Fool's Paradise Read online

  In 1912 Fisher bought a vacation home in the city of Miami, and he wasn’t there long before he heard a story about a bridge— the longest wooden bridge in the world, 2Vi miles in length, built with 2,100 wood pilings— that was left half finished sticking out into Biscayne Bay. It seemed that an old Quaker, John Collins, originally from Moorestown, New Jersey, and now an avocado farmer on the barrier island across the bay sometimes called “Ocean Beach,” was trying to build a bridge between the island and the mainland to get his avocados to market and had run out of money halfway. Fisher loaned Collins $50,000 to finish the bridge, and in return he was given 200 acres of swamp on Miami Beach, and then bought 210 acres more.

  When Fisher first visited the island, it was nearly primeval, covered with bugs, rats, snakes, mosquitoes, and biting horseflies so voracious that, according to Jane Fisher, they would hungrily cover a man from head to foot so it looked as if he was wearing a black suit. The horseflies’ incessant biting was so intolerable that mules brought to the island to help clear it went berserk and jumped into the water and drowned. On the upper beach there was a House of Refuge shack for shipwreck victims, and on the southern end, a bathhouse and casino whose sunbathers were brought across Biscayne Bay by sixty-foot double-decker ferries and led to the beach through tropical undergrowth so otherworldly that the owners named it “Fairy Land.” According to Jane, the first time they walked the beach together Fisher drew a diagram in the sand with a stick and said he was going to build the greatest resort in the world, the Riviera of America.

  Fisher built his Riviera from the ground up, quite literally. He drained the swamps and had giant scythes pulled by donkeys cut the palmetto roots into two-foot-long stumps, over which he poured sixteen acres of sand from the bottom of Biscayne Bay, like pouring plaster over lath, and allowed it to settle and “sweeten” in the sun. He platted the land, promoted it, and sold it. During the great Florida land boom of the 1920s, which Fisher helped kick off, there were reports of real estate appreciating 1,000 percent in a single week.3* Fisher built mansions, nightclubs, and polo and yacht clubs, and in 1925 he created Lincoln Road to be the resort’s centerpiece.

  At the eastern end of Lincoln Road, directly on the ocean, he built his own beautiful mansion, The Shadows, at a cost of $65,000, and on the western end he built a bold archway of coral rock. In between Fisher laid out a boulevard in brilliant white coral, one hundred feet wide. He built the road with sidewalks double the width of an ordinary street because he had the idea that the inner lane would be for window-shoppers who wanted to stroll leisurely down the street, while an outside pedestrian lane would accommodate those on a less casual promenade. Chauffeur-driven automobiles would be able to follow slowly in the road. All the chic New York stores opened on Lincoln Road— Sulka, Saks Fifth Avenue, Bonwit Teller, Peck & Peck, FAO Schwarz, and Lilly Daché, the Fifth Avenue milliner.

  Miami Beach wasn’t Fisher’s only creation. In 1926 he tried, and failed dismally, to build a summer resort at Montauk, New York, on the eastern tip of Long Island, “a summer Miami Beach,” he called it. But the Great Depression wiped out most of his cash, and his Montauk project went bankrupt in 1932 and sucked him under with it. He’d divorced Jane Fisher in 1926 and married again, but he never had children. As Montauk failed and his role in Miami Beach and self-respect faltered, he began to like his booze even more. He developed cirrhosis of the liver in his fifties but could not abate his drinking, and toward the end of his life he had special suits made for him with two sets of buttons to expand when his body retained fluids. He died in 1939 at age sixty-five and was buried in Indianapolis.

  “LET’S TAKE a ride in my car,” Michael Aller said. “I want to show you something.” The waiter at the Van Dyke refused to give Mr. Miami Beach a check for his soft drink, and Aller walked around the corner to where his big pearlized-white Cadillac with MR. MIAMI BEACH plates was illegally parked. (The local police won’t give him a check either, he said.) He used some of his favorite hand lotion he had just purchased and popped the bottle in the trunk. In the backseat of the car was a Mickey Mouse doll, seat-belted in. Mickey Mouse is Aller’s theme. For decades he’s worn a Mickey Mouse figure on his lapel and on the face of his watch, and his office is filled with Mickey Mouse memorabilia, because, he told the Miami Herald, “Everything in life is Mickey Mouse. I don’t let anyone or anything upset me. Whenever I start to lose it, I just remember Mickey.”

