The Prince of Paradise (4 page)

Novack threw Lapidus a blank stare, saying he had no idea what he was talking about.
The architect was stunned, protesting that they had an agreement and that he had gone into personal debt to finance the work.
Novack just shrugged, looked Lapidus dead in the eye, and said that this was the first he’d heard of it.

“Then [my father] snapped,” said Alan Lapidus.
“He had a total nervous breakdown and grabbed a two-by-four piece of lumber and started chasing him around the pool, screaming, ‘I’m going to kill you, you son of a bitch!’”

It took four partners to subdue the architect before he blacked out.
He came around to find a group of Novack’s concerned Fontainebleau associates pouring pool water over him.

Lapidus then told the partners about Novack’s promise to pay him an extra $75,000 on top of the $80,000 they’d initially agreed to.
It then emerged that Novack had told his partners, who’d financed the project, that he was paying his architect $250,000.
It seemed he had pocketed the difference.

“They nearly killed Novack when they found out he had been stealing from them,” said Alan Lapidus.
“It was very unpleasant.”

A few days later, the partners ordered Novack to pay Morris Lapidus the extra fee.
The hotelier reluctantly agreed, but first insisted that Lapidus apologize for attacking him.

Lapidus swallowed his pride and agreed, in order to get his money.

“You
should
be sorry,” Ben Novack barked at him.
“Why didn’t you talk louder?
You were whispering, and you know that I don’t hear well.”

F
IVE

“THE MOST PRETENTIOUS HOTEL IN THE WORLD”

On Monday, December 20, 1954, the Fontainebleau hotel officially opened with a grand ball for 1,600 specially invited guests.
Two days earlier, Ben Novack had personally taken influential newspaper columnists such as Walter Winchell and Earl Wilson on a guided tour.

New York mayor Robert Wagner was among the celebrities who flew in for the grand opening.
But the official guest of honor was the mayor of Fontainebleau, France, Homer Pajot, who would perform the opening ceremony, as well as provide a great photo opportunity.

Unsure what was expected of him, Mayor Pujot had brought along a tree from the Forest of Fontainebleau, which was promptly seized by Miami Airport customs agents.
Novack’s fast-thinking publicity man then purchased a replacement tree at a local nursery, which he had decked out in a French tricolor bow.
Unfortunately, an eagle-eyed reporter spotted the florist’s van arriving with it, and the next morning an embarrassing gossip piece ran in
The Miami Herald
.

Throughout the opening ceremony, Mayor Pujot, who didn’t speak a word of English, looked lost and confused.
No one had thought of hiring an interpreter for him.

The French mayor winced as Novack mispronounced the hotel name—“FOUN-tan-BLOO”—and for years afterward, Bernice would complain that everyone pronounced it incorrectly, and that the correct French pronunciation should be used.

The tree-planting ceremony was held in the hotel’s French gardens, copied from the ones outside the palace of Versailles.
A smiling Ben and Bernice Novack stood inside the gigantic crescent-shaped aquamarine glass façade as Pajot kissed them on both cheeks.
Then, to a round of applause, he presented them with a tablet inscribed in French, reading, “May the sun warm your day and the moon and stars bring happy evenings.
And may you return again to taste the pleasures and elegant living at this most fabulous of all resorts.”

Everyone then went inside to gasp at Morris Lapidus’s amazing interiors, which Mayor Pujot later described as “a bouillabaisse.”

That night, Ben and Bernice Novack hosted the opening ball in the La Ronde Room.
Ben wore a black tuxedo, and at his side was Bernice, looking like a movie star in a white mink stole and glittering diamond earrings.

The guests danced past midnight, as Patti Page sang the “Fontainebleau Waltz” and Liberace played an 1882 German Steinway grand piano under a huge chandelier cheekily nicknamed “Sophie Tucker.”

Even Eastern Airlines jets passing overhead tipped their wings in a salute that night.

The next morning,
The Miami Herald
carried a tongue-in-cheek report on the opening.

“Everything was French, including the confusion,” the paper wryly observed.
“Millionaires in their elegant glamorous attire lost their dignity as they scrambled for their tables.
But the guests took it all in their stride.
One gushed, ‘You can’t get in, you can’t get a drink, you can’t get anything, but isn’t this the grandest hotel you ever saw.’”

