by John Glatt
Then everything changed.
World War II broke out, making Ben Novack rich beyond his wildest dreams.
* * *
In February 1942 the U.S. Army took over Miami Beach, using it as a basic training center for troops before they were shipped off to Europe. With its perfect weather conditions, Miami was the ideal place to train pilots and rehearse the Normandy invasion.
Almost overnight, an estimated hundred thousand men from the Army Air Corps and the U.S. Navy invaded Miami Beach, and nearly two hundred hotels were requisitioned to billet them. The U.S.government generously compensated hotel owners up to $10 a night ($141 today) for each room, not including food.
“Boy, did my dad clean up,” Ben Novack Jr. told author Steven Gaines in 2006. “He raked in the profits, and he did so well that he got another hotel and did the same thing, and then another hotel with an army contract.”
Ben Novack used his profits to buy a share in the Monroe Hotel before snapping up the Cornell Hotel and then the Atlantis, which became an army reception center. Over a five-year period, he bought up five hotels.
Of Ben’s housing soldiers, Novack’s future sister-in-law, Maxine Fiel, remembered, “He told me, ‘I don’t have to feed them. I don’t have to give them anything. Just a bed.’ And that’s how he made his money.”
As he prospered, Novack carefully cultivated his own unique sense of style, becoming rather a dandy. He began wearing elaborate bow ties and draping custom-made brightly colored suits over his lithe five-foot, six-inch frame. Every morning, his personal barber trimmed his thin mustache the French way.
Novack took great pride in his appearance. It would be the same approach he would later bring to his hotels.
At the end of the war, Novack went into partnership with Harry Mufson to build the Sans Souci, boasting that the new hotel would “wow” guests. Novack envisioned it as the last word in elegance on the ocean, with its own restaurants, shops, and a penthouse nightclub with fabulous views. Its French name, Sans Souci (meaning “without care”), he felt, would add a touch of class.
Ben Novack saw hotels as pleasure palaces straight out of a Busby Berkeley musical. He dreamed of transforming Miami Beach into an unparalleled paradise, like no other place in the world.
In the spring of 1945, his ambitions knew no bounds when he strolled into Manhattan’s La Martinique nightclub and first set eyes on top photographic model Bernice Stempel.
TWO
BERNICE
Bernice Mildred Stempel was born on December 2, 1922, on New York’s Upper West Side. Her father, William Jack Stempel, had emigrated to America from London some years earlier.
The Stempels settled in New York and young William, whom everyone knew as Jack, grew up to become a successful furrier, dressing Manhattan’s elite. Handsome and athletic, he was a welterweight boxing champion and a bon vivant, who liked the good life.
“He was a playboy,” recalled his youngest daughter, Maxine Fiel. “He was a guy that knew all the politicians in New York and had his own card games.”
One day, Stempel was in Gloversville, in upstate New York, during one of his frequent fur-buying trips to Canada. He stopped off at Worth’s department store, where he saw a beautiful young Irish salesgirl named Rowena Sweeney Burton.
It was love at first sight.
“He thought she was just unbelievably gorgeous,” said Maxine. “Red hair and blue eyes. And when my father wanted something, he was like a dog with a bone.”
Over the next few months, the thirty-six-year-old Stempel, who was Jewish, assiduously courted the twenty-one-year-old devout Irish Catholic. When he proposed marriage, she readily agreed.
After the wedding, he moved his new bride to Manhattan, installing her in his spacious West End Avenue brownstone. He then went into the insurance business and made a fortune.
In 1922 their first daughter, Bernice, was born, followed by Maxine, two years later. Rowena insisted on having the babies baptized Catholics.
Now a father, Jack Stempel did not allow his new family to cramp his playboy lifestyle in the slightest. He was already well known in New York society, cultivating influential friends and gambling away his nights in the speakeasies during Prohibition.
“He’d go out,” said Maxine, “and do the same things as if he was unmarried. So he left [our mother] alone.”
One day, Jack asked his best friend to keep his wife company nights, while he went out on the town.
