PASSIONATE PALM BEACH
A very merry, dancing, drinking,
Laughing, quaffing and unthinking time.
--DRYDEN.
Like all places in which idlers try to avoid finding out that they are
idle, Palm Beach has very definite customs as to where to go, and at
what time to go there. Excepting in its hours for going to bed and
getting up, it runs on schedule. The official day begins with the
bathing hour--half past eleven to half past twelve--when the two or
three thousand people from the pair of vast hotels assemble before the
casino on the beach. Golfers will, of course, be upon the links before
this hour; fishermen will be casting from the pier or will be out in
boats searching the sail fish--that being the "fashionable" fish at the
present time; ladies of excessive circumference will be panting rapidly
along the walks, their eyes holding that look of dreamy determination
which painters put into the eyes of martyrs, and which a fixed intention
to lose twenty pounds puts into the eyes of banting women. So, too,
certain gentlemen of swarthy skin make their way to the casino sun
parlor, where they disrobe and bake until the bathing hour. The object
of this practice is to acquire, as nearly as a white man may, the
complexion of a mulatto, and it is surprising to see how closely the
skins of some more ardent members of the "Browning Club," as this group
is called, match those of their chair boys. The underlying theory of the
"Browning Club" is that a triple-plated coat of tan, taken north in
March, advertises the wearer as having been at Palm Beach during the
entire winter, thus establishing him as a man not merely of means, but
of great endurance.
The women of Palm Beach seem to be divided into two distinct schools of
thought on the subject of tanning. While none of them compete with the
radicals of the "Browning Club," one may nevertheless observe that, in
evening dress, many young ladies reveal upon their necks, shoulders, and
arms, stenciled outlines of the upper margins of their bathing suits.
Ladies of the opposing school, upon the contrary, guard the whiteness of
their skins as jealously as the men of the "Browning Club" guard their
blackness. Rather than be touched with tan, many ladies of the latter
group deny themselves the pleasures of the surf. The parasols beneath
which they arrive upon the sands are not lowered until they are safely
seated beneath the green and blue striped canvas tops of their beach
chairs, and it may be observed that even then they are additionally
fortified against the light, by wide black hats and thick dark veils
draped to mask their faces up to the eyes; "harem" veils, they call
them--the name, however, signifying nothing polygamous.
A pleasant diversion at the beginning of the bathing hour occurs when
some mere one-horse millionaire from a Middle-Western town appears on
the beach with his family. He is newly arrived and is under the fond
delusion that he is as good as anybody else and that his money is as
good as any other person's money. Seeing the inviting rows of beach
chairs, he and his family plump into several of them. They are hardly
settled, however, when the man who attends to the beach chairs comes and
asks them to get out, saying that the chairs are reserved.
The other thinks the man is lying like a head waiter, and demands to
know for whom the chairs are reserved.
In reply the beach-chair man mentions, with suitable deference, the name
of Mrs. Hopkinson Skipkinson Jumpkinson-Jones.
"Well," cries the Middle-Westerner, "Mrs. Jones isn't here yet, is she?
She can't use the chairs _now_, can she, if she isn't here?"
Even without this evidence that he does not grasp at all, the
seriousness of the beach-chair situation, the fact that the uncouth
stranger has referred to Mrs. H.S. Jumpkinson-Jones merely as "Mrs.
Jones," brands him among the Palm Beach "regulars" who have overheard
him, as a barbarian of the barbarians. People in neighboring chairs at
once turn their backs upon him and glance at each other knowingly with
raised eyebrows. At this juncture, let us hope, the daughter of the
intruder manages to pry him loose; let us hope also that she takes him
aside and tells him what everybody ought to know: namely, that Mrs. H.S.
Jumpkinson-Jones has been a society leader ever since the "Journal"
published the full-page Sunday story about her having gold fillings put
in her Boston terrier's teeth. That was away back in 1913, just before
she was allowed to get her divorce from Royal Tewksbury Johnson III of
Paris, Newport, and New York. The day after the divorce she married her
present husband, and up to last year, when the respective wives of a
munitions millionaire and a moving-picture millionaire began to cut in
on her, no one thought of denying her claim to be the most wasteful
woman in Palm Beach.
