Atlantic Monthly Press; 288 pages; $27.are different from you and me, we all know that even if some of the people in Palm Beach don’t,” the writer Nora Ephron said of the town in south Florida where society is the local industry. In “Palm Beach, Mar-a-Lago and the Rise of America’s Xanadu”, Les Standiford, author of a book about Andrew Carnegie and Henry Clay Frick, traces the history of a sandbar lifted from swamp and scrub to gilded glory by the Florida East Coast Railway line.
Palm Beach, Mr Standiford observes in a book that will appeal to nose-pressed-against-the-glass readers, helped redefine class in America. Once upon a time, status was predicated on lineage and ancestors who had arrived on the. That was before celebrity “became the new imprimatur of consequence”. Newport, Rhode Island? Stale upper crust. Saratoga Springs? That crème de la crème had curdled.
It was also where, in 2005, Melania Knauss, a model, married reality-show host, future president and latter-day lord of Mar-a-Lago Donald Trump, with Elton John and Hillary and Bill Clinton among the big names and net worths in attendance. Buying Mar-a-Lago and its furnishings for $8m in 1985 was Mr Trump’s ticket to Palm Beach—now his permanent residence after he and New York fell out of love.
Now it is a private club, with a portrait of Post on a wall in the former library, across from a younger version of the current proprietor in tennis gear. The announcement, when the club opened, that Prince Charles and Lady Diana had bought memberships was “rubbish”, said Buckingham Palace; but Mr Trump was undeterred. “Even people who hate me are joining the club,” he crowed. The initiation fee is now said to be $200,000.
Yay cheap houses for the poor then
It's very pretty but that much water may cause my cats to panic.
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