Florida

See Naples and die

Petronella Wyatt

ave you got any plastics?' said the elderly man in Palm Beach. We were in a restaurant near the sea called Club Col- lette. 'Plastics?' I repeated. 'Well, I've got Amex, or Barclaycard.' He looked at me as if I were not only downright mad but stupid. 'No, no! Plastic surgeons.'

In uptown Florida (Palm Beach, St Petersburg, Naples) people are either very rich, very old — or plastic surgeons. Often they are very rich and very old and plastic surgeons. With the exception of Miami Beach, it is not advisable to be young and poor and badly upholstered. (One Palm Beach girl had her breasts done at 23.) In fact, it is downright mad and stupid.

Florida is a state of contrasts. Uptown there are more millionaires than anywhere else east of the Mississippi — downtown there are more poor coloureds. In parts of Miami, Hispanics outnumber Americans by five to one. Florida has the oldest town in America, St Augustine, a 16th-century Spanish mission, and some of the most glaringly modern high-rises. In towns on the west coast the average age of the popu- lation is 70 — Miami on the east pulsates with teenagers.

I began my researches in Naples, the cap- ital of Collier County in the west. With a population of just over 9,000 and no income tax, Naples is the largest and richest retirement home in America. It is often cited as the model west coast town. 'There are no poor people in Naples,' Joe, the taxi driver, said. As a good Neopolitan he was worried about a predicted influx of illegal immigrants from Haiti. 'They might lower the county's tone,' he complained. In Flori- da even the taxi drivers are anxious to attract the 'right people'. Naples has no public transport. 'Too associated with poverty,' Joe explained. It once had a railway station but that was closed down in case some undesirable peo- ple got off the train there. Down south by the Florida Keys, a horseshoe of islands in the Gulf of Mexico, where HemingwaY wrote To Have and Have Not, much of the population is young — ish. The first thing that strikes you about the west coast is that everyone on the street seems to have white

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hair (and wear short, white bermudas). They all look like Osgood, the pensioner who fell for Jack Lemmon in drag in Some Like it Hot.

Like much of Florida, Naples is one huge suburb. Only here suburbia meets St James's. Real estate costs up to $20,000 per square foot. Yet the first half mile of cen- tral Naples appeared to be taken up entire- ly by churches. There are six in the area Methodist, Baptist, Episcopalian, Presbyte- rian. 'People here are so old they are very conscious of their mortality,' said Jack, my guide. The clergy operate with the enthusi- asm with which the British navy impressed sailors during the Napoleonic wars. As I walked past an Episcopalian chapel a man shot from the vestry and grabbed my arm. `Are you a future bride?' he asked. 'No,' I replied. 'Shame. I was going to offer you our services.'

The houses, mostly built in the 1930s when Naples became a fashionable resort, look like mausoleums. Flat lawns start at the beach and run towards the front door for quarter of a mile jumping over swim- ming pools, statues and rose gardens. Sometimes the architecture is unrecognis- able. Other times it is a pastiche of China, India and Palladio. Roofs may be of cone- gated silver and glass. It is all like some- thing out of The Diamond As Big As The Ritz. One retired businessman bought a house for $5 million, knocked it down and built an almost identical one seven yards to the left in order to get a better view of the sunset.

If you are not rich you belong to the jet- sam of faceless doctors, lawyers and domes- tic servants. Naples has a token 'slum' which has little pink houses like Devon hol- iday homes. Sometimes there are Cadillacs parked outside. The real poor (who most Neapolitans deny exist) include the Hispan- ics, blacks and Indians who make up 22 per cent of the county's population. They live outside the town in shacks and trailers. Twenty per cent of the workforce is employed in agriculture. (Florida is the largest citrus producing state.) The rest are waiters, construction workers and manual labourers. Many are illegal immigrants. Joe told me the government turns a blind eye to this because they will work for less than the minimum wage. But unemployment in the county is 7.2 per cent.

Few things are what they seems in this looking-glass land. Rick, the doorman at the Naples Beach Hotel, assured me there was no crime in Collier County. He showed me a story in the Naples daily paper. 'This is the first crime story for months,' he boasted. The headline read 'Robber drops loot'. But Rick was sweeping the truth under the carpet. Last year there were 11 murders, 234 rapes, 229 robberies, 895 assaults and 2,479 burglaries. Fort Myers, a town up the coast, has as large a drug trade as Miami.

West Florida pretends gentility as fierce- ly as a Victorian matriarch. There is little nightlife. 'You have to go to Miami for that,' said Rick. Naples' two nightclubs are on the outskirts of the town. I tried my hand at the Club Oasis, which I was told was the year's hip spot — the only hip spot. It was in a parking lot. The doorman, in keeping with local custom, was trying to limit the number of young punters to as few as possible. He asked me for an ID. I didn't have one. He asked me to leave. Finally, I fished out my passport. He turned it over and over like a former East German police- man until he was satisfied I was over 21. But by that time the Oasis had run dry as far I was concerned.