*   *   *

Groucho Marx, soon to become a Fontainebleau regular, described the hotel as the Eighth Wonder of the World, but the architectural critics were not so kind.

“The nation’s grossest national product,” noted one.
“A monstrosity,” asserted another, forecasting that it would appeal to people who “don’t know the difference between architecture and Coney Island.”

Ben Novack couldn’t have cared less, proudly proclaiming the Fontainebleau “the world’s most pretentious hotel.”

He now began referring to himself as “Mr.
Fontainebleau,” and wore a tiny golden replica of his hotel on a heavy gold chain around his neck.

But it would be hard even for the flamboyant hotelier to compete with his stunning creation.

According to the Fontainebleau press release, the hotel had cost $13 million ($106 million today) to build and employed nine hundred staff.
The motif was French, and the main curved building had lovely, warm French white marble floors with black bow ties receding into the distance, elegantly winding stairways, and round columns.
An estimated $1.5 million in French Provincial antiques and statues adorned the corridors and suites.
Everything was decked out in over-the-top French period décor.
The Presidential Suite even had a dummy fireplace, with a marble mantel from the old French embassy in Washington, D.C.

The focal point of the hotel’s massive main interior was the two-story “Staircase to Nowhere,” which Morris Lapidus had copied from the Paris opera house.

Guests would take an elevator to the mezzanine before slowly walking down the curved staircase, parading their jewels and furs to an appreciative audience below.

“When they walked down the staircase, they were stars,” said Alan Lapidus.
“They seemed to be saying, ‘We’re rich and we can afford it.’”

This nonstop display of affluence soon become one of the hotel’s most popular attractions.

The future Las Vegas hotel magnate Steve Wynn vacationed at the Fontainebleau as a young boy, learning valuable lessons from Ben Novack that he would put to good use many years later.
“The Fontainebleau invented the concept of the hotel as show,” explained Wynn, who would later marry into the Novack family.
“Not only was it grand, but it had the charisma of a place that was cool to be at.
There was nothing but laughter in the lobby.
Everybody was having the time of their lives, everybody was pretty, and everybody was rich.”

*   *   *

Ben Novack never underestimated the importance of star power, carefully cultivating close friendships with the world’s biggest entertainers.
But it was through the influence of Mafia bosses and his Fontainebleau partners Sam Giancana and Joseph Fischetti that Frank Sinatra first started playing at Novack’s beloved hotel.

In return for headlining midnight shows at the Fontainebleau’s exclusive La Ronde Room nightclub, Novack presented the superstar with the key to his own permanent penthouse suite on the sevententh floor.
Over the next twenty-five-years, Sinatra became synonymous with the Fontainebleau—and one of Ben Novack’s closest friends.

Following Sinatra’s example, other big stars started playing the Fontainebleau.
The Rat Pack made the hotel its winter headquarters, performing many impromptu drunken sets at La Ronde.

“We had not just the Rat Pack,” said the hotel’s first head of publicity, Hal Gardner, “but also Judy Garland, Sophie Tucker, and Marlene Dietrich.
Where else would you see Gary Cooper reading the paper or Groucho Marx having eggs Benedict?
When Joan Crawford walked across the lobby, people would get up and applaud.”

As a world-class entertainment center, the Fontainebleau transformed Miami Beach into
the
glamour capital of the world, drawing the rich and famous like a magnet.
(Ben Novack enforced a strict evening dress code among guests all over the hotel, with suits and ties for men and cocktail dresses for women.) And the iconic crescent-shaped Fontainebleau became synonymous with Miami Beach on postcards and other memorabilia.

Incredibly, during the quarter of a century Ben Novack ran the hotel, there was never a single Fontainebleau sign inside or outside to identify it.

“If you didn’t know what it was,” explained future Fontainebleau manager Lenore Toby, “you didn’t belong.”

*   *   *

Soon after the Fontainebleau opened for business, Ben and Bernice Novack took up residence in a fabulous duplex suite on the seventeenth floor, nicknamed the Governor’s Suite.
Their majestic four-bedroom apartment looked out on the ocean and boasted a dining room, a billiard room, and a piano bar with a baby grand piano.

