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As Donald Trump tells it, he was on his way to a dinner party in Palm Beach in 1982 when he asked his limousine driver about properties for sale.
The driver mentioned Mar-a-Lago, the 110-room estate built by cereal heir Marjorie Merriweather Post. Post had left the property to the federal government in hopes that it would become an outpost for diplomats. But Jimmy Carter, who famously turned down the heat at the White House to sixty-eight degrees, thought the acquisition frivolous.
The deteriorating property reverted to Post’s foundation, which could not find a buyer. It was the jewel of Palm Beach, but no one wanted to assume the cost of maintaining the mansion—a million dollars a year, including taxes.
The future president asked his driver to take him by the estate and was mesmerized. He arranged to tour it the next day. His first offer of nine million dollars was rejected, but three years later, the foundation reconsidered and suggested he could buy the property for five million. He accepted and threw in another three million dollars for the furnishings.
At first, Trump used the estate as his private home, inviting his famous friends like Michael Jackson and Lisa Marie Presley to stay there. In 1995, Trump was able to open Mar-a-Lago as a club, retaining his private quarters as a second home.
Designed by Palm Beach architect Marion Sims Wyeth with help on finishing details from Joseph Urban, Mar-a-Lago is a 55,695-square-foot Mediterranean-style complex on South Ocean Boulevard. It has fifty-eight bedrooms, thirty-three bathrooms, three bomb shelters, a theater, a ballroom, a nine-hole golf course, tennis courts, and a private tunnel leading to the beach on the Atlantic. Atop the mansion sits a seventy-five-foot tower.
For fifty years, Marjorie Merriweather Post reigned as the queen of Palm Beach. Until her death in 1973, she presided over endless parties, supper dances, and balls that lasted until dawn. It was Post who remarked, “There is more money, more champagne, and, of course, more affluence in Palm Beach than all the rest of America put together.”
To Trump, owning what would become the Winter White House in Palm Beach represented the pinnacle of success. If you consider the multibillionaires who maintain part-time homes in Palm Beach, it is easily the wealthiest town in the world.
With vigilant police, ubiquitous personal security staffs, and screens of tall ficus encircling every mansion, Palm Beachers protect their impossibly rich society from outside scrutiny. Behind the hedges, the games that Palm Beachers play—their affairs, scams, murders, snubs, intrigues, jealousies, pretenses, bigotry, and occasional generosity—make the seamiest TV shows look like nursery tales.
Beautiful people are everywhere—blondes wearing white tank tops and micro-miniskirts and long-haired, blue-eyed brunettes with bodies that make men’s heads spin. The men are handsome, tan, and very fit. Beauty is the coin of the realm, a lesson in evolution. People who do not consider themselves very attractive or very successful do not show up on the island. Those who do are assumed to be wealthy, part of the club.
“If you’re here at all, that says something,” says Kirby Kooluris, who was for many years a walker, escorting wealthy women to balls.
Accomplished at little more than consuming, the socialites who populate the island look to external trappings to lend meaning to their lives, creating an artificial hierarchy as a way of measuring their own success. Based on wealth, breeding, manners, and dress, they determine who is in and who is out, who will be invited to the top parties, and who will achieve the crowning distinction of having their phone number listed on the twelve-inch-by-sixteen-inch card sent out by the Fanjul sugar barons with holiday greetings. As in high school, those who are excluded—who are “unclubbable,” as Palm Beachers say—are devastated. In Palm Beach, people are judged not by their accomplishments but by the quality of their balloon decorations.
The town has only one supermarket—the Publix at 265 Sunset Avenue, where valet parking is free. When an elderly Palm Beach resident lost control of her car in the parking lot, she hit a Rolls-Royce, a Mercedes, a Porsche, a Cadillac, and an Isuzu pickup truck. Alongside the celery and Pampers, Publix sells beluga caviar and Cristal champagne at over $200 a bottle.
One evening at Ta-boó, Palm Beach’s trendiest restaurant and bar on Worth Avenue, a waiter rushed to the night manager with an urgent request.
