I Used to Be Charming

by Eve Babitz

  “Oh,” I said, “thanks.”

  He was pretty cute for a funeral director. And not uninteresting, at least on the subject of L.A. gang funerals—the Crips and the Bloods—and how he had to hire extra security or they’d shoot each other even in graveyards. But still . . .

  I was going to Miami Beach because, contrary to what my seatmate said, it was the place. The new place—the Art Deco District known as South Beach. The place with pastel buildings (I’m a fool for them) and all the New Yorkers (even New Yorker editor Robert Gottlieb shared a house there now) and so many fashion photographers and models that even as they set up their shoots they muttered that it must be passé. It was also the place where Chris Blackwell, the record producer who had always been ahead of his time in so many elegant ways, was opening a hotel, the Marlin, that I just had to see. I had a friend there, Susan Brustman, a publicist doing the film festival, who told me, “You’ll love it here. I can get you into all the parties. It’s like L.A. in the fifties—before it got ruined.”

  She had never been in L.A. in the fifties, but the idea that anyone would try to seduce me with a promise so ephemeral mowed down my reservations. L.A. in the fifties, which I did experience, was even more a mirage than Miami is now, because nobody in L.A. at the time appreciated it except the odd artist, and I do mean odd.

  “If you let me know in time,” she said, “I can get you a room somewhere, even though there’s a boat show and the whole place will be impossible.”

  “In the Art Deco part?” I asked. It seemed a dream.

  “At the Raleigh,” she said. “There’s one room left. I’ll call Zarrilli.”

  “Who?”

  “He’s one of these hotel guys, except I trust him,” she said. “He bought this great hotel. They’re fixing it up still, but you won’t mind. It’s right on the beach, you can sunbathe topless, and they’ve got great coffee.”

  “How far from the airport?”

  “Nothing in Miami Beach is more than fifteen minutes from the airport,” she said.

  That made it sound like a good town to me. And if worst came to worst, I thought as the plane landed, I could always write a piece about Crips funerals instead.

  Stepping outside to find a cab, I smelled this pearly, silky, feminine, luxurious, tango-salsa air and suddenly knew that what my friend Jeanette Aaron had told me the day before I left was true: “If you can’t get in the mood in Miami, Eve, you can’t get in the mood. Period.”

  It was as though I’d left America. And of course, in a sense I had. Miami is the only city in America that’s tropical. It’s the only city that in parts, at least, feels more like Cuba than the United States, with all those expatriates who make things lush and fill the city with their own dreams and keep the place hanging in a kind of limbo, while the Havana that actually exists hangs on the horizon like an unpaid debt. Even McDonald’s in Miami has Cuban-style coffee. The thought occurs to you, as you feel such tropical air, that here is a city in which anything can happen: torrid romances and violent deaths, immigrant dreams realized and dashed; a city as warm as true love if they like who you are, and as cold as heartbreak hotel if who you are is not OK with them.

  I got a Haitian cabbie—one of the lucky ones, the ones who got to stay. He had his radio tuned to French Haitian religious music, trying, no doubt, to douse the pure, unadulterated lust in the air with “Moulin La Toujou” by the Happy Singers. We had flash showers, three in the fifteen minutes it took to reach the Raleigh. As he paid to go over the bridge, I was reminded that we were going to an island, Miami Beach—unlike Miami Itself, which looked like an island too. Water everywhere was the theme; huge cruise ships in the harbor, water planes and boats galore.

  The Raleigh turned out to be a seven-story confection in creamy white, mint green, and plum surrounded by photographers’ vans, Jeeps, TV-commercial crews, and Winnebagos, with a huge stairway leading up to the double front doors. Inside was a large, terrazzo-floored, high-ceilinged lobby with a newly installed café to my right where I could smell coffee and see magazines for sale. It was homey already.

  “Hi,” said a widely smiling girl behind the desk. “Welcome to Miami Beach. I’m Suzy.”

  “Hi,” I said, glad she wasn’t dressed better than I was.

