Fool's Paradise Read online

  Elaine Lancaster, the female impersonator nonpareil and Miami Beach socialite who is so popular that she was given the key to the city of Miami Beach as well as the key to the city of Miami, explains, “This is the island of broken toys. This is a place where people get away with things they would never get away with anyplace else in the world. That’s what draws them here.”

  Almost everything in Miami Beach has come from somewhere else, including the palm trees (the original nuts were brought from Trinidad), the flamingos (brought from the Bahamas by entrepreneur Carl Fisher and replenished when they died), and the beach (which had to be widened with sand from up the coast). Other parts of Miami Beach have been tailored, nipped, tucked, or engorged as well, including nineteen man-made islands that were dredged from the ocean floor and added off its western shore to increase the landmass. Even its blunt southern tip at Government Cut was circumcised to accommodate larger ships entering the port.3*

  MIAMI BEACH is deliberately missing three features usually found in American cities: It does not have homeless shelters, black neighborhoods, or cemeteries. The many homeless people who live in South Beach would sleep on the beach all year round if they were allowed, and each night they are rounded up by a posse of “homeless police” and brought to shelters across Biscayne Bay in the city of Miami.

  There is no African American neighborhood in Miami Beach because blacks were never welcomed. At its roots, Miami Beach is a city in the Deep South that remained segregated long after the rest of the South, its bigotry hidden under the guise of a resort city of white transients. Until the 1960s, African Americans were only allowed in Miami Beach during the day if they had a job there, and at night they were checked for “night passes,” signed by white employers, at the causeway entrances.4* During World War II when the U.S. Army used Miami Beach as a basic training camp, black soldiers were segregated from the USO, and in 1953 the Betsy Ross Hotel on Ocean Drive allowed black delegates from the Churches of God in Christ convention to stay there, but would not allow them into the dining room. Celebrities were not exempt. When the African American singer Lena Horne headlined the Fontainebleau Hotel, she wasn’t allowed to sleep there; after the show she was driven to a hotel in Liberty City, a black section across Biscayne Bay, to spend the night. The reason why the singer Nat King Cole premiered what would become his classic song “Mona Lisa” at the Eden Roc was because he was told that black entertainers had to use the side door at the Fontainebleau. The first African American entertainer allowed to stay in Miami Beach was Harry Belafonte, who was given a room at the Eden Roc Hotel in 1963. Racial tensions in Miami between whites and blacks were exacerbated in the 1970s when the newly arriving Cuban population (regarded as the “Jews of the Caribbean” for their industriousness) found immediate acceptance, jobs, and assimilation, while black citizens were still regarded as inferiors.

  In 1990, under pressure from Cuban and Jewish leaders who were angered by Nelson Mandela’s support of Fidel Castro and Yasser Arafat, the city of Miami Beach decided to officially snub the great South African leader. Recently freed from prison, Mandela was scheduled to visit Miami Beach as part of a seven-city tour of the United States. He checked in and out of his Miami Beach hotel suite without so much as a basket of fruit from the city. Angered and affronted, American civil rights activists called for a national 1,000-day boycott of Miami Beach hotels and businesses by all people of color. It was a powerful protest. Large corporations with African American employees stopped booking their conventions in Miami Beach, simply to avoid becoming part of the controversy, and in the first 365 days of the boycott, the city of Miami Beach lost $50 million in revenues. Anxious to reconcile with black leaders, the city fathers in 1993 promised to guarantee a loan for the construction of the first black-owned-and-operated hotel and convention center in Miami Beach, which everybody in Miami Beach immediately began to refer to as the “Black Hotel.” Nowadays Miami Beach depends deeply on African Americans for income in the off-season. The Winter Music Conference every March is almost all R&B and hip-hop and attracts an estimated 40,000 people of color to its eighty-five parties; and Memorial Day weekend in South Beach has become unofficially known as the “black weekend,” when an estimated 100,000 African Americans come to Miami Beach to celebrate.

  As for cemeteries, burials are against the law in Miami Beach. Youth, not death, is the selling point, and in any event, because the soil is so porous, a coffin would bob to the surface within ten years of being inhumed. Like everything else in Miami Beach, its very foundation is liable to shift.

