Fool's Paradise Read online

  Nearly a year passed of having to deal with bellicose Ben Novack, and Morris Lapidus was exhausted and broke. He estimated he’d already worked double the amount of time he had allotted for his fee of $80,000. He was supporting two residences— an apartment in Miami Beach and his house in Brooklyn— and his creditors up north were hounding him. Without telling his wife, Bea, Lapidus emptied out their savings account to pay the bills and borrowed money from friends. According to his version of events, faced with personal bankruptcy he met with Novack and asked to renegotiate his fee. After some haggling, Novack agreed it would be fair to pay him an additional $40,000— but only if the other investors consented.

  In November of 1954, a few weeks before the opening of the hotel, Novack gave a grand tour of the new hotel for all the partners, which ended on the deck of the impressively large 6,500-square-foot swimming pool. This was the moment that Lapidus chose to take Novack aside and ask if it would be a good time to tell the partners about the additional $40,000 that Novack had promised.

  “I don’t understand what you’re talking about,” Novack said. “What forty thousand dollars?”

  “You remember, Ben,” Lapidus recounted saying. “The forty thousand dollars’ extra fee that we agreed would be paid to me. You said to wait until the partners saw the hotel.”

  “I can’t understand you, Morris,” Novack responded. “What are you talking about?” Novack looked incredulous. “I never said I’d pay you another forty thousand dollars.”

  Lapidus lost his mind, literally. He wanted to kill Novack. As Novack turned to walk away, Lapidus picked up a three-by-six piece of construction lumber lying on the pool deck and began to chase after Novack with it, swinging the lumber at Novack’s head. Lapidus recounted, “I had no control over myself— running— screaming— flailing the length of timber … I only knew that I wanted to crush that timber on my client’s skull.” Novack ran from Lapidus as the startled guests stared in disbelief while Lapidus chased him around the pool, waving the lumber and loudly chanting, “He must die! He must die! He must die!”

  The next thing Lapidus remembered was that he was on his back on the deck pinned down by several of the investors while a man splashed pool water in his face. He was so distraught that, he recalled, “It took about three of the partners to restrain me.”

  The architect was eventually paid the additional $40,000, but only after he was made to apologize to Novack for trying to kill him. Novack maintained that he had never promised the money to Lapidus in the first place and that because of his hearing problem, or faulty hearing aid, he must have misunderstood the conversation.

  “I can’t say anything good about the man,” Lapidus said. “Bad, bad, bad.”

  SHEATHED IN a veneer of 85,000 square feet of aquamarine glass that took on the color of the sky during the day and shimmered in the sultry air at night, the arcuate Fontainebleau Hotel dominated everything around it, the sky and ocean merely a backdrop to its beauty. It was so instantly recognizable around the world that for the first twenty-four years of the hotel’s existence it never had a name sign. It opened on December 20, 1954, with a party for 1,600 people, including New York mayor Robert Wagner, who flew to Miami with a contingent of international press. There was such a crush of people on opening night that much of the carpeting was ruined and had to be replaced. Patti Page sang the “Fontainebleau Waltz” in the La Ronde Room, and above the hotel whenever an Eastern Airlines jet arrived or departed Miami International it tipped its wings in salute. “Everything was in French,” reported the Miami Herald, “including the confusion.” (The rest-room doors were marked MESSIEURS and MESDAMES.) The guest of honor was the mayor of Fontainebleau, France, who was stupefied by the hodgepodge of style and furniture and the twenty-four different colors Lapidus had mixed together. The nicest thing he could say about the hotel was that while the outside was very strong, the inside was a “bouillabaisse.”

  Fish stew or not, it was as promised “a monumental show-place … that … dazzled visitors,” said the New York Times, but only in retrospect. When the hotel first opened, it was the subject of great ridicule. To comment that the hotel was overdone or garish was beside the point. The Fontainebleau wasn’t built for traditional aesthetic reasons. It was shameless, built to amuse the senses, to shock and surprise. “I wanted people to walk in and drop dead,” Lapidus said. He created a world that “would represent for [guests] the dream of tropical opulence and glittering luxury, influenced by the greatest mass media of entertainment of that time, the movies … So I designed a movie set! I never for a moment let Ben Novak [sic] know what I was doing. For him I was expressing his ideas of what a luxury hotel should be.”