“I have to have some Twinkies,” the waiter said. “This guy at table four is going to pay me $500 [equal to almost $1,000 in today’s dollars] if I can get him Twinkies in half an hour.”
“Cut me in, and I’ll send for the Twinkies,” Kevin O’Dea, the night manager, said.
When the Twinkies arrived, the pastry chef put the Twinkies on a large plate and surrounded them with raspberry sauce and whipped cream.
“He not only paid $500 for the Twinkies, he tipped $175 on a $600 check,” O’Dea said.
In her office on Sunrise Avenue, Ann Zweig, a Palm Beach caterer, laughingly recalled what happened when she mentioned to an heir to a major fortune in Palm Beach that Ivana Trump needed a butler.
“Ivana Trump needs a butler? Me! I always wanted to make it with Ivana Trump,” the man said.
“ ‘My God. You don’t know how to be a butler,’ ” Zweig said.
“What do you mean?” the man said. “I’ve had one all my life.”
The trust fund baby applied for the job and was hired. He donned a white jacket and white gloves for a party.
“Amongst the guests was his mother,” Zweig said. “He didn’t stay long.”
For some, the socializing can be a strain. Charles H. “Carl” Norris Jr. blamed commuting to Palm Beach during the season for the breakup of his sixteen-year marriage to Diana Strawbridge Wister.
Wister, who at the time was worth $900 million from Campbell’s Soup Co. stock, had met Carl when he worked on her legal affairs when he was with a Philadelphia law firm. At the time, she was married to a fox hunter.
Besides a home on Lake Worth in Palm Beach, the couple had a house in Vail, a sprawling estate called Runnymede Farm in Coatesville, Pennsylvania, and property in Mount Desert Island, Maine, a summer haunt of blue bloods.
During the divorce proceeding, Diana testified that each home was staffed at all times with social secretaries and servants in case she dropped by. In some years, she conceded, the couple spent $600,000 on clothing alone.
Asked why she failed to answer her door at her Palm Beach home when a deputy sheriff arrived to serve her with divorce papers, Diana was perplexed. Then she smiled as the meaning of the question dawned on her. It would never occur to her to answer a doorbell.
“That is the duty of the household staff. I’ve never answered a door,” she said.
Joseph P. Kennedy, the founder of the Kennedy dynasty, had his home in Palm Beach at 1095 North Ocean Boulevard. Until his death in 1969 at the age of eighty-one, Joe would be described in print as a Horatio Alger hero and chaste Roman Catholic, a saloonkeeper’s son who rose from East Boston to become one of the richest men in America. Usually, he would be pictured with his wife, Rose, and one or more of his nine children. The pictures never showed his well-sculpted, green-eyed Hyannis Port secretary, Janet Des Rosiers, who was his mistress for nine years.
The safety, the money, the sunsets, the lushness, the balmy weather, the unblemished streets, the lack of purpose all combine to create a feeling of floating. Instead of discussing the latest horror in Washington, Palm Beachers chat about the weather forecast or the traffic problems caused by Trump’s winter visits to Mar-a-Lago. Sheltered on what Cleveland Amory called “an island of privilege, in many ways the most remarkable one left in this country,” they tend to be trusting, open, almost childlike. When choosing jurors, prosecutors in the Palm Beach County State Attorney’s Office told me they try to avoid Palm Beachers: They are too cut off from reality. Only the daily paper and television offer a reminder that most married couples do not own matching Rolls-Royces.
As part of the research for my 1999 book The Season: Inside Palm Beach and America’s Richest Society, my wife, Pamela Kessler, a former Washington Post reporter, and I flew down to Palm Beach with Trump on his plane and spent the weekend with him at Mar-a-Lago. On the way down, Trump imitated the nasal, constricted tones of members of Palm Beach’s blue blood WASP Old Guard who condemned his club because it admitted blacks and Jews.
Letting his guard down for once, Trump explained, “I want to be loved and enjoy sticking it to them.”
To this day, there are clubs in Palm Beach that will not admit minorities as members.