  1* There is no official answer to how long a “season” is in Miami Beach. The chamber of commerce would like tourists to believe that the season starts in November and ends around Easter, but tourism doesn’t really pick up until January and it falls off at the end of March.

  2* In the Miami area, the most valuable art is not in museums but in the private museums of a handful of wealthy local collectors. The Rubell Family Collection, started in 1964 by Don and Mera Rubell, has twenty-seven galleries and a 30,000-volume research library, and is considered one of the finest contemporary art collections in the world. But it’s in Miami, not Miami Beach.

  3* Curiously although Miami Beach is associated with plastic surgery, in part because of the success of the pansexual plastic-surgery saga on TV, Nip/Tuck, the best plastic surgeons are still in New York and Los Angeles. Plastic surgery in Miami Beach is apt to look extreme— breasts too large, lips too puffy— and many middle-aged men and women sport a tight, caught-in-a-wind-tunnel look. Plastic surgery, on average, is half the price of surgery in New York and LA, but you get what you pay for.

  4* Fisher Island, which is often touted as the most expensive zip code in America, was once owned by a prominent black businessman named Dana A. Dorsey, who bought the island to start a resort for African Americans who were prohibited from vacationing in Miami Beach. Carl Fisher bought the island from Dorsey in 1919.

  Three

  LINCOLN ROAD

  Miami Beach is where neon goes to die.

  —LENNY BRUCE

  No, madam, this is no t a switchboa rd,” Michael Aller said pleasantly into his cell p hone. “You have reached the tourist hotline directly. This is Michael Aller, Mr. Miami Beach”

  Mr. Miami Beach listened patiently.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, “but that particular footrace is already over. It started four hours ago. There’s another race tomorrow, which includes the handicapped, and there’s one next week— if you’re still here in Miami Beach. Well, thank you for coming. God bless.”

  Aller, sixty-seven, snapped his cell phone shut and placed it on the marble table in front of him next to his Louis Vuitton tote-all. He was perched on a stool at a table inside the Van Dyke Café on Lincoln Road, taking shelter from one of those baby squalls in Miami Beach that materialize with no warning and then evaporate into blue sky. It was a Saturday in January, and Miami Beach locals know that January is the coolest and most unpredictable month weatherwise, although the resort-industry professionals don’t want the tourists to know that, especially Michael Aller, for whom there is no such thing as a bad month in Miami Beach. “Mr. Miami Beach” is the self-proclaimed sobriquet of a man whose official job title is Chief of Protocol of Miami Beach and Tourism and Convention Director, a powerful position in a city whose lifeblood is tourism and its tributaries.

  Aller is a small, pear-shaped man with a sweet grandfatherly face. He was wearing khaki slacks and a polo shirt with a plastic I LOVE MIAMI BEACH pin on it. He had a good manicure and the faint aroma of Kouros surrounded him, the same Yves Saint Laurent cologne he’s worn for more than 30 years. Aller is one of the last of a generation of Miami Beach old-timers, with a twist— he is openly gay. (“How will you recognize me?” he asked a writer incredulously over the phone. “I’m old, I’m fat, I’m Jewish, and I’m gay”)

  Aller’s cell phone rang again, but this time instead of answering “Miami Beach Tourist Bureau” he turned off the ringer
and let his voice mail answer. He remarked that his phone rings so frequently because it’s printed on every official tourist guide and pamphlet published by the tourist board of the city of Miami Beach, and he produced a stack of flyers from his tote-all to prove it. He said he never gets tired answering questions about footraces and hotel availability. “Never,” he said flatly. “I love what I do.”

  He grew up in Detroit, Michigan, an only child. His father’s company supplied much of the marble and stone used in the construction of the Fontainebleau Hotel, and as part of his payment the Fontainebleau’s owner, Ben Novack, gave Aller’s family an apartment at the Fontainebleau in winter months, from Thanksgiving to Easter. “You’ve heard of Eloise at the Plaza?” he asked. “Well, I was Michael at the Fontainebleau. I was nine years old when I first was taken there.” Every morning Aller, dressed in short pants and blazer, would go down to the lobby and say hello to Novack, who would pat him on the head. Aller’s parents, he once explained, had two cabanas at the Fontainebleau, one where his father played gin rummy and another where his mother played canasta. He told a reporter that his father made so much money playing gin rummy that he “became a limited partner in two hotels and a shopping center just on the winnings from card games.”

