Fool's Paradise Read online

  Novack’s grand idea was that the behavioral design techniques Lapidus was successfully using to create retail space would work as well for hotels. Lapidus agreed to tinker with Roy France’s design in exchange for a modest fee of $18,000. Novack and Mufson arranged a meeting between France and Lapidus in France’s Miami Beach offices, where Lapidus produced plans for additions and changes. France, an accomplished and well-respected architect, was undoubtedly furious, and he dismissed Lapidus’s plans as not physically feasible; there were stresses and strains and stairways that could not be built on a foundation of sand. The meeting ended abruptly, and outside on the sidewalk Novack and the partners agreed that Lapidus should take over and that Novack and Lapidus would doctor France’s design to suit them, Roy France be damned.

  To celebrate they invited Lapidus to dinner at Harry Mufson’s house that night. Lapidus got a taste of what was in store for him. The partners got into a brawl over whether the nightclub in the new hotel should be big and brassy or small and intimate. Ben Novack wanted small and intimate. Within minutes Novack was snarling insults at his partners to “stick to the tire business” and “stick to your dresses,” and “the air became blue with more four-letter words than I knew existed,” Lapidus wrote. Ben took Bernice by the arm and said, “We’re getting out of here, the deal is off.” The deal wasn’t off, but angry threats and life-and-death crises became daily events.

  The Sans Souci was in fact the showstopper hotel of 1949. It ushered in a new standard in luxury and design in Miami Beach. Architecturally the building sported many easily identifiable Lapidus touches— such as the architectural fin of blue glass tiles that ran up the front of the building, at the top of which the sans-serif name Sans Souci was bathed in blue-white light, visible for miles up and down Collins Avenue. “There were native coral stone walls,” Lapidus wrote, “with splashing fountains and lush tropical foliage growing in the most unlikely places.” The swimming pool was in the shape of a Lapidus squiggle, and at night the colored lighting on the pool and decks and gardens “turned the areas into an exotic fairyland.” The lobby had undulating walls, cheese holes, and bean poles on which hung globelike birdcages with branches and leaves instead of birds, because the birds would have left droppings on the furniture and guests. The promotional material boasted, “In Paris it’s the Eiffel Tower … in London, Buckingham Palace … and in Miami Beach, the Sans Souci.” When Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the shah of Iran, visited Miami Beach, he and his entourage leased Sans Souci’s entire top floor, and Novack redecorated all the rooms to their pleasing.

  The Sans Souci was unquestionably deserving of the accolade “Hotel of the Year,” yet the Saxony won the award again that year, and again the year after that, for three years in a row. It irritated Novack, but in the long run it hardly mattered. He had ambitions that would dwarf any award the Hotel Owners Association could bestow. He was going to build not just the “Hotel of the Year” but the hotel of the century. He knew what the public wanted and how to give it to them. Glamorous. Expensive. Dramatic. Big. Very big. “I want to build,” he said, “the world’s most pretentious hotel.”

  1* The Fontainebleau’s publicist Lisa Cole related that one day a man had to hock his wife’s jewelry to pay his gambling debt, and the next day his wife saw another woman wearing her diamonds.

  2* Miami Beach historian Howard Kleinberg writes in his book Woggles and Cheese Holes that there is “no evidence of such a formal declaration or award by any organization.” Be that as it may, it was a real thing in the public’s mind.

  Five

  THE FONTAINEBLEAU

  All the rivers of the very worst taste twisted down to the delta of each lobby in each grand Miami Beach hotel …

  —NORMAN MAILER, 1968

  Ben Novack never stopped pursuing Bernice from the night he met her at La Martinique nightclub. He phoned whenever he was in town, he begged her to come out to dinner at 21, and he sent her extravagant gifts from Miami Beach, including a Joe’s Stone Crab dinner on dry ice. At one point she was told by her modeling agency that she was booked on a photographic shoot in Havana. A few days later she was flown to Cuba with another model, a photographer, and a makeup artist. “But when I got there,” she said, “it was Ben! He had set up the whole thing to look like a job, just so he could spend time with me.” She was taken with his romantic, soft side, although she was one of few people to see it. “He used to write poetry,” Bernice said, “and he played the piano for me and he loved romantic musicals, like Brigadoon.”