“They lived like royalty,” said future Miami Beach mayor Alex Daoud, “and they acted like they were royalty.
Ben could be very charming, and he could also be very cruel.
He could be ruthless, but he was always very cunning.”

Ben Novack now devoted himself to making the Fontainebleau a success, having little time or energy for anything else.
He lived and breathed the Fontainebleau 24/7, and Bernice soon realized that she would always take second place.

“The Fontainebleau was his life,” she later told author Steven Gaines.
“It was his baby, his wife, his mistress, all his dreams and ideas together.”

Resigning herself to the role of trophy wife, she spent her days shopping and fulfilling her duties as the Queen of the Fontainebleau.
Her husband demanded she always dress in the latest fashions—it was as if she had a full-time modeling assignment for his hotel.

“You’re always in a glass cage,” she later explained.
“People stared at me.
They’d say, ‘There’s the owner’s wife’ or ‘There’s Mrs.
Novack.’
I didn’t care for it.
I didn’t like the ‘front’ of the house.”

Still, Bernice was constantly upstaged by her narcissistic husband and his ever more garish suits, bow ties, and jeweled bling (years before the word was coined).
Plus, she soon discovered that although she might be living like a queen, wearing the most expensive furs and jewels, it all belonged to the hotel and she actually owned nothing.

On May 28, 1955, Ben and Bernice Novack flew to Paris for an extended European shopping vacation.
On June 7 they checked into the luxurious Savoy hotel in London for a ten-day stay, before flying back to the States.

By the time Bernice arrived back at the Fontainebleau, she was pregnant.

*   *   *

While Ben Novack was in London, his estranged business partner Harry Mufson called a press conference.
He announced that he had bought land directly north of the Fontainebleau, to build an even more elegant and luxurious hotel.
It would be named the Eden Roc, after the gardens and swimming pool at the Hôtel du Cap-Eden-Roc, in Antibes.

His architect would be Morris Lapidus, who vowed to create an even more ambitious hotel than the Fontainebleau.
Mufson’s brief to Lapidus was to make the Eden Roc the ultimate in elegance and luxury, with “no French stuff like the Fontainebleau.”
When Lapidus proposed Italian Renaissance, Mufson replied that he did not care if it was “Brooklyn or baroque,” as long as it had plenty of glamour and “screams” luxury.

“I want the Fontainebleau to fall flat on their ass,” he told his architect.

When Ben Novack returned from Europe, Lapidus went to the Fontainebleau to inform him as a matter of courtesy that he had agreed to design the Eden Roc.
Novack went ballistic, forbidding his former architect to design the rival hotel.

“I patiently explained to him that architecture was my profession,” wrote Lapidus in his autobiography, “and my means of earning a livelihood.
Ben claimed that I owed it to him to turn down my new commission.”

When Lapidus said he would be designing the Eden Roc anyway, Novack banned him from ever setting foot in the Fontainebleau again.

“I left the hotel feeling like Adam being driven out of the Garden of Eden,” Lapidus wrote.

Some years later, when Lapidus attempted to enter the Fontainebleau for a charity luncheon, Novack had security guards physically throw him out of the hotel he had designed.

*   *   *

At 9:00
P.M
.
on Thursday, January 19, 1956, Bernice Novack gave birth to a baby boy at a Manhattan hospital.
When she went into labor, Ben Novack jumped on a plane from Miami Beach.
He arrived at the hospital two hours after his son, Ben Hadwin Jr., entered the world.

“Benji was already born when Ben came,” recalled Benji’s aunt Maxine.
“He flew in from Florida and [Bernice] says, ‘We have a son.’”

Maxine Fiel, who had been at the hospital with her sister since 2:00 that afternoon, said the new father displayed little reaction on learning that he now had a son and heir.

“Ben didn’t ever show a great deal of emotion,” explained Maxine.
“He’d smile or something, but he never [seemed] very happy.”

Novack first saw his baby son in the hospital nursery, and Maxine’s husband, David, took photographs of him holding Benji for the first time.

The next day, Ben Novack flew back to Miami to take care of Fontainebleau business, and a week later Bernice brought their baby son home to the seventeenth-floor penthouse, where he would spend his childhood.