High life
Beach boys
Taki
nlike in Palm Beach, its chic neigh- bour ten miles to the north, some things in Delray never change. For 76 years resi- dents have strolled along Atlantic Avenue, the town's main street, greeting friends and strangers alike, as people used to do back in the good old days when manners were more important than money. For 76 years Delray has considered itself a neighbour- hood community with a home-town atmos- phere, an attitude that would bring on instant social leprosy to anyone affecting it ten miles north of here.
The very first time I drove through the place was in 1954, and I was the proud owner of a black Thunderbird convertible, the latest Ford model of that year. I stopped for a reason. It was a Sunday, I was on my way to Miami Beach and it was the first time I had seen people actually walking in a Florida street rather than driving. I remember it very clearly. There were family outings on the beach, the churches were full and after the services there were volleyball games at the beach And children made human chains in the waves. Thirty-four years later, very little has changed.
I have been going down to Delray for the last four Thanksgiving weekends and staying at a wonderfully old-fashioned beach club motel called the Seagate. The owner is a gent, which makes for the friendliness of the place, and he has two truly beautiful daughters, which needs no explanation. Alas, his elder one, Amanda, a gifted writer, got married last Saturday, making it a sad occasion for the countless suitors who have been sniffing round the place for the last five years. Amanda gave a terrific party and flew down the man people are calling the Cole Porter of the Eighties, Christopher Mason, a Brit with talent galore.
Mason doesn't bite the hand that feeds him, but he certainly teases it, in verse and on the piano. Here's an example of his wit, on the prosperati's most egregious couple:
Now the Gutfreunds are good friends of mine, John and Susan are simply divine.
As people they're good, they're just mis- understood And their pure sense of style is sublime. And if Salomon Brothers is waning, and Susan is getting too grand, The Gutfreunds are darling young people. Oh, why can't New York understand?
I rediscovered Delray because my friend Chuck Pfeifer's parents live down here. Chuck and I run each morning on the beach, swim for as long as we run and then play tennis. In between sports Chuck regales the tourists with stories about the people he's killed (two silver stars in Nam). It makes for an empty beach and lots of room in the patio where we lunch. This year my best friend in Chicago flew down — the pork-belly king of that town, in- cidentally — Christopher Gilmour. The pork-belly king protested at Pfeifer's stor- ies as they kept the women away, but we still managed to have a whale of a time. On Friday evening we got so wrecked we drove to Palm Beach and went into Car- tier's, thinking it was a bookstore. Inciden- tally, there are 150 jewellery shops in Palm Beach for each book boutique.
That's the bad news. The good is that there is only one Bath and Tennis club. It's the best club of its kind in the world, and the tennis atmosphere about as good as you can find. The club is not only exclu- sive, it's also restricted, which means minorities need not apply. As I was playing rather well I drew a crowd. Afterwards, however, I found out it was because some new members thought I was black and Jewish to boot.
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