True, she may not come down to the beach to-day, but in that case it is
obviously proper that her chairs--including those of her dog and her
husband--remain magnificently vacant throughout the bathing hour.
The lady is, however, likely to appear. She will be wearing one of the
seventy hats which, we have learned by the papers, she brought with her,
and a pint or so of her lesser pearls. Her dog--which is sometimes
served beside her at table at the Beach Club, and whose diet is the same
as her own, even to strawberries and cream followed by a demi
tasse--will be in attendance; and her husband, whose diet is even
richer, may also appear if he has recovered from his matutinal headache.
Here she will sit through the hour, gossiping with her friends,
watching the antics of several beautiful, dubious women, camp followers
of the rich, who add undoubted interest to the place; calling languidly
to her dog: "_Viens, Tou-tou! Viens vite!_" above all waiting patiently,
with crossed knees, for news-service photographers to come and take her
picture--a picture which, when we see it presently in "Vogue," "Vanity
Fair," or a Sunday newspaper, will present indisputable proof that Mrs.
H.S. Jumpkinson-Jones and the ladies sitting near her (also with legs
crossed) refrained from wearing bathing suits neither through excessive
modesty nor for fear of revealing deformity of limb.
Many a Mrs. H.S. Jumpkinson-Jones has beaten her way to glory by the
Palm Beach route. Many of the names which sound vaguely familiar when
you read them in connection with the story of a jewel robbery, in lists
of "those present," or in an insinuating paragraph in the tattered copy
of "Town Topics" which you pick up, in lieu of reading matter, from the
table in your dentist's waiting room, first broke into the paradise of
the society column by way of this resort. For a woman with money and the
press-agent type of mind it is not a difficult thing to accomplish. One
must think of sensational things to do--invent a new fad in dress, or
send one's dog riding each day in a special wheel chair, or bring down
one's own private dancing instructor or golf instructor at $5,000 for
the season. Above all, one must be nice to the correspondents of
newspapers. Never must one forget to do that. Never must one imagine
oneself so securely placed in society columns that one may forget the
reporters who gave one that place.
One lady who, for several seasons, figured extensively in the news from
Palm Beach, fell into this error. She thought herself safe, and altered
her manner toward newspaper folk. But, alas! thereupon they altered
their manner toward her. The press clippings sent by the bureau to which
she subscribed became fewer and fewer. Her sensational feats went
unnoticed. At last came a ball--one of the three big balls of the
season; a New York paper printed a list of names of persons who went to
the ball; a column of names in very small type. Lying in bed a few
mornings later she read through the names and came to the end without
finding her own. Thinking that she must have skipped it, she read the
names over again with great care. Then she sent for her husband, and he
read them. When it was clear to them both that her name was actually not
there, it is said she went into hysterics. At all events, her husband
came down in a rage and complained to the hotel management. But what
could the management do? What can they do? The woman is doomed. The Palm
Beach correspondents who "made" her have been snubbed by her and have
unanimously declared "thumbs down." It is theirs to give, but let no
climber be unmindful of the fact that it is also theirs to take away!
As Mrs. H.S. Jumpkinson-Jones looks over the top of her harem veil she
may see a great glistening steam yacht, with rakish masts and funnel,
lying off the pier-head; and down on the sand she may see the young
master and mistress of that yacht: a modest, attractive pair, possessors
of one of the world's great fortunes, yet not nearly so elaborately
dressed, nor so insistent upon their "position," as the
Jumpkinson-Joneses. By raising the brim of her hat a trifle Mrs. H.S.
Jumpkinson-Jones may see, sweeping in glorious circles above the yacht,
the hydroplane which, when it left the edge of the beach a few minutes
since, blew back with its propeller a stinging storm of sand, and caused
skirts to snap like flags in a hundred-mile-an-hour hurricane; and in
that hydroplane she knows there is another multimillionaire.
