The Prince of Paradise (3 page)

T
HREE

MR.
ROMANTIC

Ben Novack first met Bernice Drazen at the fashionable La Martinique nightclub in early 1945, and was smitten.
He was on a brief trip to New York, making arrangements for his new Sans Souci hotel and looking for a good time.

As he already knew one of the girls at Bernice’s table, he casually came over to introduce himself, sitting down next to her.

Many years later, Bernice would explain that, for her, it was anything but love at first sight.
In fact, she blew off the thirty-eight-year-old flashily dressed hotel proprietor, thinking him gauche.

After buying champagne for the table, Novack started boasting about his growing Miami Beach hotel empire.
Bernice was not impressed.
To the twenty-three-year-old model, Novack seemed overbearing and middle-aged.
She also noticed the hearing aid in his right ear, with a large wire connecting it to a pocket microphone.

“But there was something about him,” she recalled more than half a century later.
“He was charming and vulnerable, and there was the way he walked and swayed his shoulders.”

Ben Novack started bragging about the Sans Souci hotel, saying it would be the last word in grandeur and luxury.
It was a one-way conversation, as Novack could not hear Bernice, and had to keep asking her to speak louder into the microphone of his hearing aid.

At the end of the night, he gave the model his business card and asked her to call him.

“And she glanced at it,” said Maxine, “and dismissed him.”

Refusing to take no for an answer, Novack then requested Bernice’s telephone number.
Once again she refused, saying she had to go.

“He flipped for her,” Ben Novack Jr.
would later tell
The Miami Herald
.
“She didn’t want to date a married man and made it very clear to him.”

The next day, Novack returned to La Martinique, bribing the maître d’ to give him Bernice Stempel’s phone number.
Instead, he was given the phone number for a young male friend of Bernice’s, who had also been at the table.

Ever resourceful, Novack called the friend, saying he needed to get in touch with Bernice on a legal matter.
He was then given a contact number for the Conover Model Agency.

“So he called up the agency and said he had a job for them,” said Maxine.
“He manufactured a shoot in Havana and said he wanted a very American girl type.
Outdoorsy looking.
Red hair.
Freckles.
He made the whole thing up.”

A week later, Bernice and another model were sent to Havana for the modeling assignment, together with a makeup girl and a photographer.

When she came out on the beach in her swimming costume for the scheduled photo session, a smiling Ben Novack suddenly appeared out of nowhere.

“He had set the whole thing up to look like a job,” Bernice later explained, “just so he could spend time with me.”

His elaborate romantic ploy paid off.
Bernice was so impressed that she started seeing him whenever he came to New York.

Her husband, Archie Drazen, was still fighting in Europe, and although they regularly corresponded, they had grown apart.
There was also little passion between Novack and his wife, Bella, who was content to remain in Miami while he gallivanted around the world on business.

Before long, Ben and Bernice were lovers.

“He wined her and he dined her,” said Maxine, “and she’s still married.”

All through their often rocky four-year courtship, Ben Novack wrote Bernice love poems, enlisting Maxine as an ally.

“He was in Florida sending her soft-shell crab and baskets of fruit,” Maxine recalled.
“He was a hotel man, so he would send beautiful things like wine, cases of liquor, and the top sirloin steaks.
And he’d always say, ‘Maxine, I want her to know how she can live if she marries me.
This is how she’ll live.’”

Maxine says her sister did not fall in love with her ardent suitor immediately.
She was also romantically involved with a rich young man named Ivan Mogul, but his parents did not consider the beautiful young model marriage material, making him break off the relationship.

Soon after that, Bernice and Ben became serious, and when Archie returned from Europe, Bernice decided to end the marriage.

“She wrote him the ‘Dear John’ letter,” said her sister.
“She said, ‘Arthur, I don’t know if we’re suited.
You know I met somebody and I think you’d be happy with someone else.’”

Bernice even visited her mother-in-law to explain.
She and Archie Drazen would remain friends for the rest of her life.

Maxine said their father had always encouraged his daughters to be socially ambitious.

“Bernice had ambitions,” Maxine explained, “We inherited that from our father.
He’d always say, ‘Remember who you are.’”

*   *   *

Back in Miami Beach, Ben Novack spent 1948 trying to get his ambitious Sans Souci hotel off the ground.
It was being built on 1.5 acres at the prime location of 3101 Collins Avenue.

He had hired architect Roy F.
France to design his dream palace, but was unimpressed with France’s plans, viewing them as run-of-the-mill and lacking that “wow” factor Novack so desired.

So he hired retail store designer Morris Lapidus, whom he had met years earlier in New York, to jazz things up.
Lapidus had been designing retail stores for the A.S.
Beck chain of shoe stores, but had absolutely no experience with hotels.