  The sheer volume of open space in the main lobby, with its eighteen-foot ceilings, was as marvelous as was the ridiculous incongruity of marble statues and busts on pedestals placed throughout it with no particular design scheme, so it seemed— Greek statuary mixed with terra-cotta cherubs and marble Roman busts, potted palms, a faux nineteenth-century grand piano, ornate wall clocks, then stretches of open marble with black inlaid bow ties almost as if there was not enough furniture to fill it, until another furniture setting appeared next to a paneled wood wall. The central lobby was supported by majestic columns that had no base or capitals, and recessed into the lobby ceiling were four crystal half-ton chandeliers that Lapidus had had fabricated in Belgium, each made of 1,800 pieces of crystal that needed to be disassembled by hand twice a year and individually washed in soap and water.

  The Fontainebleau was the only hotel on the Beach that had a formal nighttime dress code; women wore cocktail dresses with mink stoles and men wore suits with ties. The doorman, Floyd “Mac” McSwane, who worked there for twenty years, kept extra jackets and ties in his locker. Getting dressed up for a night at the Fontainebleau was part of the fun, and Lapidus cleverly gave the guests a dramatic way for them to display their finery with the “staircase to nowhere.” The white marble staircase hugged a curved wall painted with a scene of the ruins of the Roman Forum. It allowed hotel guests the opportunity to take an elevator to the mezzanine and walk down the staircase, stopping at the “return,” where the staircase changed direction and women could pivot while everyone in the lobby watched, as if they were at a fashion show. Watching people walk down the “staircase to nowhere,” the women in gowns and diamonds and furs, was one of the hotel’s most popular attractions.

  As Ben Jr. pointed out, the staircase to nowhere “didn’t go nowhere.” It connected the lobby with the mezzanine, where there were hotel offices; a writing room with comfortable chairs and desks, an important part of every hotel in the 1950s, where guests could send home postcards and letters on Fontainebleau stationery; a “TV Theater,” which featured one of the earliest large-screen television sets and rows of chairs for people who didn’t want to watch TV in their rooms; and a large card room, full of smoke and gamblers, with high-stakes pinochle and poker games. On an average day in season, hundreds of thousands of dollars would change hands, on the weekend sometimes a million, and when the mobsters and movie stars were playing, a folding wall would be drawn to separate the VIPs from the more public tables.

  Novack showed himself to be the consummate hotelier. Behind the scenes the Fontainebleau was a huge, complicated piece of machinery with dozens of components that all operated under his command. There were 847 full-time employees— 1 employee per 1.4 guests— and hundreds more in parttime help. Behind the walls of the lobby were banks of switchboard operators manning phone boards with plug patches for the hotel’s hundreds of telephones, and since there was no voice mail at the time, messages were written by hand and one of the hotel’s small army of bellhops, dressed in impeccable Fontainebleau uniforms, slipped a copy under the guest’s door, with a second copy left in the room box. For more urgent calls, one of the page boys would wander through the lobbies and out by the pool and beach summoning guests by name.

  Because there was constant wear and tear on the furniture in the 550 ro
oms, Novack outfitted the basement with its own furniture repair shop and hired two full-time craftsmen to run it. There was also a full-time television repairman; four staff gardeners; and a team of laundresses who worked round-the-clock in an industrial-size laundry plant bigger than that of most metropolitan hospitals, washing thousands of sheets and towels a day. The amount of mail in and out of the hotel was so voluminous that Novack had to create an in-house post office to deal with it.

  The food service and cuisine of the hotel’s seven restaurants was overseen by a septuagenarian maître de bouche with the suspiciously grand name of René de la Jousselinière de Villermet de la Godsrary To store food for its hungry boarders, the hotel maintained six walk-in freezers the size of trucks. The Fontainebleau also had its own bakery and its own butcher department with a staff of full-time butchers; Novack would no doubt have raised the cattle and chickens to supply his kitchens if he had had the chance. It took a total of 80 cooks working in eight kitchens over 30 gas ranges to prepare an average of 2,000 meals a day, including food for 24-hour-a-day room service.

