Between the Shiny Sheets

Palm Beach, reports PHILIP NORMAN, makes Agnes Ash throw back her head and gurgle. She’s the publisher of the “Shiny Sheet,” the paper with all the news that Palm Beach is fit to read

Some years ago Agnes Ash, publisher of the Palm Beach Daily News, decided to turn her experiences along Florida’s Gold Coast into a play. For a collaborator she approached Helen Bernstein, who contributes a column to the Daily News—or “Shiny Sheet”—and is, moreover, noted for pithy one-liners about Palm Beach, its impossible glamour and unique social order, its superabundance and shortcomings. There was, for instance, the time Mrs. Ash telephoned Mrs. Bernstein to complain about the local shortage of reliable doctors, as distinct from socialites with medical diplomas. “Helen,” she said, “if you ever got sick in Palm Beach, who would you call?” Mrs. Bernstein thought for a moment, then replied,

“The airport.”

The line, to this day, sends Agnes Ash into peals of her frequent, gurgling laughter. She and Mrs. Bernstein are lunching together at Club Colette, a restaurant recently acquired by a noted Palm Beacher, Aldo Gucci. The very butter dish bears Gucci’s logo, although the butter pats so far have escaped it. The headwaiter weaves Gucci-logo shapes of adoration round Helen Bernstein, a dour, shy woman who has no need to earn her living from journalism. Her husband, Joe Bernstein, put up the New York Telephone building in midtown Manhattan. Her great-aunt, Kate Wollman, gave the skating rink to Central Park.

For all that, she takes her “Shiny Sheet” column seriously, and was eager to work with Agnes on the Palm Beach play. “I even went to courses in play writing at N.Y.U.,” she recalls wryly. “All I learned was that I couldn’t write a play. 1 didn’t know how to get the characters onstage, and once I’d got them on I didn’t know how to get them off again.”

Agnes Ash, in any case, realized that superior dramatic skills would be needed to portray what she and Helen Bernstein constantly see and overhear around their town. She mentions a vignette she once observed at the height of the winter season, when Palm Beach glitter briefly dissolved, as it sometimes does, to reveal undercurrents of barely expressible pain and loneliness.

“I was at a lunch, sitting at the same table as Rose Kennedy. She was the star that day: everyone at the table was obviously trying to think of something to please or entertain Rose. Finally, a friend of mine hit on the perfect line. ‘1 see Gloria Swanson’s ailing and may die,’ my friend said. Everybody knew, of course, that Gloria Swanson and Joe Kennedy had had a longtime affair. It was saying the right thing to Rose without actually saying it: ‘Hey, your husband had an affair with a movie actress, but she’s sick now. You came through.’

“After that, everyone round the table started mentioning women with whom their husbands, or their friends’, had had affairs, and how those other women were ailing, or in financial difficulties. You could feel the same spirit in all these wives who’d been hurt or neglected in the past. ‘We’ve paid our dues. We’re the survivors.’

“Every day you get scenes like that,’’ Agnes Ash says. “Palm Beach is a play no one would believe."

To commemorate its ninetieth anniversary, in March this year, the Shiny Sheet published a shiny supplement filled with pictures from its archive spanning half a century of everyday Palm Beach life. There was Winston Churchill, with cigar and jaunty yachtsman’s cap. There was the Duke of Windsor, Britain’s banished king, smiling bleakly from his exile in high fashion. There was Barbara Hutton, then Countess Haugwitz-Reventlow, nursing a poodle—and, evidently, a grievance—as she watched tennis at the Everglades Club. There, buttonholed en route to dinners, teas, or costume balls, were Bea Lillie, Irving Berlin, Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., Aristotle Onassis, the young John F. Kennedy. There, in understandable pride of place, was the breakfast-food heiress and queen of Palm Beach, Maijorie Merriweather Post, whose name grew more majestically polysyllabic with each successive marriage, and whose 118room mansion, Mar-A-Lago, conceived by a Ziegfeld set designer in an amalgam of eight different architectural styles, remains the consummate Palm Beach winter hidey-hole.

