OF THE SMARTEST THING IN PALM BEACH—OF LARGE AMOUNTS OF MONEY—AND OF THE OLD GUARD
THE smartest thing at Palm Beach is the Everglades Club. The Everglades Club is so smart that it almost gives itself a pain. It has only a few over four hundred members, but these four hundred include names that make a society editor’s scalp tingle, and control so much money and jewels that the mere mention of them is enough to make any normal burglar tremble all over.
The Everglades Club building was started in the summer of 1918 by Paris Singer, who is a wealthy society man, as a hospital for convalescent officers. The war was over, however, before the building was ever used as a hospital; and it immediately occurred to the smartest of the Palm Beach colony that the building was exactly the thing to use for a smart club where really smart people could go off by themselves and be too exclusive for words. The proposition was put up to Paris Singer, who saw the force of it; and that’s how the Everglades Club started. The initiation fee and yearly dues might be expected to be about as large as the national debt, but in reality they amount to something like one hundred dollars initiation fee and fifty dollars yearly dues. The club has built a very smart and attractive apartmenthouse within a stone’s throw of the parent building; and in it club members can rent small but smart apartments for a mere twenty-five hundred dollars a season—and there are several Maine summer resorts where one pays as much and gets much less for his money.
The club has its own golf links and tennis courts; and it has a restaurant whose chef could easily enter a cheffing contest with the leading Parisian chefs with an excellent chance to win the diamond-studded skillet, or the seventeen-jeweled egg-beater. It is my fixed belief that if old M’sieu Marguery, who invented Filet of Sole Marguery, could have been led into the dining-room of the Everglades Club and placed where he could look out through the palms to the placid waters of Lake Worth, and handed a platter of Pompano Meuniere—it is my fixed belief, I say, that old M’sieu Marguery would have put his head down in his hands and cried like a child to think that he could have doubled his fortune if he could have started serving Pompano that way thirty years ago.
The interior fixtures of the Everglades Club are of the proper sort to go with such food. The walls are hung with sixteenth century tapestries, and the dining-room is wainscoted with oak from the interior of a Spanish monastery.
There was some talk at one time of covering the wall of one room with silver plates made by flattening the silver cocktail shakers of the club members. This was never done, however; and it is probable that the members found other uses for their shakers.
It would be idle to attempt to estimate with any accuracy the amount of money represented by members of the Everglades Club. If they were pushed, they could easily dig up one billion dollars among them.
While we are speaking in billions instead of in mere beggarly millions, it might be appropriate to mention that the most astute Palm Beach estimaters figure that the thirteen hundred guests who fill the Royal Poinciana Hotel at the height of the season, if placed in one room and carefully assayed, would yield at least two billion dollars.
The Country Club is another smart place at which to lunch or dine. There is no restaurant in Europe to my knowledge that is able to produce a better dinner than the Palm Beach Country Club, especially if one leaves it, as the saying goes, to François. François is the head waiter; and he works in conjunction with a chef named Marius, who inherited most of his recipes from a gifted relative in the south of France, and who spends a large part of his time when not cooking in fearing that somebody will solve the recipes. The chief object of the Country Club is to provide a golfing retreat from the Buckwheats and the Three Day Suckers, who usually break for the hotel golf links immediately on arrival. Consequently the links which are open to the Buckwheats are apt to become so congested that if one doesn’t stick rigidly in his place in the golf procession, he is more than apt to get a couple of golf balls in the side of the head and then have to stand aside for two hours while a long parade of golfers and near-golfers hacks its way past him. So the smart golfers go to the Country Club. It is there that one finds the Old Guard of Palm Beach.
The Old Guard is a hide-bound organization of ardent golfers who know all the intimate personal scandal about practically every dollar that has changed hands in North America since the Dutch purchased Manhattan Island from the Indians for twenty-four dollars, and threw in enough rum to provide magnificent hang-overs for the families of the original owners.
One must have been a resident of Palm Beach for five years before he is allowed to join the Old Guard, the theory being that unless a golfer has lived there for five years, he is not thoroughly conversant with the essential features of Palm Beach gossip and will be apt to interrupt a calm and quiet game of golf to ask who the G. Daley Squabbles are going to marry when they have divorced each other, or some other equally irrelevant and unnecessary question.