  “And this is Kenny,” she said, pulling away from the shadows—or what he wished were shadows—this dark-haired John Cassavetes–type guy with light eyes and an almost furtive, totally un–hotel-type manner. “Kenny Zarrilli,” she explained. “You need anything, ask for me or him or anyone down here.”

  “Hi,” he managed. He seemed too young to me to have a hotel, midthirties at most. He had on worn black jeans, a T-shirt of faded olive, and tennis shoes. If this was how the Raleigh was run, I knew it was the place for me. Kenny peered at me as he shook my hand, then turned and left, going off to direct some construction crews in the back.

  “He used to be an investment banker in New York,” Suzy told me on our way up in the elevator, “and he was really great, but he got bored. The last thing he did before he went out on his own was the Beverly Center in L.A. He got the financing when everyone said it couldn’t be done.”

  “The Beverly Center,” I said, remembering this funny, huge shopping mall with a caterpillar escalator outside, which at first everyone hated but now can’t live without. “Really?”

  I couldn’t imagine this guy in a suit.

  The elevator opened onto a rather long hallway with orange carpeting, which we walked down until we reached my room. Suzy opened the door, and suddenly there was this view that went all the way to Spain, or some infinite direction over the Atlantic. The furniture was simple—no rattan—and easy. The bed was covered with a brown paisley spread right out of the sixties and had big floral-printed pillows. Recessed in the walls were a CD player, cassette deck, and TV. On a neat little table in the corner was an orchid in a small vase.

  “Wow,” I said, “far-out.” (I always say “far-out” when I’m dumb-founded.)

  “Kenny did everything,” she said. “He designed it or approved it.”

  The only trouble with the room, in my opinion, was that I hated leaving it.

  When I finally did leave, I walked all over Miami Beach, up and down Ocean Drive, looking at all the old hotels that have come alive once more. The Raleigh was on Collins, which I would learn made it quieter at night. Washington, the third street over, was dotted with thrift shops, Latin juice stands, Hispanic and Jewish businesses, and places like Lulu’s, with its Elvis motif, and Don’t Say Sandwich to Me, a place where locals go at 4 a.m. to watch horror movies on a large TV screen and eat before going home.

  Nowhere at all did anyone approach me for money or look dangerous. The streets themselves were so clean that when my shoes started killing me, I walked barefoot a few blocks home.

  •

  My second day in Miami Beach, I made the mistake of calling an old musician boyfriend from my rock and roll days who lived in Coconut Grove and who, hearing my voice, said urgently, “Wait right there, I’m coming to get you. I’ll take you to Miami Itself.”

  For the next eight hours, my old boyfriend passionately made the case for Miami Itself as opposed to Miami Beach. He drenched me in history, the rich, luxurious houses all over the city with yachts and boats and rowboats in their backyards, Brickell Avenue and its current architectural impressiveness, and the white I.M. Pei building, which at night glows red or blue or purple and green from color gels thrown over it for fun. He showed me the huge cruise liners and told me about “tonnage.” He showed me three golf courses, one where Nixon played in Key Biscayne; a park with raccoons; the ancient mansions with banyan trees all around; the private schools and the black ghetto; the Little Havana section and the Mayfair Mall in Coconut Grove, the world’s most beautiful mall but also, somehow, the least successful. By this time, my eyes were crossing from Miami Itself. “I want to go home,” I said.

  By way of apology, he said he’d take me to the Chris Blackwell party. Of c
ourse I’d already heard about the party. It was to celebrate the official opening of the Marlin, even though it had been open for a while. “It’s going to be hard to get in—very VIP,” he said. “But Chris is an old friend of mine. Both my ex-wives want me to take them.”

  As I came up the wide steps of the Raleigh, I saw Kenny Zarrilli behind the front desk. He looked as far from a hotelier as, say, Edward Villella.

  •

  Kenny made more sense the next morning, when I saw him having breakfast with a cluster of businessmen in suits, with briefcases and computer printouts. Kenny was in a suit too, looking bowed but untamed, like “I may be wearing this suit, but not for long.” It was one of those Armani things that was supposed to be casual, though no outfit with a tie in Miami Beach could be anything but painful.

  “What’s the matter?” I asked Suzy behind the desk.