The famous faces collectively bore bore witness witness to to the the success success of of a a pubpublication which almost no one refers to as the Palm Beach Daily News, any more than one would refer to a Palm Beach hostess by her formal name. In Palm Beach society, there is only “Muffy” or “Ancky” or “Dee Dee” or “Dysie” or “Brownie.” And, no less essential to the Florida season, there is the Shiny Sheet. The name comes from the paper on which it is printed—white, glossy, “book quality” stock that can be handled without the usual newspaper-reading experience of grimy fingers and ink-stained clothes. “We love you, Shiny Sheet..ran a typical birthday tribute. “You keep our linens clean and neat.” Each morning the folded missive, eerily pale, as crisp as if pre-starched by attentive housemaids, throws weightier Florida journals like the West Palm Beach Post, even the lordly Miami Herald, into gray, proletarian eclipse.

On one level, the Shiny Sheet is a conventional daily, conscientiously serving a resort area of 10,000 permanent inhabitants with necessary but unexciting small-town news. The tone changes dramatically each fall, when the rich begin returning from their northern summer haunts or their European travels to reconstitute the true Palm Beach community. Then the Shiny Sheet starts to reflect wealth and pleasure-seeking conducted with a grave ceremony that hardly exists nowadays on the Cote d’Azur. At midPalm Beach season, a Shiny Sheet staff photographer can expect to wear out three tuxedos on the unremitting social treadmill. The front page, the back page, and two or three inside can become a panorama of parties, a landscape of lunches, a seething picture gallery of more people in evening dress than one thought remained on earth.

Social life in Palm Beach is indeed of such intensity from September to April that the Shiny Sheet alone, for all its mid-season daily circulation of 9,500, cannot satisfy the desire of prominent Palm Beachers to see themselves displayed in print. The town each season supports four other independently owned publications, dedicated to gossip and printed on paper of competitive glossy whiteness. There are a daily, the Palm Beacher; two weeklies, the Palm Beach Social Pictorial and the Palm Beach Chronicle; and a twice-weekly, the Palm Beach Mirror. The Shiny Sheet company also puts out a monthly magazine, Palm Beach Life. Each, when it appears, will have covered the same functions and photographed the same faces. The steady average circulation of 4,000 of each suggests that Palm Beachers on the party circuit regularly buy all five.

The gap between the Shiny Sheet and its rivals has widened since 1976, when Agnes Ash became publisher after a career with the . New York .— Times — and Women’s Wear Daily. The Shiny Sheet’s balance between cocktail gossip and real journalism is the balance Mrs. Ash herself man^ ages Beach to community—an strike in the insidPalm er who never forgets she is primarily a thoroughgoing reporter. Two years ago the Shiny Sheet received heavy criticism for its coverage of the Pulitzer divorce case, which rent Palm Beach open with allegations of lesbianism, incest, and cocaine use among the under-fifties. Agnes Ash is proud that her paper broke the story, and does not regret having published a single steamy column inch.

The gurgling laugh is much in evidence as she sits with the Shiny Sheet’s editor, thirty-year-old Ellen Koteff, running through the names that shine brightest and most often in the Palm Beach society press. Great Palm Beach names have always tended to be synonymous with products crucial to American homelife.

“There’s Sue Whitmore,” Mrs. Ash says.

“.. .Listerine,” Ellen Koteff adds. “Her family owned the company that makes it,” Mrs. Ash says. “Yeah...” The publisher gurgles again. “Every time Sue gives a party, she’s made a buck from all of us before we even leave home.”

“Zuita Akston.. .Q-Tips.”

“Victor Farris. He invented the paper milk carton. And there’s Mead Johnson ...”

Ellen Koteff says, “And there’s Jacqui and Jim Kimberly.”

“He’s the Kimberly in KimberlyClark,” Mrs. Ash says.

“They make toilet paper. .. ”

“.. .and Kotex.”

