Free Madness Under the Royal Palms by Laurence Leamer Page B

said nothing. He was a three-pack-a-day man, and he sat puffing away on his Camel. Smoking was so chic that the non-smoking Brownie used a cigarette as a prop when she was photographed. “If you don’t,” Brownie said finally, “I’m going to be going with somebody else and you will read about it and you’ll be upset.”
    “Oh, darling, if I would go to one ball a year with you, would that make you happy?” Jock asked.
    Brownie looked at Jock. “No, darling, you can’t do that because they’d call you ‘One Ball McLean.’” So Brownie went to the balls with other escorts, who deposited her home in the early-morning hours.

6
The Evening Is Only Beginning
     
    I n 1957, Jock and Brownie purchased El Solano, one of the great estates on South Ocean Boulevard. The 10,600-square-foot-home had nine bedrooms, a 40-by-26-foot ballroom, and two swimming pools—one that caught sun in the morning, one that caught it in the late afternoon.
    Addison Mizner, the most important creative figure in the history of Palm Beach, built El Solano in 1925. When the forty-six-year-old largely self-trained architect arrived on the island in 1917, Palm Beach was still part of a hotel culture. Most visitors stayed at either the Royal Poinciana Hotel on Lake Worth, or the Breakers on the Atlantic Ocean. It was not until the twenties that the Army Corps of Engineers created the Intracoastal Waterway. In these years, the western shore of the island fronted the freshwater Lake Worth. The island was largely jungle, and most guests rarely ventured much beyond the confines of the hotel grounds except to go to watch Alligator Joe wrestling alligators in a dusty pit in his great thatched hut.
    When Mizner died in 1933, on the grounds where Joe had fought alligators stood the magnificent Mizner-designed Everglades Club, the center of the social life of the island. Along Worth Avenue rose other Spanish/Moorish-inspired Mizner buildings, including a five-story villa with a turretlike room at the top that was his studio, like a lighthouse above the village. Beneath was a twisting narrow passageway full of small shops that evoked an image of medieval Spain. In the surrounding streets stood about a hundred homes designed by Mizner, including great mansions and petite villas. Interspersed around them were estates and homes that blended into the architect’s fantasy, designed by several other notable architects, including Maurice Fatio and Joseph Urban. It was a magical scene; a bit of Spain, a dash of Morocco, a hint of Paris, a flourish of Hollywood, and something of exotic, jungle Florida as well.
    The sick, rotund man who arrived in Palm Beach during World War I was an unlikely candidate to transform not only Palm Beach, but also the whole ethos of South Florida. Mizner had such a varied, contradictory existence that it was as if he lived an encyclopedia of lives. His father was a successful lawyer in Benicia, a town in northern California. His son had the soul of a bohemian and the tastes of an aristocrat. Addison was the seventh of eight children, and when the boy was sixteen, his father was named ambassador to Guatemala.
    In his year there, Mizner imbued much of the cultural life of old Central America, an influence that years later he would draw upon in his own architecture. Six foot three and weighing close to three hundred pounds, he would have been an imposing figure, even without his vibrant, outgoing personality. After desultory studies in California and Spain, he set up an architectural practice in San Francisco. When that did not work out, he prospected for gold in Alaska, published a calendar in Hawaii, painted slides in Samoa, boxed in Australia, and eventually worked his way back home selling casket handles. He ended up in New York, surviving as much on his enviable charm, which he employed on wealthy ladies, as his abilities as an architect. One day in 1917, he picked up three hitchhikers in Long Island. They beat him half to death,