Madness Under The Royal Palms - Palm Beach Under A Microscope

Palm Beach Under A Microscope

In Madness Under the Royal Palms, Leamer, best known for his bestsellers including The Kennedy Women, looks at the way wealth makes its own rules and how it creates a culture of privilege untouched by the rules governing most Americans. He was given unprecedented access to the tightly controlled hierarchy in Palm Beach’s coveted inner sanctums. He reveals the lives of the men and women who have come to this exclusive island off the coast of Florida with big ambitions and even larger checkbooks. He covers the hotly contested memberships in the “right” clubs to the rise of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago which leveled long-standing barriers with its glitz and celebration of new glamour. He hilariously writes about the architecture wars -— when the high social value of buying one of the “grand old” homes shifted to knocking those old houses down and the race to build mega-mansions in their place. And he captures the uneasy alliances that fuel marriages -– including the successive trophy wives – to the rancorous and even fatal divorces.

Leamer’s Madness Under the Royal Palms shows that money cannot buy happiness. As Leamer writes, “in Palm Beach, people chased after happiness, but like dogs chasing a mechanical rabbit in a greyhound race, no matter how fast they ran, happiness was just a few inches in front of their noses.”