‘ ‘Paper products, ’ ’ both agree diplomatically.

“Jim is honorary consul to Jordan,” Agnes Ash says. “King Hussein often stayed at their house, though I don’t think he has since he married that third wife. I remember seeing Jacqui in a beautiful velvet cape that King Hussein had given her. I said, ‘Jacqui, aren’t you going to leave your cape at the checkroom?’ She said, ‘I’m certainly not.’ It was trimmed with eighteen-karat gold.”

“And there’s Liz Whitney Tippett,” Ellen Koteff says.

“She was tested for the part of Scarlett O’Hara in Gone with the Wind,” Agnes Ash says. “They thought she’d be perfect for the part, until they heard her voice. Liz used to be a great horsewoman. Once, when a horse was being troublesome and threw her, she got up, went over to it, and punched it on the nose.

“Now she says she’s leaving Palm Beach. She complains it’s not lively enough for her, and she’s in a wheelchair!”

No other town made of money wears its jewelry with such discretion. There is a plain, pastel-colored front elevation of blocks in mid-1920s mock-Spanish, mock-Tudor, or mock-Palladian style, and a leafy back elevation, scooped out to accommodate boutiques and art galleries down tiled passageways for which the correct term is “vias.” Worth Avenue, the principal shopping via, proffers the names of Bonwit Teller, Brooks Brothers, and Hermes with a quietude marred only by the Gucci building, which, in certain lights, could be mistaken for the town hall. Understatement becomes almost deafening along the via nicknamed Mansion Row and containing the foremost readers, and stars, of Agnes Ash’s Shiny Sheet. Each mansion is masked by a high front hedge, beautifully planed into continuous green-gold ramparts; the millions make no sound but the snip of gardeners’ shears.

Across the inland waterway named Lake Worth, the uninhibited satellite named West Palm Beach displays all that is abhorred on this side of the water. Palm Beach positively prides itself on what it does not allow its inhabitants to do. In Palm Beach you cannot buy a car, rent a tuxedo, find a fast-food stand, or be admitted to a hospital. Casual. visitors are tolerated only so long as they observe the labyrinthine rules of local etiquette. The Breakers hotel—centrifuge of Palm Beach society—issues its guests a guide to dress protocol, specifying, for instance, that one may not appear at breakfast in “a collarless shirt,” wear a swimsuit in the lobby or golf shoes in the drugstore, or be seen anywhere in the frescoed lobbies after seven P.M. without a jacket.

With the ubiquitous black tie and Rolls-Royce Silver Cloud go certain predictable habits of thought. Palm Beach is seamlessly Republican, a condition personified by the towering figure of ex-ambassador Earl E. T. Smith and also strongly suggested by the community’s failure to designate John F. Kennedy’s former home a place of historic interest. Habits of thought prevail unchallenged at the two most exclusive Palm Beach clubs, the Everglades and the Bath and Tennis, both still preferring an exclusively non-Jewish membership. It seemed a reference to more than the town’s lack of high-rise office buildings when a local businessman commented that Palm Beach was “basically a nogrowth area.”

The society papers—apart from the Shiny Sheet—remain silent on all such tactless topics. Though each paper is different in format—the Pictorial starchy, the Chronicle jazzy, the Mirror wacky—all maintain the same resolute editorial policy of saying nothing that could remotely offend any possible subscriber. The six-day-aweek Palm Beacher, in particular, was loud in its refusal to print a word about the Pulitzer divorce, and bitterly upbraided the Shiny Sheet for covering the sensational trial with such enthusiasm. “In another paper,” the Palm Beacher said loftily, “we have read the term ‘lesbianism’ 127 times, ‘incest’ 63 times, and ‘menage a trois’ 48 times .. .compliments are coming from readers... ‘Thanks for not printing such vulgar garbage.’ ”

