Rush to the Gold Coast

By Michael Demarest

New money buys the full life in Florida's boonies

All the charms of the Riviera, Biarritz, Menton, Nice, Sorrento, the Lido and Egypt are to be found in Boca Raton. International society demands Boca Raton, the premier of cosmopolitan resorts. The silvery sea . . . lazy lagoons. . . endless canals winding through a labyrinth of loveliness . . . unite to make living here almost beyond realness in its ideality.

--From 1926 newspaper ads

No matter that the Floridian demi-Eden never got semibuilt. Today, nearly 60 years after the Florida land bubble burst, Boca Raton and its environs really are almost beyond realness. The international rich have rediscovered the Gold Coast's Palm Beach County. Though it includes the town of Palm Beach, this incubator for the newly wealthy is snob years distant from that small, code-ridden oasis of blue blood and encrusted money. The Gold Coast nouveaux, for the most part lustier, sportier and much younger than the ancien regime of Worth Avenue, converge from all over the world to flaunt their millions. As Ralph Destino, president of Cartier, puts it, "They've carved out a new and unique style. There's nothing anywhere that parallels the mix of things here."

The mix flourishes in part because much of the area is relatively virgin territory for the rich. "It's no longer pleasant to go to the South of France," sniffs one visitor. "It's so inundated, the pleasure is gone. Life in Southern California revolves around private homes and backyard swimming pools. They've overcasualized; there's almost an absence of tone." Says Helen Boehm, president of the porcelain company that bears her name: "I've been all over the world, and this place has glamour, color and manicure." Boehm (rhymes with dream) saw her very own polo players, the Boehm-Palm Beach Team, win the $100,000 world cup title in April for the second straight year.

The Gold Coast does not have smog, or terrorists, or a socialist government. Real estate prices are not out of sight. So, as Maggy Scherer, a third-generation Californian, who with her husband Allan a few years ago sold their Beverly Hills home to move their 36 ponies to a rustic compound called La Chacra (latino Spanish for Little Farm), points out: "People are leaving France. They're leaving Italy. This is the place." Some concede that cosmopolitanism can go too far. When the band struck up the Star-Spangled Banner before a recent match, one woman demanded loudly: "Whose national anthem is that?"

There is little night life in Palm Beach County, and no evidence of a drug culture. "They're not into debauchery," says one observer. "They're not here to lie in the sun and get high." On the contrary, they are irrepressibly energetic outdoor people who play tennis at 10, golf at 2 and racquetball at 5. Their favorite sport is polo. Center of the action is the four-year-old Palm Beach Polo and Country Club. The P.B.P.C.C. has eleven polo fields (each ten times the size of a football field) surrounded by condominiums, villas and single-family homes. There is also a complex in Boca Raton called the Royal Palm Polo-Sports Club, with seven fields, and the 800-acre Gulfstream Polo at Lake Worth with five more.

The area calls itself the Polo Capital of the Free World (though not much polo gets played in the unfree world). Palm Beach County also boasts almost 200 golf courses, and styles itself, naturally, the Golf Capital of the Free World. But it is, above all, the glamour and drama of polo that give social focus to many Gold Coast lives. The 3 p.m. Sunday match at the P.B.P.C.C., preceded by a champagne brunch, is an Event. "A day without polo," sighs one veteran, paraphrasing Brillat-Savarin, "is like a day without sun."

Many polo watchers become addicted. Last Christmas his girlfriend gave Mario Mendoza, 37, a prosperous Cuban-born lawyer, a helmet, mallet and lessons at a polo clinic. "Now," he marvels, "I have seven horses and a groom. I bought a horse trailer and a one-ton truck and five acres of land where I'm building a stable with 24 stalls. Next season I plan to have my own team."

Florida's flossiest seldom discuss politics or economics. A visitor from Ohio insists: "The only recession is among the poor people." But geopolitics may be hissing, serpent-like, in the bougainvillaea. The Argentines, considered the world's best polo players, have been pillars of the sport in Florida, and so have the British. So far, at least, the Argies and the Brits have acted like the best of pals.

Members of the Boca set mostly earn their money from things visible: real estate, high-tech electronics, retail chains, minerals and oil. They are generally in businesses that can be handled over the phone. Floyd and Bonnie Perkins spend most of their winters at their four-bed room home in Boca Raton. According to Bonnie, Floyd calls his oil-and gas-drilling company in Cambridge, Ohio, periodically and asks, "Are we making any money?" Then he says, "O.K., we'll stay another day."

Unlike the old rich, Florida's nouveaux have no time for gardening. There are service companies to zap the crabgrass and prune the azaleas. In fact, most new Boca abodes come with preplanted gardens. One developer installed 350 royal palms on his plots. Other services take care of pools and window-washing. There are almost no live-in servants in any of the houses. Even $2 million "cottages" are as nearly maintenance-free as possible. Most new arrivals expect to walk into a readymade environment, with none of the bother of planning or decorating. Some builders, like Stephen Chefan, 52, furnish the houses down to the last table cloth and teaspoon, fill the bookshelves and stock the bar. Architecturally, the dwellings are a kind of California contemporary. Most come with pools, Jacuzzi rooms, electronic security systems and multimedia entertainment rooms. Says Albert Segal, who moved to the Gold Coast from Charlotte, N.C., after retiring as chairman of the Pic'n Pay shoe store chain: "All we did was move in with our toothbrushes."

The Gold Coast whirligig is almost too good to be true for Tom and Donna Wigdahl. Tom owns an electrical contracting company in Elk Grove Village, Ill., and commutes during the November-May Florida season. They have "lots" of polo ponies and a three-bedroom villa at the P.B.P.C.C. "We've met lovely people from all over," says Donna. "From Colombia, Germany, Brazil. You don't talk about changing diapers. Between the wealth, the polo and the people, it's just been fantastic. It answers everything I want out of life. And here we are out in the boonies. I'm having such a great time. I may never go home."

-- By Michael Demarest. Reported by Marilyn Alva/Boca Raton

With reporting by Marilyn Alva/Boca Raton

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