No1 Palm Beach detective

WH Auden wrote a remarkable poem in which he described his progress on the lecture circuit in the United States, delivering what he called "the same old talk" and finding himself confused as to exactly which state he was in. "God bless the United States," he wrote in the concluding lines, "so large, so friendly, and so rich!" Well, it still is large, it still is friendly (or the people are, even if officialdom is slightly tetchy these days), and it is still indisputably rich (even if the country, as a whole, lives in the shadow of a mind-numbing national debt).

WH Auden wrote a remarkable poem in which he described his progress on the lecture circuit in the United States, delivering what he called "the same old talk" and finding himself confused as to exactly which state he was in. "God bless the United States," he wrote in the concluding lines, "so large, so friendly, and so rich!" Well, it still is large, it still is friendly (or the people are, even if officialdom is slightly tetchy these days), and it is still indisputably rich (even if the country, as a whole, lives in the shadow of a mind-numbing national debt).

I have done the usual author tours of the United States. I knew, though, that lurking amongst invitations to give talks here and there one might find that elusive golden invitation, the invitation which would not require one to travel too extensively, would not involve frequent changes of hotel, and would be for that time of the year when the local temperature is just perfect. Towards the end of last year such an invitation came my way. Palm Beach, it said. January. Eight days. Five literary lunches. One literary breakfast. The Breakers Hotel.

Some visitors believe that there is a choice of hotels in Palm Beach. The Palm Beach Literary Society knows otherwise, of course, and had booked me in at The Breakers, a splendid construction with the size and feel of a great late Victorian or Edwardian railway hotel, but in this case in those pastel, almost ice-creamy colours for which Florida is famous.

The Breakers sits in 140 acres of grounds, much of that an impeccably-manicured golf course. The driveway leaves one in no doubt that one is approaching an institution of importance, and this impression is confirmed by the presence of elaborate fountains and at least eight uniformed young men rushing to open one's door and admit one to the lobby. Everywhere in Palm Beach there are young men at hand, ready to tend to the needs of the visitor. They will park your car, open doors for you, carry your bags, and fetch you towels at the poolside. It is a very good place to be if you like being waited upon hand and foot.

Beyond the front door of The Breakers is an interior of staggering opulence. With painted ceilings, ornate, gilt-laden curtains, and Versailles-scale woven carpets, the entire impression is one of overwhelming luxury planted right on the edge of a manicured beach (how beaches are manicured is not clear to me, but this one looked it). Even the waves, which rolled in on time, were well-behaved and decorous. But I knew very little about Palm Beach. I was aware, as most of us are, of its association with a social set and with the fact that this was where celebrities (that awful term) went to be celebrated. I vaguely remembered that there had been the occasional scandal (a Kennedy rape trial followed alleged goings-on at a Palm Beach mansion), and I had read that Conrad Black had decided to sell his Palm Beach house now that he had encountered a spot of difficulty with his company. And I knew that the local sport, apart from sedate rounds of golf, was polo. But I knew very little else about the place.

I engaged in chance conversation with no less a person than a private detective. He was a charming man, properly discreet about his cases, and he gave away no confidences, but he had that colourful way of talking which you sometimes find amongst people who have seen just about every human foible in the book.

He told me the basic facts of life in Palm Beach. "Firstly," he explained, "these people are very, very rich. I don't mean just rich, I mean very rich. I came across one person in my gumshoe business who just sold one of his companies for 2.4 billion dollars. And that was just one of his companies. These guys make their money and then they come down here. Some of them get trophy wives and sometimes this leads to trouble. I know one guy who was 70 or so, had a wife who was 30. He thought she was carrying on with the captain of his yacht. She was. A concealed camera on the yacht gave the whole picture. A sad case. Everybody lost out. The wife got her marching orders. The husband lost his wife. The captain lost his job and it's difficult to get a job if you're known to carry on with the owner's wife. These rich guys don't like that sort of thing.

"These winter visitors, these snow-birds, come down here in October and they stay until May. Then they go back to their mansions up in the North. And while they're here, they go at it every day. Three, four parties sometimes. Lunch at this house. Tea at that house. Dinner at the Beach Club. It's hard work, bearing in mind that many of them are 70 and beyond. But they love it."

