Fool's Paradise: Player's, Poseurs and the Culture of Express in South Beach - Couverture rigide

One

Socialites

Moderation is a fatal thing. Nothing succeeds like excess.

--Oscar Wilde

EVEN IN A CITY WHERE RESTRAINT IS NOT CONSIDERED A VIRTUE, AMBER RIDINGER'S BAT MITZVAH PROMISED TO BE SOMETHING SPECIAL.

It was a balmy Saturday night in November, with air so soft and sweet you could almost taste it, and a big, chalk white moon hung over Miami. Outside of The Forge restaurant and Glass nightclub on Arthur Godfrey Road four klieg lights on the back of a flatbed truck were making loopy pink circles in the sky, part of a pastel halo that seemed to float over the city like the aurora borealis. Miles out to sea, the light show was visible to the thousands of passengers aboard the city-size cruise ships that had disembarked from the port of Miami an hour or so before, all in a line, bow to stern, heading off to the Caribbean like a string of diamonds on a navy sea.

The pink spotlights were part of the hoopla heralding the thirteenth birthday party of Amber Ridinger. At a cost of over $500,000, it was said to be the most expensive coming-of-age celebration ever held in Miami Beach, and the biggest party of its kind since Henry Ford's coming-out gala for his daughter at the Bath Club. More than two hundred guests were expected to attend, including New York Mets catcher Mike Piazza and his wife, former Playboy Playmate Alicia Rickter, who'd given Amber a $10,000 Cartier Pasha white-gold watch for her birthday. Even that largesse was surpassed by the singer and actress Jennifer Lopez, a family friend of relatively recent acquaintance, who presented Amber with the most lavish birthday gift of all--a $100,000, 30-carat diamond bracelet. Rap stars Ja Rule, Omarion, and Marques Houston were expected to entertain, and Amber herself was going to provide divertissement by introducing her own line of clothing called Gossip in an elaborate runway show. The music would be supplied by the superstar disc jockey DJ AM, best known to readers of Us Magazine as Adam Horowitz, the studly serial dater of Paris Hilton's posse. The bat mitzvah girl was also going to introduce her own signature fragrance, Amber No. 13, packaged in custom-designed crystal bottles with Amber's personal logo, each gift-wrapped in pink bows and placed on every table for the guests to take home. The New York Post's gossip column, "Page Six," which doesn't do much bat mitzvah reporting, ran an item saying that Amber, an eighth-grade student at Miami Country Day School, was expected to wear a $26,000 purple-and-silver Dolce & Gabbana gown to her birthday party.

Amber was in "Page Six" because the bat mitzvah also had a publicist, Tara Solomon, of Tara Ink. Ms. Solomon, who hailed from Fort Myers, Florida, was herself a local celebrity and nightlife fixture, a bosomy version of Gidget gone awry, who also wrote an advice column for the Miami Herald called "Advice Diva." Ms. Solomon alerted the gossip columns and sent out press releases about the bat mitzvah, one of which was headlined butterflies and bling--it's a bat mitzvah thing! The press release noted that "a limited number of escorted cameras will be allowed inside the venue," which is why the night of the bat mitzvah there was a wolf pack of jostling television news cameramen, reporters, and paparazzi in front of the faux eighteenth-century French facade of The Forge, attacking en masse every time a stretch limousine or lollipop-colored muscle car pulled up to the VIP carpet to disgorge guests, mostly local Miami Beach celebrities such as Dr. Jeff Kamlet, the town's busiest addiction doctor; Thomas Kramer, Miami Beach's scandal-plagued Bad Boy real estate developer; Michael Capponi, the nightlife uberpromoter and his model girlfriend Erin Henry; Elaine Lancaster, a staple of the social scene and beloved drag queen who is over seven feet tall in her wig; pop singer Vanessa ("A Thousand Miles") Carlton; Irv Gotti, the formerly indicted CEO of Murder Inc. Records; and stylish hip-hop impresario Damon Dash and his wife, fashion designer Rachel Roy.

Inside The Forge restaurant the bordello-like decor had been feebly disguised in keeping with the bat mitzvah's theme as an Amberland of "Butterflies and Bling." From the restaurant's ceiling in the Dome room hung what looked like a swarm of glittering bugs but were in fact synthetic butterflies, dangling on filament thread above the heads of the guests, along with a purported 42,000 sparkling Swarovski crystals, which supplied the bling. The walls had been draped in white satin, pink flower petals littered the floors, and the restaurant's $20 million wine cellar had been turned into a "Candy Land" where two Little People dressed in munchkinlike white overalls and wigs stood on a table spread with candies and sweets as well as a fountain spouting warm chocolate in which to dip strawberries. The Little People grinned gamely at the guests, who grinned back.

Around 9:30 p.m., Amber Ridinger herself arrived, emerging from the back of a stretch limousine in a flurry of strobe lights along with rap superstar Ja Rule and the platinum-selling singer Ashanti. Amber had dark eyes, pale pink lips, and dark hair piled on top of her head, a few strands of which escaped from under a diamond coronet and fell in her face. There was an endearing awkwardness to the thirteen-year-old as she made her way up the VIP carpet in her ill-fitting $26,000 Dolce & Gabbana gown while photographers shouted "Amber! Amber! Look this way!" like she was a movie star.

Inside The Forge, Amber's beaming parents were watching her arrival on a live video feed being shown throughout the restaurant on flat-screen televisions. "The party was really just meant to fulfill Amber's every vision and every dream," Loren Ridinger, thirty-eight, told a reporter. Mrs. Ridinger was dressed in a low-cut red print dress with spaghetti straps, and her husband, James "JR" Ridinger, fifty-five, was wearing a white tuxedo jacket with a white satin collar and a white shirt open at the neck. The Ridingers both had very white teeth, in contrast to their deep suntans, and they looked years younger than their ages.