  “It’s these bankers,” she said. “They want Kenny to manage another hotel.”

  “Besides the Raleigh?”

  “And the Hotel 100 he’s doing now,” she said. “Down the street. A really big hotel.”

  If all this sprucing up was news to me, it was simply amazing to anyone who gave up on Miami Beach in the sixties. The whole concept of Miami Beach had been a sad joke, with its Arthur Godfrey Road and its Jackie Gleason Theater. The art deco buildings had had their apartments chopped into tiny rooms for pensioners. The city of Miami Beach kept hoping for some Big Developer to come and change the place into every other Florida beach town, a condo-filled, ahistorical blight on the landscape, where nothing of memory would survive.

  Luckily, the Big Developer fell through. And as in L.A. during the fifties, a “scene” was quietly born, because the strip was so cheap and the buildings so cool, in a throwback kind of way, and the beach right there at your feet. While serious vacationers were all in Europe waiting in line at the Louvre (which had once been cheap and fun), the people who have always created action—gay men—created a new home. Along with local preservationists, they helped push through new limits on development south of Sixteenth Street. Now any building plan has to pass two stringent boards of review, with even more of the neighborhood likely to be restricted soon. After what happened in L.A., SoHo, and Europe, people have learned that when a scene’s chief charm is its architecture, developers will come—and now even London looks wrong.

  The result of this has been a pastel vigilance—art deco buildings in Necco wafer shades of pink and green and yellow. Somehow, the Marlin’s facade of toast and lilac worked best of all. With its outside tables topped by lavender umbrellas and its foyer set off by mauvy sofas, it was a set piece in some new kind of elegance that doesn’t yet have a name. In the bathrooms, the walls were checkered in primary colors that matched those in the little “Jamaican” café called Shabeen, where that morning, for the first time in my life, I tasted fresh pineapple juice squeezed with fresh ginger—sweet and exotic.

  The furniture in the lobby, the magazine racks, the T-shirt stand—all had been touched by the same hand and made new and beautiful. The bar was like some under-the-sea Botticelli set, and it was there, not long afterward, that I got to actually meet the woman who had created all this beauty.

  I’d known about her for years. In London in the sixties, Barbara Hulanicki had designed the ultimately great Biba, a clothing store I had heard about but never seen. When the place closed in the mid-seventies, she’d moved to Brazil to design clothes for Cacharel and Fiorucci, then eventually came to the States to do hotels and restaurants and nightclubs such as Woody’s on the Beach, Semper’s, Bolero, and Match. The day I met her, she looked ready to go on a Kenyan safari, dressed in khaki shorts and a khaki vest—although the vest was loaded with tools, not guns or cameras. Or maybe she’d been on safari and just come back: she looked that tan. But her blond hair was straight and soft, a reminder that she was still fashion, no matter how rock and roll the money behind all this might be. She was now redoing the Netherland, condos on Ocean Drive that Chris Blackwell had bought.

  We sat in Shabeen and had lunch, but she was too preoccupied and exhausted to be as brilliant as what she did. “It’s so hard to get anything here,” she said. “It always takes a week, where anywhere else you’d have it right away.”

  We both looked around and she dived into her pineapple-ginger drink, too beat to do more than drink in silence, which I was happy to let her do since her work was enough. The only other thing she could manage to say was, “I’m glad you like it. It did turn out, didn’t it?”

  •

  On any given day in Miami Beach, you’re bound to see at least one fashion shoot in progress. The whole place is a set. Models who aren’t working walk the streets in the simplest clothes, like girls at summer camp, with no makeup, as if just getting dressed up reminds them of work. Still, you can spot them amid the great hordes of grazers making their way up Ocean Drive.

  No one walks very fast. Nowhere’s very far away, and what, after all, is the hurry? Even when people make “plans” in Miami Beach, I noticed after a while, they show up a little later than they’re supposed to. By the time they do, you’ve run into other people who are urging you to go with them, and the evenings, especially on weekends, are mad with parallel possibilities.

