by John Glatt
SEVEN
“THE SUN AND FUN CAPITAL OF THE WORLD”
Ben Novack Jr.’s pampered Fontainebleau childhood was like a Hollywood movie. When he was four, his nanny took him to see Frank Sinatra film scenes from A Hole in the Head, being shot at the hotel. Then, a few months later, Jerry Lewis took over the entire hotel for several months to direct and star in The Bellboy (which he’d also written). As a tip of the hat to the Fontainebleau’s chairman of the board, the comedian had named the hotel manager character Mr. Novak.
“Benji was running around through it all,” said Jill Campion, who was later to become Ben Jr.’s first wife. “All the stars came through there, and Benji knew them all.”
Ben Novack Sr. was now the real-life star of the Fontainebleau. Always impeccably dressed in his own unique style, he ruled his kingdom from his executive office.
In March 1960, Elvis Presley checked into a penthouse suite at the Fontainebleau to shoot a Frank Sinatra television special. It was Presley’s first public performance after being discharged from the U.S. Army, and would be filmed on the stage of the hotel’s Grand Ballroom.
Ben and Bernice Novack were in the front row to see the two superstars perform duets of each other’s songs: Sinatra’s “Witchcraft” and Presley’s “Love Me Tender.”
After filming his special, Frank Sinatra and Elvis Presley led the Rat Pack across the lobby in search of a drink. The first open bar they came across was a bar mitzvah party. The stars walked in and were mobbed, and had to leave after just ten minutes to get away from the fans.
The Sinatra TV special was broadcast on May 12, breaking viewing records and exposing the glamorous Fontainebleau to millions all over the world.
A few months later, Sinatra and the Rat Pack’s Sammy Davis Jr., Dean Martin, Joey Bishop, and Peter Lawford played the Fontainebleau. Davis had just married the Swedish-born actress May Britt, and Ben Novack didn’t want the black entertainer staying at his hotel. Miami was still segregated, and Novack was afraid of upsetting the other guests. Frank Sinatra thought otherwise.
“To Frank’s credit,” said future Miami Beach mayor Alex Daoud, “he told Ben that if he had a problem with Sammy, he was going to have a problem with him. And if Sammy couldn’t stay there, he was leaving. Ben Sr. said, ‘Oh shit!’ but there was nothing he could do.”
That same day, Davis pulled up to the Fontainebleau front entrance in his red Cadillac, with his blond wife and several black friends in tow.
“He waited until Ben Novack came out,” said Daoud, “and honked. I thought that was very funny.”
From then on, Davis always sunbathed by the Fontainebleau pool with all his friends, and Novack was powerless to stop him.
* * *
On July, 10, 1960, The New York Times ran an article on Miami Beach, examining why some hotels flourished while others went bankrupt. As the owner of the most successful hotel, Ben Novack was naturally interviewed.
“You can’t buy your son-in-law a hotel and tell him to run it,” Novack observed. “You’ve got to have know-how. And you can’t switch management every few months in a resort operation. A tourist likes to see the same faces. When he doesn’t, he thinks you’re in trouble.”
The New York Times article noted that Miami Beach now welcomed more than two million visitors a year, coming for “the sun, sand and surf.” With 378 hotels now vying for tourist business, many were going out of business. “The Fontainebleau is having its best year in its history,” the article stated.
Novack credited his success to maintaining exclusivity, and keeping prices high. He criticized hotel owners who cut rates, and others who gave travel agents generous discounts to steer clients their way.
“That’s inviting disaster,” Novack explained. “A hotel has the same fixed charges. Fill it at reduced rates and you’re still going to lose money.”
Every day, Ben Novack worked long hours in his office, ensuring his hotel ran smoothly. He micromanaged everything, but still made a point to listen to everyone’s advice, from his maître d’ to a lowly bellboy.
“He was some hotel man,” said his sister-in-law Maxine Fiel. “They had this big chandelier with about a thousand bulbs. One night he summoned his manager, Harold, and pointed up to it. ‘Harold,’ he said, ‘there’s a bulb up there that’s blown out. I want it changed.’”
