American Castle: One Hundred Years of Mar-a-Lago

by Mary Shanklin

Overview

The unvarnished history of America’s most notorious palace and its American queen

Moments before the Roaring Twenties sunk into the Great Depression, socialite heiress Marjorie Merriweather Post and financier E.F. Hutton constructed an estate to outdo all estates. To the tune of $4 million (about $68 million today) and four years of labor they called forth a 118-room mansion in a conflated Spanish, Portuguese, and Venetian design over a coral reef in hurricane-prone Palm Beach County. They named it Mar-a-Lago—a winter haven where corporate titans, the glitterati, and nobility gathered.  

But the honeymoon didn’t last long. 

In American Castle, Pulitzer Prize finalist Mary C. Shanklin reveals a century of controversy, politics, and lifestyles of the super-rich and powerful after Mar-a-Lago became a part-time residence and party place upon Post’s divorce from Hutton over mutual adultery. It’s a story of an American royal who, at the age of 27, inherited a cereal company that would later become the General Foods Corporation and spent a lifetime in business, art collection, philanthropy, and the management of multiple estates—including her white elephant, Mar-a-Lago. Though she tried time again, as Shanklin covers in riveting detail, Post could not offload the behemoth due to its extraordinary maintenance costs and the uppity Palm Beach neighbors.

Drawing from previously untapped interviews, documents, and recordings, Shanklin follows Mar-a-Lago’s evolution as it collides with the Kennedys, the state of Florida, a potential make-over as The Mar-a-Lago Center for Advanced Scholars, Lady Bird Johnson, Richard Nixon, the National Park Service, and—of course—Donald Trump, who pursued subdivision, threatened to sell to Reverend Sun Myung Moon and the Unification Church, hosted Michael Jackson and Lisa Marie Presley, made it a for-profit club, received scandalous dinner guests, turned it into his Winter White House, and watched the FBI raid before holding a home-court presser as the first former president to face criminal charges.

How did the Palm Beach hamlet so lacquered in grace and elegance come to find itself rooted in American Castle: One Hundred Years of Mar-a-Lago.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781635768961
Publisher:	Diversion Books
Publication date:	09/12/2023
Pages:	304
Sales rank:	281,597
Product dimensions:	6.20(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Journalist Mary Shanklin has written for decades about real estate schemes, housing busts, hurricanes, and government misdeeds. Her stories have appeared in the Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times, Orlando Sentinel, USA Today, Architectural Record, and elsewhere. Mary was a Pulitzer finalist for a series on the Pulse nightclub shootings (team entry), and has won journalism awards from the Society of Professional Journalists, Investigative Reporters and Editors, the Education Writers Association, and the National Association of Real Estate Editors, as well as the Gerald Loeb Award for Distinguished Business and Financial Journalism. She also teaches journalism at the University of Central Florida. She lives in Palm Beach County, Florida.

Editorial Reviews

07/03/2023

Journalist Shanklin debuts with an immersive behind-the-scenes portrait of Mar-a-Lago, the former Palm Beach mansion turned private club. “An ode to Roaring Twenties excess,” the 17-acre “winter trophy estate” built by heiress Marjorie Merriweather Post (1887–1973) cost $3 million and took three years, from 1924 to 1927, to complete. When Post took the reins of the General Foods empire in 1936, becoming one of the first women to “command a global corporation,” she shuttered the mansion. Five years later, she turned it into a tourist attraction to “raise much-needed war funds.” After the war, Post relocated to Hillwood, her Washington, D.C., mansion, and none of her children took an interest in Mar-a-Lago. The National Park Service acquired it in 1973, but, daunted by the costs of upkeep, returned it to the Post Foundation after only a year. Current owner Donald Trump acquired the estate in 1986 for $10 million, turned it into a private club in 1994, and used it as the winter White House during his presidency; Shanklin concludes with the 2022 FBI raid to retrieve classified documents from the club. Chronicling 100 years of contentious real estate schemes and failed plots to put “this massive souvenir of the 1920s” to good use, Shanklin demonstrates that Mar-a-Lago has had an unusually variegated history, even compared to similar Gilded Age castles. Readers will be entertained. Photos. (Sept.)

Publishers Weekly

"Reading American Castle is like having a tabloid newspaper in front of you and a history book on the side. Or the other way around. Or both; straddling many important historical events, there's enough inside here to satisfy the two genres equally. If you love the history of privilege, politics, or current events, American Castle is a book you won't stop talking about."