  In 1980, after spending nineteen years in the nursing-home business in California, Michael Aller moved to Fort Lauderdale and took a job selling shirts. In 1987 he was back in Miami Beach, where he became manager of the Burdines Polo Shop for $5.50 an hour. A ham at heart, with the singing voice and delivery of an old vaudevillian, he used to entertain at parties and charity events, singing “Mammy” like Al Jolson or doing Georgie Jessel impersonations and insulting people like Don Rickles. Aller was so popular that he and some friends rented a seventy-eight-foot catamaran on weekends and turned it into a “floating cabaret,” with Aller acting as host and stand-up comedian. He later had a local public-access cable-TV show, Michael Aller’s Miami Beach Is My Beat, and eventually he went to work for the chamber of commerce. He became head of tourism just as the city began to burgeon in the mid-1990s.

  The rain ended as quickly as if a faucet had been turned off, and the warm sun rolled across the wide street. The sidewalks were crowded with café tables and umbrellas, and a low concrete median of reflecting pools and thick landscaping of palms and hibiscus and oleander ran down the center of the road. Within a moment there was a return of the pleasant cacophony of squawking parrots (blown over from Parrot Jungle Island by Hurricane Andrew), and the people returned, too, materializing from nowhere into the sunshine to resume the seemingly irresistible ritual of strolling along Lincoln Road. This is the center of a city that has no center. Like the citizens of an old eastern European town, many people in Miami Beach take a weekly spaziergang on Lincoln Road. On a typical day in season, some 15,000 of the hoi polloi will wander up and down the patterned sidewalks of this broad pedestrian mall, eight blocks long and a hundred feet wide.1* It is a mesmerizing parade of tourists and locals, the high and the low, politicians, hookers, humans and dogs, pocketbook thieves and movie stars, strolling back and forth or sitting under the colored umbrellas at the café tables, watching the people watching them.

  However, this is not the Croisette in Cannes; while there are many beautiful and fashionable women and men, it is more like the cast of the barroom scene in Star Wars is passing by. The scene fascinates with the expectation of which great beauty or monster might saunter by next. There are women in skimpy clothing with Miami Beach Goddess breasts as well as anorexic stick figures with collagen-filled lips. There are street performers— a man with no arms who paints with his feet, and a woman covered in white makeup who stands immobile and pretends she’s a statue. There are bicyclists weaving in and out and people walking dogs— sometimes with multiple dogs on tangled leashes— and barking dogs are everywhere, and every hundred feet or so there are bowls of water for thirsty canines put outside by the shop owners. There are more than 200 shops, flashy clothing stores with satiny embroidered shirts and high prices, expensive shoe stores with cheap European merchandise at high prices, a Pottery Barn, housewares stores, art galleries, sunglass shops, a Banana Republic in what was once an old bank, an Apple Computer shop, and a Victoria’s Secret, which allegedly pays $60,000 a month for its visibility on the highly trafficked street.

  Sitting at the Van Dyke Café, it’s difficult not to notice all the gay men ambling down the street, intimidatingly beautiful, tanned from the beach and muscular from hours at the gym and the use of steroids and human growth hormone, all part of the Miami Beach gay subculture.2* Under Michael Aller’s command the Chamber of Commerce mounted a major campaign to make gay men and lesbians feel welcome at the resort. It’s because of Aller that in all of the Miami Beach tourism paraphernalia, photographs of male partners and female partners are featured along with heterosexual couples and families. Like the official Miami Beach advertising brochures say, “The Magic’s in the Mix.” This was done not just to champion equality but because where gays go, gay money follows. Gays have more disposable income than straight families, and they spend big bucks on travel and vacations. They also buy real estate and help gentrify neighborhoods. Gay men became one of the cornerstones of Miami Beach’s most recent revival, attracted to the cheap rents and the laissez-faire attitude of the indifferent locals. sold their life insurance policies for cash and spent their retirement funds. Then something unexpected happened— after the initial onslaught of AIDS, Miami’s gay citizens didn’t all die. New medicines were developed and many who thought they’d never leave South Beach alive went on to thrive and prosper. Suddenly South Beach was no longer the charming, inexpensive town the gays had helped gentrify; rents were high and going higher and condominiums were priced in the millions of dollars. Thousands of gay residents went on a pilgrimage north, to the Wilton Manors area of Fort Lauderdale, which now has the third-largest gay population per capita of any city in America. The former Warsaw Ballroom on Collins Avenue, one of the most famous gay nightclubs in the United States, is now Jerry’s Famous Deli, and the legendary gay club Salvation is now an Office Depot. Although the gay population in Miami Beach is still very visible, their numbers have shrunk to such a degree that as of this writing there are only two gay bars left on Miami Beach.