Novack was particularly obsessed with having clean ashtrays, constantly looking for used ones. “If he saw a dirty ashtray he would raise hell,” said Richard Marx, who later did legal work for the hotel. “He was very fastidious and he wanted that hotel to be gleaming and clean and just perfect.”
Even Morris Lapidus recognized his nemesis’s genius for running the Fontainebleau. “Ben was a hotelier to his very fingertips,” he wrote. “He knew hotel operations as few men do. But it went deeper than that. He knew what he liked [and] what his guests liked.”
* * *
One afternoon, Bernice Novack and a couple of friends were walking through the hotel basement when Frank Sinatra’s bodyguards ordered them to leave, as the great man was approaching.
“And naturally she didn’t,” said Guy Costaldo, who later became Bernice’s close friend. “She said, ‘Well, you tell Mr. Sinatra that Bernice Novack is walking through.’ And then they both passed by each other.”
When Sinatra heard what had happened, he sent her a pair of expensive diamond earrings as an apology. Attached was a note reading, “If you don’t cotton to these mothers, you can always sell them to Swifty.”
The singer was referring to the legendary Swifty Morgan, whom Damon Runyon immortalized as “the Lemon Drop Kid.” Morgan hung around the pool at the Fontainebleau, acting as a pawnbroker for down-on-their-luck guests, who would sell him their wives’ jewelry.
Over the years, Frank Sinatra gave Bernice many other presents, including a grand piano and his special recipe for spaghetti sauce.
“He liked her a lot,” said Maxine Fiel, “because she stood up to him.”
* * *
On January 9, 1961, Frank Sinatra checked into the Fontainebleau hotel to perform four nights at La Ronde. He was being tailed by an FBI agent, who later reported to J. Edgar Hoover that the singer had been seen at the hotel talking to Mafia boss Joseph Fischetti. The FBI would later claim Sinatra had “insisted” Ben Novack place Fischetti on the Fontainebleau payroll as “a talent agent,” paying him thousands of dollars a year.
One night, Sinatra summoned Bernice Novack up to his penthouse to keep him company, as he couldn’t sleep.
“He didn’t like to sleep,” said Maxine Fiel, “and just couldn’t be alone. Bernice told me that they were all sitting there at five in the morning, and he says, ‘Nobody leaves until I say so.’ Bernice says, ‘Oh, to hell with this, Frank, I’m leaving. I’m falling asleep.’”
On January 19, five-year-old Benji Novack flew to Washington, D.C., with his parents and Frank Sinatra to attend President John F. Kennedy’s inauguration.
The next day, a heavy snowstorm blanketed the capital, almost necessitating cancelation of the inauguration parade. Nevertheless it went ahead, and the Novack family were in the Capitol Building to hear President Kennedy’s historic inauguration speech. Later that night, they attended President Kennedy’s Inaugural Ball, at which Frank Sinatra performed.
A year later, Benji and his parents were all photographed with the new president when he visited the Fontainebleau. A tuxedoed Ben Novack Sr. posed alongside President Kennedy with a wide smile and his hand on his young son’s shoulder. Bernice looked radiant in a couture dress with matching top, wearing the diamond earrings Sinatra had given her. Little Benji wore a white tuxedo jacket and black bow tie. His wavy dark hair was combed forward and his eyes were full of pride.
Bernice Novack would treasure this stunning black-and-white photograph for the rest of her life. She carefully placed it in one of the many photo albums she compiled over the years showing her and her family with some of the most famous people of the twentieth century
.
* * *
On February 12, 1961, the Fontainebleau made national headlines after a teenage guest went berserk in the hotel and gunned down a Miami Beach police detective and wounded another. Nineteen-year-old John Charles Cross from New Jersey reportedly started shooting when Miami Beach detective William Allsopp, sixty-two, summoned him to the executive offices and questioned him about his massive hotel bill and suspicious credentials.
Ben Novack and his head of publicity, Hal Gardner, were talking next door when shots ran out. They dove for cover.
After shooting the detective dead, Cross ran through the corridors of the Fontainebleau waving a .22-caliber pistol at scores of horrified hotel guests. He then dashed downstairs to the lower level of stores, as a bellboy lunged at him but missed.