When Novack first asked him if he knew anything about hotels, Lapidus replied that he had “stayed at plenty,” conceding that he had never actually designed one.
Then, after seeing some preliminary sketches Lapidus did for him on the spot, Novack hired him to design the Sans Souci for a paltry $18,000.

“Local architects were not terribly imaginative,” explained the designer’s son, Alan Lapidus, “so they said, ‘Let’s bring down that guy that did our stores because he has a lot of flare.’
So he would take their plans, which were pretty boxy and straightforward, and jazz them up.”

Morris Lapidus, an early champion of Art Deco, brought stunning New York department store lobbies to hotels.
Novack loved Lapidus’s charming designs, which he called “intentional nonsense.”

Novack and his partner, Harry Mufson, agreed that Lapidus should take over as San Souci’s architect, and they had a celebratory dinner, which was attended by Ben’s new girlfriend, Bernice Drazen.

Years later, Morris Lapidus would recall that terrible evening in his autobiography.
Over dinner, Novack and Mufson got into a heated argument, hurling personal insults across the table.

“The air became blue with more four-letter words than I knew existed,” Lapidus later wrote.

Eventually, Novack ushered Bernice out of the party, to save her embarrassment.

When the Sans Souci opened in 1949, it was an instant sensation.
With its gleaming fin of blue glass tiles rising up the front of the building and its coral stone walls, it looked more like a pleasure palace than a humble hotel, even boasting a swanky nightclub.

Ben Novack’s promotional brochure for his new hotel immodestly stated, “In Paris it’s the Eiffel Tower … London, Buckingham Palace … and in Miami Beach, the Sans Souci.”

*   *   *

Just weeks after the opening of the Sans Souci, Ben and Bella Novack adopted a two-year-old boy named Ronald.
But it was Bella who bonded with the boy, as Ben was too busy with his latest hotel projects and his passionate affair with Bernice to care about much else.

Back in New York, Bernice’s modeling career was on fire.
She could now pick and choose her assignments, and had become
the
face of Coca-Cola, with a string of calendars, advertisements, and other promotions to her credit.
She was the supermodel of her day, decades before the term would be invented.

In the summer of 1951 she took an extended European vacation with friends, traveling first class all the way.
She sailed back to New York from Le Havre on the luxury French liner
Liberté
, arriving home on September 6.

*   *   *

Several months later, Ben Novack divorced Bella and had a nervous breakdown, going to Arizona to recover.
As part of her divorce settlement, Bella received the valuable land tract on which the Sans Souci hotel stood.
Some speculated that having to give Bella the land had driven Novack over the edge.

Years later, Bernice would blame Novack’s breakdown on an elaborate practical joke perpetrated by his partner, Harry Mufson.
One day he arranged to have all the furniture in Novack’s office moved out, and he changed the door locks.
After getting a locksmith to break in and finding an empty office, Novack suffered a panic attack, thinking he was losing his mind.
Upon discovering that Mufson was behind the joke, he fled to Arizona.

Ironically, it was Mufson, concerned about his partner’s mental health, who telephoned Bernice in New York, urging her to call Ben and raise his spirits.
When she called, Ben turned things to his advantage, persuading her to marry him, saying it was the only thing that could cure him.

So seven years after first meeting him, Bernice agreed to give up her modeling career and move to Miami Beach and become Mrs.
Ben Novack.

*   *   *

In early 1952, Ben and Bernice were married by a judge in a simple civil ceremony at the Essex House, New York City.
Jack Stempel gave his daughter away, refusing to let his ex-wife, Rowena, attend.

“My mother was alive,” said Maxine, who came with her new husband, David Fiel.
“But my father wouldn’t let us know where she was.
Bernice married a man just like our father: controlling, self-centered.
Not particularly sensitive.”

F
OUR

BRICK BY BRICK

When Bernice moved into her new husband’s luxurious Sans Souci suite, she fell into a deep depression.
For the first months of her marriage she remained in her bedroom, wondering if she had done the right thing.

As Ben Novack had insisted she give up modeling, she felt she no longer had an identity, apart from being his wife.
She rarely saw Ben anyway, as he was too busy running his hotel, now booked for months in advance.
Her only social contacts were with the Sans Souci waiters and maids, who brought room service to the suite.
It was a lonely existence she would soon learn to live with.

Most afternoons, Bernice would go to the hotel’s private beach and sunbathe by the pool, finding little in common with the wives of her husband’s business partners.

“The wives and I didn’t get along,” she later explained.
“They were very cold to me, and so much older.
Here I was, a model.
They wanted to sit in a cabana and play cards all day, and I wasn’t interested.”

*   *   *

As soon as Ben Novack had the Sans Souci up and running, he was ready to move on to something bigger.
A golden opportunity soon presented itself when the Harvey S.
Firestone oceanfront estate went on the market.
Well located on the bend of Collins Avenue at Forty-Fourth Street, the estate marked the boundary between Miami Beach’s hotels and the “Millionaires’ Row” mansions.

