“I immediately knew it had to be mine.” How Donald Trump—a brash outsider—warped Palm Beach’s exclusionary culture to create Mar-a-Lago as we know it now. VFArchive
n Palm Beach the private club to which you belong is not only your playground: it’s your platform, signaling who you are socially, economically, and culturally. Membership at the Bath and Tennis Club announces your arrival, and survival of an onerous vetting process, including backgrounds and bloodlines. “I know people who moved to Palm Beach, got blackballed at the B&T, and left town,” says one observer.
If you’re Jewish, there was a club for you, too, the century-old Palm Beach Country Club, “the top primarily Jewish club in the country—nothing else even comes close,” says a member. Other members have included Wall Street legend Henry Kaufman; New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft; private-equity-firm chieftain Henry Kravis; Seagram scion Charles Bronfman . . . and, infamously, Bernie Madoff, who found many of his victims there.
Trump instructed his attorney to settle his $50 million lawsuit against the town, and the selling of the Mar-a-Lago Club began, with typical Donald Trump bravado, MAR-A-LAGO CLUB MEMBERSHIP LIST A REAL WHO’S WHO, read a December 12, 1994,headline, noting that Steven Spielberg, Henry Kissinger, Lee Iacocca, Denzel Washington, Michael Ovitz, Norman Mailer, and Elizabeth Taylor, among others, had joined.
“It was quite contentious,” recalls Lesly Smith, who, as president, presided over the meeting of the Town Council. “It was supposed to last for an hour, and I believe it went until two A.M.
“They crawled into one of the Bath and Tennis chairs and were doing the big nasty right beneath the Bath and Tennis’s picture windows with all of the grandmothers having lunch with their grandchildren,” remembers Donnelly, who broke the story in theBut there was one commotion Trump himself couldn’t abide, and it came from above: airplanes flying over Mar-a-Lago.
“In the beginning, [the initiation fee] was up to $250,000—or less—depending on who you knew and how he thought you fit in,” says an informed source. “It was all about him being the greatest P.R. man who ever lived. He’s always saying, ‘This is the greatest! He’s the greatest!’”
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