  “It’s always very lazy here,” said Tatiana, who owns this great shop called Satyricon, on Española Way. “It’s always four o’clock, cocktail hour. It’s the tropics, too, and that sort of slows things down. I just love it here. I was on my way back to New York, coming through Miami Beach after a vacation six years ago, and I just never went back. I left my apartment, all my stuff. I just let my friends there have it. I love it here—I could never leave.”

  It makes sense, I suppose, that the hippest street is the sleepiest-looking. Lincoln Road, unlike the other streets I’d seen, still shows vestiges of its retirement community, and there are still little bead shops where old Jewish ladies buy sequins to sew on sweaters. But ever since a very hip gym opened, and a place where they teach flamenco dancing and another where they do belly dancing, Lincoln has been filled with casual strollers. They don’t seem to mind that this old-fashioned pedestrian-only street still looks abandoned, that its Saks and Bonwit Teller and Cartier pulled out twenty-five years ago, that there’s not so much as a Gap or a Banana Republic anywhere. They like that.

  In fact, there’s not a single Gap or Banana Republic in all of South Beach, which is one of the great things about the place. You have to go up to Bal Harbour or over to Miami Itself for those stores, which is sort of ironic, considering that all these fashion photographers and models are on shoots here for every chain and fashion magazine in the world.

  One day, in a used jeans store on Washington, I heard this guy ask, “How do I know what size these are?”

  “Guess,” the girl running the place replied.

  Oh, there’s a Woolworth, if you get desperate for shampoo or razor blades, and there is a department store called Burdine’s hidden behind Lincoln Road. I only discovered it in the middle of my second week when I was desperate for Vitabath, but really Miami Beach discourages not only buying things but wearing them. Everyone is so casual.

  Or they were, that is, until the Marlin party.

  •

  Chris Blackwell, I had heard, fell in love with Miami Beach because no one wore “clothes,” and it reminded him of Jamaica, where he had grown up and where everyone just waddled around in any old thing, not caring. But as rumors of that party percolated around town, people began wondering what they were going to wear. Grace Jones was flying in; even Madonna might show, or so I’d heard. Bermuda shorts would simply not do.

  I myself, luckily, had brought with me this extremely risqué navy blue dress that was so tight, short, and low cut that even in L.A. I wore it into bars at my peril. Also, my hair was short and unnaturally white-blond enough to fit right in with Madonna’s Marilyn look and to show that my roots and heart were with her. “Do you have an invitation to the Marlin party?” Suzy wondered wh
en I came into the Raleigh one evening. “Because you can have mine. I’m going to New York for a few days.”

  “You’re not going?” I couldn’t believe it.

  “Kenny will take you,” she said. “He wants to go.”

  By then I had become somewhat used to Kenny Zarrilli’s style of hotel management—i.e., he was running everything, but you couldn’t prove it if your life depended on it—and like a lot of people who knew him, I had begun to think of him as extremely funny. Like, to his construction crew he’d say, “Use your brain. It’s free.”

  Zarrilli and I had the same oddball taste, so we wound up one night sitting at the bar in this club called Mac’s Club Deuce, which he thought I’d like: “It’s half gay, half straight, half rich, half poor, half drag queens, half real models. You’ll love it.”

  First we’d tried to go to the DiLido Beach Hotel to see a drag show called La Cage, because, as Kenny said, “It’s so funny, you’ll laugh. Nothing else in Miami Beach is funny.” Unfortunately, we arrived just as “Bette Midler” and “Madonna” were leaving (in full drag). “It’s Sunday night—we only do one show,” they said. “Come back next Friday.”

  Just out of curiosity I went inside. It was a perfectly preserved fifties nightclub, with padded booths, darkness, a bar, and a stage where the show would have been if we hadn’t come too late. It had marble floors and that kind of fifties Miami Beach flavor that you see at the Fontainebleau, and it was a couple of blocks from the Raleigh, right at the foot of Lincoln Road.

  “We could go to the Warsaw,” Kenny said. “You’ve never seen that either, right?”

  I was ashamed to admit that I’d never been, because in Miami Beach right now, the Warsaw Ballroom is the eventual destination of everyone out on the town all night, a major gay nightclub that people told me was “just like Studio 54.”