Mar-a-Lago, home of Marjorie Merriweather Post, in the mid-1950s

Boston and Palm Beach have been the north and south poles of Brahmin society, the favored dual-address listings for an old-line, blue-blood crowd. Eager to escape our city’s bone-chilling winters, well-heeled Bostonians fled to the island of Palm Beach, turning it into a WASP Bali Hai. Or perhaps a more accurate description would be Brigadoon, where time stood still, because well into the 20th century, Palm Beach traditions were rooted in the century that had gone before.

One hundred years after its incorporation, Palm Beach remains a staple of our winter social life, with prominent locals trading Newbury Street for Worth Avenue, as they turn up for “the season,” which runs from November through April. But instead of coming to mingle with Social Register types and a Rockefellercentric crowd, Boston money today, usually self-made or minted within the last generation, seeks to rub elbows with other stars of the American meritocracy. The Wall Street Journal, FT, and assorted billionaire lists are the field guides and reference points now.

 
Joseph Kennedy at his Palm Beach home  

Palm Beach society has changed dramatically over the last decade and a half, more so than any at any other time in its gilded history. A seminal moment came when Donald Trump purchased Mar-a-Lago, the uber-WASP philanthropist Marjorie Merriweather Post’s sprawling estate and turned it into a private club. As with other resort towns catering to America’s elite, Mrs. Astor’s 400 has given way to the Fortune 500, and a new guard of Boston merchant princes and their wives have taken to Palm Beach’s philanthropic and publicity-conscious stage. It’s a long way from the old Brahmin adage that a man or woman should appear in newspapers when they’re born, marry, or die, to a time when Tiffany Cloutier, wife of American Management Services CEO George Cloutier (who founded AMS based on his Harvard college thesis), can be vetted as a possible “Real Housewife of Palm Beach.”

“I think [Palm Beach society] is more open than it used to be,” says Boston fashion show producer Marianna Toroyan. “It’s easier to break through, because you can meet more people who have similar interests— who play tennis, live in the same neighborhood, or are interested in the same charities.” But she’s quick to point out, “You can still spot the old money. If you go to the Café L’Europe, even if you’re just sitting at the bar, someone will ask your family name, even what street your house is on,” back in Boston. “When you’re at The Brazilian Court, where the younger crowd goes, all they need to see is you driving up in your Lamborghini. They could care less about your social status; all they want to know is that your economic status equals theirs.”

Back Bay boutique owner Elisha Daniels, a Boston Globe “most stylish,” who wrote a book about surviving cancer and has become active in the Breast Cancer Research Foundation (BCRF) launched by the late cosmetics tycoon Evelyn Lauder, says while the crowd may have changed, the number of in-season parties hasn’t. “It’s [still] very, very social.” The “shiny sheet” (that’s local parlance for the Palm Beach Daily News) bears this out, with page after page of party photos. “People in Palm Beach are also very philanthropic, and they love a reason to go out to lunch or to a cocktail party.” In that same spirit, Daniels and Toroyan, who organized September’s Project Fashion to fund scholarships for fashion students in Boston, produced a similar event in November in Palm Beach.

Many of the Boston names that appear in the shiny sheet today might not be strictly old money, but they make up a new gold standard and provide powerful testimony to the city’s financial clout amid the palm trees: former Wang Laboratories CEO John Cunningham; the influential Sandy Krakoff, widow of Advanstar CEO Robert Krakoff and mother of designer Reed Krakoff; former Reebok exec Paul Fireman; credit card mogul Howard Kessler and his wife, Michele; inventor Richard Krock; and Vanity Fair Corp. honcho Carl Shapiro and his wife, Ruth, to name a few.