Palm Beach, like Hollywood, shows a veneer of amoral flashiness, but on the inside has always been deeply conventional and shockable. Its founding father, Henry Morrison Flagler, was a devout Presbyterian, uncompromised by establishing the Standard Oil Company with John D. Rockefeller. It was for health first, then stimulating social intercourse, that Henry Flagler brought the railroad south through the swamps from Jacksonville in the 1880s and 1890s, and built the chain of sumptuous Italianate hotels that culminated in the Breakers. Flagler controlled the Shiny Sheet—bought from its founder, “Bobo” Dean—when the paper titillated readers with such regular features as “Gossip Overheard in the Corridors of the Palm Beach Hotels,” “Pointers About Pretty Women and Gallant Young Men,” and “Spicy News Picked Up Between Lake and Ocean.”

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THE SHINY SHEET

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Henry Flagler’s spirit lives on in the Palm Beach principle—that pleasure must always be seasoned with conspicuous virtue. Or, as one local society editor put it, “Philanthropy is the name of the game.” All the prestigious midwinter affairs, the lunches, brunches, dinners, and balls, are functions for charity. The “Top Five” in the Shiny Sheet’s social calendar, bringing forth Palm Beach society at its apogee, are the balls organized in aid of the American Cancer Society, the Red Cross, the American Heart Association, the Palm Beach Preservation Foundation, and either of the two main West Palm Beach hospitals. Admittedly—here in what Helen Bernstein, with a droll upward glance, calls “the Great Waiting Room”—those good causes tend to be medical-research programs in which Palm Beachers have a more than academic interest. Admittedly, too, there is an odd dissociation of ideas at work when socialites ask one another eagerly, “Are you going to the Cancer Ball?” The fact remains that hundreds of thousands of dollars, collected by whatever ostentatious means, annually make their way from Palm Beach to worthy and deserving ends.

Anyone who wishes to penetrate Palm Beach society must subscribe lavishly to this charitable endeavor. According to Jesse Newman, president of the town’s chamber of commerce, the investment need not be so large. “Let’s reckon on thirty-five to forty balls each season. Suppose you buy a table at each one, for $1,500 to $2,000 each. You’re bound to be noticed. You get your picture in all the society papers. People will start asking you to make up numbers at their tables. For $50,000.. .not such a great sum”—Mr. Newman throws out his hands like champagne foam—“you can be the toast of Palm Beach.”

The prospect must be an alluring one, especially to the many accidentally wealthy women who join each winter’s migration to Palm Beach, believing that its hot days and warm, frondy nights may provide a cure for widowhood. They are the women one sees, in brightwhite slacks and chiffon scarves and the neck braces their poor driving has bequeathed them, daily adrift along Worth Avenue with checkbooks, small dogs, and too bright, hopeful smiles. They are the reason why it is a positive advantage in Palm Beach for a doctor or lawyer to stay single, and why the town has such a half-submerged history of con men and predatory gigolos. “Most of the cases we never even hear about,” Jesse Newman says. “The women who get robbed or conned feel too humiliated to report what’s been done to them.” At the Heart Ball, where people cluster around $2,000 tables, pining to see themselves in tomorrow’s Shiny Sheet, there is, at least, safety in numbers.

“I knew I’d reached the breaking point when someone asked me to run a piece on transparent toilet seats filled with gold coins”

“New money” always betrays itself at functions covered by the Palm Beach society press. New money clutches at Shannon Donnelly, the Shiny Sheet’s society editor, bargaining for column inches with an embarrassed, and unavailing, hundred-dollar bill. New money leaks only into the comers of those daily photomontages where true, old Palm Beach money—the twenty-year maturing of fortunes from mouthwash or paper milk cartons—smiles its gracious, confident, philanthropic smile.

We observe the Shiny Sheet during a busy, newsy late-March week. A water shortage has gripped Palm Beach, causing local hostesses to form lines at the Publix supermarket for supplies of Evian water in which to bathe. There are reports of hair being washed in swimming pools and of poodles having to submit to shampooing in the ocean. At the 568-room Breakers, when a guest uses the lavatory, a porter is sent upstairs with a bucket of water to flush it.

