The Prince of Paradise

by John Glatt

  * * *

  In January 1967 The Miami Herald ran two investigative articles claiming that organized crime controlled the Fontainebleau. Two reporters had spent months examining thirteen years of the hotel’s financial papers and had concluded that Ben Novack was a front for the Mob, which used his hotel to launder vast sums of money.

  The first damning front-page exposé alleged that “gamblers and hoodlums” actually owned the hotel, which was run by Meyer Lansky, on behalf of a Mob syndicate called the Minneapolis Combination. The reporters branded the Fontainebleau as “a jungle of corporate and financial manipulation.”

  In the wake of the articles, eagerly picked up by other newspapers across America, Ben Novack’s good name was put on the line. Powerful bankers and other financial institutions that provided him credit began turning their backs, and his complex web of financing soon dried up.

  Novack sued The Miami Herald and the two reporters for libel, asking for $10 million in damages. The Knight-Ridder–owned newspaper refused to reveal its sources for the stories, claiming it was not in the public interest.

  Miami Herald executive editor John McMullen explained this decision: “We don’t believe that the authors of our laws,” he said, “intended to permit assorted hoodlums, protecting organized crime interests, to refuse to testify and yet require a reporter, working in the public’s interest, to divulge his confidential sources.”

  In April, the Herald’s lawyers made national headlines by subpoenaing Frank Sinatra to testify about the Mob’s involvement in the Fontainebleau. Reluctantly, the singer gave his testimony in his suite at the Fontainebleau, with his attorney Milton Rudin present.

  Under oath, Sinatra claimed he had no idea how much money he had made performing at the Fontainebleau over the years. He also denied there was any connection between Ben Novack and Meyer Lansky or Sam Giancana, although he admitted meeting the Chicago Mob boss. He testified that he might have played pinochle in the Fontainebleau card room “for a dollar or two,” but was unaware of any other gambling there.

  The following February, Sinatra canceled several performances at La Ronde after coming down with a mysterious case of viral pneumonia.

  “I don’t know when he’ll open,” a concerned Ben Novack told the Miami News on February 29.

  A week later, Sinatra’s distraught young wife, Mia Farrow, arrived at the Fontainebleau, her marriage on the rocks. Sinatra was furious that Mia was filming Roman Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby instead of being with him while he filmed Lady in Cement at the hotel. Farrow had flown in from London in a final attempt to save her marriage.

  “It was a hot and humid night as the taxi drew up to the Fontainebleau Hotel,” she wrote in her 1997 autobiography, What Falls Away. “A giant sign said FRANK SINATRA in lights, and all the way out on the driveway, I could hear the band playing, ‘It’s my kind of town, Chicago is…’ He was standing in that familiar smoky light with his tuxedo and microphone and hair and black tie.”

  Although Farrow’s autobiography maintained she spent “a restless night” with Sinatra, Bernice Novack and Hal Gardner both claim that the singer refused even to see her.

  “I found a young girl dressed in a T-shirt and jeans,” the hotel publicity director later told Ocean Drive magazine. “It was Mia Farrow who had travelled from the filming of Rosemary’s Baby to be with Frank. But he refused to let her come upstairs. Finally he sent down an envelope of money and told her to take the next plane home.”

  Bernice also recalled the incident, saying she felt terrible for the fragile young star. “She sat there like a little waif, a tiny little thing bent over with her arms over her knees. That was a horrible thing to do any way you look at it.”

  A few weeks later, with Ben Novack’s imminent Miami Herald libel trial, the newspaper’s lawyers again subpoenaed Sinatra. To avoid the process servers, he barricaded himself in his Fontainebleau suite. That night, when he went onstage at La Ronde, he recognized the process servers sitting in the audience.

  “We’re having a wonderful time in Miami Beach,” he told the audience between songs. “Get a subpoena every day.”

  On April 10, circuit court judge Grady Crawford ordered the superstar to appear in Miami for a deposition, or be jailed for contempt of court. A few hours later, Sinatra abruptly left town to avoid testifying about Ben Novack, the Mob, and his real relationship with the Fontainebleau. Although he could not be extradited back to Florida, he faced arrest the next time he set foot in the state.

