En Route To Miami With The Farrells

THE FONTAINEBLEAU, Miami Beach
(this posting originally appeared in May 2013)

The Fontainebleau Hotel, the early years (Library of Congress)

The same year of my first trip to New York with Aunt Frances, I traveled to Florida with the Farrell family.

Graham was my best friend in grammar school, and he often accompanied us to the Carthage Hotel for Sunday lunch (see Musing N° 2 of Sept. 7, 2012).   In fact, it was he who first mutilated those plastic table coverings.  Alternatively, I was regularly invited after church for fried chicken with the Farrells on Poplar Street.

In February or March of 1955 the Farrells --Cecil, Catherine and Graham-- planned their annual drive to Miami, and after a great deal of cajoling of both families by Graham and me, I was finally included in the trip.

It seems odd that I would have been able to miss so much school, but times were different, and I do remember my mother speaking with Mrs. Funderburk, my seventh grade teacher, who enthusiastically encouraged her to let me go.

I think we took three days to drive down.  I had been looking forward to staying at motels, but Graham’s parents would inevitably have an argument about the price, and we’d end up staying in a private home with rooms for rent. 

St Augustine, America's oldest city, vintage postcard

 I recall a particularly heated discussion, arriving in Saint Augustine, where there were scores of really snazzy motels as we entered the city.  Graham and I were jumping up and down in the back seat, shouting to stop at each one we saw, particularly those with swimming pools.  

Catherine was usually on our side, but we didn't stand a chance. Cecil definitely held the purse strings, and none of the prices suited.  In those days (perhaps it hasn’t changed), the room rate at U.S. motels was posted under the neon signs, and they were inevitably deemed too expensive.   Even at that age, I was surprised that no hotels had been reserved in advance.   

Me in Parrot Jungle, Miami (photo Graham Farrell)

Once in Miami, we spent much of the first day looking for a place to stay, scouting out rooming houses of which there were an abundance in the 1950’s.   We finally found one, and it seemed perfect to me, but I was still disappointed we hadn’t chosen a real hotel. 

  Graham's father was not a big traveller, but he had a special  affection for Miami, and driving through the countryside, Cecil talked to us at length about the Fontainebleau.   We were mesmerized, listening to his description of this super-modern hotel of inventive, circular architecture which he said was the finest and most expensive hotel in the world.  It had had its grand opening just a few months earlier.

One of the highlights of our trip was to be a visit to the Fontainebleau, but as I don’t actually remember anything about it, I suspect we only saw it from the outside.  I don't much imagine that back in those days it would have occurred to any of us to just march inside.

After a brilliantly successful first decade when it was embraced by show business stars and featured in numerous films and television specials, The Fontainebleau was not always able to maintain its prestige.  For a number of years, it fell, along with most of the rest of Miami Beach, on seriously hard times.  Rival Colombian and Cuban drug lords took over large suites to carry out their business, and several were arrested in the hotel in highly publicized crackdowns during the 1970's.

The Fontainebleau declared bankruptcy in 1977, but never completely shut down.  By 2006, most of the hotel's rooms were closed, and their furniture put up for auction.  Repeatedly rising from its ashes, however, the old Miami landmark reinvented itself under new ownership, and expanded, enlarged and completely redid itself in a flashy rebirth in 2008.

I have wonderful childhood memories of that week in 1955 with the Farrell family, but it is as though they end in Miami.  I have no recollection of the long drive back to Aberdeen.  Childhood was drawing to a close, and I don't think there were any more Sunday lunches at the Farrells after that trip.  In fact, I don't specifically recall going there again until the late 1960's when Cecil died, or much later when I once visited with Catherine during a trip home from Paris.  

When Brenda and I stopped over at the Winterhaven Hotel in 2011 on our way back to France from Panama, I looked forward to a visit to the Fontainebleau ... just to see what it had become.

Crowded Fontainebleau pool today (photo Buenno)

What a disappointment!   Outside, it still had its unique architecture intact, but inside it looked much like a big city train station and just as impersonal.   With over 1500 rooms (!) and 12 restaurants, it embodied everything bad that you hear about Las Vegas …. or Miami hotels:  too big, too cold, too loud, too glitzy, too crowded!   On the plus side, we did eat a very nice hamburger there. 

Whatever it once may have been, at least in my eyes, The Fontainebleau is no longer.

