AMERICA AT PLAY

Evening Star, Issue 20862, 4 August 1931, Page 1

AMERICA AT PLAY

PALM BEACH PARTIES I have been to Palin Beach to see America at play (writes Randolph Churchill, son of Mr Winston Churchill, in the ‘ Daily Mail ’). If you are an American yon have to he very rich to be able to afford to go to Florida, but somehow quite poor Europeans seem to be there in droves. Now. I suppose more money is spent in Palm Beach than in any other holiday resort in the world/ They say that if the two thousand richest men there were to change all their money into thousand-dollar bills and spread them on the beach, even the droves of Europeans could not collect them ic less than twenty years. American millionaires are not usually as rich as English millionaires, because they count their money in dollars, which aren’t as valuable as our pounds. But anyway, no millionaire can afford to go to Palm Beach. They are all billionaires. These all live in'large white palaces which are built round courtyards. The courtyards have fountains in the middle and palm trees in the corners. In front of the palaces and adjacent to the ocean they have large swimming pools made of marble. This saves them the trouble of going into the sea to bathe.

The sun shines all the time (except when I was there, when it rained nearly every day). The latest dance music is played incessantly on beautiful mahogany panatropes, and is relayed by loud speakers to the swimming pool and other parts of the garden. Cocktails made of the purest ingredients brought specially from Jamaica, and iced by expert hands, are served all day by white-coated negro attendants. Highly-polished automobiles of multitudinous horse-power stand ready day and night to transport one to some new scene of luxury and entertainment. Every night one of the biggest of the palaces is the scene of a mammoth party. These parties differ considerably from the son. of function one attends in New York, London,’ Paris, or Venice. For the last two years there has been only one recipe for “ cosmopolitan ” parties—everyone is invited to come dressed as their opposite. In Palm Beach they are much more original. Everyone goes as themselves, which, of course, is just the same thing in the end. But it is more in the form of entertainment than in the composition and attire of the guests that the difference is most striking. One of the more bizarre and extraordinary dinners which 1 attended took place in the huge patio of one of the clubs. A thousand people sat and consumed a ten-course dinner round the edges while pugilistio encounters were staged on a raised platform in the middle. Although planned as exhibition matches no gladiatorial contest in Imperial Rome was fought with more genuine brutality than was employed by these modem Milos ; so that before long the faces of the combatants were as incarnadine as the lips of the female spectators. In the intervals between the fights the guests danced in the ring upon the canvas floor, adding thereby a pleasingly barbaric touch, to what might otherwise have been thought a tame method of enjoyment. Thus day after day and night after night the panorama of American super-holiday-making unfolded itself before me. Here on this sandy waste between the sea and a lagoon a richlytinselled garden has been created, more exotic, more luxurious, aud infinitely more vibrant than Nineveh and Babylon could show. Palm Beach, unlike Nineveh and Babylon, is not a manifestation of decadence. Here is no epicureanism, but an intense ebullition of virility. The Americans are essentially a seri-ous-minded people. Their lives are conducted on a basis of resolute endeavour and unflagging energy. Repose and relaxation find but little part in their existence. They address a golf ball with as much grave resolve as they do a shareholders’ meeting, and the fulfilment of their contract at the bridge table demands of them as much mental determination as the contract they undertake in business.