Near by, sitting disconsolately upon the sand, are the one-horse
Middle-Western millionaire with his wife and daughter--the three who
were ousted from her seats by the beach-chair man. Mrs. H.S.
Jumpkinson-Jones, like every one who has spent a season, let alone half
a dozen seasons, at Palm Beach, immediately recognizes the type.
Father is the leading merchant of his town; mother the social arbiter;
daughter the regnant belle. Father definitely didn't wish to come here,
nor was mother anxious to, but daughter made them. Often she has read
the lists of prominent arrivals at Palm Beach and seen alluring pictures
of them taken on the sand. She has dreamed of the place, and in her
dreams has seemed to hear the call of Destiny. Who knows? may it not be
at Palm Beach that she will meet _him_?--the beautiful and wealthy
scion of a noble house who (so the fortune teller at the Elks' Club
bazaar told her) will rescue her from the narrow life at home, and
transport her, as his bride, into a world of wonder and delight, and
footmen in knee-breeches. Daughter insisted on Palm Beach. So mother got
a lot of pretty clothes for daughter, and father purchased several yards
of green and yellow railroad tickets, and off they went. They arrived at
Palm Beach. They walked the miles of green carpeted corridor. They were
dazed--as every one must be who sees them for the first time--at the
stunning size of the hotels. They looked upon the endless promenade of
other visitors. They went to the beach at bathing hour, to the cocoanut
grove at the time for tea and dancing, in wheel chairs through the
jungle trail and _Reve d'Eté_, to the waiters' cake walk in the
Poinciana dining room, to the concert at the Breakers, to the palm room,
and to the sea by moonlight; everywhere they went they saw people,
people, people: richly dressed people, gay people, people who knew
quantities of other people; yet among them all was not one single being
that they had ever seen before. After several days of this, father met a
man he knew--a business friend from Akron. A precious lot of good that
did! Why didn't father know the two young men who sat last night at the
next table in the dining room? Even those two would have done just now.
Clearly they had been mad to know her too, for they were likewise
feeling desolate. Perhaps mother can get father to scrape up an
acquaintance with them. But alas, before this plan can be set in motion,
the two young men have formed their own conclusions as to what Palm
Beach is like when you do not know anybody in the place. They have
departed. Next day, when mother enters daughter's room to say good
night, she finds her weeping; and next day, to father's infinite relief,
they start for home. So it has gone with many a bush-league belle.
Even the Mrs. Jumpkinson-Joneses, satiated though they be with private
cars, press notices, and Palm Beach, can hardly fail to be sensible to
the almost delirious beauty of the scene at bathing hour.
Nowhere is the sand more like a deep, warm dust of yellow gold; nowhere
is there a margin of the earth so splashed with spots of brilliant
color: sweaters, parasols, bathing suits, canvas shelters--blue, green,
purple, pink, yellow, orange, scarlet--vibrating together in the sharp
sunlight like brush marks on a high-keyed canvas by Sorolla; nowhere has
flesh such living, glittering beauty as the flesh of long, white, lovely
arms which flash out, cold and dripping, from the sea; nowhere does
water appear less like water, more like a flowing waste of liquid
emeralds and sapphires, held perpetually in cool solution and edged with
a thousand gleaming, flouncing strings of pearls.