SIDEBAR:  The Winterhaven

The Winterhaven Hotel 1945, as seen in vintage postcard

The Winterhaven is quite another story.  In fact, it would be accurate to describe it as pretty much the opposite of the Fontainebleau:  simple, attractive, and inexpensive. 

I discovered the Winterhaven in Miami Beach in 2003.  My father had been seriously ill and hospitalized for some weeks; he had recently returned home, and I was on my way to Aberdeen to see him.

I no longer remember by what fluke I found my route from Paris to North Carolina via Florida.   I had re-discovered Miami a few years earlier, and the Winterhaven had then been recommended as an inexpensive old hotel of a certain charm overlooking the ocean at the northern tip of South Beach.  

It is considered to be part of Miami Beach’s special art-deco architecture, though for purists, the Winterhaven like most of the others is a little late and more of a post-art deco, at least by European standards. 

Built in 1939, it has very pure lines.  It appears to have weathered the decades with grace, though I understand it was in a pretty dismal state by the 1980’s.    Like so many sea-front hotels there, most of the outside is white stucco, and it has enjoyed the revival of Miami Beach in the last decade or so.   Brenda and I recently  ran across an old picture book of art-deco architecture with a nice 1945 illustration of the Winterhaven (see photo).   

Unfortunately, I have a particularly sad association with The Winterhaven, as it was here just before leaving for Aberdeen in 2003, that I was informed of the death of my father.    Although I had enjoyed my stay, it left me --though of course through no fault of the hotel's-- with ambiguous memories.

I didn’t ever expect to have an occasion to return, but when Brenda and I decided to stay a couple of nights in Miami in 2011, it seemed an appealing choice to go back to.   It was almost as if I had a family connection there.  



The Winterhaven today (Photo Brenda P.)

  

AVA GARDNER STOPS IN ABERDEEN

Vintage Ava (MGM photo)

Few celebrities made their way to Aberdeen.  Eleanor Roosevelt passed through fleetingly the year  before I was born, and I once posed with my boy scout troop alongside Adlai Stevenson at Styers’ Filling Station during one of his unsuccessful presidential bids.

With Adlai Stevenson, me bottom right (photo Sandhill Citizen)

Townspeople did once get a peek of Ava Gardner, though I may be the only one left to tell the tale, admittedly second hand.  It was recounted to me and Graham during that road trip to Miami.  It was a tiny story of little consequence, but it fascinated us children, as Ava Gardner seemed like the biggest movie star in the world back in 1955.  [Cecil would undoubtedly be pleased to know that I have never forgotten it.]

Cecil Farrell had been a member of a local business owners' association during the Second World War.  Ava Gardner, as everyone may not know, grew up in a little hamlet a couple of hours away from Aberdeen, called Grabtown. 

With Rooney 1942 (MGM)

Cecil had been tipped off by a railroad official that Ava Gardner would be on the southbound train on a certain day, and that her train would actually be stopping, however briefly, in Aberdeen.

It had been her first visit back to North Carolina after marrying Mickey Rooney, and even though she had yet to make an important film appearance, the trip coincided with the considerable media attention she was receiving as an MGM starlet.

She, too, was on her way to Miami, before making the five-day train journey west back to Los Angeles.  

Cecil, along with other members of the Aberdeen business group, prepared to greet the North Carolina “girl-made-good” with a few words of welcome.  They were accompanied by several members of the high school band.

When the train pulled into Union Station, the delegation got a close look at the young Ava who was looking curiously out the window of her private drawing room.

Cecil said the band launched into a hearty rendition of “California Here I Come”, and he tried to motion for the actress to open her window before delivering his few words of welcome..

Ava Gardner looked at the unexpected welcoming committee,  made a little grimace, probably at the noise; and then, with not so much as a smile, she pulled down the shade. 

“And that was the last anyone in Aberdeen ever saw of Ava Gardner in the flesh,” Cecil concluded with a chuckle, and Catherine, who had heard the story many times, joined Graham and me in much laughter.



Aberdeen's Union Station at the turn of the century, unchanged today (Malcolm Blue Historical Society photo)

Your input is welcomed:  hotel-musings@hotmail.fr

  [Photos are mine, unless otherwise credited]

CROSS REFERENCING … a look at other postings

My first trip to New York with Aunt Frances was featured in blog No. 4, "A Two-Dollar Hamburger Under a Silvery Dome" Dec. 21, 2012, and blog No. 2 "Sunday Lunch with Grandmother Pleasants and Mrs. Kennedy" Sept. 7, 2012 (to access, click on title).