Madness Under the Royal Palms by Laurence Leamer

leaving Mizner with a severely injured leg that was in danger of amputation.
    In New York City, the invalided Mizner met Paris Singer, whose life was its own richly ornate biography. Singer was the next-to-youngest son of Isaac Merritt Singer’s twenty-four children. The sewing machine magnate had left his son enough money so he could indulge most of his whims, including a lengthy affair with the celebrated dancer Isadora Duncan, with whom he had a child. Singer was as tall as Mizner, and was an elegant gentleman with a rakish mustache.
    Singer planned to use some of his wealth to build a convalescent hospital for officers in the jungle of Palm Beach. When the new friends arrived in Palm Beach by train, Singer took the hobbling Mizner around the island. The architect was appalled at the yellow and white of the two Flagler hotels. Flagler’s colors were also slapped on everything from train cars to benches.
    Mizner came upon a New England–style colonial plopped down in the middle of the jungle, forlorn and bizarre, three thousand miles away from its natural northern habitat. He observed the stilted, artificial hotel life with its patrons changing their clothes five times a day, and wearing layered clothes inappropriate for the summery clime.
    As the two men stood on the shores of Lake Worth a mile north of the Royal Poinciana Hotel, Singer asked the architect, “What do you see on this site?” He was not asking a practical architectural question. He was asking the man for his vision, and that was how Mizner replied. “It’s so beautiful that it ought to be something religious—a nunnery, with a chapel built into the lake, great cool cloisters and a court of oranges; a landing stage, where the stern old abbess could barter with boatmen bringing their fruit and vegetables for sale; a great gate over there on the road, where the faithful could leave their offerings and receive largesse.”
    Mizner took what was little more than a visceral reaction and with Singer’s money turned it into a dark orange fantasy that spiritually anchored the island. This dream stood far above the highest of the royal palms. Unlike most architects, Mizner was as much concerned with the interior decoration as the outside. He built a series of studio shops in West Palm Beach where he trained craftsmen to make ceramic tiles, pottery, furniture, and whatever else he needed to complete the last physical details of his vision.
    Stoneworkers created discriminating objects and Mizner had them broken apart with hatchets and patched back together again, so they would appear to be old. He trained carpenters to drill wormlike holes in chests of drawers. He taught painters how to create peeling effects to make wood appear ancient. He was creating fake antiques, but to him they were not fraudulent pieces but poetic artifacts that blended seamlessly with the old to be set down in this ageless environ, outside of history, stumbled upon in the mysterious jungles of South Florida.
    When one looked up at the ornate painted beams, then down at the Spanish tiles that festooned every room, at the ornate Spanish furniture and the rich damask, all that was missing was human architecture of the same vision and grandeur. The war was over and there was no longer a need for a convalescent hospital, so Mizner and Singer decided to turn the building into a private club. They named it the Everglades. Mizner and Singer were wildly opinionated men, and they ran the club like a dinner party for which they chose the guests. These five hundred members were rich and well placed, and along with their wives, they found a new quality of social intercourse at the club.
    For decades, the Everglades was so much a center of life on the island that some people made the purchase of a home contingent upon becoming members. The club had its own superb golf course and fine clay tennis courts. That was part of Mizner’s vision too; he envisioned that people would wear sports clothes during