  Then, on April 20, 1968, two days before the trial was scheduled to begin, Ben Novack suddenly dropped the libel action. In return, The Miami Herald agreed to publish a statement on its front page stating that he was the sole owner of the Fontainebleau’s operating company. But the newspaper never had to apologize officially for the stories or retract any of its claims of Mafia involvement in the Fontainebleau.

  There was much speculation that Frank Sinatra had pressured Novack into dropping the suit, refusing ever to perform at the Fontainebleau again as long as there was the threat of a jail sentence over his head.

  TEN

  “YOU’RE FIRED!”

  In late May 1968, just days before the Novack divorce trial, Circuit Court of Dade County judge J. Gwynn Parker ordered Bernice to return everything she had removed from the Fontainebleau. The judge’s order contained a five-page list of items.

  Then on Monday, June 3, Ben and Bernice’s attorneys reached an agreement for a “friendly” divorce, avoiding a scandalous trial. That morning, circuit court judge Hal P. Dekle was told that Bernice, who had been asking for custody of Ben Jr., now sought an uncontested divorce.

  Although the terms of the property settlement were sealed, the Miami News reported that Bernice would receive more than $25,000 a year in alimony ($162,000 in today’s money).

  She was now a wealthy woman in her own right, although she would always complain about how little she had received from the settlement. “I didn’t come out of it with too much,” she explained. “Little more than my jewelry.”

  Bernice then moved out of the Fontainebleau, her home for nearly fourteen years. Defying a court order not to take anything from the hotel, she loaded up a truck with art, furniture, expensive china, and other items.

  When Ben Novack discovered what she had done, he complained to Judge Dekle, who held Bernice in contempt until she returned the goods. Even after handing back some of the items, Bernice still kept assorted pieces of furniture and furnishings, including the piano Frank Sinatra had given her and her beloved oil portrait of Ben Jr. on the beach.

  * * *

  In September 1968, twelve-year-old Ben Novack Jr. moved to Fort Lauderdale to live with his mother, who enrolled him at the Pine Crest preparatory school. The exclusive private school had been founded in 1934 by a teacher named Mae McMillan, who tutored wealthy children whose parents spent the winter in South Florida.

  Every morning, Ben Jr. would be chauffeured to the school in N.E. Sixty-Second Street, Fort Lauderdale, and then collected in the afternoon for the drive home. His chronic stuttering problem once again set him apart from the other pupils.

  “He was different,” remembered his schoolmate Cliff Dunaway. “A very nervous person. I don’t know whether that was the problem with the stuttering, or whether it made him appear to be nervous. He seemed more standoffish [and] wasn’t one of the crowd.”

  Still, Ben Jr. was immediately placed in the seventh-grade Honor’s Class, and was an excellent student.

  “He was very intelligent,” said Dunaway. “Almost too smart for his own good.”

  Tall for his age, Ben Jr. nonetheless had little interest in sports. He joined the audiovisual department, helping out with the school’s theater group.

  It was while doing the sound and lighting for a production of Julius Caesar that he became friends with the young actor playing Brutus. Kelsey Grammer was a year older than Ben Jr. and also came from a broken home. Kelsey’s parents had divorced when he was two, and a few
months before they met, his father, Allen Grammer, had been brutally murdered in the U.S. Virgin Islands, where he had a controversial radio show. The killer, who had first set fire to his house before shooting him dead, was later found not guilty by reason of insanity.

  The two troubled boys found much in common, remaining close for the next forty years.

  “Benji’s one friend was Kelsey Grammer,” said his aunt Maxine. “They were just two lost souls when they met.”

  * * *

  In January 1969, sixty-two-year-old Ben Novack Sr. married a beautiful young model named Janie Strong, almost forty years his junior. He had been seeing her all through the divorce, and after they married, he moved out of the Fontainebleau, setting up home in South Miami.

  “She was a beautiful girl,” said Lenore Toby. “She was elegant and very classy.”