Next I tried the Brassie bar on the beach. A blonde was belting out Hold Me. I sat down at a table and ordered a vodka. (Drinks are cheap, around $3. Food is even cheaper. You can buy a lobster for $4.) At the next table were two Osgoods. Wanna dance, honey?' said one. He looked me over in an offensive manner. The dance- floor was empty except for two white- haired couples tripping over each other to a rock 'n' roll number. Osgood persisted. 'We like English ladies here. Yes, sir.' He reached for my hand and his stick fell over with a clatter.

David, who owned a steak and lobster house, was my only pick-up under 50. We had booked ourselves on a deep sea fishing trip — shark, tuna and grouper, the local fish, to do the Hemingway stuff. (A Florida tuna can fetch up to $25,000 on the Japanese market.) David, who said his nick- name was Snoopy, had the disconcerting directness of most Florida men, whether young or old. 'Let me ask you a question,' he said, pressing my leg. 'Is it true that English men have to go to a clinic before they can make love?'

I headed east for a day stop in Miami, Florida's best known tourist trap. Miami is an amalgam of drugs, discos and art deco. The beaches are dirty and packed with a backdrop of high-rises. The British lie on Miami Beach like white slugs. In the evening they head to the Marlin Bar down- town to sip pina coladas with pink umbrel- las stuck on top. 'Miami's great, isn't it?' said a spaced-out, red-headed girl from London. She said you could get drugs there at half the London price. She offered to take me to a dealer called 'Slim'. As the tabloid journalists say, I made an excuse and left.

Miami crime is a cliché. The city suffered 3,276 crimes last year, many of these violent thefts. 'Of course, it all depends on how you hold yourself,' said Hank, a Miami bar- man. 'If you hold yourself up and don't look over your shoulder you can walk down the worst areas of Miami [like Biscay Boulevard] with dollar bills stuck to your jacket. But if you look worried you can be mugged in broad daylight on Miami Beach.'

An hour-and-a-halfs drive along the coast and you are in a different world again. Gone are the tower blocks and the muggers. Palm Beach, population 9,848, is Ascot-by-the-sea. Like Naples, the poor are bundled out of sight in Palm Beach County. Unemployment in the town is virtually nil: there is no industrial area to speak of and few offices. Unlike Miami, where some petrol station attendants do not speak English, the town is almost exclusively white. Palm Beach began much of its eye-catch- ing modern development in the 1920s when money and Hollywood descended on the Atlantic coast. I asked a local what the sights were. 'Famous peoples' houses,' he said. Many of these were built by an archi- tect called Addison Mizener, who con- structed magnificent, jumbled pastiches of Spanish and Venetian palaces. Donald Trump's house, Marlago, was built in the Twenties by the set designer for the Ziegfeld Follies. Yoko Ono's Italian palace towers nearby.

The Kennedys live just outside the town. (It was at Aubar, the Palm Beach nightclub, that William Kennedy Smith trysted with the woman he was later accused of raping.) Estee Lauder, the cosmetics magnifica, Posts a guard outside her white colonial mansion 24 hours a day. The only trouble is that all the houses are hidden behind ten- feet high walls and you cannot see anything but the roofs. So much for sightseeing.

The young — there are young on the east coast — hang out in the Aubar by night and Play polo by day. The occupations of the old seem to be golf, exercise classes, hair- dressers and plastic surgery. The day after I arrived one prominent matron gave a wed- ding party. The bride was 82, the groom 40. As soon as their husbands die, these women rush off for face lifts and look for a new man,' said a snide hostess. `Or a new wardrobe.' Fortunately for locals, Palm Beach — where nothing except a pair of socks costs under $200 — is relatively safe from thieves. (This is because, unlike in Miami, no run-of-the-mill criminal could afford to live there.) In Palm Beach last Year there were three murders, two rapes, and only 78 robberies and muggings.

You are more likely to be mugged by someone's artificial bouffant wig. At a reception in an art gallery off Worth Avenue, pearl-pallid women with sky-high hair floated by in heavy velvets and bro- cades — though it was 80 degrees outside. The fake tanned men, in elegant suits, have a certain aristocratic hauteur. But Palm Beach is very friendly. I went to a small din- ner for 50 in a huge, gleaming restaurant and was seated beside a man of about 49. He was full of confidences. He told me he had been worried his libido was failing so he took male hormones every day. 'Worked wonders, I'm now at it all the time,' he said. He winked. 'Like a demonstration?' Later, he tried to dance to the band on one leg and was taken home by his wife.

James, a retired polo player, whose great friend, he said, had been Bobby Kennedy's wife's late brother, suggested we go for a nightcap in a hotel. 'Most bars shut at eleven,' he said. So east and west do meet. We got into his tiny convertible Mercedes. I wanted to go to Aubar to spot a Kennedy but he said that after the rape trial it had become too down-market.

We ended up in a hotel piano bar where the pianist was playing Fly Me To the Moon, motto pianissimo. Behind me a tipsy man in his sixties was telling his companion how he had recently had liposuction on his thighs to remove the fat from his 'love handles'. `I've got the best old body in the state,' he crowed. As expansive as all Palm Beachers, he turned to me for confirmation. 'You believe I've got the best body, don't you?' I said I did. But like so many things in Flori- da, this too may have been a deception.

Petronella Wyatt travelled with British Air- ways Holidays and stayed at the Embassy Suites Hotel in Palm Beach.