Madness Under the Royal Palms Read Online Free PDF Page A

in Palm Beach, I joined the Breakers Club so I could play tennis and meet some of the players and pretenders off the court as well. It now costs $150,000 to join, plus $15,000 annual dues, but it was a refundable $5,000 when I signed up, with around $2,000 in dues. It was there at the preeminent resort hotel on the island that I met and played tennis with Eddy Louis, Eric Purcell, and David Berger.
    David was an avid tennis player, amazingly physically fit for a man in his early eighties. Like most of the megawealthy, David rarely traveled alone, always with at least one other person, and often with a considerable entourage. The group that arrived a few minutes before David’s game seemed energized and nervous, as if around him everything proceeded in double time.
    David had a chess player’s approach to doubles, planning his moves far ahead and making up in finesse what he lacked in power. Playing against him, I could imagine what an opponent he must have been in the courtroom.
    After our games, we often sat and had spirited conversations. David had been one of the leading Democratic fund-raisers in America, and was conversant not only about the highest levels of politics, but elite business affairs as well. David told Barbara that I was the only interesting person he had met at the Breakers. It is not quite the compliment it may appear. For the most part, the club members are narrow men who made their fortunes doing things such as building airplane hangars or buying mobile home parks. They have largely retreated into lives that begin and end with personal pleasure. Beyond talking about how they had made their fortunes, they are passionate about nothing except their own wellbeing.
    David put me in a different category, but he and Barbara had no intention of getting to know me beyond the tennis courts. I was not part of circles to which they sought entrée. I could do them no good, and I might say or do something that would set them back in their quest for acceptance. David and Barbara were royally dismissive of those who were not part of the rarified social circles. That meant most of the residents including Fred and Rose Keller, whose presence never graced elite events. Fred was a good tennis player but David would never consider playing with him.
    Barbara was not thinking about the people she had not invited. The evening had been a triumph, and she was full of an immense sense of satisfaction that she and her lover were on the cusp of achieving their dream. She had good reason to believe that she had lifted David and herself to the upper reaches of Palm Beach society, to which he so strenuously aspired and which she considered her birthright.
    As she stood at the doorway gaily chatting with the departing guests, Barbara had no inkling that within a few years David’s and her lives, and the lives of many of those around them, would change in ways she would have considered impossible. The old elite world that she and David were seeking to enter was dying. Weakened by inertia, self-absorption, indulgence, moral myopia, and spiritual inbreeding, it was vulnerable to being overcome by a forceful, often merciless new world of money. As much as David wanted to become part of that old world, he was one of the forces destroying the society that he sought so desperately to enter.
    As Barbara said good-bye to her last guests, she had not even the slightest premonition that one of these women would be accused of poisoning her husband; one would accuse her husband of violently assaulting her; and one of her guests would fall grievously ill and miraculously recover. There would be divorces and public shame. Among the outer circle murder, suicide, humiliation, and virtual exile would ensue. As for Barbara’s own fate, it would be both unthinkable and, as she saw the world, unspeakable.

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Palm Beach Millionaire Seeks Playmate
     
    I played tennis most of the time at the Breakers, but I also played at the Seaview Tennis Center, which