  Novack had now visibly aged, and was no longer the dynamic entrepreneur he had once been. Although he still dressed in colorfully outrageous clothes—red pants with polka dots were a current favorite—his hearing had deteriorated further and his perfect white teeth looked artificial. But he still oozed charm and was as sharp as a tack.

  “Ben Novack was a wonderful old codger,” recalled Miami attorney Al Malnik. “If he liked you, he invited you to sit at his personal table at the Poodle Lounge for happy hour [where] there was always a surplus of girls.”

  As a young attorney, Malnik frequented the Poodle Lounge, but it was months before he would be invited to sit down at Ben Novack’s table. When it finally happened, “I thought I had arrived,” he said. “That was how the social hierarchy of the day worked: Who you were was where you sat at the Fontainebleau.”

  Although now almost deaf, “Mr. Fontainebleau” had by now stopped wearing a hearing aid out of vanity. “So you had to yell in his ear,” said Malnik. “He wore outlandish clothes, bright green jackets and moccasins with no socks.”

  The Fontainebleau proprietor had recently had a major facelift, trying to recapture his youth. He was so delighted with the results that he threw a special party for his plastic surgeon, Dr. Larry Robbins, at his La Ronde Room.

  “He had me invite twenty people,” remembered Dr. Robbins, who is now retired, “and picked up the check for everybody. He would introduce me saying, ‘This is Larry Robbins, who did my face but not my eyes.’”

  Through his third wife, Janie, Novack became friends with a young Miami attorney named Richard Marx. “Janie had been a model with my wife, and they were good friends,” Marx explained. “And based upon their relationship, we got together socially [and] all hit it off very well.”

  Soon after they met, Novack asked the young lawyer to do some legal work for him. “I was fascinated,” said Marx. “I said sure.”

  Marx became the hotelier’s go-to man, and as Novack was very litigious, there was plenty to do. “I basically gave a lot of advice to Ben,” Marx explained. “I was his sounding board for a long time. He didn’t always listen—or, let’s put it this way—he always listened but didn’t always follow through. He was a very independent thinker and never unsure of himself.”

  Novack also started taking Marx to football games, as well as going out socially with their two wives.

  “Ben didn’t suffer fools,” said Marx. “He wanted perfection, and I always like a good challenge. I was [his] unofficial confidant.”

  Over their long friendship, Marx often visited the Fontainebleau, observing Ben Novack’s unique business methods. “He was a hell of a hotel man,” said Marx, “and he ran a tight ship. He lived and breathed it, and he was there twenty-four hours a day … that’s all he cared about.”

  The attorney also got to know Ben Jr., who, when he wasn’t in school, spent most of his time hanging around with the security officers. “Junior was just a little kid and he was always looking for a friend,” said Marx. “He was kind of a loner, and I tried to befriend him because his father, unfortunately, did not spend enough time with him.”

  As he got to know Ben Jr., Marx realized how destructive his pampered upbringing had been. “Quite frankly … anybody growing up under those circumstances has a strange view of the world,” he explained, “His privilege was infinite there for him, and yet when he walked out of that place … then what? So it was a two-edged sword.”

  Marx, too, noticed that the Fontainebleau staff catered to the young teenager’s every whim, never daring to say no to him. “People would do whatever he said,” said Marx. “If they crossed him, he would run to his father and there would be problems. So everybody acknowledged his importance there.”

  Miami Beach police officer Joe Matthews recalls one occasion when Benji felt that one of the head chefs had not shown him enough respect. “He wasn’t a nice kid,” said Matthews, “And he went into the kitchen and asked the executive chef, who was in charge of all the restaurants, for some kind of dessert.” The chef replied that he was too busy, telling Benji to ask one of his staff to take care of it. Ben Jr. then ordered him to bring the dessert to him personally, and when the middle-aged chef refused, the teenager exploded.

  “So Benji fired him on the spot,” said Matthews. “Then the guy goes up to Ben Novack Sr. and says, ‘What the hell’s going on? Your son comes in and he wants the ice cream and he fires me?’ And the old man said, ‘Well, if he fired you, he fired you. Now get the hell out.’ So the old man let everybody know that he was preparing his son to be the ruthless businessman that he was.”

