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  It was World War II that made him rich.

  At first the war scarcely seemed to faze Miami Beach. Busi ness was good, the band played on, and the song was a rumba. The rich continued to take vacations and the city became a safe haven for international café society and wealthy Europeans. There were some modest attempts at patriotism— there were metal collection drives, and the bathing beauties painted their fingernails red, white, and blue— but for the most part the city continued on with its frivolity until the Germans posted U2 boats in the shipping lanes just off the coast.

  It came as a rude awakening for the rollicking resort when in February of 1942 the U.S. Army designated Miami Beach as one of several cities in which to billet thousands of soldiers for basic training before they were shipped out to duty. Within a matter of weeks the Army Air Force requisitioned more than 180 hotels, 100 apartment buildings, and 18 private homes to be used as offices and barracks, as well as the Nautilus Hotel, which was converted into an army hospital, and the Miami Beach golf course, which was leased for a dollar a year to be used as a parade field. The army took over 70,000 hotel rooms, for which the government paid from $1 to $10 a night. “Basically my father walked into a deal where the army took a contract out with him and his hotel was filled with troops,” explained Ben Jr. “He raked in the profits and he did so well that he got another hotel and did the same thing, and then another hotel with an army contract.” Novack parlayed his good fortune into buying a stake in the Monroe, then the Cornell, and eventually he operated the formidable Atlantis Hotel on the ocean, built in 1936, which the army used as a reception center for ser vicemen. “Boy, did my dad clean up!” Ben Jr. said. “He got rich!”

  In 1944, Dolly De Milhau, a correspondent for Town & Country magazine, reported “Next time you’re wondering where anybody is, I suggest you come down to Miami Beach, park a camp chair … and just sit and wait. Sooner or later everyone you’ve ever known or heard of is sure to wander by.” The Duke and Duchess of Windsor visited Miami Beach in 1940 (but stayed at the Biltmore in Coral Gables), and the football player John Sims “Shipwreck” Kelly and his fiancée, glamour girl Brenda Frazier, the “debutante of the century,” rented a house on Pine Tree Drive and invited Howard Hawks for dinner. William Kissam Vanderbilt was in residence at his home on Fisher Island. Damon Runyon owned a home on Hibiscus Island, and Walter Winchell spent winters at the Roney Plaza, where Al Jolson lolled away hours on the beach every day toasting himself the color of a coffee bean. Eleanor Roosevelt rented a house on Golden Beach and gave talks at Miami Beach High School. Statesmen Harry Truman, Douglas MacArthur, and Winston Churchill vacationed in Miami Beach after the war, and Churchill, who rarely took vacations, spent several weeks painting on the beach. Churchill somehow found the time and inspiration to write the historic speech he gave that March of 1946 at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri, in which he coined the phrase “iron curtain.”

  Miami Beach already had the reputation of “an open city, nakedly acknowledged to be a funhouse exempt from moral and legal restrictions,” as Miami Beach historian Harold Mehling described it. It was true that the nightclubs and saloons were boisterous. One Beach favorite, the Five O’Clock Club, served free drinks at five in the afternoon and at five in the morning, and at both times the place was packed. Kitty Davis’s Airliner on Alton Road was decorated to look like the inside of a plane. Jack Dempsey was a partner in the Vanderbilt Hotel and worked the bar and shook hands with customers. Roberto’s Mexicana Bar featured transvestite bartenders and waiters, and the men at the Club Ha Ha wore makeup and sang dirty songs to the customers. At La Paloma in the city of Miami, male customers wore evening gowns, as was their pleasure, before the club was shut down and the owners sent to jail. There was also a nude floor show of beautiful women at La Boheme nightclub. Possessing more mainstream appeal was Lou Walter’s Latin Quarter, with its buxom showgirls à la Ziegfeld. In 1941 alone, Hildegarde, Jane Froman, Milton Berle, Martha Raye, Shecky Greene, and Sophie Tucker entertained at Miami Beach nightclubs, and the music of the great Latin bands of Tito Puente, Tito Rodriguez, and Xavier Cugat filled the balmy night air.