  The main dining room, the Fleur de Lis, was pure Lapidus magic. It looked like the set of a Jean Cocteau movie, with high gray walls and giant bisque and papier-mâché figurines of Louis XV and his courtiers on pedestals, interspersed with bizarre electrified candelabra fashioned from tree branches and antlers. Patrons entered the Fleur de Lis room by stepping up on a raised carpeted platform bathed in pink light so they could be seen by everyone in the dining room before descending a few steps onto the restaurant level to be seated. The pixilated ambience of this restaurant so amused John Jacob Astor that he gave several dinner parties there instead of at his nearby mansion, and the chairman of Revlon cosmetics, Charles Revson, once held a party at the Fleur de Lis that depleted the hotel’s entire caviar supply.

  Novack created the Fontainebleau to be self-contained, so that a guest would never have to leave and spend money elsewhere. The hotel’s lower level was named the Rue de la Paix, and it had more than thirty retail shops, including a shop for women’s formal wear where live mannequins modeled Dior evening gowns; a linen shop with $2,500 lace tablecloths and $50 napkins; a stock brokerage so guests could keep an eye on their investments; a furrier, who did such a good business in selling mink stoles late at night that he stayed open until dawn every day; and a barber shop where a down-on-his-luck former lightweight boxing champ named Beau Jack shined shoes. The lower level also featured a spacious “elegante” coffee shop/Jewish delicatessen called the Chez Bon Bon, which was intended to look like an Old World Viennese pastry shop, with plastic hedges along the walls and alcoves in which bisque figures balanced cornucopias of food on their turbans.

  One of the hotel’s most popular amenities was simple compared with all the rest— a “gymnasium” with schvitz baths, both Turkish and Russian, where a heavyset old man hosed you down after a good sweat with water so icy cold it was a miracle more men didn’t have heart attacks. Up on the roof there were separate men’s and women’s solariums, human broilers where guests could lie naked in the sun coated in suntan oil, or get a naked massage from a bulky eastern European type dressed in white pants and T-shirt. There was also, although not advertised in promotional materials, a mikvah, or ritual cleansing bath, for Orthodox Jewish women in the basement.

  The Fontainebleau proved to be a spectacular background for dozens of films and television shows, including Jerry Lewis’s 1960 film The Bellboy, with actor Alex Gerry playing the part of the obsequious “Mr. Novak” [sic]. The hotel’s Boom Boom Room was the hangout of Sandy Winfield II, the dashing young detective played by actor Troy Donahue in the 1960–62 hit tele vision series Surfide 6, and the opening scene in the 1962 James Bond movie Goldfinger took place in one of the hotel’s 250 double-decker cabanas, in which Margaret Nolan gave Sean Connery a massage while outside a team of shapely female water-skiers skied on the six-lane, Olympic-size swimming pool.4* The Fontainebleau also made appearances in the action movie The Specialist, with Sylvester Stallone and Sharon Stone; The Bodyguard, with Kevin Costner and Whitney Houston; and Scarface, with Al Pacino as Tony Montana, a Marielito Cuban drug dealer who looks out from the magnificent hotel’s rear terrace and murmurs, “This is paradise. This is paradise.” Yet the hotel— and Miami Beach— probably never had any better publicity than from 1966 to 1970 when each week a CBS TV announcer uttered the words, “From Miami Beach, the sun and fun capital of the world, it’s the Jackie Gleason Show!”