  A few months later, Benji asked his father to book the eccentric falsetto ukulele singer Tiny Tim for ten shows at La Ronde, at a reported $60,000. “He told his father, ‘Oh, you’ve got to book him,’” said Dixie Evans. “So his father bowed to the kid and said okay.”

  Tiny Tim, who had just married Miss Vicky in front of forty million viewers on Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show, bombed at the Fontainebleau, playing to empty houses. And Big George, La Ronde’s maître d’, was furious there were no tips.

  “He came down here with his hair all in his face and pulling out his pockets,” Evans remembered of the maître d’, “and he says, ‘I didn’t make any tips tonight. That kid got his way and nobody showed up.’”

  * * *

  In 1970, Ben Novack Sr. bought the Sorrento hotel, just south of the Fontainebleau, to expand his empire. He planned to build a spa and beef up the Fontainebleau’s lucrative convention business.

  Then disaster struck. His builders were in the midst of attaching a new wing onto the old Sorrento building when the entire building collapsed. Unfortunately, Novack’s contractor did not have a proper insurance bond, leaving Novack financially liable for the repairs.

  “So he was stuck for all that money,” said Lenore Toby, “and he was unable to get financing, after The Miami Herald had said he was Mafia connected.”

  Novack was forced to take $3 million out of the Fontainebleau’s cash flow to rebuild the wall and complete his ambitious new project.

  A year later, he bought a large tract of land by Miami International Airport to build Fontainebleau Park, which he envisioned as becoming “the world’s most majestic country club.” He even had a special Fontainebleau Country Club crest designed, which he had sewn onto all his jackets.

  “He was copying the Doral,” explained Lenore Toby, “because they had a country club, and he didn’t want to be left out.”

  Confident of success, Novack used millions of dollars of his own money for the project, which comprised a new hotel, two golf courses, and hundreds of condominiums and apartments.

  “The land was laid out to create a beautiful little city,” said Morris Lapidus, “with roads, parks, schools and everything.”

  Once again, the rumors of Novack’s Mafia connections scared off the banks and other would-be investors, who refused to put up the rest of the $25 million required.

  In 1972, he refinanced the Fontainebleau, taking out a $6 million mortgage, as well as buying a further 180 acres for his proposed Fontainebleau Park.

  “He never got to build that, t
hough,” said Toby, “because he could not get the financing.”

  * * *

  In June 1970, Ben Novack Jr. was officially put on the Fontainebleau payroll, working security for twenty-five dollars a day. He reported directly to the hotel’s chief of security, Ronnie Mitervini. He would later describe his job as “Security—Property Protection and General Assignment.”

  Six months later, Ben Jr. turned fifteen, and as a birthday present, his father persuaded Miami Beach Police Department chief Rocky Pomerance to allow him to go out on regular patrols with detectives.

  “That privilege wasn’t granted to the average kid,” said now-retired Miami Beach detective Joe Matthews, “but because of his father’s influence, everybody allowed it to happen.”

  In return, Ben Novack Sr. showed his appreciation to the Miami Beach Police Department by lavishing hospitality on favored officers who moonlighted as security at the Fontainebleau.

  “Well, there were two kinds of cops back then,” explained Matthews. “Those that befriended Benji so they could get a free weekend at the ’Blue. And then there were those that felt sorry for him, because he never had any friends and stuttered to a point where you couldn’t hardly communicate with him. You’d feel sorry for him because he would struggle so hard just to say a few words.”

  Joe Mathews’s brother, Pete, now serving with the Miami Beach Police Department, became close with the teenager, taking him out on night patrols in his cruiser. “Benji was our biggest fan,” said Pete Matthews. “Always taking an active part. I kind of befriended him, and we just hung out and walked around the hotel.”

  As he got to know Ben Jr. better, though, Pete Matthews observed how “arrogant and self-centered” he could be. He was also struck by how distant he was from his parents, especially his mother, whom the boy called “Bernice.”

  “When they were together,” Matthews said, “there was no hugging, touching, kissing or anything. I didn’t see any affection at all, but that was Benji’s nature.”