Balked At The Cloud Machines

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31091, 21 June 1966, Page 2

Balked At The Cloud Machines

(N.Z. Brest Assn.—Copyright) MIAMI BEACH, June 19. Ronald Rothstein, facing the prospect of marrying Susan Grenald amid cooing doves and gurgling cloud machines, disappeared yesterday, 12 hours before the ceremony. The bride’s father, who owns a store chain, said: “The kid got cold feet and got on a plane. The wedding is off. It isn’t postponed, it’s cancelled.” It was to have been Miami’s wedding of the year. The bride’s mother, announcing it as the “wedding of the doves,” invited about 300 guests to watch the

25,000-dollar ceremony in two of the Fontainebleau Hotel’s grand ballrooms and to eat a champagne dinner. Susan, in a pleated coat and a gown with a train 30 feet long and 30 feet wide, was to have descended a speci-ally-built pink staircase surrounded by live doves in gilded cages. She was to have come to the altar through a white cloud produced by smoke machines, so she would “look like she’s coming from heaven.”

A national magazine crew was to have recorded the event.

At the dress rehearsal the bridegroom was heard to mutter: "The import thing is that two people love each other and are getting married.” As the smoke machines coughed out something that looked more like smog he added: “If I had it to do over again, I’d elope.” “My daughter, I am positive, will not go back,” Mrs Grenald said today. She said her daughter’s

passport—to have been used for an 83-day world honeymoon—was returned by Rothstein through a •‘mutual friend.” “We don’t want him to know where she is. It’s over,” said Mrs Grenald. "I don’t know why everyone doesn't just forget it. “It isn’t as if the wedding were that much different. A friend of mine had a wedding with a cloud machine, and nobody said anything about it. They were divorced three months later.”