Built in 1918, at a cost of $350,000, by James Snowden of Standard Oil, the fifteen-room Italian Renaissance–style palace had long dominated Miami Beach.
Harvey Firestone, the chairman of the Firestone Tire Company, bought it in 1924, renaming it Harbel Villa.
He used it to entertain notables such as President Herbert Hoover, Henry Ford, and Thomas Edison.

When Firestone died in 1938, his heirs left Miami, and Harbel Villa fell into disrepair.

The Sans Souci lay thirteen blocks south of the abandoned estate.
Every day, Ben Novack drove past it, lusting over its possibilities.
With its commanding 950 feet of oceanfront, it would be far and away the biggest hotel in Miami Beach, if he could ever buy it and realize his vision.

Unfortunately, the Firestone estate lay right on the line dividing commercial buildings to the south and residential ones to the north.
The rich and powerful Miami Beach citizens living nearby did not want any new hotels intruding on their exclusivity.
They maintained that the four hundred hotels Miami Beach already had were quite sufficient, and any new ones would ruin the place.

In 1943 the late Harvey Firestone’s heirs had first legally challenged the zoning laws, wanting to sell the land for the best possible price.
For the next seven years, there had been a barrage of lawsuits, culminating in a state supreme court decision allowing the estate to be rezoned as commercial.

Novack had been following this case closely, and in late 1951 he and Harry Mufson began quietly negotiating with the owners to buy the Firestone estate.
In July 1952 the two partners called a press conference to announce that their Sun N’ Sea Corporation had agreed to purchase the old Firestone estate for $2.3 million ($19 million today).
They told reporters they would tear down the Firestone mansion to build a “gigantic” 550-room hotel costing $10 million ($83 million today).
It would be, Ben Novack boasted, the largest luxury hotel in Miami Beach.

On the eve of closing the deal, Harry Mufson discovered that Novack had double-crossed him by secretly syphoning off $15,000 in Sans Souci hotel money to get his Firestone estate deal under way.
To make matters worse, he also discovered that only Ben Novack’s name would go on the Firestone estate deed.

There was a heated confrontation between Novack and his partners at the Sans Souci, before Mufson stormed out and hired a lawyer to take legal action.

With just twenty-four hours to close the deal, Ben Novack started hitting the phones for financial backing.

Years later, Ben Novack Jr.
claimed that his father had literally begged acquaintances he barely knew to trust him and wire the money, promising to send them contracts later.

“He put together the most unusual partnership,” Ben Jr.
told author Steven Gaines.
“Some of the people he got weren’t his choice, but they were willing to cough up the dough.”

One of Ben Novack’s new partners, one who put up big money, was Mafia boss Sam Giancana, who would soon play a major role in the new hotel.

*   *   *

In the wake of his battle with Harry Mufson, Ben Novack moved into the derelict Firestone mansion, using the dining room as his new office.
Bernice took over one of the bedrooms and watched in admiration as her husband began working on the daunting logistics needed to start building the enormous seventeen-story pleasure palace he had in mind.

*   *   *

A few months later, in New York, Morris Lapidus picked up his morning newspaper to read that Ben Novack had selected him to be the architect of his new super-luxurious hotel, to be called “The Estate.”
It was the first he had heard of it.

Lapidus immediately called Novack, who explained that when he had been asked by a reporter who his new architect would be, Lapidus’s was the first name that came into his head.
Although Lapidus wanted the project, the hotelier now said he needed “a name” architect.
Eventually, Lapidus persuaded Novack to allow him to design not only the hotel, but also the interior furnishings and everything down to the bellhops’ uniforms.
And he agreed to do it for just $80,000, a fraction of the going rate.

“My father made the devil’s deal with Novack,” explained Alan Lapidus.
“It was an insane fee, but my father knew this was a chance to make his bones.”

On December 17, 1953, Ben Novack met with his new architect and recently hired contractors in the Firestone mansion to discuss a time line for completion.
He then shocked everyone by announcing that the opening ceremony would take place a year to the day from then.

“I protested this was impossible,” Lapidus wrote in his autobiography,
Too Much Is Never Enough
.
“The general contractor suggested that instead of preparing my plans in my New York office, I set up an office right here.”

Lapidus agreed, and moved his wife and two sons to Miami Beach.
He then started doing preliminary sketches for the new hotel, deciding to break way from straight lines and rectangles.
Instead, he used curves and round buildings, as in his distinctive New York department stores.
He later claimed the idea had come to him in the subway, on his way to work, as an epiphany.

“A sweeping curved building was what I wanted,” he explained, “and what I hoped I could sell my client.”

When Lapidus presented his client with twenty-six designs, Novack ripped them up and threw them in the trash can, saying he was going to “dream up his own shape.”

