Key to membership at Bradley's Beach Club's? Money, and lots of it - Palm Beach Daily News
Though she publicly seemed impervious to gloom, there were nights in 1920s Palm Beach when actress Billie Burke — later known for playing Glinda the Good Witch in "The Wizard of Oz" — cried herself to sleep over "losing my husband to a roulette wheel."
A gambling habit that had trailed her husband, flamboyant Broadway impresario and womanizer Florenz Ziegfeld, became a compulsion in Palm Beach, as Burke details in an obscure out-of-print 1949 memoir.
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At a posh and illegal gambling establishment on the island, Ziegfeld, then-famed for his all-female "Follies" shows, would gamble all night, winning or losing "fifty thousand dollars in an evening."
He'd sit "silent at the roulette wheel hours after everyone else had gone home, determined to break the bank," Burke wrote in "With a Feather on My Nose."
For that, she lamented, "I came close to leaving Flo."
The Beach Club was a black-tie gambling casino that operated from 1898 to 1945 where Bradley Park is today at the northwest corner of Royal Poinciana Way and Bradley Place.
The club was indeed a place where spectacularly rich and elegant-looking people had a ball whether they won or lost because it was just money and there was plenty of that to go around in Palm Beach.
And being flush enough to afford to lose a considerable bet was a key membership qualification of the club in the eyes of owner Edward R. Bradley, a Kentucky racehorse breeder, entrepreneur and philanthropist. But as Burke's anguish suggests, despair found entry into the Beach Club's 47-year history as a high-stakes playground.
Still, it's all fogged by the fact that social and other activities inside the club went unrecorded; no known photographs of the interior exist.
The Beach Club, which included a restaurant, was founded in 1898 as a private dinner club "organized for social purposes" including "games or amusements the management and its members may from time to time agree upon."
Most years, it was open January through April.
The club's rambling clapboard exterior was painted white with green trim, and featured green-and-white awnings, the colors of Bradley's racing silks at his Kentucky stable, which would saddle four Kentucky Derby winners.
While the club's dining room offered among the best food in the country — the handsomely paid chef served turtle soup and sauced Florida lobster — the games of chance thrilled: roulette and hazard, and by 1923, chemin de fer.
High rollers came from down the street at Standard Oil baron, railroad magnate and Palm Beach developer Henry Flagler's two 1890s-built resort hotels, which in their early years stood like grand fortresses on a mostly undeveloped island.
Bradley, who eventually bought his brother John's interests in the Beach Club, ran his place as conservatively as his dark suits and stiff-and-high white collars.
Alcohol consumption was monitored (not always successfully), formal attire was required after 7 p.m., and smoking was forbidden in the "ballroom" (the gambling floor).
Although gambling was illegal in Florida the entire time the Beach Club was open, law enforcement officials never closed the business. There were a few raids, but Bradley, who employed a security force, was always tipped off in advance.
In 1913, a Palm Beach area citizens' group calling itself the Law & Order League tried unsuccessfully to force the Beach Club's closure. Lack of evidence ended a 1915 case charging Bradley with operating a gambling establishment.
Bradley was well-liked and respected, and gave significant sums to charity as well as for much of the construction of Palm Beach's St. Edward Catholic Church. He shared a large stone winter home with his wife, Agnes, just north of the club. Old-time Palm Beachers have recalled "Auntie" Agnes' kindness to them as kids.
"She was a wonderful lady," the late T.T. Reese once said. "She'd invite us up to the house to have … baked Alaska and macaroons."
Nearby at the Beach Club, Bradley always screened potential members to try to ensure their finances could sustain bets that bombed. When people won, he seemed genuinely pleased, according to longtime club secretary Tom Bohne.
"Many a time when the customer would win, he'd be tickled … because so many would lose during the season. … If (a member) could get some pleasure out of it, extending his time at the table and being seen … that was (Bradley's) idea of entertainment."
Bets and losses could be significant, according to various sources.
One evening's gambling at the roulette wheel logged a loss of $200,000 for automotive magnate John Studebaker.
Joshua Cosden, a Baltimore streetcar conductor before making a fortune in Oklahoma oil, used poker pots he'd raked in elsewhere for his Beach Club wagers.
It was repeatedly rumored Mrs. William K. Fair Vanderbilt II, heir to the Fair silver fortune, laughed upon losing $850,000 at chemin de fer.
Not everyone thought losing was fun.
A soused titan playing roulette one night ranted to Bradley that he wanted to win back his $250,000. He also demanded another drink, recalled film, TV and radio producer Herbert B. Swope Jr., a longtime Palm Beacher familiar with the Beach Club in its later years.
"Bradley gave him his money back rather than have him gamble drunk," said Swope, who also remembered composer Irving Berlin being a Beach Club regular.
New York and Palm Beach socialite James P. Donahue also laid down big bets. The stockbroker began wintering in Palm Beach in the 1920s with his wife, multimillionaire 5-and-10-store heiress Jessie Woolworth Donahue.
They entertained at their mansion, Cielito Lindo, just north of Mar-a-Lago, once the manse was completed for the 1927-28 season.
After James P. Donahue died at 44 in 1931 at a New York sanitorium following an ingestion of mercury pills at his family's Upper East Side residence, New York tabloids quickly blamed his alleged sky-high debt at Bradley's Beach Club.
The New York Times reported "no definite motive for suicide."
"Friends who had watched him night after night in the big chemin de fer game (at the Beach Club)…say they never saw Donahue win," the New York Daily News wrote in a series about Donahue.
"During the Palm Beach season," the series continued, "you might see gathered there (at the club) Florenz Ziegfeld. famous Follies producer, risking wealth garnered in show business … Fifi Widener Holden, her arms blazing with diamond bracelets; J. Leonard Repogle, rich clubman, and Jim Donahue … risking and generally losing the millions earned by the sale of pink combs, green candies, nail files, paper napkins and other varied merchandise of a Woolworth 5-and-10."
While Donahue may have favored chemin de fer, Ziegfeld loved roulette.
He and Burke, a blue-eyed and red-headed beauty 17 years his junior, wintered in Palm Beach in the 1920s and were popular; friends including broker E.F. Hutton and cereal heiress Marjorie Merriweather Post, whose Mar-a-Lago opened in 1927.
Ziegfeld's then-hallmark all-female Follies revues ran for two months in Palm Beach in 1926 at a now-gone nightclub.
Flo, as friends called him, would leave dinner parties to bet at the Beach Club.
"This would happen when we had guests, for just like an alcoholic, Flo was just about impossible to reason with when these gambling moods were upon him," Burke wrote. "I would ride over (to the Beach Club) on my bicycle … then plead with him in whispers …`Go away dear,' he would say, `I'm busy.'"
After Ziegfeld returned home one night from a gambling stretch, Burke and the couple's daughter Patricia had packed their bags. "With all the finality I could summon," Burke told him to "stop gambling" or lose "everything."
That put a lid on his gambling, at least in Palm Beach. Bradley closed the Beach Club in 1945, prompting Joseph P. Kennedy to proclaim that Palm Beach had "lost its zipperoo."
Before his 1946 death, Bradley willed the club property to the town with the provision it be torn down and become a park, which was named after Bradley.
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