The idea of doing a season in a watering-place is one which has been largely abandoned in Europe, even if some fashionable spas and up-market resorts still become crowded at certain times. There is, of course, an English season, with key events of an eccentric nature (a horse race, a boat race and so on), and a few grand grouse-shooting parties still gather in Scotland, but these are not long-term residential seasons. What makes Palm Beach so unusual is that a very large number of the same people come for months on end and spend their time being seen by one another. That is the feature which makes Palm Beach rather special.

Making one's way in Palm Beach society is neither simple nor cheap. You can rent an apartment or house, of course, just for the season, but that would not be a strong base from which to launch a social campaign. If you are really serious, you look for a house in Palm Beach itself (South Ocean Drive is a good address) rather than in one of the other neighbouring towns. Boca Raton and Delray Beach, although perfectly pleasant, are not Palm Beach. There is always a villa or a palazzo to be had provided that one has sufficient millions. A large house with a couple of acres and access to the beach might start at £5m or so. A very nice house, with a bit of palm-tree-dotted beach and a mooring, might be upwards of £11m. Conrad Black's house is said to be on the market for £20m. It has absolutely everything that a house could need, including such imaginative touches as a tunnel to the beach. So few people today have their own tunnel.

But the house is only the start. You have to prove your worth by entertaining sufficiently and, critically, by showing that you are prepared to pull your weight when it comes to charity events. These charity events are very important in Palm Beach, and they raise millions upon millions for good causes. Medical charities do very well out of the Palm Beach season, as do a whole range of other causes. The best position is to be the chairman or chairwoman of the committee behind the event. That involves a lot of work and manoeuvring but it does mean that you are morally entitled to have your picture in the Palm Beach News, "the shiny sheet", as it calls itself. You have to work to get into the shiny sheet, but a good event that raises a lot of money for charity would justify a decent-sized picture of you in your black tie or ball-gown, as the case may be. The shiny sheet, by the way, reveals the average net worth of its readers (for the purposes of attracting advertisers). It is, quite astonishingly, £6m.

Why do people bother? There must be simpler, easier places that also enjoy a good winter climate and which are less ruinously expensive and socially demanding. But what brings people to Palm Beach is the sheer comfort and security which the presence of great affluence more or less guarantees. Everything is spotlessly-kept - the pavements, although only made of humble concrete, are of a very well-kept and spotless concrete. There is also every sort of facility for one's comfort: numerous plastic surgeons, for example, ply their trade here, and an army of domestic servants - Jamaicans, Hispanics, recent African immigrants - is only too happy to wait hand and foot on those who have the money.

And then there are the shops. Worth Avenue, which is the main shopping street in Palm Beach, is a long line of two-storey buildings, built in that attractive and vaguely Cuban style which haunts the architecture of Florida. It contains just about every designer shop one might imagine. Cartier, Tiffany and so on - there they all are, selling fancy jewels and alligator shoes and the like. All of it of questionable usefulness, except as decoration to those who have nothing else to buy, no real material needs to satisfy. None of these shops show prices. That would be vulgar. If you enter them, you are assumed to be able to afford to buy without asking the price.

But I was there to work, not to shop. Every morning at 11 o'clock a large black limousine prowled its way up to the front of The Breakers and swept me off to the day's lunch engagement. This usually took place in the function room of the discreet private bank which was sponsoring my visit. This bank has been identified as the most ethical bank in the United States - quite an important accolade in these days of corporate misbehaviour, and it is certainly generous in its support of literature. The bank premises are a far cry from the high street banks which we are used to in this country, with their air of parsimony and their warnings that your every move is being recorded on closed circuit television. These banks have plush entrance halls, with cut flowers in profusion and curved staircases sweeping up to the offices above. There is no sign of anything as crude as cash; no tills, no drawers, no visible pay-in slips. Money here must be a concept.

In the function room the members of the literary society would be waiting, most of them ladies, although a handful of men might be in attendance. They were invariably elegant. They had arrived for the lunches in splendid cars, driven by tactful chauffeurs. I saw one Palm Beach grande dame arrive in a dazzling white Rolls-Royce; the car was beautiful, so stately, against the green of the surrounding foliage; the lady herself was a vision in pink silk. In most countries, such ladies have disappeared - crushed by our utilitarian societies, by the victory of denim. But here they are, in Palm Beach, and we may gaze on them, and wonder.