  Eventually Novack divorced his wife, and the divorce so depressed him that he had what Bernice described as a “ner vous breakdown” and he went away to Arizona for a time to recuperate.1* The Novack family contends that Harry Mufson helped perpetrate Novack’s psychological break with a mean practical joke. Evidently Mufson was getting a little sick of Novack’s shrill grandiosity, and Mufson emptied all the furniture out of Novack’s office at the Sans Souci and changed the locks to goad him. When Novack arrived to find the door to his offices locked and his furniture gone, he panicked and thought he was going crazy. When the practical joke was revealed, Novack was humiliated. This prank inflamed the growing one-upmanship and enmity between Novack and Mufson. Yet it was Harry Mufson who called Bernice in New York to tell her how sad and forlorn Novack was without her and that she should call to cheer him up.

  In 1952, seven years after they met, and after Bernice’s marriage to her soldier husband had been annulled and an engagement to another man had been broken, Bernice and Ben were married by a justice of the peace in a small ceremony at the Essex House in New York. Then she packed her belongings and moved to the Sans Souci hotel.

  It was a tough transition. The Sans Souci was booked solid, the lobby overflowing day and night with guests and gawkers. There were days Bernice didn’t feel like leaving her room. While some hotel owners kept a separate residence, “Ben always lived in his establishments,” Bernice said. Novack was happy living in a big impersonal transient place, where the lobby was like his living room only it had strangers wandering through it. He had learned from his father’s hotel in the Catskills that being a hotelier was not a nine-to-five job. “A hotel owner is always on the premises and he must be a good host,” Novack told a reporter. “He must have a warm, pleasant manner. Otherwise he has no business being in the business.”

  For Bernice, life in a hotel was aimless. She had given up her modeling career and all she had was time on her hands. She didn’t know a soul in Miami Beach except for the spouses of Ben’s partners. “The wives and I didn’t get along,” she recalled. “They were very cold to me and so much older. Here I was, a model. They wanted to sit in a cabana and play cards all day and I wasn’t interested.” So she sat by herself most of the time and wondered what she’d gotten herself into.

  In any event, she didn’t live at the Sans Souci for very long. In July of 1952, Ben Novack announced to the Miami Heraldthat he and a syndicate had made a deal with the heirs of Harvey S. Firestone, the late chairman of Firestone Tire and Rubber Company, who died in 1938, to buy his oceanfront estate on Collins Avenue and 44th Street for $2.3 million, a considerable sum in the 1950s. The estate had 950 feet of oceanfront, the largest privately owned piece of oceanfront in Miami Beach. Harry Mufson told the Miami Herald that they would demolish the thirty-year-old mansion and replace it with a behemoth hotel— 550 rooms— at a breathtaking cost of $10 million (which would escalate to $16 million by the time the job was done). The new hotel “would be gigantic,” Mufson bragged to the Herald. “Twice as big as anything on the Beach.”

  Nobody was cheering. Novack had at first said he was going to buy the Firestone estate to conserve the land as a public park and prevent another hotel from being built on it. The Firestone estate was figuratively and literally a line in the sand in Miami Beach. It was the curtain raiser on Millionaire’s Row, a cavalcade of oceanfront mansions that lined Collins Avenue from 44th Street to 59th Street. Harbel, as it was called, was a stately Medit
erranean villa bounded by palm trees, built in 1919 by James Snowden, a partner in Standard Oil. It was the setting of elegant parties at which Thomas Edison and Henry Ford and other notable men of their day joined Firestone’s table. Harbel had become a showcase for Carl Fisher’s vision of Miami Beach’s luxurious lifestyle.

  More important to many, it marked the zoning demarcation between residential and commercial buildings. Conventional wisdom was that the nearly four hundred existing hotels below 44th Street were enough for Miami Beach, and there was still hope that the northern part of the Beach would retain its residential aspect, like Palm Beach, instead of becoming a commercial quagmire, the ocean view lost to a wall of hotels. Harvey Firestone’s heirs disagreed; they wanted the right to sell the property at the highest price for the best possible use, and beginning in 1943 they challenged the zoning ordinance in court, initiating a series of lawsuits that took seven years to wend their way to the State Supreme Court, where in 1950 the Firestones were awarded a commercial rezoning. Novack and his partners bought the estate two years later.

  Or so his partners thought.

