High life
Barbarians at the gates
Taki
I
New York f memory serves, the West Palm Beach courthouse lies six rugby fields away from the Kennedy House on Ocean Boulevard. I once spent a very nervous morning there while a magistrate decided to fine me rather than jail me for having drag-raced over the Everglades Club golf greens on a bet with Sean Flynn, Errol's boy. Daddy paid and I walked, as they say. Mind you, I was sweet 16.
There were no Trumps then, no Yoko Ones were allowed and the Kennedys were kept behind walls, as in a zoo. At the time Mrs Stephen Sanford, or Queen Mary, was said to rule Palm Beach. In my not so hum- ble opinion, the Phippses and the Guests were socially, intellectually, physically, financially and hormonally her superiors. I was lucky to have stayed`with all three, and although Mary Sanford's oceanfront house, Las Incas, was the most comfortable, the Guests and the Phippses made me feel more at home. The Sanfords ran a tight house, the Ps and Gs a relaxed one. All one needed was a white dinner jacket and a modicum of manners.
No longer. Big money has invaded Palm Beach, and by big money I mean new big money, vulgar big money. Laddie Sanford is dead, Mary is living in the wrong part of town, Winston Guest is playing polo in that heavenly field up above, while Nonie Phipps has joined her husband, Tommy Schippers, where he, too, conducts a heav- enly symphony orchestra.
Whereas once upon a time Palm Beach
hit the headlines because of Barbara Hut- ton running off with Porfirio Rubirosa, of Jimmy Donahue arriving at a nightclub with the Duchess of Windsor and dancing cheek to cheek all night, it now arouses more prurient interests. Like Pulitzer V. Pulitzer (remember Roxanne and the ear trumpet?) Kimberly v. Kimberly (lesbian v. conjugal love) and, of course, the William Kennedy Smith case (all-American boy allegedly meets all-American girl and acts like all-American uncle Ted).
Gregg Dodge, the once beautiful show- girl who married the automobile heir and ran through his fortune quicker than a Dodge, is now a gossip columnist, while my friend Brownie McLean, whose mother-in- law owned the bad-luck Hope diamond, now lives in Trump's failed condo in West Palm. Mollie Wilmot is even worse off: among her more recent guests was a Venezuelan tanker that ran aground in her swimming pool.
Needless to say, the barbarians have not as yet breached the gates of the Bath & Tennis or Everglades clubs, nor have the Kennedys. And I don't think they will. Membership of these two bastions of con- servatism is mostly Mid-Western and middle-class. When I was a junior member of the B & T 35 years ago I thought it glamorous. Now I realise it's like having been fascinated by Miss Havisham. The average member makes Norman Lamont seem swashbuckling by comparison. The alternative is the Trumps and Balkanys of this world. The latter is a Rumanian who was born Robert Zellinger, changed his name to Balkany and then, later still, to de Balkany. His ex-brother-in-law, Victor Emmanuel of Savoy, pretender to the throne of Italy, just got let off a manslaugh- ter charge in Paris. So perhaps after all I'll stick with Miss Havisham when in Palm Beach.
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