The Season by Ronald Kessler

Author:Ronald Kessler [Kessler, Ronald]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-06-204765-6
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 1999-12-15T00:00:00+00:00

WINTER/SPRING

FINALE

18. The Trumpster

On Worth Avenue, a Christmas tree in the middle of the street in front of Tiffany’s marked the beginning of the season. Two stories tall, it sang like Johnny Mathis. Bentleys, Aston Martins, and Rolls-Royces maneuvered their way around the tree and the pedestrians who stopped to admire its gold ornaments. In Palm Beach the ornamentation of choice is gold of course, gold and white balls and stars and snowflakes, the trees wrapped up like gifts with stiff gold ribbon and bows at the top.

But Christmas is at a disadvantage here. Warm tropical breezes wreak havoc on wreaths. Not responding at all well to salt air, cut greens become skeletal. Inside, Christmas trees quickly droop and dry into an unappealing light brown. Still there was rejoicing on Worth Avenue, and nightly, one shop or another had a reception to bring in the crowds, more or less invited, for champagne and a free gift. From Chanel, in small shopping bags, Chanel No. 5 for the lady, body lotion for the gentleman. Through the large shop windows, party goers could be seen laughing and chatting and toasting one another. One night Mary Mahoney’s invited 250 select guests to a party to view a collection of shipwreck artifacts being offered for sale, and around the corner, Christian duPont hosted a champagne reception among its fine antiques.

At night the little palms planted along the avenue twinkled with tiny white lights. Garish aqua spotlights that underlit the palms from the ground made the trees look plastic. It’s what you do with an embarrassment of riches.

For the ultra-rich of Boston, New York, Grosse Pointe, Dallas, Philadelphia, and Washington, the season offers an opportunity to escape the stodgy buttoned-down world of commerce, get away from stuffy old banks and overheated boardrooms, from drying winds that wrinkle, and to dress up and dance all night, to schmooze with other socially minded people.

For some, the socializing can be a strain. Charles H. “Carl” Norris, Jr. blamed commuting to Palm Beach during the season for the breakup of his sixteen-year marriage to Diana Strawbridge Wister. Wister, worth $900 million from Campbell’s Soup Company stock, is the granddaughter of John T. Dorrance, Sr., the chemist who built the condensed-soup empire. A lawyer, Carl had met Diana when he worked on her legal affairs when he was with the Philadelphia firm of Morgan, Lewis & Bockius. At the time, she was married to a fox hunter.

Besides a $5 million home on Lake Worth in Palm Beach, the couple had a house worth $2.8 million in Vail, a sprawling $25 million estate called Runneymeade Farm in Coatesville, Pennsylvania, and property in Mount Desert Island, Maine, a summer haunt of blue bloods. In Palm Beach the couple belonged to both the Everglades and the Bath & Tennis.

During the divorce proceeding, Diana testified that each home was staffed at all times with social secretaries and servants in case she dropped by. In some years, she conceded, the couple spent $600,000 on clothing alone.

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