At the Shiny Sheet’s office, on Royal Poinciana Way, Shannon Donnelly surveys a week’s calendar slightly thinner than at the peak time of January and February, but crowded enough with the chamber-of-commerce banquet at the Breakers, the Preservation Foundation Ball at Mar-A-Lago, an opening at the Norton Gallery, a cocktail party for Planned Parenthood, and a Red Cross auction. Shannon is a brisk girl who took on the society editor’s job chiefly because it allows her to spend the mornings with her baby son. Her style is two-fistedly forthright. “Over Worth Avenue way, Helga Wagner—she of the blonde hair and flashing teeth, etc. etc.—threw an opening-night party to celebrate her new boutique... .Seen at the festivities were the likes of new couture designer Lorina Gabrielli, Baron Arndt von Krupp, Kathy and Gene De Matteo, Pam Wynn, Rutilia and Arthur Burck, Bonnie Walker, and so on.”

All the Shiny Sheet’s young reporting staff get the chance to vary routine newspaper chores with celebrity interviews that many a bigger-time journalist might envy. “Everyone who’s rich and famous comes through Palm Beach sooner or later,” Ellen Koteff says. “And because they’re relaxed, they’re always much more accessible here than they would be in New York.” So twenty-four-year-old Angel Hem&ndez, the municipal specialist, has one assignment this week to write about beach erosion and another to interview Andy Warhol.

Karyn Monget, the elegant, multilingual fashion editor, is trying to confirm an interview with Joseph Brooks, head of the Lord & Taylor department store. Mr. Brooks is famously punctilious about his appearance and does not want to be photographed too soon after his tennis game. Karyn’s other problem is how to write up, in any sensible form, her recent, long-sought interview with Norman Parkinson. The venerable photographer greeted her, disconcertingly, drinking a pina colada and wearing a hat with an artificial parrot attached to it. “I asked him which era he thought was the most exciting in fashion, and he said, ‘The present.’ Then, a few minutes later, he started saying how boring everything was in fashion nowadays.” The willowy girl shakes her head in perplexity.

At House of Kahn, the estate jewelers on—where else?—House of Kahn Via, they are preparing to auction treasures that once belonged to the Hollywood star Dolores Del Rio. Agnes Ash, stopping by to see her friend Adele Kahn, greets a customer in a violet dress and crocheted knee socks who is inspecting some $175,000 impulse buys in diamonds.

“It’s Mrs. Bronstein!” Agnes Ash says. ‘‘In the paper we called you Evel Knievel!”

Mrs. Bronstein earned the nickname by driving her car over Lake Worth across the Southern Boulevard Bridge just as its two halves were being raised, and leaping the gap.

‘‘That’s me,” she agrees placidly.

Andy Warhol is in town for the opening of Baby Jane Holzer’s ice-cream parlor, on Worth Avenue. The spare little figure, under the heavy white sheaf, is more youthful than anything in his life would have seemed to allow. People do not talk directly to him but, rather, take short trips around him as if viewing some interesting obelisk. Civilization may search for definitions of Andy Warhol, but Shannon Donnelly does not, firmly typing in her night’s copy that he is an “esoteric artist.”

The news is not all diamonds and ice cream. Four years ago the Palm Beach Town Council became embroiled in a financial scandal after $2 million of local taxpayers’ money was discovered to have made its way, via New York, Texas, and Mexico, to a mysterious bank account in the Cayman Islands. So insistent was the Shiny Sheet’s pursuit of the story that the incumbent town council petulantly withdrew all civic advertising from its pages. Under a new town council—led by Mayor “Dee Dee” Marix—the ban has at last been lifted. Ellen Koteff remembers a queasy moment at the height of her investigations into the scandal when Agnes Ash cautioned her about the methods some people might use to throw a persistent reporter off the scent: “Mrs. Ash told me always to be sure to lock my car, in case anyone interfered with it or tried to plant some drugs on me.” Palm Beach, did they say, or Dodge City?