“There’s nothing like the Everglades Club anywhere in the country,” Trump told me. “If you’re Jewish and marry a gentile member, forget it. You can only be a guest. They wouldn’t let Estée Lauder come in with C.Z. Guest.” Asked about the club’s policy on Jews, an Everglades Club president declined to comment.
If the members of the Palm Beach Town Council had had their way, there would be no Mar-a-Lago Club. Trump believed that prejudice by Palm Beach Town Council members, some of whom belonged to those clubs, was in part behind their opposition to his plan to turn Marjorie Merriweather Post’s 1927 estate into a private club that would not discriminate.
Providing insight into how Trump operates as president, to overcome the town’s opposition and get his club approved, Trump used the carrot and the stick. His Florida lawyer, Paul Rampell, who had come up with the club idea and over a period of a month persuaded Trump to accept it, sent DVDs of Gentleman’s Agreement, a movie about anti-Semitism in the 1940s, and Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, about antiblack prejudice, to the mayor and each of the town council members when they tried to impose crushing restrictions on the club.
Their limits on membership, traffic, party attendance, and even photography would have made it virtually impossible for Mar-a-Lago to operate as a club. None of those restrictions had been applied to those clubs in town that discriminated.
The message behind sending the movies was clear: Trump was accusing the town council members of bigotry. On top of that, presaging the way he labels opponents today, Trump publicly referred to the trust fund babies who opposed his plans for Mar-a-Lago as the “lucky sperm club.” For good measure, he sued the town for fifty million dollars.
At the same time, Trump unleashed a charm offensive. Guided by Rampell, who is Jewish and a lifelong resident of the town, Trump invited members of the town council to play golf or tennis with him. He invited them to glittering events at Mar-a-Lago, promising the men that gorgeous young women would be in attendance.
For town council members, sending the movies depicting prejudice was the last straw. “It’s like saying the emperor has no clothes,” Rampell tells me. “Discrimination by clubs was an unmentionable. They expected Trump to bow to them. Donald was the extreme in the other direction.”
The town was horrified at Trump’s intrusion. Trump represented everything Palm Beach society claims to hate. Trump was not only nouveau riche, he was aggressive and flamboyant. Instead of the conventional Rolls-Royce costing up to $450,000, Trump drove a red Lamborghini, which can zoom up to 180 miles per hour. Instead of wearing the approved blue blazer with no tie, Trump wore tailored suits with white shirts and ties. In contrast to the Old Guard, Trump was not shy about having money. Nor was he afraid to poke fun at the town’s traditions and unique culture.
“It’s amazing,” Trump said of the International Red Cross Ball, which he has attended every year and is the highlight of the season. “It’s from a hundred years ago. It’s like a religion to them,” he told me. “They worry about this 365 days a year. It’s incredible. Only in Palm Beach.”
Trump spent millions renovating Mar-a-Lago. He employed Richard Haynes, whose father originally gilded Mar-a-Lago, to do nothing but replicate and restore the estate’s artistic touches. Using gold leaf thinner than tissue paper, Haynes regilded forty rams’ heads that jut from the roof line. Trump spent $100,000 on four gold-plated bathroom sinks near the ballroom.
Showing off his bedroom, Trump said to me, “This is Marjorie’s room. It’s exactly as it was. Central air-conditioning has been put in.”
Melania has redecorated the bedroom and the rest of the private quarters, which Trump calls the owner’s wing. She arranged to buy the draperies in the forty-five-room John Kluge estate in Charlottesville, Virginia, and had them hung in the bedroom. Trump later bought the Kluge estate, which was once listed for sale at a hundred million, for $6.7 million and turned it into a bed-and-breakfast called Albemarle Estate at Trump Winery. A room goes for $405 a night in the spring. Trump already owned the vineyard, winery, and much of the land surrounding the house, which he also purchased for a fraction of their value about a year earlier. Trump now features the estate’s Trump Sparkling Blanc de Blanc at his Mar-a-Lago New Year’s Eve party.