  Many of the patrons in these nightclubs and bars were what Life magazine described politely as “playboys and expensive demi-mondaines.” The tourists in Miami Beach, said Fortune magazine, “bring their pleasures and their morals with them from the North.” Fortune estimated that 20,000 “lone women” visited Miami every season and that “casual acquaintances are easily made … An unattached girl, if she so desires, may pay her winter’s expenses from the pocketbook of a man picked up in any bar.” There were so many B-girls in bars that the Miami Beach city council passed an ordinance requiring that clubs notify patrons how much money was owed after each round of drinks. There was also a popular 1941 movie musical extolling the ease with which a young woman could meet a rich husband called Moon Over Miami starring Betty Grable and Don Ameche. Conveniently, Miami Beach was also a divorce mill that rivaled Reno— it only took ninety days to declare residency, and over 10,000 couples were divorced in Dade County a year. In 1942 one woman sued for divorce on the grounds that her husband was “interested chiefly in wine, women, song, and slow horses.”

  There were lots of slow horses. Since the legalization of pari-mutuel gambling in 1929, three horse tracks and four jai-alai frontons were built within easy reach of Miami Beach, and at the southernmost tip of South Beach a dog track called Miami Beach Kennel Club opened, operated by sports promoter Ted Rickard but allegedly bankrolled by Al Capone for $1 million. Going to the track to “watch the dogs” became one of the most popular diversions on the Beach. Capone also had interests in the Villa Venice, a casino on Ocean Drive and 14th Street; in the Hangar Room casino; and in the Palm Island Club, which was on the same exclusive residential island where Capone made his home.

  In 1928 Capone bought a Spanish-style, two-story mansion on Palm Island surrounded by high walls and dense shrubbery. The house had been built by the beer brewer Clarence Busch, and Capone added a $75,000 thirty-by-sixty-foot swimming pool that could be filled with either salt or fresh water. Capone’s house became one of the city’s biggest boat-viewed tourist attractions. Those who dared to get close enough could see men patrolling the premises carrying rifles. It was said that Capone slept in a four-poster bed with a chest of money at the foot, and that every afternoon he held poker games for his pals— played only with $1,000 bills. He obviously got sand in his shoes because he liked Miami Beach so much that he called it the “Sunny Italy of the New World.” Capone was a good neighbor, well behaved, polite, and generous. He tried to grease his way into the community’s good graces by making generous donations to local charities, and he once gave a party for Miami Beach’s firemen, at which his staff sported shoulder holsters and guns. But the Miami Herald ran articles and editorials reminding everyone how murderous he really was, and soon the charities began to return his money, his house was raided, and he was brought up on charges as a public nuisance. Carl Fisher himself testified at a court hearing that Capone’s presence in Miami Beach was bringing property values down. Capone got to stay, but he wasn’t around very much. For most of the 1930s he was in and out of prison for tax evasion, and he only moved back to Miami Beach to die of syphilis-induced dementia.

  Capone helped to establish Miami Beach’s reputation as a gangster and gambling haven and an easy port for bootleggers. Writer Helen Muir claimed that there were so many gangsters in Miami Beach in the 1940s that they met around 11:00 a.m. on 32nd and Collins “like show people of vaudeville days meeting by the Palace to swap trade information.” As a public service the Miami Herald began to run a column called “Know Your Neighbor,” which featured photographs and rap sheets of crooks and gamblers who had come to town to live. Later, a group of anonymous citizens called “The Secret Six” was formed to expose hoodlums who had moved into the area, and a local radio station began to carry a show called The Sinister Plot in which a different gangster was featured each week, a for
erunner of TV’s America’s Most Wanted.

  As tourism began to grow in the 1930s and 1940s, casino gambling became a crucial attraction. Author Ted Koefed described Miami Beach as “an illegal Las Vegas, with an ocean, instead of a desert … ” Just north of the resort there was plenty of action at Ben Marden’s elegant Brook Club in Surfside, or at the Sunny Isles Club, where tourists happily rubbed elbows with nattily dressed mobsters and their girlfriends. There were also dozens of less elegant places to gamble called “rug joints,” run by gangsters in private homes to which any hotel doorman could direct a tourist.