A few days later, Novack called Lapidus in great excitement, saying he had “hit upon a marvelous idea,” one that had struck him like a bolt of lightning while he was sitting on the toilet that very morning.

“Why not have a curved building?”
he declared.
“No one has ever designed a curved building.”

Keeping “a straight face,” Lapidus agreed, congratulating Novack for having such an inspiration.

Later, who had actually come up with the original idea for the hotel’s iconic crescent shape would become a matter of contention.
Half a century later, Bernice Novack would vehemently dispute Lapidus’s claim that it was his idea.

“Ben designed [it] while sitting on the toilet of the Sans Souci hotel,” she told
Ocean Drive
magazine in 2001.
“He liked things that are round, like the feeling of embracing arms.
He was in the bathroom for an hour and a half, and he came out with three pages of sketches.”

*   *   *

In January 1954 the bulldozers moved in and razed the Firestone mansion to the ground.
Then an army of 1,200 construction workers began work on Ben Novack’s dream hotel.
Once he was satisfied that construction was progressing well, he and Bernice sailed to Europe for an extended vacation.

During the trip—during which they took in England, France, and Spain—they drove past the stunning Fontainebleau Palace outside Paris, the summer residence of French kings dating from the twelfth century.
But Ben refused to stop the car to look inside, saying he wasn’t into historical places.

“I don’t go for those foreign chateaux,” he was later quoted as saying.

However, he did think the name “catchy,” deciding on the spot that it would be perfect for his new hotel.

“Ben loved and was inspired by everything about French luxury,” Bernice later explained.

On the way home, the Novacks stopped off in New York, where they visited Bernice’s sister, Maxine Fiel, at her home in the Bronx.

“He liked my furniture very much,” Maxine recalled.
“He said, ‘It’s not fussy.
It’s French Provincial.’
And he copied it for the bedroom sets at the Fontainebleau.”

*   *   *

Morris Lapidus soon realized the enormity of his mistake in agreeing to design the Fontainebleau for a pittance.
By June 1954 he had spent his entire fee, and he informed Ben Novack that he was quitting unless Novack came up with another $75,000.

Eager that his architect not abandon him and delay construction, Novack promised that if his partners liked the finished building, Lapidus would get the extra money upon its completion.

The architect reluctantly agreed to these terms, fearing his reputation would be ruined if he walked away from his first major project.
So without consulting his wife, he spent their savings to keep them afloat, before taking out a series of personal loans when that money ran out.

*   *   *

Each morning, Ben Novack was the first on site in a hard hat and work clothes, like a general leading his troops into battle.
Always hands-on in the hotel business, he now micromanaged everything.

That summer, Morris Lapidus got his teenage son, Alan, a job with the construction company, pouring concrete.

“I was fifteen,” Alan remembered, “and we lied about my age.”

Working there, the young boy witnessed Ben Novack’s aggressive business style while attending some of the rancorous business meetings with his father.

“I remember [Ben] not being very pleasant,” said Alan Lapidus.
“Always imperious: ‘I want this thing done and don’t give me any goddamn excuses.’
That’s the kind of guy he was.
Any problem could be solved if you swore enough.”

Every afternoon, Bernice Novack came out onto the beach in her skimpy bathing suit to sunbathe.
“She would just lie out there,” recalled Lapidus, “and work would really come to a stop.”

*   *   *

The Fontainebleau was the largest American hotel to be built since the war, and a New York–based building union soon arrived in Miami Beach to unionize the workforce.
Fiercely antiunion, Ben Novack was livid when the union threatened to disrupt work and cause months of delays.

One day, at 4:00
A.M
., Morris Lapidus got a call from the on-site night watchman, saying a bomb had just exploded.
By the time the architect arrived, the police were already there.
Lapidus could smell dynamite in the humid air.

Fortunately, the explosive charges had been set against a column supporting a two-story wing, so the damage was not serious, and was easily repaired.
It was obvious, though, that the dynamiters knew what they were doing, and had not been trying to create permanent damage.

“Basically, the hotel workers’ union was run out of town,” said Alan Lapidus, “and it wasn’t until much later that it was discovered that Ben Novack was behind the bomb.
He had done it to break the union—which he did.”

*   *   *

One week before the scheduled December 20, 1954, opening of the Fontainebleau, as the builders were making the finishing touches, Ben Novack took his partners on a tour of his new hotel.
After a brief meeting in his office, Novack invited Morris Lapidus out to join them.

The tour finished up at noon by the new Olympic-size swimming pool.
The partners stood there in awe, staring at the building’s graceful curves, and at the fountains and statues on the immaculately laid-out seven acres of grounds surrounding it.

Then they congratulated Novack and his architect on their great achievement.
It was at that point that Lapidus reminded Ben about the extra fee he was now owed, as Novack’s partners obviously liked his work.