  As he drove up Collins Avenue, he reminisced about meeting the comedian Georgie Jessel when he was a child and going on the road with him as a teenager, and how Miami Beach was paradise for him now and he never left town, perhaps only for a week or two in summer because “Why would you want to leave paradise?” He went on about his eyesight getting worse and that he only listened to audiobooks, and Sunday afternoon was the only day he turned off his phone. Suddenly there it was, up ahead, Aller’s destination. “Look! See!” he exclaimed. “What do you see?”

  It turned out that what Aller wanted to show me was something that wasn’t there anymore: A Miami Beach landmark was missing— a ten-story wall, 120 feet wide, at Collins and 44th Street, where the street turns to the west. On the wall had been a trompe l’oeil mural, painted in 1985 by New York artist Richard Haas, of two classical figures on either side of an archway that showed what the viewer would see if the wall had not been there—the world-famous curved edifice of the Fontainebleau Hotel. Then, when you turned the corner, there was the real Fontainebleau Hotel. The wall, which had stood for forty-eight years, had been torn down, and the view now was of a shockingly big, thirty-six-story white concrete condominium honeycomb of apartments with tiny terraces. Peeking out almost modestly from behind it was a sliver of the iconic curve of the Fontainebleau, which was going through a $400 million makeover. This new incarnation of the Fontainebleau, they say, will set the standard for the next generation of Miami Beach hotels— big Las Vegas–style resorts with condominium complexes, high-end retail shops, four-star celebrity restaurants, and nightclubs that will draw headlining stars back to Miami Beach.

  For the half a minute that Michael Aller sat behind the steering wheel of his car waiting for the light to change, gawking at the new building, he looked very much like part of the city’s past staring at its future.

  1* Lincoln Road is technically twelve blocks long, but only eight are part of the pedestrian mall.

  2* In 1960, Miami Beach historian Harold Mehling wrote in his book The Most of Everything that “… the Beach is plagued by a rampaging problem of overt homosexuality and lesbianism. Whatever the lure for sexual deviates is, they respond in large numbers and can be found any evening clogging the vicinity of Lincoln and Alton Road … There they promenade in public as a mild form of enjoyment. The Miami Beach police allow the deviates to “cluster’ on the theory that they will at least be isolated … ”

  3* Much of the land rush in Miami Beach in the 1920s was aided by the “Binder Boys,” a group of fast-talking opportunists named for an unusual Florida real estate law that allowed a buyer to tie up a piece of property for ninety days with only a small deposit by signing a binder. That gave the speculator ninety days to sell the binder at a profit. A man could parlay $100 into $1 million. The Binder Boys, who were mostly Jewish and not too appreciated by the locals, met every morning at the Ponce De Leon Hotel for breakfast.

  Four

  SANS SOUC

  This was the asshole of the world, Florida, as far as I’m concerned, when it comes to architecture and interior design.

  —MORRIS LAPIDUS

  That lying hor ror La-pe ee-dus! ” Be rnice Nov ack unexpectedly cried out, rocking forward in her chair and folding her arms across her stomach as if she had a bellyache. “I’ve always called him La-peee-dus because that was his real name,” she said.

  For the past hour, Bernice Novack’s voice had barely risen above a shy whisper until she heard the name Morris Lapidus, yet after all these years just the mention of her ex-husband’s nemesis sent her into a
paroxysm of anger. She was sitting in a folding chair amid the clutter of her son’s crowded Fort Lauderdale office, looking very small and delicate. She was still beautiful, even at eighty years old, and it was not hard to understand what had made Ben Novack become so infatuated with her fifty-five years before.