The Ridingers had been identified that week with a thrift of description by the Miami SunPost as "money-heavy socialites." They'd materialized about ten years earlier from Greensboro, North Carolina, where they created a company out of their garage that sold household products over the Internet called Market America Worldwide, Inc. In 2006, Market America was grossing nearly $300 million a year in revenues, with annual sales projected to reach $1 billion by 2010. The firm was so rich that the Ridingers reportedly had $100 million in cash just sitting in the company's accounts. Back in Greensboro, Ridinger had run into some trouble with the SEC when he created a shell company to take Market America public and then sold shares without disclosing he had an interest in the company. Soon after paying the SEC a fine, the Ridingers moved to Miami. Like so many others, they were looking for fresh horizons and beautiful sunsets over the Everglades.

Miami Beach is a city of neophiliacs where people are mesmerized by shiny new things, and the newcomers du jour quickly rose to the top of the social strata--at least someone's social strata. They built a remarkable $25 million waterfront chateau-style house on North Bay Road, one of the city's toniest streets. The house had a formal living room with a trompe l'oeil ceiling painted with chariots and angels, and there were crystal chandeliers, gold-leaf-gilded crown moldings, and a marble bust of Beethoven. The Ridingers also had their own ballroom, in which they threw galas for the other money-heavy socialites. Mrs. Ridinger owned so many expensive Judith Leiber pocketbooks that they were locked in a display case in her bedroom. There was a stable of eighteen cars, including a Rolls-Royce Phantom, an Aston Martin, and a Mercedes McClaren--one of only five in the United States--and a staff of thirty-one, including chauffeurs and yacht crew. The couple also owned two boats, a $6 million 20-footer and an $18 million, 156-foot yacht, the latter of which they took to Manhattan in the summers to escape Miami's tropical heat. They kept it berthed at Chelsea Piers while they lived in a penthouse suite at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel. The couple was also known for their generosity to charities and their friends. They'd befriended an impressive variety of A-list celebrities, including singers Jennifer Lopez and her husband Marc Anthony, and Madonna, who was wary of most people and hard to get to know, yet who felt comfortable enough with the Ridingers to use their six-room guest cottage instead of staying in a hotel when she was in Miami.

Tara Solomon hit a home run for the Ridingers in the press. Amber's birthday party made the front page of the Miami Herald and the cover of the Style section of the New York Times and was featured in the South Florida Sun-Sentinel. Amber's pink-carpet arrival was seen on the 11:00 p.m. news on several local TV outlets in Miami, and it was featured in segments on Inside Edition, Access Hollywood, and Geraldo at Large. MTV ran a news story about the party called "Torah Down the House," and on CNN, in a segment about expensive parties for teens, Loren Ridinger was seen saying to Amber, "You're a great kid and don't be mad at Mommy if everything's not perfect."

There was just one thing that wasn't perfect.

Amber Ridinger wasn't raised Jewish.

Her father had been brought up Methodist, and the family celebrated Christmas--but Amber's maternal grandmother, who died when she was only seven months old, was Jewish, which made Amber's mother Jewish, and in Miami Beach, that's enough to throw a bat mitzvah. Rabbi Zev Katz, thirty-four, who officiated at Amber's extravaganza, admitted he did not perform a bat mitzvah ceremony. The bearded and jovial Rabbi Katz was the quintessential Miami Beach Lubavitcher rabbi, who could be found weekdays with his "Chabad ...

Praise for Fool's Paradise
“Exposes scandal, intrigue, sex and drugs in the sun-drenched social spot... perfect reading for a lazy afternoon in the double-decker cabana.”
—Publishers Weekly

“Gaines is at ease with all aspects of his subject...[he] also loves his characters, no matter how flawed they may be... His colorful snapshot of the weirdness that is Miami Beach will forever color your view of the Sunshine State. Original, gossipy and flat-out fun–will either have you booking the next flight or scare you off the place altogether.”
—Kirkus Reviews

“Gaines inspects decadence at its zenith through the stories of some of the city's most famous and notorious-characters."
—L.A. Confidential
 
"Part Vegas flash and part old-school-Hollywood, Gaines shows us the 'manic desperation and reckless wealth' of Miami Beach.”
—Smoke Magazine

“The book will make a hot beach read, and its pretty pastel cover will punch up everyone's new beach ensemble.”
—Miami Herald

"You don't read this book — you inhale it. Considering the staggering cocaine consumption of South Beach, maybe 'snort' is a better word choice.Whatever word we use, Fool's Paradise: Players, Poseurs, and the Culture of Excess in South Beach is an irresistible book that wraps up hilarious and tragic stories and serves them in this elegant souffle."
—St. Petersburg Times
Praise for Philistines at the Hedgerow

"Breezy, irreverent, amusing . . . replete with scandals, scurrilous characters, assorted bacchanalia, and all manner of wretched excess."
—Laura Landro, Wall Street Journal

"Hugely entertaining . . . With wit and zest Gaines tells the story of the embattled Hamptons through a series of deft profiles."
—Stephen Birmingham, Washington Times

"A narrative of surprising unity and velocity. Such a cast of eccentrics hasn’t been seen since Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil."
—Jay McInerney, The New Yorker

"Richly entertaining."
—People

"A fabulous cast of real-life characters, both high and low . . . more fun than most fiction."
—Publishers Weekly

"A satisfying comedy of manners about snobbishness and land lust among America’s overachievers. . . . Gaines knows how to tell a story, and he knows how to dish."
—Carl Swanson, Salon