American Castle: One Hundred Years Of Mar-A-Lago

The unvarnished history of America's most notorious palace--from Donald Trump's purchase of the estate, through the FBI raid, the scandalous dinner guests, back one hundred years to its construction by one of the country's wealthiest financial-hustler couples and decades of controversy, politics, and lifestyles of the rich and powerful In American Castle, Pulitzer Prize finalist Mary Shanklin draws from previously untapped interviews, documents, and recordings to capture the complete 100-year rise, fall, and outrageous resurrection of Mar-a-Lago. The FBI's August 8, 2022, search for national security documents cemented Mar-a-Lago's place in American history, but Donald Trump's "Winter White House" has a long, controversial life-story, told here in a definitive biography. Moments before the Roaring Twenties sunk into the Great Depression, socialite heiress Marjorie Merriweather Post constructed the estate to the tune of $4 million (about $68 million today) and four years of labor--a 118-room mansion in a conflated Spanish, Portuguese, and Venetian design over a coral reef in Palm Beach County, the most hurricane prone land in the continental United States. Baptized by the 1928 Okeechobie hurricane, which killed over 2,500, many of them Black laborers, Mar-a-Lago became a winter haven where corporate titans, socialites, and nobility gathered. But the honeymoon didn't last long. The Depression and the unraveling of Post's marriage to investment broker E.F. Hutton from mutual adultery left Mar-a-Lago a part-time residence and party place, and Post's time over the decades was consumed trying to offload the estate--a white elephant due to its extraordinary maintenance costs--without giving it to rapacious, subdividing developers. For a brief shining moment, the National Park Service stepped in to acquire Mar-a-Lago, one of the last official acts of the LBJ administration, a maneuver championed by the First Lady herself, Lady Byrd Johnson. But preserving a capitalist shrine wasn't in the purview of the Park Service, which turned the keys back to the Post family. The years passed as the Palm Springs citizenry squelched every opportunity to transfer the property or put it to civic use.... But then, a white knight seemed to appear--a real estate developer and casino mogul from the outer boroughs of New York City named Donald J. Trump! Trump, as is his wont, primarily used bank financing for the $10 million purchase price, only putting up $3,000. With his casino empire sliding into bankruptcy and desperate to cover Mar-a-Lago's monthly $300,000 nut, Trump reneged on his assurance not to subdivide the estate. Thwarted in court by the locals, he threatened to sell to Rev. Sun Myung Moon's Unification Church, but eventually settled by turning Mar-a-Lago into a for-profit club. Years later, as Trump's "Winter White House," Mar-a-Lago finally became a financial dynamo through the doubling of club membership dues and over-the-top fees for guests to hobnob with the President--and possibly even eavesdrop on discussions of national security.

• | Author: Mary Shanklin
• | Publisher: Diversion Books
• | Publication Date: Sep 12, 2023
• | Number of Pages: 304 pages
• | Language: English
• | Binding: Hardcover
• | ISBN-10: 1635768969
• | ISBN-13: 9781635768961