  In the 1980s the Beach became a mecca for HIV-positive men when there were few treatments and life expectancy was short. South Beach, where people lived in the present and sensation was paramount, seemed the perfect place to spend their last years, and according to Florida International University, in the late 1980s and early 1990s Miami Beach became the single greatest destination for gay men newly diagnosed with AIDS. Out magazine described Miami Beach as “a palm-lined cliff that mighty buffaloes throw themselves over.” By 1995 one South Beach AIDS support foundation estimated that one in three gay men in Miami Beach had HIV, and between 1999 and 2001 South Beach had one of the highest “conversion” rates to HIV positive in the country. These gay men

  ONE COULD only imagine what Carl Fisher, the real Mr. Miami Beach, the brilliant showman and salesman who invented the resort, would have thought of Lincoln Road today, a street he built to be the “Fifth Avenue of the South.” The café in which Aller was sitting, the Van Dyke, was the tallest building in Miami Beach when Carl Fisher built it in 1924, and it was the first to have an elevator, in which prospective land buyers could ascend to Fisher’s real estate offices and purchase plots of land. “If you look up there,” Aller said, pointing to the sixth floor, “you’ll see a balcony from which he sold property. He took customers out on the balcony because it was too much of a jungle to be sold from land level, so he stood up there and pointed out pieces of property to sell them.”

  Fisher was a hard-drinking man who cussed and smoked cigars and spat in a spittoon. Several biographies have been written about the extraordinary Mr. Fisher and his myriad endeavors, not the least of which was raising Miami Beach from a snake-infested swamp, but the most amusing— and probably most apocryphal— acc
ount of his life is called Fabulous Hoosier, written in 1947 by Jane Watts Fisher, Carl’s first wife, who after her divorce continued to live in Miami Beach, where she was a celebrity. Although Carl Fisher remarried, after his death Jane played the role of the widow and gave all the interviews when the press came calling. She was such a fabulist that no one knows what parts of her book or stories are true, yet what better historian for Miami Beach? She married Carl Fisher in 1909 when she was fifteen years old and he was thirty-five. She claimed she first laid eyes on him in the Indianapolis sky sitting in an automobile hanging from a balloon in a publicity stunt. He owned the largest automobile dealership in America and used all manner of promotional ploys to sell his product, including tossing a car off the roof of a building and then starting it up to show it could take rough handling.

  Fisher was born in 1874, and his vision was diminished by 50 percent from the time he was a child because of severe astigmatism. It stopped him from accomplishing very little: He opened a bicycle shop in the 1880s when he was only a teenager, and despite his vision problems he raced bicycles and automobiles, and in 1904 he set the automobile speed record of two miles in 2:02 minutes. That same year, he craftily bought the patent to a sealed, gas-filled acetylene car headlight from its disgruntled inventor and started the Prest-O-Lite manufacturing company, which gave drivers the ability to see at night and revolutionized the automobile industry. Fisher sold Prest-O-Light to the Union Carbide Company for $9 million a few years later. He also conceived and built the Indianapolis Speedway in 1909 to help promote auto racing, and in 1912 he raised $10 million from his pals in the auto industry to build a coast-to-coast paved highway, the Lincoln Highway, named for Abraham Lincoln, his idol, to encourage the use of automobiles for travel instead of trains. For the same reason, he also built the Dixie Highway to create a southeast corridor for vehicles, which eventually led him to Miami’s door.