Madness Under the Royal Palms: Love and Death Behind the Gates of Palm Beach

Palm Beach is such a strange carousel of eccentrics and wannabe's. A friend of mine lives in West Palm and we often venture over into Palm Beach for dinner. How bizarre!! When I first arrived I was so naive that I thought a 90-year-old man with 3 / 20 year olds was having dinner with his granddaughters. I though perhaps his wife was using the rest room, until two of these girls started kissing one another while another man took photos. This was in a pretty upscale establishment for New Years. The quest for wealth and power is highly disturbing.

"Let me tell you about the very rich," begins the narrator of "The Rich Boy," F. Scott Fitzgerald's short story. "They are different from you and me." The truth of that observation, written more than 80 years ago, is brought home with the force of a hurricane in Laurence Leamer's engrossing, at times shocking, examination of Palm Beach society. Leamer, who purchased a duplex a block north of Palm Beach's tony shopping street, Worth Avenue, in 1994, is something of a Nick Carrawayesque narrator. He shares the lives of his subjects, joining them for tennis games at the Breakers Club and attending some of the myriad social events around which life centers during the "season," when the population of the island triples. But Leamer, a former Newsweek editor who brings solid journalistic credentials to his task, never allows proximity to the world he's trying to capture dilute his objectivity. He's a consistently clear-eyed observer, with no illusions about the people he's describing and no awe of their wealth and power. At least partially as promised in its subtitle, there's a surfeit of death in MADNESS --- a shooting, a suspected poisoning, a savage beating, a suicide and a death by fire --- all in the space of barely 10 years. The characters who swirl through the book encompass sociopaths like Fred Keller, whose bitter divorce battle (described in all its sordid detail) ends in a shattering act of violence, to the merely self-absorbed, a description that fits most of the rest of Leamer's subjects, including participants in the several May-December marriages that dot the book. Life in Palm Beach, Leamer writes, is like an "elaborate costume party in which one can wear whatever outfit one wants as long as the mask never falls." It's an endless round of charity events intended less to raise money for their ostensible causes than to ensure the participants are featured in the "Shiny Sheet," the local nickname for the Palm Beach Daily News, whose main function involves keeping score in the cutthroat competition that's the focus of the Palm Beach social ecosystem. One story that illustrates the fierceness of that competition is that of David Berger and his companion and later wife, Barbara Wainscott. Berger was a distinguished Philadelphia trial lawyer, one of the pioneers of class action litigation, who amassed a $350 million fortune in the course of a storied career. In his 80s, however, he set about becoming the first Jew to crack the stratosphere of Palm Beach society. Leamer painstakingly reveals how Berger, with Wainscott as his guide, strategically dispensed charitable contributions and hosted parties (one of them featuring Prince Edward) seeking to gain entrance into those lofty precincts. If the story were of a man less accomplished than Berger, it would smack of farce; in the case of someone of his accomplishments, it is little short of tragedy, especially as he passes the last years of his life (he died in 2007 and is buried in the humble Pe

What a wonderful book! From a literary perspective it is very well written. I found all the little short stories in this book to be interesting and insightful. Who do these people in palm beach think they are?! Exposure to the dark side of money! READ THIS BOOK!! I give this book 5 stars and if I could give it 6 I would. -Cheers

I live in palm Beach and saw a copy because a friend of mine was mentioned in it and once I started reading it, I couldn't put it down. It's absolutely fascinating and filled with interesting little stories. I don't think you have to live here to enjoy it. It reminded me of "Midnight in the Garden of Eden," only there were more characters in this one so it was a very lively read. Very definitely recommended for those who like to read about the rise and fall of the rich.

Given the name and uber wealthy playground about which Madness was written, I was expecting an oblique assault on an elitist and secretive sliver of society suspected of profligate spending, narcissism and caste systems. Instead, I found that the book is more of an amusing anthropological study that offered layers of depth and insight into individuals, relationships and social groups. The result is a humorous parable with some heavy moral lessons. Leamer used multiple sources to build a penetrating character analysis of some of the more notable Palm Beach residents who, as an aggregate, are symbols of the various cliques that define the essence of Palm Beach. NON-FICTION THAT READS LIKE FICTION While it's a non fiction work, it has the literary ardor, flow, and the readability of a sticky novel you can't put down. The structure and clever collation of the vignettes is a thing of genius; like a movie that presents a montage of time periods in a character's life, Leamer seamlessly builds the story, jumping from one vignette to the next, and then taking us backwards and forwards in time. As you move through the book, the building of the individual events sculpts the big picture, and lives are viewed through different lenses. The result is a story that comes together so artfully, that it's hard to believe it's non fiction. For this reason, among others, Leamer has become my favorite contemporary writer. STORIES THAT WILL MAKE YOU CRINGE As Leamer draws us into his world and follows the lives of the characters, like with Aesop's Fables, we cannot help but predict the tragic outcomes of the paths they have chosen. The irony here is that these are real people, illustrating that the tragic flaw of humanity is our inability to step outside our selves and get past the artificial world of our own construct. This is the real-life version of Faust, and a lesson in perception, misperception and mortality. Some of the characters were blessed with not surviving to read about their own catastrophic social failures. KEEPING UP WITH THE JONES' IS NOT ENOUGH Money seems to be the fulcrum in the lives of the residents, an ends and not a means. Greed is the corrupting factor that invariably crushes relationships, family, trust and trust funds. In a twist of the plot, however, money is the engine that fuels their existence, and yet it is still a limiting factor on the island. For the very privileged, social status is determined by caste, not wealth alone. You can keep up with the Jones', but they'll never have you over for dinner. The elite must maintain their exclusivity at all cost. The "caste" of characters is so colorful and the world so utterly bizarre, that it is hard to fathom such a place exists. It's the American Dream stretched to extremes, at which point it becomes distorted and absurd. We get the special insight and understanding from an author who has lived among these people for fourteen years. After putting down Leamer's new book, I was reminded