“That was fatal,” said Maxine. “He left her alone, and his friend, who was a salesman, was interested in her.”
When Stempel discovered that his wife and best friend were having an affair, he threw Rowena out of the house and filed for divorce.
“It was all over the papers,” said Maxine, “because my father was very prominent.”
Jack Stempel won custody of his young daughters, but sent them to live with his two sisters. He refused to let their mother have any further contact with them. Rowena tried to fight for custody, but she had no money to challenge her ex-husband’s expensive attorneys.
After a few months, Bernice and Maxine’s aunts could no longer take care of them, so the sisters were sent to an orphanage. They were eventually fostered out to a German family named Reiser, who owned a restaurant in Far Rockaway, in Queens.
Bernice was a nervous child, and was so traumatized by her parents’ bitter divorce that she withdrew into her own world.
“Bernice was older, but I always took care of her,” said Maxine.”She wouldn’t speak up, and I always had to.”
* * *
In the early 1930s, divorce was rare. Most people stayed together, making the best of a miserable marriage. Bernice and Maxine Stempel, therefore, had a difficult childhood, growing up under the stigma of their parents’ divorce. This tough childhood took a toll on Bernice, leaving scars for years afterward.
Their foster parents sent the girls to public school in Washington Heights, where their mother would try to visit them.
“She would come to the schoolyard to see us,” recalled Maxine.”She was gorgeous. I adored her.”
They missed their mother terribly, but spent the holidays with their father and his family. He would never let them see their mother, who eventually ended up in a mental health facility.
Both Stempel girls were unusually beautiful, turning heads wherever they went. They were skinny and pale, with striking red hair and freckles that they had inherited from their mother.
When Bernice was ten years old, an uncle recommended that she and her sister become millinary models for the big New York department stores.
“He was a buyer for a big firm,” said Maxine, “and he suggested we go into [modeling], because he said you girls are so beautiful.”
The uncle found them jobs modeling hats, jodhpurs, and other riding outfits for society outfitters in Manhattan, but they were paid a pittance.
At public school, Bernice was a good student with a talent for stenography. She was also a natural rebel, and often cut classes.
When she left school, Bernice was headed for a secretarial career, until she was spotted in the street by a talent scout for the famous Conover Model Agency, who immediately signed her to their books.
* * *
By 1940, Conover was the top fashion model agency in New York. It was founder Harry Conover who had invented and trademarked the term cover girl, and who headed a stable of the most beautiful models, specializing in the “well-scrubbed” natural American girl look.
The handsome and charismatic Conover turned his “girls” into the first supermodels, giving them suggestive professional names such as Choo Choo Johnson, Jinx Falkenburg, Dulcet Tone, and Frosty Webb.
After signing with the Conover agency, Bernice Stempel soon went to the top. Her natural red hair and cream skin made her one of his most sought-after girls. Overnight, the once-insecure girl was reborn as a poised, sophisticated young woman whose breathtaking beauty won her a string of lucrative modeling assignments.
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br /> “It helped her get self-esteem and to be validated,” explained Temple Hayes, later to became a close friend. “She and her sister had started out in an orphanage, so it was wonderful for her to have those kind of doors open. And she was proud of surviving such a horrific [childhood].”
In the mid-1940s, Bernice moved into her own apartment with another model, and started going out on the town with her new, glamorous friends. At one party, she was introduced to Salvador Dalí, who immediately invited her to come to his studio and model for him.
When she arrived and the middle-aged surrealist ordered her to strip naked for a portrait, she fled.
“He wanted her to pose nude, and she refused and walked out,” said Estelle Fernandez (not her real name), who would later become Bernice’s best friend. “She told me he was absolutely crazy and he tried [to take advantage of her]. She would never use her body or do anything to [get ahead].”
Although many advertising directors employed the casting couch approach, Bernice Stempel never resorted to these measures to get modeling assignments.
