OF THE ALIBI WINDOW—OF THE TRICK FLASKS AND CANES—OF DRINKERS FRAIL AND FAT—AND OF ONE CONCEPTION OF SIMPLICITY
THE Palm Beach crowd is always ready to part with money for anything that looks sufficiently smart and interesting. In order to facilitate the parting, some of the country’s leading costumers and rug merchants and hat makers and jewelers have moved their branch stores into the hotel lobbies, so that the passers-by can separate themselves from their money with a minimum of exertion.
There is one Palm Beach window that is known as the Alibi Window. It is full of gorgeous diamond pendants and diamond bracelets and simple little ten-thousand-dollar rings; and the Palm Beach theory is that the shop’s best customers are men who have been raising what is somewhat loosely known as the dickens. As is well known, a man whose conscience is troubling him can frequently keep it quiet by getting his wife a pendant of diamonds set in platinum. At night, when the shop is locked up, all the jewelry is removed from the window and replaced with a large flock of frosted silver cocktail-shakers whose appearance alone is warranted to give even a Prohibition Enforcement Agent a thirst. This spectacle is supposed to make the observer hunt up some whisky and get himself nicely boiled, and possibly to make him fall so low as to speak disrespectfully of the society leaders. On the following day he buys jewelry to square himself with his wife.
Large, curved pocket flasks, two of which would make fine protective armor for the entire upper part of the body if worn on opposite sides, are popular at Palm Beach, as is a new trick cane that unscrews at a joint and reveals a long, slender bottle three-quarters of an inch in diameter and two feet long. The popularity of these canes, which come in half-pint and pint sizes, indicate clearly that some enterprising hat manufacturer will soon get out a two-pint straw hat for Florida wear.
There is a great deal of fire-water in sight at Palm Beach at all hours of the day and night; and the débutante who can’t absorb eight cocktails without raising her voice or falling over the chairs is regarded as being handicapped by some sort of inherited weakness. One of the most frequently pointed-out personages at Palm Beach is a very fat man who can—according to the claims made for him by his admirers—drink thirty-five cocktails at one sitting without blinking. The price of Scotch whisky starts down around forty dollars a case in the summer time and works gradually upward until at the height of the season one is paying from seventy to one hundred dollars a case for it.
The building-boom that has struck Palm Beach in the last five years is claimed by most of the loose claimers and enthusiastic drinkers to be due to Prohibition. A great many cottages have been erected by persons of wealth and social prominence in these five years; and the prevalent architectural idea for a simple little Palm Beach cottage seems to be a Spanish modification of a Union Station, or a Court of Jewels at a successful World’s Fair.
To hear the drinkers tell it, these houses have been built so that the owners could have a place in which to drink without being watched or hurried or made to feel uncomfortable. This may be possible; but if it is, the house builders are the only ones who haven’t felt free to drink when and where they choose.
The truth of the matter unquestionably is that the people who built houses liked the place and the climate, and so built in order to enjoy them more thoroughly than they could be enjoyed in a hotel room smelling faintly of damp carpets and previous occupants.