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Along with the socialites (the William Kissam Vanderbilts arrived last week), there are many, many more of unspectacular fortune (oil, hats, machinery, Coca-Cola, motors, patent medicine) whose yachts and homes adorn the Beach. There is "the mob" from Hollywood and Broadway (Al Jolson, Walter Winchell, Ben Bernie, et ol., usually at the garish, $8-$75 a day Roney Plaza); or a few, like Columnist-Author Damon Runyon, in their own winter villas; and some, like the Manhattan George ("Romeo & Juliet") Lowthers (TIME, Nov. 27), who last week were swapping their tabloid fame for a free honeymoon at the Floridan Hotel.
Hundreds are well-to-do rather than rich, spending a month's income for two weeks, a month, a winter by the sea. (More of these than of any other group buy $25-$50,000 houses, retire the year round to Miami Beach.)
Swarming thousands of thrifty folk stretch a year's savings over two weeks in "South Beach," where there are many small, relatively cheap ($5~$1) hotels, the dog-track, drug-store lunch counters, the only public beach space. Collectively they bring millions in cash to Miami Beach. Their tide is spreading northward to and past 15th Street, where (at Alton Road) an apartment-hotel sign is a symbolic outpost. The sign: GENTILES.
Son of the Beach. Near Miami, 64 years ago, when the county had less than 800 residents, lived a Republican notary called the Duke of Dade. He was able, it is said, to conjure up 350 Republican votes for Hayes, tip the Florida electoral balance against Tilden, and thus assist in robbing the Democrats of the 1876 Presidential election. Since then the political morals of Miami and environs have not materially improved. But Mayor John Hale Levi of Miami Beach would never be so crass as to manufacture votes, and nobody ever called him the Duke of anything. Presiding last week at a meeting of the Miami Beach City Council, His Honor wore a brown jacket, linen pants neatly molded to his modest paunch, tan-and-white sneakers which could have passed for bedroom slippers. Cocked off centre in his tanned, round, somewhat sallow face was one of Shorty's High Grade Stogies (made in Gallipolis, Ohio), which the Mayor continually chews or smokes.
John Levi speaks of "the Beach" as fondly as he would of a child (he has none: handsome Mrs. Levi has a son by a previous marriage). He is 64; she is perhaps ten years younger. The Levis, like many another moderately well-to-do couple whose spacious, substantial but unobtrusive homes dot the less effulgent sections of Miami Beach, are never seen at the Surf, Bath or Brook'(gambling) Club. They eschew such roisterous joints as Mother Kelly's night club. "My position, you know," the Mayor explains with distinct regret. Mrs. Levi spends much time at bridge, fishing, or at Hialeah on racing afternoons. The Mayor is likely to be at home, ensconced on his front porch with a rye-and-plain-water. Next to judicious sipping, his joy is Skippy, gifted Boston bulldog, who can seize a fallen coconut, whirl it round & round on the palm-fringed lawn until he has stripped off the fibrous covering. Of this performance, Levi & Skippy never tire.