Mrs. Ash spends her morning at the beauty parlor, writing her next month’s article for the Shiny Sheet’s glossy stablemate, Palm Beach Life. Punctual as ever, she hands it to Ava Van de Water, the managing editor, who is leaving shortly to take a job in public relations.

It will be a relief for Ava no longer to be the target of P.R. people trying to scrounge editorial space for products aimed specifically at the Palm Beach consumer.

‘‘I knew I’d reached the breaking point,” she says, ‘‘when someone called me and asked me to run a piece on transparent toilet seats filled with gold coins.”

The glittering names can be observed outdoors each weekend at the Palm Beach Polo and Country Club, watching the sport that so suits this environment being played by a mixture of royalty and highborn mercenaries under the sponsorship of international jewelry firms. Today’s polo game, a semifinal in the Cartier International Open, features a team from Dallas versus one billed as ‘‘Palm Beach-Piaget.” The ponies merge in thickets of legs; the white ball flies off with a costly click, wafted over ten other polo fields and a 1,650-acre estate whose residents include Merv Griffin and Zsa Zsa Gabor. Dallas’s team features two high-rated brothers named el Effendi from Pakistan. Their forenames, respectively, are Wicky and Podger. No frisson disturbs the cut-glass British voice of David Andrews, the club’s resident match commentator. “Wicky el Effendi breaks away....Oh! nice setup there by Podger!”

Jim Kimberly, paper magnate, Palm Beach playboy, and honorary consul to the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, sits in the main grandstand in Gucci shoes and yellow plastic baseball cap, watching a game he first saw played in an indoor version in the Midwest half a century ago. His seventy-seven years are belied by his racy young wife, Jacqui, and his narrow red Ferrari.

“I’ve seen polo played with Model T Fords,” Jim Kimberly says. “They were fitted with hoops over the top so that when they rolled over they’d roll right back upright again.”

A $250-per-ticket ball at the Polo Club, sponsored by Cartier in aid of the American Cancer Society, finds Agnes Ash in her alternative role as correspondent for Women’s Wear Daily. In black cocktail dress and pearl necklace, cradling a large notebook, she strikes her habitual skillful note of detached insider, accepted, not assimilated. All five Palm Beach society papers have photographers there, working through a crowd believed to contain Zsa Zsa Gabor, Andy Warhol, an ex-king of Tunisia, Britain’s Duke of Marlborough. An elderly man, peeping into his oldfashioned Rolleiflex, is hardly less a celebrity: Bert Morgan, dean of Palm Beach photographers, in his heyday knew where the Duke of Windsor could be found, even when the duchess had temporarily lost sight of him. Bert Morgan came to America from England by sea in 1912. “I wanted to sail on the Titanic," he recalls. “But the ship was all sold out.”

In the center of the marquee, Cartier jewelry worth $11 million is displayed on the necks and limbs of white shopwindow dummies, bald and eyeless, arranged in a tableau that, from time to time, fretfully stretches up an arm or crooks a leg. The dummies are dancers from Ballet Florida, in all-enveloping white body stockings. As dinner is announced, each blind, white, sparkling figure is helped down from the podium and led away by an attentive sheriff’s deputy.

And there is Zsa Zsa, whose very name renders Palm Beach life into onomatopoeia, blonder and pinker than one could ever have hoped. Young men stand close, smoking caddish cigars, as the “darlings” blow among them like chinchilla fluff.

“Darling, of course I know Bunny Esterhazy...”

Of course.

“Palm Beach is a place where you can laugh a lot,” Zsa Zsa’s friend Helen Bernstein says. “My trouble is, I see the miserable side of it, too. Another good friend of mine, in her seventies, would like to be accepted by the in crowd, but she can never quite manage it. She’s always just on the edges—always trying to make up for it by being seen around with very young men. She’s an intelligent woman; she knows the problem. ‘Helen... ’ she said to me once, ‘it’s just that I’m so scared to stay home alone in the evenings.’ ”