As in the White House, Trump is a hands-on manager who pays attention to detail. When we stayed at Mar-a-Lago for the book on Palm Beach, Trump was developing plans to build a second pool with cabanas and a grill along the beach on the ocean. Besides steaks, hamburgers, and hot dogs, the menu for what Trump calls the Beach Club includes Jared’s Chopped Salad, a delicious mix of crisp romaine lettuce, roasted corn, chickpeas, avocado, Swiss cheese, roasted red peppers, and tomatoes with choice of dressing. He also designed a ballroom to replace the tent used for shows and social events. The problem was how to present the plan to the town of Palm Beach. Because Mar-a-Lago has been designated a historic site, the town has to approve every detail of any construction. As we sat in on a meeting with his lawyers and architects at Mar-a-Lago, Trump objected to calling the ballroom a ballroom.
“The word ‘ballroom’ is a hard word to get approved,” Trump said to his lawyers. “ ‘Pavilion’ is a softer word. Use pavilion.”
Trump looked at the architectural drawings. He asked for a black felt-tipped pen. “Here’s what I would do,” he said to an architect, drawing on the plans. “I would add this—another bay,” meaning an alcove.
Trump asked how large the new ballroom would be. He said he wanted it to be even bigger than originally planned—twenty-two thousand square feet. “It will be the best in Palm Beach,” he said. “Do it.”
Trump drove a Durango SLT four-wheel-drive vehicle to the site of a thirty-five-foot waterfall being built for his new Trump International Golf Course in West Palm. On the ground were samples of rocks ranging in color from white to red.
“I like the lighter color,” Trump said. “I don’t like the red. To me, a red rock is more like granite from New England.” He asked the construction crew which color they liked, then he asked his staff, Pam, and me. He seemed genuinely interested in everyone’s opinions, and when most said they preferred the reddish samples, he decided to go with them.
Now at the Sunday night buffet, while watching football playoffs on big-screen TVs at Trump International Golf Course, 350 to 400 club members devour oysters on the half shell, stone crabs from Joe’s Stone Crab in Miami, gigantic cocktail shrimp, lump crabmeat, prime dry-aged steaks grilled to order, barbecued ribs, rack of lamb, veal chop, steamed four-pound lobsters cracked open on the spot, and every dessert from apple crisp to make-your-own hot fudge sundaes, which Trump especially savors.
Still, Donald’s favorite food is meatloaf, which is always on the menu at Mar-a-Lago. And when my wife Pam and I sat with Trump at his table at the Golf Club buffet, Jared and Ivanka ate kosher hot dogs.
Like a proud maître d’, Trump greets guests and asks if their steak was done properly. A germophobe, he used to avoid shaking hands but now only avoids it when dining.
Rather than being a white elephant, Mar-a-Lago has thrived. It now costs $200,000 to join—up from $100,000 before Trump became president—plus $15,000 a year in fees. In addition, the roughly 450 members pay for dining, shows, and suites where they can stay at $1,000 a night and up. The club opens every year with a Halloween party and closes after a Mother’s Day brunch.
One weekend, Jackie Evancho, the young singing marvel who gained popularity on America’s Got Talent, performed. David Foster, who has won eighteen Grammys and worked with Mariah Carey, Donna Summer, Kenny Rogers, and Céline Dion, introduced her.
Referring to Trump’s ego, Foster said, “Out by the pool today, I mentioned to Donald that the weather was beautiful. Donald replied, ‘Thank you.’ ” The host laughed along with everyone else.
Fronting on both sides of the idyllic 3.75-square-mile island, Mar-a-Lago with its furniture and artwork is insured for $700 million. The club brings in $37 million a year in income for Trump. As he wrote in The Art of the Deal, Mar-a-Lago “may be as close to paradise as I’m going to get.”
While the press hammers Trump for enjoying himself at Mar-a-Lago, the fact is, as he did before he was elected, he works almost all the time, never even following his bikini-clad wife Melania to the pool on the ocean, the one she prefers over the main pool at the mansion. Unlike Obama, who played golf almost exclusively with White House or campaign staffers as well as Joe Biden, Trump plays golf with congressional and world leaders to forge relationships that help achieve results.