The Miami News reported that the crazed gunman then grabbed Fontainebleau house detective Louis Behrens and forced him at gunpoint out of the back entrance.
“You’re my way out of here!” he screamed, pushing the detective into his car before taking off toward Collins Avenue, a gun to Behrens’s head.
A Miami Beach police squad car finally cut him off in front of the Montmartre hotel, and officers began shooting. When Behrens tried to grab Cross’s gun it went off, shooting the detective in the knee. Then police rushed in and arrested Cross.
The next morning the Miami News devoted its entire front page to the murder, with the screaming headline “Murder at the Fontainebleau.”
“[It was] the size of a war declaration,” recalled Gardner of the headline. “Novack told me, ‘Murder at the Fontainebleau! What are they trying to do to me?’ I said, ‘Don’t worry. It’ll be good.’ And it was: The Poodle Lounge was jammed that night with people who wanted to see where the murder was.”
* * *
Three days later, FBI agents arrived at the Fontainebleau and questioned Ben Novack about Sam Giancana’s recent weeklong stay there. An FBI report released years later under the Freedom of Information Act stated that Novack was evasive, saying the Chicago Mafia boss had probably “just dropped by.”
“[Ben Novack] volunteered no information,” the report read, “and answered all questions tersely with no elaboration. He advised that it was not hotel policy to make records available to law enforcement agencies in the absence of a subpoena.”
A few months later, the Florida attorney general labeled the Fontainebleau a “hangout for hoodlums.”
Operating alongside Swifty Morgan’s pawnbroker business was an ex-con named Max Raymond, also known as “Little Maxie,” who had served a two-year sentence at Leavenworth for narcotics. Ben Novack gave Raymond the linen and lingerie store concession in the lower lobby. A subsequent investigation into the Mafia’s ties with Ben Novack Sr. and the Fontainebleau would allege that Raymond was in fact the hotel’s “resident muscle,” and his real “concession” was running the Mob’s invitation-only high-stakes card games there.
During Raymond’s years at the Fontainebleau, he was arrested for gambling, burglary, and vehicular homicide, but never convicted.
“Maxie Raymond was always in the card room,” Steve Wynn told Ocean Drive magazine in 2001. “His leverage was that he was buddies with the union guys at the hotel.”
Ben Novack’s personal security force, composed of off-duty Miami Beach Vice Squad officers, turned a blind eye to the high-class prostitution conducted in the Poodle Lounge, where the maître d’ took phone calls for the girls, even arranging assignations in return for a good tip.
“On a good night,” said the Fontainebleau’s former head of security Ronnie Mitervini, “you’d have six to ten different hookers working the Poodle Lounge. They were very classy, dressed conservatively, and came down for the winter not just from New York, but from little towns in the Midwest. They were the girls next door.”
Whenever Frank Sinatra played the Fontainebleau’s La Ronde Room, there was big money to be made. There would be long lines of fans in the lobby, desperate for tickets, and the only way to see the show was to discreetly tip the headwaiter $100.
“He’d make five thousand dollars a night when Sinatra was here,” said hotel bellman Floyd “Mac” Swain, “and he had to split the cash with security and Novack.”
Frank Sinatra was the engine driving the Fontainebleau, and whenever he was in residence, the money flowed. After the show, the action moved upstairs to the Sinatra penthouse suite, where anything could happen. The singer would party with his Mafia cronies Joe Fischetti and Sam Giancana, calling room service to send up the most beautiful girls from the Poodle Lounge, along with buckets of the best champagne.
“God, did they spend money,” Ben Jr. later recalled admiringly.
The wild nights often finished with a drunken Frank Sinatra and his Mob pals in hysterics, throwing cherry bombs off the seventeenth-floor balcony.
* * *
Soon after JFK’s inauguration, two writers who were working with Frank Sinatra on a film script arrived at his penthouse to discover him locked in the bedroom. Just before their arrival, the star had raised the silver salver that Room Service had delivered to his room to find a fully skinned lamb’s head.
A shaken Sinatra viewed it as a warning from the Mob to use his influence to have President Kennedy tell his brother Robert, then attorney general, to stop waging war against organized crime.