  The Fontainebleau boasted yet another distinction: It was the most robbed hotel on Miami Beach, a candy store for thieves. The hotel was rife with room burglaries. Even Novack reported to the police the theft of his “piggy bank,” which, he said, was filled not with loose change but with $15,000 worth of $100 bills. Since guests brought their best jewels to wear at the Fontainebleau, each room had its own safe-deposit box in a wall behind the cashier’s desk in the lobby, but not every guest took advantage of the locked box, and in two years over $250,000 worth of jewelry was stolen from guests’ rooms, including a $70,000 jewelry heist that took place while a clothing manufacturer and his wife were playing canasta by the pool. Novack hired twenty plainclothes men to patrol the hallways twenty-four hours a day, commanded by former New York City Police Department lieutenant James Gillace, whose remedy for the thievery was to suggest that if the women didn’t wear so many diamonds at night, there’d be less stolen.

  THE FONTAINEBLEAU turned Lapidus into an object of ridicule from both critics and peers, winning him the sobriquet “The Lib-erace of architecture.” The reviews were unmerciful. The New York Timess Ada Louise Huxtable called the Fontainebleau “aesthetic illiteracy.” Architect Robert Anshen described it as “a monument to vulgarity.” Art in America decried that the building was “hedonism’s vacuum in a materialist culture.” A friend of Lapidus who was an editor at Architectural Forum called him and said, “Morris, what the hell did you do? You created a monstrosity,” and the magazine went on to label the hotel a “building of sucker-traps.” Look called it “a mammoth dental plate.” (Look also noted that there were “116 jokes in circulation about the Fontainebleau,” for example, “The Fontainebleau is the only hotel to have wall-to-wall carpeting on the beach.”) Even the architect Frank Lloyd Wright, usually reticent about critiquing his colleagues, described the Fontainebleau as an “ant hill.”5*

  Belittle it as they may, the hotel took its place in American culture, but it would take thirty years for scholars to admit that the Fontainebleau inaugurated the postmodern movement in architecture. What began as “a condescension to the client,” as Lapidus called it, became an internationally known style.

  “You asked who designed it?” Novack snapped to a reporter. “ I did. It was my idea to have the curved building, it was my idea to decorate it, it was my idea to build it, it was my idea to pay for it. Lapidus helped. He was part and parcel of me. He’s a very clever man,” Novack said, lapsing into the third person, “but Ben Novack designed that building.”

  BEN AND Bernice Novack’s apartment on the fifteenth floor of the Château building at the Fontainebleau was known as the Governor’s Suite. It was a four-bedroom oceanfront duplex with marble floors, formal dining room, billiard room, and piano bar— all with floor-to-ceiling windows. The view was a spectacular panorama of sea and changing sky. It was the kind of apartment you see only in movies (and sure enough, a scene in the 1960 movie Ocean’s 11 was shot in its billiard room), yet after a short time it lost its luster for Bernice. The disquieting reality was that save for her clothing and a few pieces of jewelry, nothing belonged to her. “Everything was owned by the hotel,” she said— the Limoges dishes upon which she ate, the bed in which she slept. She didn’t choose the sofa in the living room or the curtains for her bedroom. There was no grocery store at which to buy milk or shop for dinner, no laundry, no dishes in the sink, no beds to make. Instead there was room service and chefs cooking her meals to order, a bar that was automatically restocked, and fresh linens on t
he bed every day— life in a completely impersonal world.

  “I was never happy living in the hotel,” she asserted, and she asked Ben to buy a house nearby so she could make a life away from the hotel, but he didn’t want to be away from the Fontainebleau— ever. “The Fontainebleau was his life,” Bernice said. “It was his baby, his wife, his mistress, all his dreams and ideas together.”

  Bernice’s part in this dream was as the beautiful trophy wife.

  She was always on stage, an object of curiosity for the guests and the staff. She was expected to be the most fashionable woman in the hotel, as she was, impeccably turned out at all times, in an amazing array of outfits, even just walking to her cabana by the pool. “You are always in a glass cage when you’re the wife of the owner,” she explained. “People stared at me. They’d say, “There’s the owner’s wife’ or “There’s Mrs. Novack.’ I didn’t care for it. I didn’t like the “front’ of the house.” In her many years as the Fontainebleau’s First Lady, she is remembered as the very pretty woman at Ben Novack’s side who smiled and kept quiet. “It was not an easy life,” she acknowledged. “It was very difficult, believe it or not.”