Over the beach lies a layer of people, formed in groups, some of them
costumed for the water, some for the shore; some of them known to the
great lady, many of them unknown to her. The groups are forever
shifting as their members rise and run down to the sea, or come back
shiny and dripping, to fling themselves again upon the warm sand, roll
in it, or stretch out in lazy comfort while their friends shovel it over
them with their hands. Now one group, or another, will rise and form a
grinning row while a snap-shot is taken; now they recline again; now
they scamper down to see the hydroplane come in; now they return, drop
to the sand, and idly watch women bathers tripping past them toward the
water. Here comes a girl in silken knickerbockers, with cuffs buttoning
over her stockings like the cuffs of riding breeches. Heads turn
simultaneously as she goes by. Here is a tomboy in a jockey cap; here
two women wearing over their bathing suits brilliant colored satin wraps
which flutter revealingly in the warm, fresh fragrant breeze. And now
comes the slender, aristocratic, foreign-looking beauty who wears
high-heeled slippers with her bathing costume, and steps gracefully to
the water's edge under the shade of a bright colored Japanese parasol.
It seems that every one must now be on the beach. But no! Here come the
three most wonderful of all: the three most watched, most talked about,
most spoiled, most coveted young women at Palm Beach. Their bathing
suits are charming: very short, high waisted, and cut at the top like
Empire evening gowns, showing lovely arms and shoulders. Hovering about
them, like flies about a box of sweets, yet also with something of the
jealous guardianship of watchdogs, is their usual escort of young
men--for though they know none of the fashionable women, their beauty
gives them a power of wide selection as to masculine society.
One is a show girl, famous in the way such girls become famous in a New
York season, vastly prosperous (if one may judge by appearances), yet
with a prosperity founded upon the capitalization of youth and amazing
loveliness of person. The other two, less advertised, but hardly less
striking in appearance, have been nicknamed, for the convenience of the
gossips, "The Queen of Sheba," and "The Queen of the May." They too
suggest, somehow, association with the trivial stage, but it is said
that one of them--the slender wonderfully rounded one--has never had the
footlights in her face, but has been (in some respects, at least), a
model.
Like the climbers, like the bush league belle, these girls, we judge,
brought definite ambitions with them to Palm Beach. Partly, no doubt,
they came for pleasure, but also one hears stories of successful
ventures made by men, on their behalf, at Beach Club tables, and of
costly rings and brooches which they now possess, although they did not
bring them with them. But after all, the sources from which come their
jeweled trinkets may only be surmised, whereas, to the success of their
desire for fun, the eyes and ears of the entire smiling beach bear
witness. Watch them as they clasp hands and run down to the water's
edge; see them prancing playfully where the waves die on the sand, while
devoted swains launch the floating mattress upon which it is their
custom to bask so picturesquely; see them now as they rush into the
green waves and mount the softly rocking thing; observe the gleam of
their white arms as, idly, they splash and paddle; note the languid
grace of their recumbence: chins on hands, heels waving lazily in air;
hear them squeal in inharmonious unison, as a young member of the
"Browning Club," makes as though to splatter them, or mischievously
threatens to overturn their unwieldy couchlike craft. Free from the
restriction of ideas about "society," about the "tradition" of Palm
Beach, about "convention," they seem to detect no difference between
this resort and certain summer beaches, more familiar to them, and at
the same time more used to boisterousness and cachinnation. They go
everywhere, these girls. You will see them having big cocktails, in a
little while, on the porch of the Breakers; you will see them having
tea, and dancing under the dry rustling palm fronds of the cocoanut
grove, when the colored electric lights begin to glow in the luminous
semi-tropical twilight; and you will see them, resplendent, at the Beach
Club, dining, or playing at the green-topped tables.
The Beach Club has been for some time, I suppose, the last redoubt held
in this country by the forces of open, or semi-open gambling. Every now
and then one hears a rumor that it is to be stormed and taken by the
hosts of legislative piety, yet on it goes, upon its gilded way--a
place, it should be said, of orderly, spectacular distinction. The Beach
Club occupies a plain white house, low-spreading and unpretentious, but
fitted most agreeably within, and boasting a superb cuisine. Not every
one is admitted. Members have cards, and must be vouched for, formally,
by persons known to those who operate the place. Many of the quiet
pleasant people who, leading their own lives regardless of the splurging
going on about them, form the background of Palm Beach life--much as
"walking ladies and gentlemen" form the crowd in a spectacular
theatrical production--have never seen the inside of the Beach Club; and
I have little doubt that many visitors who drop in at Palm Beach for a
few days never so much as hear of it. It is not run for them, nor for
the "piker," nor for the needy clerk, but for the furious spenders.