  Her son, Ben Jr., fifty, was observing his mother from behind a large desk covered with stacks of file folders, model boats, snow globes, and collectible plates from various U.S. cities. Behind him the office’s white shutters were closed against the afternoon sun. From this office in one of two homes he owns next door to each other in a gated Fort Lauderdale community, Ben Jr. runs a convention-booking company, a business he learned by rote from growing up behind the scenes at the Fontainebleau, the hotel his father built and operated for twenty-three years. He doesn’t look like his father, who was short and wiry and dark— Ben has blue eyes and bushy hair— but there is something taut and difficult about him, much like his father was said to have been. Although his office was a jumble of cartons, overflowing file cabinets, and antiquated printers and fax machines stored in the corners, Ben Jr. himself was precise and demanding; in the bathroom he shared with his office staff there were not one but two signs insisting occupants WASH YOUR HANDS BEFORE LEAVING.

  Ben Jr. and his mother are deliberately not easy to find. They are not listed in the phone directory, and people they once knew in Miami Beach never see them anymore, or have a handy phone number. Miami Beach may only be forty-five minutes away on I-95, but for mother and son it’s another place in time. They rarely go there and they stopped driving by the Fontainebleau years ago; it was too painful. They don’t like to talk about it either, and Bernice only rarely gives interviews. “If she wanted to talk,” said Lisa Cole, the former publicist for the Fontainebleau Hotel, “she could tell some stories. She probably witnessed some outrageous things. She was there for it all. But she’ll take it to the grave.”

  When the Fontainebleau was the world’s most famous hotel, Bernice was its First Lady. She was the perfect accoutrement. She lived in a duplex penthouse apartment, and she was always perfectly coiffed and poised and dressed in what seemed like an endless array of beautiful clothing and evening gowns. She met the prime minister of Israel and dined with Ed Sullivan, Jerry Lewis, Walter Winchell, and Joan Crawford, who arrived at the hotel with a makeup case full of vodka, and whose mere appearance in the lobby was enough to prompt a round of applause from the guests. There are photos of Bernice in a two-piece swimsuit with her arm around Esther Williams’s waist at the hotel’s pool, and there’s a photo of her and Ben and Ben Jr. with John F. Kennedy, to whose inauguration she was invited (JFK stayed in Suite 1784 at the Fontainebleau while Marilyn Monroe stayed in Suite 1782). Monroe was no stranger to the Fontainebleau. Her husband Arthur Miller’s father stayed in the hotel near the end of his life and Monroe visited him there. The desk clerk didn’t recognize her and “thought she was a prostitute,” the hotel’s longtime doorman Mac McSwane told a journalist. “She was nice but very dumb.”

  Bernice remembered when Mia Farrow, in T-shirt and jeans, “a little waif, a tiny little thing,” sat crying on the front steps of the hotel. On a break from shooting Rosemary’s Baby in New York, she surprised her then-husband Frank Sinatra and he refused to let her up to his suite. He sent down an envelope full of money and told her to go home. Bernice adored Sinatra, despite all the gangster rumors and violence that surrounded him. He once gave her a pair of emerald earrings with a note that read, “If you don’t cotton to these mothers you can always sell them to Swifty,” meaning Swifty Morgan, the Fontainebleau’s resident loan shark, who sat in a cabana all day and took markers or jewelry from guests, often to pay gambling debts incurred in the Fontainebleau card room.1*

  “I had quite a life,” she said. But she doesn’t want to dredge all that up again.

  Then there’s Ben Jr., who does not allow his mother to give unfettered interviews. This is because almost everything ever written about the Fontainebleau makes him furious. Sitting behind his desk he huffs and puffs indignantly over bits of hotel lore repeated to him, stories that helped make the Fontainebleau a legend. “It’s a shame,” he said. “They all make such great mythical stories— the spite wall, the staircase to nowhere— but they’re only imaginations that people have perpetrated over the years.” Ben Jr. is so angry about the imaginations that he’ll consent to an interview only if he is granted— in writing— the opportunity to refute every story about his father that others tell. For the record, he refutes almost every single one of them.

  The story that irritates mother and son the most is the issue of who really designed the Fontainebleau’s iconic curve: Was it the owner and creator, Ben Novack, or the architect and designer, Morris Lapidus? Ben Jr. dismissed Lapidus as “nothing but a draftsman.” He claimed, “Nobody knew Jack Diddly about Morris Lapidus before my father.” The theory is that because Morris Lapidus outlived Novack, he had the advantage of rewriting history without Novack around to refute it, and Lapidus took his fair share of credit while portraying Novack as an egotistical liar. In fact, Lapidus disliked Novack so much that he intentionally misspelled his name as Novak throughout his two auto biographies, the last one appropriately titled Too Much Is Never Enough. “I thought about taking him on,” Ben Jr. said, “but then I thought, “What am I taking on a ninety-year-old man for?’” The Novack family still took pleasure by intentionally pronouncing the name Lapidus with its Old World emphasis every time they said it.