The scene would later be immortalized by Francis Ford Coppola in The Godfather.
* * *
In the summer of 1961, Ben and Bernice Novack vacationed in France, dropping Benji off in New York to spend a couple of days with his aunt Maxine and cousins Meredith and Lisa, before going off to summer camp.
“Bernice asked me to take him,” said Maxine. “Buy him some shoes and see him off to camp.”
During the boy’s brief stay, Maxine was shocked to see how socially inept and maladjusted the five-year-old appeared to be. Talking to her nephew, she was alarmed at how little he knew of the real world outside the Fontainebleau, and how lonely he was.
“He really was the little Prince of the Fontainebleau,” said his aunt. “When he wanted his parents, he couldn’t just go down and call for them. They were with presidents, diplomats, Sinatra, and the rest. This kid was stuck in a penthouse. He would make a few friends on the holidays, and then they would leave the hotel and he was alone again.”
Despite his cousins’ attempts to befriend him, Benji preferred to stay in his room and play alone.
On his first night there, the little boy ventured out to the kitchen, helping himself to ice cream and anything else in the freezer that took his fancy. He then left numerous open food containers littering the counter, as if expecting Room Service to clear up after him.
“He had everything open on the counter,” Maxine remembered, “and my husband, David, and I had to tell him that we have to go to the store, pick out the food, buy the food, bring it home, and put it in the refrigerator. We don’t just call down and say, ‘Bring it up.’ We told him that oranges don’t come squeezed. I said, ‘Benji, we’re not a hotel. So if you want the ice cream, let me know, but don’t open them all.’”
The next day, Maxine’s husband David took Benji out on his boat, which was moored in a slip. He first warned him not to play on the slippery hull, in case he fell over the side.
“It was filthy water,” Maxine recalled. “Everybody relieves themselves there before they go out sailing.”
Benji would never take orders from anybody, and before long he was up on the hull. Then he slipped, falling headfirst into the polluted water.
“David had to jump in and pull him out,” Maxine said. “Benji was a mess. He smelled to high heaven. We had to take him home, and David put him in the shower and shampooed his hair. David told him, ‘When you’re told no, it means no.’ And something about that made them close. He bonded with my husband in a way he never did with his father.”
Ben Jr. was shaken up. Later that night his aunt came into his bedroom to read him a story. “I put him on my lap,” she
said, “and he kept snuggling and went to sleep. He’d never had that kind of affection before, and he was a changed kid. We had that kid straightened out.”
The next morning, they dropped him off at the summer camp, where Maxine introduced him to another boy. “I found a little friend for him,” she said. “I said, ‘You can be friends and if you get along, you can add people.’”
One week later, Benji called his parents saying he hated the camp and wanted to come home. “He couldn’t get along with the other kids … he was arrogant,” said his aunt. “So his father came up in a helicopter and picked him up. Oh, that’ll win you friends. One week and you pick the kid up in a helicopter.”
* * *
After the Fontainebleau put Miami Beach on the map, it spawned a string of new upscale, Art Deco–style hotels all over town. There was the Americana, Deauville, Doral, and Carillion, each trying to outdo the others in glamour and luxury.
In August 1961, Ben Novack upped the stakes by announcing that after Thanksgiving he was closing his hotel to the general public, to reopen it as a private club and health spa.
“I’ve always wanted to give a little more to my guests,” he told the Miami News, “to improve facilities. Not only will this help the hotel but it will help the general Miami Beach area.”
Bernice would later complain that the Fontainebleau had become part of the Miami Beach sightseeing tour, attracting busloads of gaping tourists who weren’t even staying there.
“Guests from other hotels would bring their lunch in brown paper bags,” she told Ocean Drive magazine, “and eat it in the lobby. They’d steal ashtrays, stationery, anything that wasn’t nailed down.”
Bernice hoped that making the Fountainbleau private would stem the flood of unpaying guests, but Ben Novack had an ulterior motive: Under new IRS rules, if a businessman was sent to a health spa by a physician for medical reasons, he could write it off as a business expense, and his wife could go along as a medical necessity. By privatizing, Novack hoped to lure business travelers to his resort, in a mutually beneficial arrangement.