observes Esther Percal, one of the top real estate brokers, “People come here with a lot of baggage.” It is of no small consideration to those with baggage that because of Florida’s Homestead Act, no one can take your home even if you declare bankruptcy or are convicted of paying for your Bentley with your company’s junk bonds.