  BERNICE DRAZEN met Ben Novack during World War II at La Martinique nightclub on 57th Street in New York, where she had gone for a drink with her girlfriends. She was twenty-two years old and a successful photographer’s model. Ben knew one of her girlfriends and joined the women at their table. “It was not love at first sight,” she said. “First of all, he was seventeen years older. But there was something about him. He was charming and vulnerable, and there was the way he walked and swayed his shoulders.” He was five foot six and something of a dandy. He had a tightly trimmed mustache that looked like two insect wings on his upper lip, and he regularly wore hand-tailored sport jackets, pocket squares, and cuff links of semiprecious stones. Due to a childhood swimming accident, he wore a large, flesh-colored hearing aid in his right ear with a wire that ran down to a microphone in his pocket, despite which he kept asking Bernice to repeat things for him.

  He was married, it turned out, to a woman named Bella, who stayed behind in Miami Beach when he came to New York on business, or to play, like that night Bernice met him at La Martinique. Of course, Bernice was married too, to a solider who was off in Europe fighting the war.

  “People who don’t hear well want to talk,” Bernice said. Ben was full of bombast and braggadocio. He owned a hotel in Miami Beach called the Cornell, and he had big plans for the future. He was putting together a partnership to build a hotel of a class never seen before in Miami Beach, an elegant and sophisticated inn on the ocean with a penthouse nightclub and its own restaurants and shops. He was going to give it a fancy French name, the Sans Souci—‘without care.”

  Bernice smiled remembering it. “That Ben,” she said. “He always wanted to build his grand hotel.”

  WHEN BEN Novack first arrived in Miami Beach in February of 1940, the city was at its glittering, giddiest best. It was what New York Herald Tribune society columnist Lucius Beebe described as “the last Gomorrah, the ultimate Babylon, the final Gnome-Rhône-Jupiter-Whirlwind, superdeluxe, extra-special, colossal, double-feature and Zombie-ridden madhouse of the world.” Less hyperbolic but just as impressive was a 1940 story in Time magazine, which featured the city’s mayor, John Levi, on the cover, declaring the resort a “unique U.S. phenomenon” and “like no other town in the U.S. or in the world.”

  While other cities were still struggling to recover from the Great Depression, Miami Beach just brushed itself off and continued on as if the crash had hardly happened. Its growing reputation as an escapist playground made the resort more po
pular than ever. The kind of visitors changed, from wealthy industrialists who owned second homes to tourists who needed hotels in which to stay. In the early 1940s, despite the government’s wartime plea for patriotic citizens to curtail pleasure travel, a whopping 3 million tourists a year came to visit southern Florida.

  Novack arrived in Miami Beach with a crazy scheme to buy a fleet of boats and import bananas from Cuba, although some people who knew him back then remember him selling expensive wristwatches to get by. It quickly became obvious to him that he should stick with the family business, hostelry. Miami Beach was in the midst of a hotel-building frenzy that had begun in 1935. Architectural Forum magazine called it a “Boom Over Miami.” The year Novack arrived, an astonishing forty-one new hotels opened their doors. Novack’s father, Hyman Novack, had built and operated the famous Laurel’s Country Club on Sackett Lake in the Catskill Mountains, and Novack grew up in the front office. After his father died Novack tried to run the Laurel’s with his brother, but they didn’t get along, so he quit. His next venture was a haberdashery called Kemp and Novack in New York on Sixth Avenue, but again he quarreled with his partner, and they closed up shop and liquidated the store. When he got to Miami Beach he rallied some partners for cash— one of his specialties would be finding part ners— and he signed a $20,000, one-year lease on the 111-room Monroe Towers at 30th and Collins, where his first wife, Bella, helped change the sheets and towels and he fixed the plumbing.