PALM BEACH, Fla. – If money and glamour were all that mattered, then today’s wedding of billionaire Donald Trump and a European fashion model might stand out as the high point of the high society season.
Among more than 300 guests expected at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Club for the postnuptial shindig are a host of stars from Hollywood, politics and sports. And many are almost as rich as the groom.
Yet in a resort town that for decades was the exclusive winter playground for America’s old-money elite, status is more complicated than wealth and good looks, even for a man who builds skyscrapers, owns casinos and presides over his own hit television show, “The Apprentice.” So while Trump’s marriage to Melania Knauss has galvanized worldwide attention, the event is not likely to shake up the listings on a Palm Beach social register that has included names such as Vanderbilt, Woolworth and DuPont.
“This is not a social wedding,” explained retired society chronicler Agnes Ash. “It’s a celebrity wedding. And news events like that don’t always penetrate the rest of Palm Beach.”
Ah, the rich. “Let me tell you about the very rich,” wrote F. Scott Fitzgerald in 1926. “They are different from you and me.”
Of course the rich have more money. Anyone who lives on Palm Beach – median household income, $138,000 – is likely to have more money than almost anyone else. But within the community of the well-to-do there still are distinctions drawn between old money and new money.
“I am not in the upper echelon of society, but I do know those folks,” attorney and Palm Beach resident Bob Montgomery said of the old-money crowd. “And attitudes are different.”
Some of those attitudes suggest that Trump’s brash, self-aggrandizing style is inappropriate for an island that through the middle of the past century symbolized the aristocracy of inheritance, where having money was a given but talking about it was taboo.
Trump is hardly the first newcomer to Palm Beach “who might be labeled as not polished enough” for some, Ash said. “But business is business, and if you track them back, they all had people like Donald Trump to start the fortune.”
In buying Mar-a-Lago, the 118-room villa built for cereal heiress Marjorie Merriweather Post, and opening it up as a club that anyone with $150,000 entrance fee and $8,925 in annual dues might join, Trump is credited with allowing a democratic breeze to sweep the stuffy island.
“The culture has changed. People are friendlier, and life is more fun since he came,” said society maven and philanthropist Lois Pope, who inherited a fortune from her late husband, National Enquirer founder Generoso Pope Jr. When she and her husband moved to the island in 1971, she recalled, some clubs would not admit “people who were Italian and Catholics like (Generoso) was.”
At Mar-a-Lago, “there are no restrictions,” said Montgomery, a member. “I think he’s looked on favorably.”
Town Councilman Sam McLendon, a candidate for mayor in next month’s election, also lauds Trump for preserving Mar-a-Lago and opening it as a club. Yet, he said, “There is a lot of anti-Trump feeling remaining in this town.”
Evidence of that anti-Trump sentiment surfaced Thursday at Town Hall when the council met in special session to take up a last-minute request to stage a fireworks show at Mar-a-Lago during Saturday night’s party.
When the council voted unanimously to deny the request, several spectators in the audience erupted into applause.
Some anti-Trump sentiment may stem from the developer’s behavior since he paid $8 million for the 17-acre property in 1985. He sued Palm Beach County in an effort to shut down air traffic over his house, challenged his property taxes, and threatened to sub-divide the historic estate and sell it off for development. He ran afoul of town ordinances in 1997 when he hired out Mar-a-Lago for a television show.
And although he is wealthy – current worth: $2.7 billion, according to Forbes magazine – Trump has not been particularly generous locally, some say. He has given just $10,000, for example to the Kravis Center for the Performing Arts in West Palm Beach. “I wish he would be one of our major supporters, a man of his prominence,” said philanthropist Alexander W. Dreyfoos Jr., chairman of the Kravis board of directors.
Pope, who calls herself a Trump friend, said she knows there are those in Palm Beach struggling to get used to Trump’s style.
“There are probably people who probably don’t like what he’s done,” she said. “I run into it occasionally, and I defend him. I think he’s made people happier, and therefore Palm Beach is a better place to live.”
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