Palm Royale: Today’s Feminism?

 Palm Royale, Kriten Wiig, Carol Burnett, Farce, Political Comedy, Palm Beach, Psychology, Feminism, Margaret Merriweather Post, Mar-a-Lago

Palm Royale: Today’s Feminism?

The reluctant wife had seen most of the first season of this series, enjoyed it (she didn’t remember having seen the last episode of the first season) and thought that I might be interested in seeing it because of its fun, complicated but light comic quality, but also because it is depicting the Palm Beach of my childhood.  She was willing to rewatch the first season to prepare for the second season because it was a complicated depiction of the intersection of multiple lives in Palm Beach in 1970.

In 1970, I was a ten-year-old living in West Palm Beach.  We went to church on Palm Beach, at Bethesda-by-the-Sea, and I was in a gifted child class that met on Palm Beach one day a week, the rest of the time I was at Belvedere Elementary in West Palm Beach. 

The Palm Beach I knew, was not the Palm Beach that is depicted here.  At Bethesda-by-the-Sea, when my buddy and I approached the Chauffeurs who were polishing the Rolls Royce’s lined up to take the wealthier parishioner’s home, I asked one of them how much the car cost.  He looked down his nose at me and said, in what I thought was a proper British accent, but may have been a cockney one, “Thirty thousand books of Green Stamps.”

For those of you who may be too young to know, Green Stamps were given out to customer’s of the Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company Grocery Store.  When you saved up enough books, you could buy a toaster with them.  Clearly he had correctly peeped me out as not belonging to the class that drove Rolls – or rather had them driven. 

Palm Royale is about that other class – or about those who wanted to belong to that class and worked their way, one way or the other, into it.  It is also a series about women who live in a world that is ostensibly run by men – and it purports to show that this world’s stars, and the people competent to run businesses, politics, and society are actually the women.

The end of the second season (this will not be the spoiler I have set it up to be, don’t worry) references, not so subtly, a film that also celebrates the women behind the men at a time of turmoil – The Sound of Music.  This is not a series that is as impactful as that film was, or that has a straightforward narrative arc, the way that film did.  Instead, it deals in feints and whodunnit twists and turns, and it is filled with antics and comic folderol, but like the film it references, it is definetly a commentary on the politics of an era. 

The intent of the series, as light and fluffy as it is, is, I think, quite serious.  It intends, through sarcasm and innuendo, to show that a world run by women is every bit as ridiculous and crazy, but therefore every bit as serious as a world run by men.

If feminism has had two waves – one that crested with suffragism – and the second, one that was starting at the time of the Sound of Music, and crested with free love and a sort of faux equality; this movie might be heralding the building of a third wave - one in which women are declaring that they are substantial enough to be ridiculous and important enough to have their ridicule be the centerpiece of our entertainment.  We can laugh at ourselves - and you will watch - the way we used to watch you-all laugh at yourselves and we watched.

Oh, the men in this series…  They are incompetent fools who are insipid, they can’t fight their way out of a paper bag – even with stupid stag antlers on their heads, unless they are gay, in which case they can sing, connive and, even more importantly, love. 

The latest word on the internet is that Apple TV has not yet decided whether to renew the contract for a third season of Palm Royale.  Though the door was left open, I found the ending of the second season satisfying.  Perhaps by the time a third season would drop it will no longer be necessary to continue this tomfoolery because the buffoons in office, who so closely mirror the straight men in it, will no longer be in office after the other men in power join the women who are trying to rein them in by growing a spine and tossing them out.  Of course, the other possibility is that those buffoons will have asserted their flimsy authority and outlawed all sarcastic and laughable representations of themselves.  If they smart enough to be able to recognize themselves here, they will surely outlaw this sort of entertainment when they have the power to do so and then there will be no third season for a very different reason.

Let me be clear, I do not believe that men, as a species, are buffoons.  Nor do I believe that the Republican Party is, at its actual core, problematic.  It is necessary for a healthy Democratic Republic to have different governing philosophies and parties.  In fact, the only historical character that I know of that is being depicted in depth here, Margaret Merriweather Post (Patti LuPone), is being, I believe, misrepresented as a means of depicting the current debauchery of Mar-a-Lago, her home now occupied by Donald Trump.  She was, I presume, a Republican and one who, I presume, supported Richard Nixon, who makes a series of cameo appearances to clarify the connection to Presidents who have unlawfully consolidated executive power, something that doesn’t need to be distorted to make the connection with the current administration.  But depicting Margaret Merriweather Post as debauched goes a bit too far for me.

Mar-a-Lago was visible from the end of the block that I lived on in West Palm, across the intracoastal waterway – also known as Lake Worth.  Mar-a-Lago was like Brigadoon, a kind of fairy tale place with a tower and various outbuildings.  It occupies land at the southern end of Palm Beach nestled inside the crook of the road that connects the bridge from the mainland across the Lake to Palm Beach proper, and Mar a Lago has a tunnel under the road to connect the home, that sits on the Lake Worth side, with the ocean (and various pool houses) on the Ocean side of the Island, perhaps the only estate that straddles the island.