  Shortly before the closing— just two or three days before the terms of the deal would expire, according to some versions of the story— Mufson discovered that the seed money Novack had used to bankroll the Firestone property— $15,000— came out of the coffers of the Sans Souci hotel and that the Sun N’ Sea Corporation’s name wasn’t on the deed to the Firestone estate, only Novack’s name. It was a double cross. Bernice and Ben Jr. don’t remember the details except that “Ben didn’t get along with Mufson,” according to Bernice. Novack and Mufson nearly came to blows at the Sans Souci, and the next day Mufson and the other partners consulted a lawyer.

  With Mufson and his partners’ money gone, and just twenty-four hours before the day of closing, Novack worked the telephones late into the night, calling old friends and acquaintances, trying to raise the funds before the deal fell through. According to Ben Jr., his father called just about everybody he ever knew in his entire life, begging, “Trust me, just send me the money, I’ll send you the contracts later.”

  Said Ben Jr., “He put together the most unusual partnership of people you ever heard of. Some of the people he got weren’t his choice, but they were willing to cough up the dough.” Among the eleven original partners in the new hotel were Herbert Glassman, who made millions in the taxi and limousine business; auto dealer Joseph Cherner, who opened the first shopping center in the United States in Shirlington, Virginia; Abe Rosenberg, the owner of a large spirits distributor called Star Liquor; Jules Gorlitz, the president of the Sea Nymph bathing suit company in New York; and possibly a few unnamed investors, such as Sam Giancana from Chicago. In Miami Beach there was a joke that Novack had about as many partners as his hotels had rooms.

  Novack also secured a $5 million building loan, the largest such loan in the history of South Florida.

  Before the end of the year Harry Mufson and five other stockholders in the Sun N’ Sea Corporation filed suit against Ben Novack to halt the construction of the new hotel. The court refused to stop construction, but in settlement Novack divested himself of his Sans Souci stock and the partners paid him $1.5 million for the land he owned upon which the Sans Souci stood. Harry Mufson hated Novack from then on. It wasn’t just about the money; in the Wild West world of Miami Beach hotel owners, there was blood of honor spilled on Collins Avenue.

  IN DECEMBER of 1953, when Novack was asked who would be the architect of his new hotel, he claimed he blurted out the first name that came to him— Morris Lapidus. But that wasn’t true. By the time Novack uttered the name Lapidus, the hotelier had already consulted with several prominent architects whose design fees for a $12 million building were in the range of $500,000. Some architects refused to work with Novack, putting him in the life-is-too-short category. So when pressed, Novack said Lapidus’s name. It certainly was news to Lapidus when he read in the New York Times that he was going to design Novack’s new hotel. Hardly a flattering way to be offered a job, but in truth Lapidus was so grateful to be able to design an entire building from the ground up that he was willing to suffer almost any of Novack’s indignities. Since his work on the Sans Souci, Lapidus had been in demand as a “hotel doctor” who put the frills and finishing touches on half a dozen hotels on Collins Avenue, among them the Nautilus, Delano, Biltmore Terrace, and Algiers, which featured a semicircular glass-walled lobby that hung out over Collins Avenue and bellhops dressed in tunics and fezzes. But none of these buildings carried Lapidus’s name as the architect, and he got little public credit for his work.2* “I had never been the architect for a complete new building,” he lamented.

  Lapidus made what he called a “ruinous” deal with Ben Novack. He agreed to design not just the building but the entire hotel, inside and out, including landscaping and lobbies, wall sconces and wallpaper, chandeliers, sofas, and staff uniforms— all for only $80,000.

  At the start of their collaboration on the Fontainebleau, Lapidus presented Novack with twenty-six drawings for the hotel. “These are for me?” Novack asked sweetly. “May I do anything with them I want?” When Lapidus said of course he could, Novack ripped up the drawings and tossed the pieces in the wastepaper basket.

  Lapidus decided that since any idea that wasn’t Novack’s own would be rejected out of hand, he would nonchalantly mention concepts to Novack in passing, like a posthypnotic suggestion, and then wait for Novack to regurgitate the idea back to him a week or two later, at which time Lapidus would act as if Novack was a creative genius.