—Terri Schlichenmeyer,  The Goshen News

"...a fast-paced narrative that takes a detailed look into the 118-room, 17-acre estate's history...What lies ahead for Mar-a-Lago isn't known." 

—Susan Salisbury, Palm Beach Daily News

“An enthralling narrative of extreme American opulence and unforgettable characters set within Marjorie Merriweather Post’s Mar-a-Lago. American Castle is the brilliantly detailed, must-read prologue to the estate’s current chapter of excess and scandal.”
—Gilbert King, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Devil in the Grove: Thurgood Marshall, the Groveland Boys, and the Dawn of a New America

“A history of a grand mansion and its numerous occupants . . . A well-told story that’s full of surprises, its storied subject generating headlines for a century."

—Kirkus Reviews

“An entirely new perspective of the now world-famous Mar-a-Lago. The public tends to look at Mar-a-Lago as the residence of Donald Trump, without realizing that it once belonged to them as part of the National Park Service—and before that to one of the wealthiest and most compelling socialites in American history, Marjorie Merriweather Post. Bookended by the FBI search and Trump’s arrest, American Castle is an opulent, lively history of Post’s grand estate."

—Tim Franklin, Senior Associate Dean of Northwestern UniversityMedill School, former President of the Poynter Institute

"Journalist Shanklin debuts with an immersive behind-the-scenes portrait of Mar-a-Lago, the former Palm Beach mansion turned private club. “An ode to Roaring Twenties excess,” the 17-acre “winter trophy estate” built by heiress Marjorie Merriweather Post (1887–1973) cost $3 million and took three years, from 1924 to 1927, to complete. When Post took the reins of the General Foods empire in 1936, becoming one of the first women to “command a global corporation,” she shuttered the mansion. Five years later, she turned it into a tourist attraction to “raise much-needed war funds.” After the war, Post relocated to Hillwood, her Washington, D.C., mansion, and none of her children took an interest in Mar-a-Lago. The National Park Service acquired it in 1973, but, daunted by the costs of upkeep, returned it to the Post Foundation after only a year. Current owner Donald Trump acquired the estate in 1986 for $10 million, turned it into a private club in 1994, and used it as the winter White House during his presidency; Shanklin concludes with the 2022 FBI raid to retrieve classified documents from the club. Chronicling 100 years of contentious real estate schemes and failed plots to put “this massive souvenir of the 1920s” to good use, Shanklin demonstrates that Mar-a-Lago has had an unusually variegated history, even compared to similar Gilded Age castles. Readers will be entertained."

—Publishers Weekly

From the Publisher

2023-06-13
A history of a grand mansion and its numerous occupants.

In the 1920s, writes Shanklin, “across the Sunshine State, the steamy lure of tropical weather, flour-colored beaches, queen palms, orange trees, cheap land, and more cheap land drew hundreds of speculators.” One structure sat on 17 acres behind a low rise that served as a buffer against the region’s frequent hurricanes. That was an important consideration: In 1928, a hurricane “levied the ultimate regressive tax on its victims.” Though the white citizens living in the mansions did fine, hundreds of Black workers brought in to build and maintain the new estates drowned and were either buried in mass graves or burned. Mar-a-Lago was relatively unscathed, though its owner, Marjorie Merriweather Post, complained that the winds had uprooted a number of palm trees. The property wasn’t cheap, but Post wasn’t concerned. The heiress to a fortune built on cereal, she had even more money at her disposal thanks to her marriage to financier E.F. Hutton. So wealthy were they that they went on a 10-week Caribbean cruise while the world staggered through the worst days of the Great Depression. Post eventually turned the keys over to the National Park Service under the aegis of Interior Secretary Stewart Udall, but NPS never had an adequate budget for the place. As such, it was returned to the Post Foundation in 1980 and, in 1986, sold to Donald Trump, who inflated its value and suckered Chase Manhattan Bank into floating 99.97% financing. When creditors suddenly called in $2 billion in notes, Trump developed it into a golf club with a historic easement that “could unlock a trove of tax breaks for Mar-a-Lago’s owner.” In a grifters’ paradise, that seems fitting, though doubtless Post, a major donor to the Democratic Party, wouldn’t be pleased with the current occupants.

A well-told story that’s full of surprises, its storied subject generating headlines for a century.

Kirkus Reviews