I was enamored enough of Mrs. Post to tour her home in Washington D.C. that has been turned into a private museum.  Yes, as depicted in Palm Royale, she has a collection of Faberge Eggs, perhaps the most extensive collection in the world.  Of course, her story is idealized there, but they note that her father let her know that she would be fabulously wealthy and that she should spend two dollars on others for every dollar that she spent on herself.  They also don’t emphasize that while she inherited a great deal, she also built Post into General Foods, acquiring many other major lines in the process. 

She built Mar-a-Lago in the early 1920s as the premier property on the island.  Palm Beach itself was first exploited and created as a winter escape by Henry Flagler, whose museum sits next to the next bridge north from Mar-a-Lago.  Flagler started Standard Oil with Rockefeller, and he built a railroad to Florida and a very impressive, Gilded Age Mansion that he built in 1900, in part to attract other wealthy people down, is now a museum.  

The most impressive thing about the Flagler museum to me as a child was the secret staircase that ran from the back of Flagler’s study to the second-floor bedrooms (that were not open to the public).  Apparently, Flagler, who threw lavish parties, did not particularly enjoy them and would often retreat to his study – and from there, through the panel in the wall to his bedroom, without offending his guests by walking up the front stairs to bed while they were still dancing the night away.

Mar-a-Lago, of course, now has a resident who believes himself too important for the beliefs of those who elected him to matter, and he flaunts himself in ways that Mr. Flagler would have found contemptable.  And, when Ms. Post was in residence at Mar-a-Lago, I am told by my best friend from when I was ten, that hsi mother would see her at the local women's community meetings, something she surely could have sent a proxy to do.

The secrecy and deceptive practices of the very wealthy (I rode my bike past the Kennedy mansion, surrounded with a wall that was capped with broken bottles to prevent trespassers) seems to have attracted the interest of Kristen Wiig (who plays the Tennessee born, orphanage raised, interloper Maxine Delacorte – the star of this show) and the rest of the producers, writers, directors and players, as just the kind of place that would interest middle Americans like me - and I think they are right.  We are curious about the very rich - are they like us?

The assistant priest at Bethesda-by-the-Sea who ran the teenage outreach programs there came to that parish after having served teenagers in one of the poorest parishes in the country in East St. Louis.  My mother tells me that he reported to her that the issues in the two places were the same.  There was little to no oversight of kids among both the very rich and the very poor and this led to very similar issues when the kids became teenagers (we moved north right before I became a teenager, so I did not get to see the parallels).

The adults in Palm Royale are, at best, teenagers, but actually less mature than that.  Maxine Delacorte has been following them in the Shiny Sheet – as the Palm Beach Daily News is called (one of our field trips in the gifted child program was to see how the Shiny Sheet was printed – and the printer gave us each a bit of type that had been used that day).  The Shiny Sheet, though really a local society based paper with perhaps a few stories of national interest to keep up appearances, apparently included distribution in Tennessee, and Maxine grew up wanting to be part of the socialite set – so she snagged a disenfranchised member of the Delacorte’s, a faily of Palm Beach Royalty, when he judged one of her beauty contests and married him while he was a pilot and earning a nice living.  She decided that he wanted to give up their middle class lifestyle and go back to Palm Beach, certainly her own desire, and when they landed there, she worked to break into Palm Beach Society.

She was more successful than she had any right to have been, and she climbs to the top of the Palm Beach pyramid with chutzpah, subterfuge, but also with genuine care and conern for those around her.  At the peak of that society is a woman who has been the queen of Palm Beach forever, Norma Delacorte, played delightfully by the 92 year old Carol Burnett, who gets to play, most of the time, the straight woman (though her stunt double does hilariously do a series of somersaults down the stairs).  Norma, like Maxine – and, indeed, all of the other characters, is hiding who she is behind a series of masks.  This is not a series where we learn about human nature’s depths, but about its surfaces and it is a farce, a spoof, and a whodunit.  Keeping track of the antics from beginning to end is a daunting task, but this may become a cult classic that people enjoy binging for the pleasure of seeing women in all the lead roles of a dramatic-comedy that heralds the abilities of women to take the reins from the men and bring some common sense back to the running of this country.

They may also enjoy the warmth of the ending's message - that the characters who have a happy ending, and who have acted with integrity (more or less throughout) are the outsiders - the ones who had to ask how much that car cost, demonstrating both their naivete, but also their grit and resolve to figure out how to be able to afford it without losing touch with the principles that they learned in simpler, more closely watched world.

 

To access a narrative description of other posts on this site, link here.  For a subject based index, link here.

To subscribe to posts (which occur 2-3 times per month), just enter your email in the subscribe by email box to the right of the text.