Palm Beach is on sale - discreetly

May 17, 2009|Drake Bennett and Rebecca Ulam Weiner, Globe Correspondent

PALM BEACH, Fla. - "There's no one here!" whined an intensely tanned older woman into her cellphone, as she waved her cigarette feebly at a persistent fly. It was breakfast time on the flowery terrace of Café Boulud, at the Brazilian Court hotel, where the ratio of servers to guests was a healthy 3 to 1. While her date yelled into his Blackberry, she paced in slow, irregular laps around the courtyard as her crème fraiche omelette congealed in the sun. Judging by their New York accents, the couple appeared to be snowbirds. They had arrived earlier in an old white Rolls Royce, declaring to the valet that they had decided to breakfast out.

She was right. The hotel was next to deserted on a late March weekend despite perfect weather, cheap airfare from the Northeast, and room discounts of up to 70 percent. Of course, those were the very reasons we were there - the island, long off-limits to hoi polloi like ourselves, was letting down its guard just a bit.

Perhaps because of its small size - the town, on a barrier island, is less than 4 square miles - Palm Beach has always been remarkable, even among enclaves of the extremely rich, for its concentration of opulence. Henry Flagler, the robber baron and Standard Oil cofounder who created modern Florida, built his vacation home in Palm Beach, and ever since the town has done its utmost to keep the spirit of the Gilded Age alive.

The island is ringed by resplendent waterfront mansions. Donald Trump sold his to a Russian fertilizer mogul for $95 million last summer. Italian supercars and sloop-sized English sedans prowl the streets, and sockless old men in loafers squire willowy young women in and out of the town's glittering luxury boutiques. In the 1942 Preston Sturges film "The Palm Beach Story," Claudette Colbert's character goes to Palm Beach to find a rich suitor, and presumably that's where she would head today.

But while she would have an easier time finding affordable digs, the wooing these days might be a little less lavish. Like everywhere else, Palm Beach is feeling the pinch of late. The town has been rocked by the saga of Bernie Madoff - formerly a pillar of the town's Jewish community - whose Ponzi scheme dissolved millions, if not billions, of dollars of that community's wealth. And so the face Palm Beach presents to the world is one on which the gilding is wearing through in a few places.

We hadn't come to examine this, at least not primarily, but to visit a relative a few miles inland. Still, we found ourselves spending part of our stay in a Palm Beach that, at least by its own standards, was relatively affordable - and that seemed happy to have us.