Throughout the 1940s, she regularly modeled for Coca-Cola, as the clean-cut American girl in many of its ad campaigns. She also worked for Old Gold cigarettes, with her long shapely legs tap-dancing under a king-size pack in a popular commercial of the time.
Bernice was a regular at the ultra-exclusive Stork Club, becoming a favorite of its charismatic owner, Sherman Billingsley. She was also pursued by a string of admirers, some of whom proposed marriage.
“She went out with some very wealthy guys,” recalled her sister, Maxine, “but she ended up marrying a nice middle-class good guy.”
Arthur “Archie” Drazen was anything but a playboy, but Bernice fell for his charm. After they married, they settled down in a modest apartment at One University Place, Greenwich Village, overlooking Washington Square Park.
Then Drazen went off to Europe to fight in World War II, leaving his beautiful model bride alone in Manhattan, with all its temptations.
THREE
MR. ROMANTIC
Ben Novack first met Bernice Drazen at the fashionable La Martinique nightclub in early 1945, and was smitten. He was on a brief trip to New York, making arrangements for his new Sans Souci hotel and looking for a good time.
As he already knew one of the girls at Bernice’s table, he casually came over to introduce himself, sitting down next to her.
Many years later, Bernice would explain that, for her, it was anything but love at first sight. In fact, she blew off the thirty-eight-year-old flashily dressed hotel proprietor, thinking him gauche.
After buying champagne for the table, Novack started boasting about his growing Miami Beach hotel empire. Bernice was not impressed. To the twenty-three-year-old model, Novack seemed overbearing and middle-aged. She also noticed the hearing aid in his right ear, with a large wire connecting it to a pocket microphone.
“But there was something about him,” she recalled more than half a century later. “He was charming and vulnerable, and there was the way he walked and swayed his shoulders.”
Ben Novack started bragging about the Sans Souci hotel, saying it would be the last word in grandeur and luxury. It was a one-way conversation, as Novack could not hear Bernice, and had to keep asking her to speak louder into the microphone of his hearing aid.
At the end of the night, he gave the model his business card and asked her to call him.
“And she glanced at it,” said Maxine, “and dismissed him.”
Refusing to take no for an answer, Novack then requested Bernice’s telephone number. Once again she refused, saying she had to go.
“He flipped for her,” Ben Novack Jr. would later tell The Miami Herald. “She didn’t want to date a married man and made it very clear to him.”
The next day, Novack returned to La Martinique, bribing the maître d’ to give him Bernice Stempel’s phone number. Instead, he was given the phone number for a young male friend of Bernice’s, who had also been at the table.
Ever resourceful, Novack called the friend, saying he needed to get in touch with Bernice on a legal matter. He was then given a contact number for the Conover Model Agency.
“So he called up the agency and said he had a job for them,” said Maxine. “He manufactured a shoot in Havana and said he wanted a very American girl type. Outdoorsy looking. Red hair. Freckles. He made the whole thing up.”
A week later, Bernice and another model were sent to Havana for the modeling assignment, together with a makeup girl and a photographer.
When she came out on the beach in her swimming costume for the scheduled photo session, a smiling Ben Novack suddenly appeared out of nowhere.
“He had set the whole thing up to look like a job,” Bernice later explained, “just so he could spend time with me.”
His elaborate romantic ploy paid off. Bernice was so impressed that she started seeing him whenever he came to New York.
Her husband, Archie Drazen, was still fighting in Europe, and although they regularly corresponded, they had grown apart. There was also little passion between Novack and his wife, Bella, who was content to remain in Miami while he gallivanted around the world on business.
Before long, Ben and Bernice were lovers.
“He wined her and he dined her,” said Maxine, “and she’s still married.”
All through their often rocky four-year courtship, Ben Novack wrote Bernice love poems, enlisting Maxine as an ally.
“He was in Florida sending her soft-shell crab and baskets of fruit,” Maxine recalled. “He was a hotel man, so he would send beautiful things like wine, cases of liquor, and the top sirloin steaks. And he’d always say, ‘Maxine, I want her to know how she can live if she marries me. This is how she’ll live.’”