  Every big hotel in Miami Beach had to have an on-premise bookie for the convenience of the guests, and an estimated two hundred bookies worked on the Beach. In 1948 Time magazine described bookmaking in Miami Beach as “an industry” and reported that the police chief, P R. Short, explained, “We don’t intend to bother the bookies. They don’t bother us.” Perhaps that was because although Short’s salary was only $7,500 a year, he was earning ten times that amount in bribes. The bookies usually worked out of beach cabanas that the hotels rented to them for the season, and they were in competition with each other for spots at the best hotels. The owners began charging them for the franchise, and in some cases the bookies paid as much as $50,000 for the use of a cabana for a season. In the mid-1940s a group of five men— Jules Levitt, Charles Friedman, Harold Salvey, Ed Rosenbaum, and Sam Cohen— put an end to the rent gouging by hotel owners by forming a group called the S&G Syndicate (the initials possibly standing for Stop and Go) to control and protect gambling in Miami Beach. The S&G Syndicate was so successful that by 1949 it was collecting $40 million a year in bets placed with bookies. Hotels that were not controlled by the S&G Syndicate were raided by the police, and their bookies were harassed.

  It was Tennessee senator Estes Kefauver who finally put an end to the organized bookmaking and illegal gambling casinos. Kefauver was the head of the Senate Special Committee to Investigate Organized Crime in Interstate Commerce, which very effectively ferreted out organized crime throughout the country. The Kefauver Committee, as it became known, investigated crime in fifteen U.S. cities, often grilling gangsters in televised hearings watched by 30 million Americans. In 1949 the committee launched a massive investigation into Miami Beach gambling. “Criminals from all over the nation were able to act freely in the Miami area,” found the Kefauver Report, “because the con centration of economic power they brought in from the out side enabled them to … corrupt substantial portions of the community.”

  THE GREATEST realization of pharaonic desire may not be to build a mausoleum for the world to remember one’s glory, or a palace in which to live that is the envy of one’s peers, but to build a hotel, to create a unique physical and psychological environment in which people will pay money to sleep and eat and play The owner of the hotel is omnipotent, a god-like ringmaster of his living creation. The desire to build and run a hotel never attracted small personalities, and Miami Beach hotelmen were kindred spirits, mavericks, gamblers and scrappy guys with oversize personalities.

  In the 1940s the hotel owners started to compete with each other with gimmicks and amenities to attract guests. The Royal Palm at 15th and Collins Avenue boasted a shower, bath, telephone, and radio in every room. The Versailles at Collins and 34th Street offered running ice water and steamed heat for chilly nights. The White House on Ocean Drive advertised running saltwater, for in-room bathing, and the Normandy Plaza at 69th and Collins had a roof solarium for nude bathing. In 1947 the first $1 million hotel was built, the Sherry Frontenac, which had two towers connected by a bridge and twelve shops in the hotel, and it was the first hotel to provide entertainment in its own nightclub.

  Yet no hotel helped usher in the modern era of Miami Beach glitz and ersatz glamour, or held the public’s sway, more than the 246-room Saxony Hotel, which was built in 1948 at a then astonishing cost of $5 million. It was named for its millionaire owner, George Saxon, the famous “punch board” king of Chicago who manufactured the important component in slot machines. The hotel’s architect was Roy F. France, one of the holy trinity of local Miami Beach architects (the other two being Henry Hohauser and Lawrence Murray Dixon), who had designed hundreds of beautiful apartment buildings, public spaces, and elegant hotels in Miami Beach, including the grand Whitman Hotel in 1936, right across the street from the Saxony. The sleek, modernistic, slightly fan-shaped Saxony was a block wide and sixteen stories tall. It was nicknamed the “Ivory Tower” for its luxurious penthouse nightclub. The Saxony was the first completely air-conditioned hotel on the Beach, and guests ascended to their room floors in a glass-enclosed elevator that ran up a track on the outside of the building.

  The year it opened it was awarded the Miami Beach Hotel Owners Association “Hotel of the Year”2* award.

