Midas' Return

Contemplating the fantastic midwar vacation boom in Miami, asp-tongued Novelist Philip Wylie (Generation of Vipers) last week reported to the New Republic:

"The collection of garbage - Miami's method of counting noses -was getting heavier every week. . . . The season broke early and big. The race track at Hialeah is taking in more than $600,000 a day - one day it made a record by passing $1,000,000--and the dog tracks do as much as $100,000 apiece at night. . . . Real estate is changing hands at million-dollar tunes. . . . The beaches are deep in vacation humanity, the nightclubs are roaring in spite of a midnight curfew on drinks,* and Midas has moved back to Miami.

"This situation has worked excruciating hardship on military personnel. Into the area are now coming American wounded and American air crews for rest. . . . Their Miami interlude represents their only chance to see their wives and families. . . . Both the Army and Navy seem unable or unwilling to house these myriad families. Women and children walk the streets. . . .

"If fighting men in this area become bitterly certain that the home front is not backing the attack -as they do -it is for the simple reason that the men who have sacrificed most meet in Miami those who sacrifice least."

The flooding war-boom, which had gradually engulfed city after city across the U.S., was now lapping finally into the last sancta of the rich in Miami--and in New York. Even in the most gilded of joints the service was bad; and at the bars coarse new characters joggled the Martini-bent arms of the Older Members.

In the New York Herald Tribune, another reporter, sensitively attuned to ihe muffled sound of plush meeting plush, described revelry in Manhattan. Wrote Columnist Lucius Beebe: "The gold rush is on. ... New York is only now in its finest and ultimate dionysiac frenzies. . . . It is only necessary to belly up to the bar at Monte Carlo ... or insinuate yourself past the five or six dinner-jacketed guards at the Stork.

"A year or so ago the goodtime Charlies were hiking to the Top of the Mark on Nob Hill or streaking for the Pump Room in Chicago or screaming for cracked ice in the Adolphus in Dallas, but now there is all the trouble and hurrah anyone could ask for in Times Square and Madison Avenue. Manhattan is once more America's play town de luxe."

Seats for Oklahoma, he reported, are available for "a mere $25 a pair"; at El Morocco, "vintage wine retails for $19 a splash."

But Luscious Lucius noted a minor tragedy for voluptuaries: "Cartier's isn't selling anywhere near the number of men's gold garters the shop usually does. Not because there is a declining demand; on the contrary, they aren't able to fill even the orders on hand because of the difficulty of obtaining good quality -elastic!''

*Columnist Cornelius Vanderbilt reported that men are now required to wear ties at Miami niteries. Tieless men can rent one for $1.

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