D AV I D PAT R I C K C O L U M B I A T H E 5 8 T H I N T E R N AT I O N A L D E B U TA N T E B A L L AT T H E W A L D O R F = A STO R I A
Reagan Corbett and Carlton Adams
Mackenzie Nix, Ellen Stuart and Olia Lau
were filled to the brim with guests for the same big weekend. And the Coconuts convened for their annual traditional dance. This year’s party was affected by the death the Thursday before New Year’s of Bob Leidy, a prominent Palm Beacher who died at the age of 75. Leidy, a long-time supporter of the annual “meeting,” had been chairman, honorary chairman, and chairman emeritus, and you-name-it. A hail-fellow-well-met kind of guy, he was paid tribute to on that Monday night when the Coconuts eschewed their traditional white dinner jacket (with a red carnation) for 24 QUEST
Richard and Peg Bright
Jerry Jones and Linda Sweeney
black. In his memory. Mr. Leidy, who started coming to Palm Beach when he was a kid with his parents, was married to (and later divorced from) Liza Pulitzer, Lily and Peter Pulitzer’s daughter, with whom he had two sons, Christopher and Bobby. He had known Liza all her life—as her mother Lily had known Bob Leidy all his life. The Palm Beach he knew was always very much a small town in that way. Out of the natural election of longevity and the meanderings of socio-economics, Bob Leidy was a reigning member of the town’s actual Old Guard—the crew who were in residence
back in the ’50s and ’60s when P.B. was more of a village, in a nadir of sorts after its long heyday that ended with the Second World War. It was a holiday destination, but mainy for families who had been going there for decades, or just to visit grandmother who still lived in the house her parents built back in the 1920s. In Bob Leidy’s youth and into his middle age, many of Palm Beach’s year-round residents were grandchildren and great-grandchildren of its earlier denizens. And although they socialized with and were often related to the winter residents, they were the core of the community. In the go-
Madison Powell and Jordan Naftalis
Michael Rolla and Nicole Fischer
go ’60s, for example, it had lost its allure for the newer tycoons, (you could have bought some of the biggest houses for a song), and the Old Guard, many of whom were living on old trust funds and even less, could have cared less. Remember, Donald Trump bought Marjorie Meriweather Post’s Mar-aLago for practically nothing. She’d left it to the U.S. government. President Nixon briefly considered it for the official Presidiential Florida White House. But the numbercrunchers in the government decided it was too expensive to run. So for a minute there it was a white elephant (while
E L A I N E U B I Ñ A ; PAT R I C K M C M U LL A N
Courtney Walls and Princess Lucretia Obolensky