  As for the big question of whose idea it was for the now world-famous shape of the hotel, Lapidus claimed it came to him while riding the BMT subway in New York. To prepare Novack, he kept telling him that every hotel on Miami Beach was boxy and square and that Novack should think of “curves and circles, curves and circles.” Lapidus said that weeks later when Novack showed him a sketch for a curved building, he commented, “That’s terrific,” and kept his mouth shut.

  Bernice tells a different story that she claims is the gospel about the design of the Fontainebleau. One day when she and Novack were living at the Sans Souci, Ben borrowed her sketchpad and charcoal and took it to the bathroom with him, where he sat on the toilet sketching. A long time went by— over an hour— and Bernice finally knocked on the door and said, “Ben, are you all right?”

  And Ben said, “I’m all right. I’m designing the Fontainebleau.”

  When Lapidus heard this story he countered, “Ben Novack couldn’t design a toilet.”

  WHEN THE war with Harry Mufson erupted, Ben and Bernice fled the Sans Souci and moved into the abandoned Firestone mansion, which became the construction headquarters for the new hotel. Novack used the large formal dining room for the general contractor’s office and the adjoining breakfast room as his inner sanctum, guarded by a secretary named Miss Gabby. Bernice sequestered herself in one of the large bedrooms and watched in awe while around her a hotel was created from the foundation up. The concrete trucks lined up all down Collins Avenue, while a crew of 1,200 men3* worked dawn until dark, swarming over a seventeen-story skeleton composed of enough steel to build a skyscraper one hundred stories tall. Finally the Firestone mansion itself had to be bulldozed to make way for seven acres of formal gardens designed after the petit jardins of the Palace of Versailles, at their center a fifty-four-by fifty-four-foot fishpond. Novack was on the job site every morning, dressed in work clothes, supervising each bolt and nail. Years later when Conrad Hilton asked Novack how he managed to build such a massive hotel in less than a year, Novack answered, “Put on a pair of overalls.”

  Novack wanted a big hotel, and big it was. Truckloads of materials were delivered in quantities so large they were measured in miles: 25 miles of carpeting at a cost of $600,000; 1 mile of fluorescent tubing; 140 miles of electrical wiring; 50 miles of tele phone wires. There were also 8,000 lightbulbs; 2,000 mirrors; and enough plumbing fixtures for 800 homes. More than 100 miles of plumbi
ng pipe connected the swimming pools, fountains, kitchens, 1,000 toilets, and 40 bidets. Truckloads of white and pink and black marble for the lobbies and public spaces were unloaded on forklifts. It seemed as though the hotel was being glazed in marble. In the main lobby alone there was half an acre of white marble on the floor, inlaid with repeating black marble bow-tie shapes.† “We’re full of marble,” Novack proudly told a reporter.

  The hotel’s interim name was “Estate,” but before long Novack settled on “Fontainebleau,” although the correct French pronunciation eternally escaped him. He, and everyone in Miami Beach, pronounced the name FOUN-tin-blew. Novack first became aware of the Royal Château de Fontainebleau in 1951. He was on a driving vacation in France with Bernice and they accidentally came upon it. As it happened, the Château de Fontainebleau was an apt inspiration for Novack’s new hotel. Originally built in the twelfth century, with architectural makeovers through the centuries by Henry II, Catherine de Medici, and Napoléon Bonaparte, it was always considered the height of gilded glamour, and its mannerist interior design inspired the expression “Fontainebleau style” in France. Ironically, Ben and Bernice never actually laid eyes on the château. “We didn’t stop to look at it,” Novack said, “but we liked the name, kind of catchy.”

  When Novack told Lapidus he wanted the interior of the modern hotel to look like a French château, Lapidus showed him pictures of a château in a book. “Not that French château,” Lapidus recalled Novack saying; “I want a modern French château.” Novack wanted to invent his own “Fontainebleau style” called “Modern French Provincial,” otherwise known as “Miami Beach French.” How faux French Provincial furniture was going to mesh with— and fill up— a modern building that size was anybody’s guess. Lapidus actually went on a $100,000 shopping spree along Manhattan’s Third Avenue, then lined with expensive antique stores, and had the furniture shipped back to Florida. When he returned he found the marble statuary being used by workmen as sawhorses. It hardly seemed to matter how the statues were treated, because eventually many of the antiques were stripped to their wood and painted with gold paint because they hadn’t been shiny enough.