Fortune, fantasy shaped Mar-a-Lago in 1920s
My grandparents always had a jar of Postum in their kitchen. Introduced in 1895 about the time they were both born, this beverage made of roasted wheat bran and molasses was marketed as a healthy alternative to coffee. It would keep the evil “Mr. Coffee Nerves” at bay, ads proclaimed. Later, in radio commercials, Mr. Nerves could be heard muttering, “Curses! Foiled again by Postum!”
As amazing as it may seem today in the era of designer decaf coffee, Postum helped make a mint for its namesake, cereal titan C.W. Post. In the Roaring Twenties, his daughter and chief heir Marjorie Merriweather Post would put that fortune to work on the Palm Beach estate she named Mar-a-Lago.
In Spanish, the name means “sea to lake,” the lake in this case being Lake Worth Lagoon, now part of the Atlantic Intracoastal Waterway. But it’s probably no coincidence that “Mar” is also the first syllable of the name Marjorie, who both shaped the house and directed activities there until her death in 1973.
You can read more about Post, Palm Beach and Mar-a-Lago in Les Standiford’s excellent 2019 book, “Palm Beach, Mar-a-Lago, and the Rise of America’s Xanadu.” Here are a couple of nuggets.
Flagler and the palms
First, like much of Florida, Palm Beach bears the imprint of Henry Flagler. The Standard Oil tycoon established a deep bond with the wild state in 1888, when he opened his opulent Ponce de Leon
Hotel in St. Augustine, Standiford writes, and the rail lines Flagler forged down its east coast were more than anything a way to get visitors to the hotel empire he envisioned, with Palm Beach as the southern boundary of his domain.
At the time, journalists tried to figure out how Flagler could be so entranced with a place that was so, well, nowhere. The 18-mile-long barrier island bracketed by Lake Worth and the ocean was essentially a swamp. Maybe it was the palm trees that beguiled Flagler, one writer theorized in 1910 — the palms that had risen on the barrier island and inspired its name after a ship bearing 20,000 coconuts had run ashore there in 1878.
Whatever the reason, Flagler believed in the island and its palms. In 1893, he snatched up 200 acres of land and announced plans to build a grand hotel, the Royal Poinciana. When it opened in February 1894, it had only
17 guests — the railroad wouldn’t be completed for another month.
But soon Flagler’s gamble paid off, and Palm Beach began drawing thousands
of wealthy winter visitors. In 1902, when Flagler and his young third wife, Mary Lily, began entertaining at their new 75-room mansion, Whitehall,
their upper-crust guests realized they didn’t have to book a hotel or wait for an invite from the Flaglers to enjoy Palm Beach winters. They could build their own palace in paradise.
Mizner and Urban
By the time Post and her then-husband, E.F. Hutton, decided to build their palace in the mid-1920s, the island had acquired an architectural style much different than Flagler’s neoclassical Whitehall, thanks to architect Addison Mizner, who arrived in Palm Beach in 1919.
Whether one describes it as Venetian Gothic, Mediterranean Revival, Moorish Mediterranean or “Ali Baba Comes to Florida,” Mizner’s buildings were a great fit for then-exotic Florida and gave its moneyed transplants “equally exotic habitations to root them there,” Standiford writes.
Mizner was not the architect of Mar-a-Lago, however, although it stands under the Moorish Mediterranean umbrella he established. To create their world between the sea and the lake, Post and Hutton hired Paris-trained architect Marion Sims Wyeth. When his work began to seem a bit too conservative to Post, she turned to Joseph Urban, a Viennese-born designer recommended by Broadway impresario Florenz Ziegfeld.
Urban had shaped stage sets for Ziegfeld’s Follies and film sets for William Randolph Hearst. At Mar-a-Lago, he shaped much of exterior and interior decoration, as well as the 75-foot bell tower. As Palm Beach residents watched his ideas take shape, some grappled with their inability to find a common style. Each guest room had a different look, from Dutch to Spanish to American Colonial. The tile roofs were Mediterranean, but the chimneys were straight out of the Netherlands, and the stonework included figures from Egyptian, Greek, Far Eastern, and Tudor mythology.
Perhaps it should simply be called “Urbanesque,” one observer suggested. After all, almost no one was complaining about the end result in 1927, when Mar-aLago was finished in that Jay Gatsby world.
After all, as author Robert Barnwell Roosevelt observed as early as 1884, “Florida is a land of dreams, a strange country full of surprises, an intangible sort of place, where at first nothing is believed to be real and where finally everything is considered possible.”