“Even before he had any political desires, Trump would come to Mar-a-Lago on a Friday evening, get off the jet, and he was working,” his friend Gary Giulietti says. “He was always carrying paperwork. He’d work tirelessly. Next thing you know, he’d have taken a shower, put on a new suit, and come out and would greet everybody there. Whether it was your wedding or you’re just having dinner with some friends, he did it every time.”
“Work, to me, is going on a two-week vacation,” Trump has said. “If somebody says, you have to go away for two weeks, you’re going to Africa on a safari. There’s not going to be any phones. You know, get me out of here, right?”
At a recent New Year’s Eve party held in the same ballroom where Trump and Melania held their wedding reception, the nearly seven hundred guests paid $1,200 per couple to attend. First came hors d’oeuvres and Trump champagne, which has become quite impressive, on the terrace overlooking the pool, cocktail shrimp, stone crab claws, cold lobster, oysters on the half shell, sushi, and caviar lovingly dished onto blini. At a previous New Year’s Eve party, the hors d’oeuvres included foie gras seared to order and risotto with white truffles.
After the champagne and hors d’oeuvres, the guests swanned over to the ballroom for dinner and dancing. No one would be hungry for dinner, which included truffle and ricotta ravioli and filet mignon and scallops.
The band Party on the Moon kept the Mar-a-Lago pavilion rocking as guests donned party hats they found at their table. Even Trump’s usually reserved wife Melania sported a black paper top hat.
To safeguard the billionaires who attend such events, Mar-a-Lago managing director and executive vice president Bernd Lembcke hires four town firefighters and emergency technicians to stand by. Originally from Germany, Lembcke was the Breakers Hotel’s food and beverage manager before Trump hired him at Mar-a-Lago. When Trump began running for president, Lembcke proudly told me he had become a U.S. citizen. Polished and urbane, Bernd has a sophisticated understanding of How Things Work.
In contrast to past New Year’s Eve parties, after Trump’s election as president, guests for the party ushering in 2017 were screened for weapons, as Secret Service agents struggled to open bejeweled clutch purses. Stony-faced Secret Service agents stood at key locations in the ballroom wearing identifying pins, their hands clasped in front of them so they could react quickly and grab their guns. Other agents were not so obvious, mixing in with the guests and not wearing the traditional audio earpiece.
Sitting on a sofa overlooking the main Mar-a-Lago pool four days before the party, I asked Trump how he likes being protected by Secret Service agents.
“It’s great,” he said. “I have agents all around me as I’m playing golf, and they are all looking in different directions, so when I miss a shot, they don’t see it!”
If Donald had wanted to invite them, he could have attracted some of the biggest celebrities in the country to the New Year’s Eve bash. But his guests were old friends—including my wife Pam and me, who are honorary members of Mar-a-Lago, sitting with Donald and Melania at the head table. The rest were club members such as Gianna Lahainer and her husband Guido Lombardi. As revealed in The Season, Lahainer’s previous husband, Frank, indulged her every whim: He bought her a twenty-five-carat engagement ring from Harry Winston, a white Rolls-Royce Corniche, a thirty-two-carat sapphire, and a twenty-six-carat emerald. In time, Frank contracted leukemia, and he died in Palm Beach at the age of ninety. His fortune was estimated at $300 million. Frank left everything to Gianna.
It was poor timing. Frank died inconveniently during high season, which runs from January through March. Gianna decided to postpone the funeral so she wouldn’t miss any of the glittering parties, balls, and receptions that give Palm Beach residents their reason to exist. Instead of having him buried, she had her husband embalmed and stored at the Quattlebaum-Holleman Burse Funeral Home for forty days, until the season was over.
“I wanted to go to the parties,” Gianna told me. “He was ninety. I am sixty. So why should I wait? I did everything for my husband. I did his injections. I was faithful.”
Three days after Frank’s death, Gianna threw a party complete with beluga caviar and Dom Pérignon champagne.
“I went to a party at the Breakers, I went to a party on a yacht with Ivana Trump, I went to a party at Mar-a-Lago,” she said. “My new life was going on,” she said. “Why should I wait? I would miss the season.”