Maxine says her sister did not fall in love with her ardent suitor immediately. She was also romantically involved with a rich young man named Ivan Mogul, but his parents did not consider the beautiful young model marriage material, making him break off the relationship.
Soon after that, Bernice and Ben became serious, and when Archie returned from Europe, Bernice decided to end the marriage.
“She wrote him the ‘Dear John’ letter,” said her sister. “She said, ‘Arthur, I don’t know if we’re suited. You know I met somebody and I think you’d be happy with someone else.’”
Bernice even visited her mother-in-law to explain. She and Archie Drazen would remain friends for the rest of her life.
Maxine said their father had always encouraged his daughters to be socially ambitious.
“Bernice had ambitions,” Maxine explained, “We inherited that from our father. He’d always say, ‘Remember who you are.’”
* * *
Back in Miami Beach, Ben Novack spent 1948 trying to get his ambitious Sans Souci hotel off the ground. It was being built on 1.5 acres at the prime location of 3101 Collins Avenue.
He had hired architect Roy F. France to design his dream palace, but was unimpressed with France’s plans, viewing them as run-of-the-mill and lacking that “wow” factor Novack so desired.
So he hired retail store designer Morris Lapidus, whom he had met years earlier in New York, to jazz things up. Lapidus had been designing retail stores for the A.S. Beck chain of shoe stores, but had absolutely no experience with hotels.
When Novack first asked him if he knew anything about hotels, Lapidus replied that he had “stayed at plenty,” conceding that he had never actually designed one. Then, after seeing some preliminary sketches Lapidus did for him on the spot, Novack hired him to design the Sans Souci for a paltry $18,000.
“Local architects were not terribly imaginative,” explained the designer’s son, Alan Lapidus, “so they said, ‘Let’s bring down that guy that did our stores because he has a lot of flare.’ So he would take their plans, which were pretty boxy and straightforward, and jazz them up.”
Morris Lapidus, an early champion of Art Deco, brought stunning New York department store lobbies to
hotels. Novack loved Lapidus’s charming designs, which he called “intentional nonsense.”
Novack and his partner, Harry Mufson, agreed that Lapidus should take over as San Souci’s architect, and they had a celebratory dinner, which was attended by Ben’s new girlfriend, Bernice Drazen.
Years later, Morris Lapidus would recall that terrible evening in his autobiography. Over dinner, Novack and Mufson got into a heated argument, hurling personal insults across the table.
“The air became blue with more four-letter words than I knew existed,” Lapidus later wrote.
Eventually, Novack ushered Bernice out of the party, to save her embarrassment.
When the Sans Souci opened in 1949, it was an instant sensation. With its gleaming fin of blue glass tiles rising up the front of the building and its coral stone walls, it looked more like a pleasure palace than a humble hotel, even boasting a swanky nightclub.
Ben Novack’s promotional brochure for his new hotel immodestly stated, “In Paris it’s the Eiffel Tower … London, Buckingham Palace … and in Miami Beach, the Sans Souci.”
* * *
Just weeks after the opening of the Sans Souci, Ben and Bella Novack adopted a two-year-old boy named Ronald. But it was Bella who bonded with the boy, as Ben was too busy with his latest hotel projects and his passionate affair with Bernice to care about much else.
Back in New York, Bernice’s modeling career was on fire. She could now pick and choose her assignments, and had become the face of Coca-Cola, with a string of calendars, advertisements, and other promotions to her credit. She was the supermodel of her day, decades before the term would be invented.
In the summer of 1951 she took an extended European vacation with friends, traveling first class all the way. She sailed back to New York from Le Havre on the luxury French liner Liberté, arriving home on September 6.
* * *
Several months later, Ben Novack divorced Bella and had a nervous breakdown, going to Arizona to recover. As part of her divorce settlement, Bella received the valuable land tract on which the Sans Souci hotel stood. Some speculated that having to give Bella the land had driven Novack over the edge.
