“Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner,” released in 1967, stars Sidney Poitier, Spencer Tracy, and Katharine Hepburn. The role of Sidney Poitier’s white fiancee is played by Katherine Houghton who in real life is Katharine Hepburn’s niece.…"The culture clash began to approach a climax last fall [1996], when Mr. Trump’s lawyer sent members of the [Palm Beach] town council a copy of the film “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner,” a film that deals with upper-class racism.”
4/30/1997, “Trump’s Palm Beach Club Roils the Old Social Order,“ Wall St. Journal, Jacqueline Bueno, Staff Reporter “It’s a warm Saturday night, and the party is getting hot at Mar-a-Lago, the Palm Beach estate that owner Donald Trump recently converted into a private club. As the Beach Boys harmonize on a makeshift stage, hundreds of revelers, many of them decked out in Hawaiian shirts, straw hats and leis, dance in the aisles and gyrate on wooden lawn chairs.
At the height of the fete, Mr. Trump asks the crowd: “Does this remind you of the Bath and Tennis Club, anybody?"
The answer is a definite no — among the evening’s partygoers, and for many more of the nearly 10,000 residents of this posh island town. But whether the contrast between the freewheeling Mar-a-Lago Club and the more-formal Bath and Tennis Club, as well as Palm Beach’s other traditional social establishments, is good or bad depends on whom you ask.
Uptight and Offended
For Mr. Trump and his club set, Mar-a-Lago is a saving grace, affronting hypocrisy in a corseted culture of snobs. “Palm Beach is very much changing for the better,” says the New York real-estate tycoon, “and a lot of that is because of Mar-a-Lago.”
But for the old money that has long dominated this town — mostly staid, conservative, publicity-shy philanthropists who donate tens of thousands of dollars at social functions each “season” — Mar-a-Lago and its owner are the town’s vulgar future made unpleasantly present.
“We’re youthenizing here,” says James Jennings Sheeran, publisher of Palm Beach Society magazine, which has covered the town’s social scene for more than 40 years. “Before it was just old, graceful people who partied and gave to charity for reasons other than their own aggrandizement. Today, many of the young people tend to give money for their egos and the publicity it generates.”
Palm Beach is suffering from a classic case of culture clash — between a patrician aristocracy and a band of new-money colonizers led by the brash, boastful and ostentatious Mr. Trump. A lot of it may seem silly: socialites boycotting functions associated with Mar-a-Lago; others fretting over the fate of a landmark estate.
But Mr. Trump also has resorted to the courts to secure his foothold here, and many residents wince at the attention his legal battles with the town have drawn — to the town in general, and to the admission practices at some of Palm Beach’s older clubs in particular.
For many longtime residents, Mr. Trump’s decision to set up camp here was bad enough. That was in 1985, when Mr. Trump paid about $7 million for the 128-room Mar-a-Lago mansion, built 70 years ago by cereal heiress Marjorie Merriweather Post. Over the decades, Ms. Post’s party schedule had placed the estate at the center of Palm Beach social circles. By the time she died in 1973, it was a local institution. (Part of the original guest quarters eventually became the Bath and Tennis Club.)
Mr. Trump arrived well-known, though not necessarily well-regarded. He brought with him a reputation as a real-estate developer accustomed to battling local residents who resist his wishes and as a latecomer to high society who hadn’t learned the art of discretion.
A Royal Denial
He lived up to expectations. In his book titled “The Art of the Deal,” Mr. Trump bragged that he had acquired the estate at a bargain price. But soon after, he challenged on appeal the county’s property-tax appraisal. (Later, he would boast that Britain’s Prince Charles and Princess Diana had joined Mar-a-Lago — an assertion that Buckingham Palace denied.)
In the early 1990s, Mr. Trump found himself mired in a costly divorce just as real-estate markets began to slide. He complained openly about the $3 million a year in maintenance costs that the estate was costing him. He proposed subdividing the 17-acre property into smaller lots for residential development.
That set the stage for Mr. Trump’s first big battle with Palm Beach leaders. The town, which years earlier had approved a subdivision proposal for the site from another developer, rejected Mr. Trump’s plan, prompting him to sue for $50 million in damages. He dropped the suit when the idea emerged to turn the home into a private club. The town council agreed to that, but placed restrictions on the club, such as allowing no more than 500 members, to allay residents’ fears about traffic congestion and noise. In the spring of 1995, the Mar-a-Lago Club officially opened, and is now charging $75,000 for membership, plus annual dues.
The club, like most in Palm Beach, doesn’t make its membership list available. Among its known members is financier Ronald Perelman. Mar-a-Lago became an effective means for Mr. Trump to contribute to the flow of a comparatively young and indiscreet crowd into town.
A Mover and a Shaker
As one of the first “young monied guys to come down,” says Mr. Sheeran, Mr. Trump “was the prime mover of all the young money coming into the market.” Recent arrivals have included singers Rod Stewart and Jimmy Buffett.
But this is a town where until recently, city ordinance required that male joggers wear shirts. Residents bemoaned the rise of a culture in which consumption is meant to be conspicuous. Ten years ago, Mr. Sheeran estimates, about 65% of Palm Beach residents lived on trust money or inherited wealth. Today, he estimates, only about 25% do so. “This was a very graceful senior-citizen market,” he says. “It was nice, clean people. Now, you have a lot of junk-bond money. The quality of the money is not pure.”