All the ladies were dressed in the style expected of Palm Beach residents: namely, a new dress. There was also a great deal of tasteful jewellery; indeed, it might be that some of them had at least half of that average of £6m around their wrists or on their fingers. Diamonds come in all shapes and sizes, but the ones which surface in Palm Beach seem to be of a uniformly convincing size.

"Come to dinner," said some of the ladies, with that kindness and openness which so distinguishes Americans. We are so slow and so grudging with our invitations; they, by contrast, are so liberal. I am glad that I was able to accept, as I was lavishly entertained and I had many conversations of the sort that one might not have elsewhere. One very attractive and well turned-out lady said: "You will be picked up by my husband at 6pm. He will come to The Breakers. You will recognise his Rolls-Royce, as it's the brown and butterscotch one." And there it was on time, ready to take me to drinks at the mansion followed by dinner at the Beach Club. And my hosts were extremely interesting people. His fortune came, in part, from peppermints. His stories were so funny that with his permission I reached for my notebook and began to write, lest they disappear forever into the balmy ether of Palm Beach. One day I hope to be able to use the story he told me about how he invented a successful product - cough drops on a stick - by accidentally putting cough syrup into an Italian lollipop-making machine. But it will have to wait.

I came to the end of my week, having spoken to about 800 in all. At the end of the day, I reached the conclusion that Hemingway was right when he told F Scott Fitzgerald that the rich were only different from the rest of us in that they have more money. Palm Beach revealed itself to have a good cohort of well-meaning, well-educated people who read books with enthusiasm and passion. They are generous in their attitudes. They have a sharp sense of humour. They are entirely human, and I found that I liked them. I know, I know that this is not what people want to hear. Many Americans regard Palm Beach as being outrageous, a bit of frippery, the jewelled crust of a society which has greater numbers of huddled poor than might be imagined, many leading desperate lives. One can understand that. But the view that those who winter in Palm Beach are universally shallow and inevitably selfish is condescending, and actually quite wrong. Some of them may be, but there is certainly no presumption to this effect.

If you want to see how those at the very top of this fantastically powerful society, the ones who ultimately own it, spend their relaxing hours, then Palm Beach affords this insight. This is where style resides; not the tawdry style of Hollywood and Los Angeles, but the classy style of the East Coast; this is the wintering place of old money, of money which is no longer nervous, of money in repose.

But how long might one stay here before one yearned for one's normal, simpler existence? A week seemed about right. In other words, a rather short season.

Alexander McCall Smith is the author of the 'No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency' series. The sixth book, 'The Company of Cheerful Ladies' (Polygon, £12.99), will be published in August and a new series, 'The Sunday Philosophers' Club' (Little, Brown, £14.99), will be published in September

Traveller's guide

GETTING THERE: There are no direct flights between the UK and Palm Beach International Airport. The obvious route is from London Heathrow to Miami on American Airlines (08457 789 789; www.aa.com), British Airways (0870 850 9 850; www.ba.com) or Virgin Atlantic (0870 380 2007; www.virgin-atlantic.com). In February and March, expect to pay around £300 return off-peak. From Miami there are limousine services to Palm Beach for around $40 (£25) per person.

STAYING THERE: Residing with the rich and famous comes at a price. However, there is a notable difference between prices during high (mid December to mid May) and low seasons. Alexander McCall Smith stayed at The Breakers (001 561 655 6611; www.thebreakers.com) at 1 South County Road, an opulent beachfront hotel with double rooms starting at $450 (£245) per night. Lower down the price scale is The Palm Beach Historic Inn (001 561 832 4009; www.palmbeachhistoricinn.com) at 365 South County Road, where prices start at $95 (£51) per night for a double room.

EATING AND DRINKING: Charleys Crab at 456 South Ocean Boulevard (001 561 659 1500; www.muer.com) is a seafood restaurant looking out on to the Atlantic. Most bars are located nearby in West Palm Beach, clustered around Clematis Street. The Liquid Room at 13 Clematis Street (001 561 655 2332) is a hangout of the rich and famous but lesser mortals are allowed in.

SHOPPING: Try one of the second-hand clothes shops where designer items are cast off. Déjà vu at 219 Royal Poinciana Way (001 561 833 6624) and The Church Mouse at 374 South County Road (001 561 659 2154) are worth a visit. More upmarket shops are on Worth Avenue, littered with jewellers and designer boutiques.

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