Let us therefore view the Beach Club only as an interesting adjunct to
Palm Beach life, and let us admit that, as such, it is altogether in the
picture. Let us, in short, seek, upon this brief excursion, not only to
recover from our case of grippe, but to recover also that sense of the
purely esthetic, without regard to moral issues, which we used to enjoy
some years ago, before our legislatures legislated virtue into us. Let
us soar, upon the wings of our checkbook, in one final flight to the
realms of unalloyed beauty. Let us, in considering this most
extravagantly passionate and passionately extravagant of American
resorts, be great artists, who are above morals. Let us refuse
pointblank to consider morals at all. For by so doing we may avoid
giving ourselves away.
* * * * *
The season wanes. Crowds on the beach grow thinner. Millionaires begin
to move their private cars from Palm Beach sidings, and depart for other
fashionable places farther north. Croupiers at the Beach Club stand idle
for an hour at a time, though ready to spin the wheel, invitingly, for
any one who saunters in. The shops hold cut-price sales. And we,
regarding somewhat sadly our white trousers, perceive that there does
not remain a single spotless pair. The girl in Mr. Foster's fruit store
has more leisure, now, and smiles agreeably as we pass upon our way to
the hotel dining-room. The waiter, likewise, is not pressed for time.
"They was seven-hunduhd an' twe've folks heah yestahday," he says. "On'y
six-fohty-three to-day. Ah reckon they a-goin' t' close the Breakuhs day
aftuh t'-mo'w."
Still the flowers bloom; still the place is beautiful; still the weather
is not uncomfortably warm. Nevertheless the season dies. And so it comes
about that we depart.
The ride through Florida is tedious. The miles of palmettoes, with
leaves glittering like racks of bared cutlasses in the sun, the miles of
dark swamp, in which the cypresses seem to wade like dismal club-footed
men, the miles of live-oak strung with their sad tattered curtains of
Spanish moss, the miles of sandy waste, of pineapple and orange groves,
of pines with feathery palm-like tops, above all the sifting of fine
Florida dust, which covers everything inside the car as with a coat of
flour--these make you wish that you were North again.
The train stops at a station. You get off to walk upon the platform. The
row of hackmen and hotel porters stand there, in gloomy silent defiance
of the rapidly approaching end of things, each holding a sign bearing
the name of some hotel. In another week the railway company may, if it
wishes, lift the ban on shouting hotel runners. Let them shout. There
will be nobody to hear.
You buy a newspaper.
Ah! What is this? "Great Blizzard in New York--Trains Late--Wires Down."
You know what New York blizzards are. You picture the scenes being
enacted there to-day. You see the icy streets with horses falling down.
You see cyclonic clouds of snow whirl savagely around the corners of
high buildings, pelting the homegoing hoards, whirling them about,
throwing women down upon street crossings. You have a vision of the
muddy, slushy subway steps, and slimy platforms, packed with people,
their clothing caked with wet white spangles. You see them wedged, cross
and damp, into the trains, and hear them coughing into one another's
necks. You see emaciated tramps, pausing to gaze wanly into bakery
windows: men without overcoats, their collars turned up, their hands
deep in the pockets of their trousers, their heads bent against the
storm; you see them walk on to keep from freezing. You remember Roscoe
Conkling. That sort of thing can happen in a New York blizzard! Little
tattered newsboys, thinly clad, will die to-night upon cold corners.
Poor widows, lacking money to buy coal, are shuddering even now in
squalid tenements, and covering their wailing little ones with shoddy
blankets.
"Horrible!" you say, sighing upon the balmy air. Then, with the sweetly
resigned philosophy of Palm Beach, you add:
"Oh, well, what does it matter? _I'm_ in Florida anyhow. After all it is
a pretty good old world!"