Adds Shannon Donnelly, society writer for the Palm Beach Daily News: “I tend not to go to Mar-a-Lago.” Gatherings there, she says, don’t attract “a high-end social crowd. If they were high-end, they’d be at one of the other clubs.” Besides, covering functions at Mar-a-Lago “would lend [Mr. Trump] credibility he doesn’t deserve yet,” she says.
Wanted: Doers
Mr. Trump, who still occupies a private wing of Mar-a-Lago, considers such sentiments the last gasps of a dying breed. “You have two groups here,” he says, “the doers and those who inherited. Mar-a-Lago is composed of the doers. At the other clubs, you probably wouldn’t recognize the [members’] names.”
The culture clash began to approach a climax last fall [1996], when Mr. Trump’s lawyer sent members of the town council a copy of the film “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner,” a film that deals with upper-class racism. Mr. Trump then approached the town council about lifting the restrictions that had been placed on the club. He also asked some council members not to vote on the request because their membership in other clubs created a conflict of interest.
Last December [1996], after the council refused to lift the restrictions, Mr. Trump filed a lawsuit in U.S. District Court in Palm Beach, alleging that the town was discriminating against Mar-a-Lago, in part because it is open to Jews and African-Americans. The suit seeks $100 million in damages.
The town denies the allegation and says it was merely deciding a zoning matter. (The Everglades Club denies that it discriminates in admissions; Palm Beach’s other clubs generally decline to comment on Mr. Trump’s allegations.)
The episode shook the Palm Beach establishment, unaccustomed to having its linen, dirty or not, aired publicly. Some organizations now find they have to tread lightly if they want to hold a function at Mar-a-Lago. When an arm of the Junior League of Palm Beach recently decided to hold a luncheon at the estate, organizers received incensed calls and letters from some members, though the luncheon kept to schedule and was well-attended.
Among the angry was Estelle Curran, a stalwart of the local social scene. “Mr. Trump has made so much trouble in this town,” Ms. Curran says. “A lot of people feel that if we boycott the place, we won’t help him make money.”
Even the Anti-Defamation League in New York, which in a 1994 battle forced Palm Beach’s Sailfish Club to open up its membership, was concerned that Mr. Trump was using the charge of anti-Semitism for his own mercantile ends. The league’s national director, Abraham Foxman, met with Mr. Trump soon after to air his concerns. According to Mr. Foxman, Mr. Trump agreed to modify his claims to allege only that the town council has treated Mar-a-Lago unfairly, compared with other clubs in town.
Beneath the Glitter
Now, Mr. Foxman seems pleased that Mr. Trump has elevated the issue of discriminatory policies at social clubs. “He put the light on Palm Beach,” Mr. Foxman says. “Not on the beauty and the glitter, but on its seamier side of discrimination. It has an impact.”
In recent weeks, Mr. Foxman says, the league has received calls from Jewish residents telling of how Palm Beach clubs are changing. Locals concur that in the past year, organizations such as the Bath and Tennis Club have begun to admit Jewish patrons. The Palm Beach Civic Association, which for many years was believed to engage in discriminatory behavior, this month named a Jewish resident as its chief officer.
Mr. Trump’s critics credit a more general social evolution. “You see gradual change, changes in attitudes,” says Frank Chopin, lawyer for the Preservation Foundation of Palm Beach.
For others, the future remains a scary prospect of unwanted social upheaval and the extinction of a way of life. Palm Beach, says Mr. Sheeran, “is going to be less graceful, noisier, flashier and younger.””
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Added: “The racism charge against Trump is…used now as it has always been used — to divide and judge by skin color for political profit.” The good news here that in Donald Trump someone — finally — is standing up to fight back. Just as he fought back all those years ago in Palm Beach when no one was looking.”
11/13/2015, “When Trump Fought the Racists,“ Spectator.org, Jeffrey Lord
“In other words, long before he was running for president, there was Donald Trump battling racism and anti-Semitism in Palm Beach society. Using every tool at his disposal.…
Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner was released in 1967 and starred film legends Spencer Tracy, Katharine Hepburn, and Sidney Poitier. The Oscar-winning story revolved around a liberal, upper-class older couple who are stunned and discomfited when their daughter, played by Katharine Houghton, brings her new fiancé — Poitier — home to dinner and an introduction to her white parents. As liberals, her parents were staunch supporters of racial equality and had raised their daughter accordingly. Yet suddenly, in comes the very personal reality of equality when their daughter waltzes in the door after a vacation with husband-to-be Poitier, a black widower and doctor. Soul searching about just how devoted to equality they really are ensues.
Thus it was no accident that Trump selected this movie to tweak the members of both the Palm Beach town council and the larger white society it represented. Trump understood exactly what the game was and he would have none of it. In addition to sending a copy of the movie, he launched his lawyers, who filed that $100 million lawsuit “alleging that the town was discriminating against Mar-a-Lago, in part because it is open to Jews and African-Americans.”…
The harsh reality of the racism charge against Trump is...used now as it has always been used — to divide and judge by skin color for political profit.
The good news here that in Donald Trump someone — finally — is standing up to fight back. Just as he fought back all those years ago in Palm Beach when no one was looking.”
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