  Shortly after the Saxony opened, Novack assembled a group of investors to talk about building a hotel that would top the Saxony to be built on a plot of land just one block south of it. His partners included Ben Marden, a nightclub operator; Danny Arnstein, the owner of the Yellow Cab Company of Chicago and New York; Harry Toffel, a wealthy dress manufacturer they called “Little Harry;” and “Big Harry” Harry Mufson, the “tire king.” Mufson was an elegant man, pleasant and easygoing, but with a quick temper, particularly when he’d had a few. He liked to spend his day playing cards and drinking gin and tonics in a cabana at the Cornell Hotel— which Novack once operated. Mufson had made his money in an automotive tire business that he and his younger brothers started in the Bronx, New York, in 1930. They called it the Vanderbilt Tire and Rubber Companies, a name they chose because “Vanderbilt” sounded classier than “Mufson.” The brothers built the company into a national chain of 37 tire franchises with outlets in Macy’s, Bamberger’s, and Sears, Roebuck stores, and in 1945 they sold the company to the B.F. Goodrich tire company for $6 million. Harry Mufson and his brothers all moved to Florida, where they opened the first of a chain of ten auto-supply and tire stores on the Tamiami Trail they called Jefferson’s.

  Jefferson’s was so successful that it again made the brothers millionaires, but Mufson’s heart wasn’t in tires or the auto-supply business. Mufson was taken with the fast-paced, high-stakes, booze-and-broads world of Miami Beach hotel life, and he bought the small Cornell Hotel to get his feet wet before becoming partners with Ben Novack in building a grand new hotel, the Sans Souci.

  In 1948 Novack and Mufson hired Roy F. France, and encouraged France to eclipse his own work on the Saxony. France took the commission, but when he presented his architectural sketches Novack was unhappy. Instead of the innovative design he expected, the drawings looked like all the rest of the L-shaped hotels on the Beach: six stories of pancaked floors painted a tropical white with horizontal bands of windows. Novack wanted something more unusual, but France refused to make changes according to his client’s whimsies. Novack had already paid France a portion of his fee, so instead of firing him, Novack made inquiries to find another architect who would embellish France’s work and give it some pizzazz. At the suggestion of his friend Charles Spector, a vice president of the A.S. Beck shoe store chain in New York, Novack met with a top retail-store designer named Morris Lapidus, an unlikely choice to gussy up a hotel.

  MORRIS LAPIDUS, who was forty-six at the time, was a tall man with broad shoulders, a receding hairline, and bushy sideburns. He was always fastidiously groomed and dressed, and almost every day of his life he wore a sport jacket and slacks or a suit to work, always with a perfectly tied, butterfly bow tie— his signature piece of attire. Although he sometimes looked as though he might have just stepped off the floor of the House of Commons, he was not a visiting lord but rather a Russian Jewish immigrant who lived in a relatively modest but strikingly decorated house on East 8th Street in Flatbush, Brooklyn, New York. From the way he carried himself, and his high opinion of his work, one would assume he designed skyscrapers, not retail shops.

  But he had designed some of the most famous retai
l shops in the world. By the late 1940s, when Lapidus was introduced to Ben Novack, he had already created some 450 storefronts and interiors, including the showstopping A.S. Beck shoe store on Fifth Avenue and the steel-and-glass Bond clothing store on State Street in Chicago, one of the most photographed storefronts of the decade. In the process he’d become something of a marketing strategist. “I am an architect by training but a mob psychologist by insight,” Lapidus said of his work. He began to look at retail space as “a machine for selling” and developed three basic categories for store design: ornamentation, color, and light. He had a “moth theory” that posited that customers were attracted to brightly lit areas where premium merchandise should be displayed. He observed that “people don’t walk in straight lines like ants,” so his interiors were open spaces with meandering, curved parameters and dramatic recessed lighting. He devised ornamentation that he referred to as “intentional nonsense to amuse customers.” His ceilings had jigsaw-shaped recesses backlit by neon; his walls had random Swiss cheese cutouts; and he sometimes separated open spaces with rows of tension poles that the critics named “bean poles.” He also favored an amoeba-like shape that was called a “woggle” by another critic, and these shapes and lighting effects and curving walls became what Lapidus referred to as his “bag of tricks.”

  Lapidus had been a drama student at New York University and an aspiring stage designer. He graduated from Columbia University’s architectural school in 1925, and his first job was for the architectural firm of Warren and Wetmore— the architects of Grand Central Terminal in New York. Lapidus’s first major assignment was to design the details of the bathrooms for the Atlantic City Convention Center, but he soon graduated to designing the interior details of the Palais Royale, a New York speakeasy owned by Bugsy Siegel. Never before had he worked on a hotel. Only once had he submitted a plan for a hotel, but he forgot to put bathrooms in the rooms, and so, after time, retail shops became his métier.