Miami L.A.; L.A. Miami

To understand how popular Miami has become with the L.A.’s movie crowd, it is necessary only to know this: When Details magazine hosted a party for celebrities in early January, the biggest name there was Kato Kaelin.

Jack Nicholson and Oliver Stone were partying in Miami that night. Nicholson--along with Michael Caine, Quincy Jones, Johnny Depp, and Steven Tyler of Aerosmith--was at an Island Records party at the Marlin Hotel on Miami Beach. The next night Nicholson, Stone, Caine, Steve Guttenberg, Tyler, Donald and Marla Trump and models Niki Taylor and Bridget Hall were at a party on Fisher Island off Miami Beach, hosted by the Miami celebrity/model magazine, Ocean Drive.

Until a few years ago, Miami Beach was well-known as a winter playground for wealthy and famous Northeasterners, especially New Yorkers, and in particular the New York fashion industry. The new twist is that it’s drawing movie industry types from Los Angeles. Vanity Fair fashion editor Elizabeth Saltzman says its midnight-to-dawn club life makes Miami Beach a little hard on the L.A. imports; she calls it the “the perfect every-other-weekend destination.” Hotelier Ian Schrager (The Royalton and Paramount in New York City, the Delano in Miami Beach and the remodeled Mondrian in L.A. says: “We’d always taken the New York-Miami connection for granted, but now L.A. is quickly moving into the scene.”

Nicholson arrived late to the Ocean Drive party and retired to the VIP library after 1 a.m., where he drank bourbon, smoked a cigar and charmed models, telling one: “Your hands are cold, you must not be dancing.” He later departed with three of them in a limo, presumably to warm their cold hands. Stone, meanwhile, ended up at the club Liquid, where he danced until 3 a.m. At Liquid, Stone said: “Miami makes me relaxed. It’s become a night town that never stops.”

Some of the L.A. celebrities moving into the scene discovered the pleasures of Miami Beach when they came there to work on films--South Florida is the third-busiest film location in the country, behind only L.A. and New York City. Nicholson and Stephen Dorff “discovered” South Beach when they began working on their film, “Blood and Wine.” Al Pacino has begun to explore South Beach, now that he is about to shoot scenes for the movie “Donnie Brasco” in Miami. Last year’s all-star paparazzi couple, Melanie Griffith and Antonio Banderas, met while making “Too Much” in Miami, and Robin Williams and Nathan Lane shot Mike Nichols’ adaptation of “La Cage aux Folles,” titled “The Birdcage,” there. Shooting begins soon on John Leguizamo’s “The Pest.” Others, like Stone and Sean Penn, have become so enamored of South Beach’s late-night clubs that they’ve bought into their own. Stone owns Bar None, a refuge for models and actors, and Penn owns a piece of Bash, known more for its earthier local clientele.

Some celebs have even set up permanent residences in South Beach’s environs. Sylvester Stallone bought a mansion in nearby Coral Gables a few years ago. Madonna bought an equally lavish mansion nearby. Cher has a home in the Miami area, and it is rumored that Demi Moore, who shot the movie “Striptease” (based on Miami writer Carl Hiaasen’s novel) in South Florida, is now hunting for a house there with her husband, Bruce Willis, and their daughters. So, it is reported, is Nick Nolte.

Madonna and Stallone got in for what turned out to be rock-bottom prices a couple of years ago, according to Esther Percal of Gerard International Realty in South Beach, who has sold or rented houses to Cher, Rosie O’Donnell, Melanie Griffith and Vanilla Ice.

. “Madonna at the time overpaid for her house at $3.9 million. Stallone paid $6 million for his--but for 13 acres on Biscayne Bay; it was a great deal.”

Cher bought a house on La Gorce Island for $1.5 million, then tore the house down, spent more than $2 million redoing it and put it up for sale at $4.9 million. She recently bought a lot on Tahiti Beach, which lies between Coconut Grove and Coral Gables, for $1.75 million. It has “a killer open-bay view,” Percal says.

“These stars have made a major impact on prices,” she adds. “The top amount paid for a South Beach house 24 months ago was about $2 million. Now, the stars from L.A. are regularly paying more than $3 million.

The only complaints from the stars is that they’re used to the bigger houses on bigger lots in California. They prefer homes with 8,000-9,000 square feet of space; the houses in Miami run 5,000-6,000 square feet.

What do the L.A. stars like best about South Beach. “The weather, for one thing,” Percal says. “Also, it’s close to South America and Europe, where these people spend lots of time. Furthermore, there’s no state income tax, and the buyers tend to get more property for the money in Miami. They can live a very laid-back lifestyle in relative anonymity.

Other reasons for this influx from L.A. is both as simple as the weather and as complex as the distinct nature of the scene itself and the VIPs who have moved here. The beach has its sugary-white sand and Art Deco hotels trimmed in pale shades of coral and aqua and mint green, and the city has its towering, glass-and-chrome skyscrapers, which, in sunlight, reflect the bay’s pale-green waters and in darkness are illuminated by pink and blue lights.

But Michael Caine, who is planning to open a venue called the South Beach Brasserie in the fall, says the area’s allure for him has to do with its “polyglot peoples”--Anglos and Latinos and Island and European inhabitants. More than 65% of Miami’s inhabitants are Latinos from Cuba and the Caribbean Islands and from South America. Their influence on the city since the Cuban Revolution of 1960 has been profound, pervasive, colorful and lucrative.

“Latins eat dinner at midnight,” says Tara Solomon, who writes about night life for the Miami Herald in a weekly column called “Queen of the Night.” “So the clubs have to stay open late to accommodate them after dinner. Some clubs don’t get started until 5 a.m. and end when most law-abiding citizens are sitting down to lunch. L.A. clubs close at 2 a.m. So [L.A. celebs] come here and lose themselves in this relentless scene where the later it gets, the more people get immersed in demimonde activity that is increasingly depraved.”

The epicenter of it all is South Beach, also known as “Sobe” (pronounced so-bee,) the 20 southernmost blocks of Miami Beach, which contains the highest concentration of recently renovated Art Deco hotels and restaurants and the smaller apartment buildings populated by Miami’s young and hip. South Beach is slowly creeping into North Miami Beach, the familiar Miami landscape of elderly retirees, fabled hotels like the Fountainbleu and Doral and wall-to-wall high-rise condos.

Sobe clubs (Solomon despises that term) are raided by police, and three have had their liquor licenses revoked during the last six months for alleged illegal sexual activity and/or drug violations. A week after New Year’s Eve, Glam Slam, owned by the Artist Formerly Known as Prince, was closed on drug charges. Last year, Paragon (drug and sex charges) and Twist (drug charges) also were shuttered. (The latter has since reopened.)

Despite L.A.’s reputation for beautiful people, Solomon believes it can’t hold a candle to Sobe, which she calls the home of more “genetically blessed men and women” than any other place on earth. She believes that one of the main attractions for L.A. celebrities is Sobe’s seemingly endless supply of “tanned Euroboys and hormonally friendly babes” at the beck-and-call of well-known visitors. She describes them in her column as “famous bachelor actors who make more [money] in one day than most grown men in a year and sit around a VIP couch, swilling free champagne and receiving ego-building attention from assorted young women, some of whom are wearing clothing that looks like it snaps off all too easily.”

Five years ago, the crowd at a Miami restaurant called the Forge wouldn’t have been caught dead in black. The men tended to wear unstructured linen jackets and cool pastel-colored silk T-shirts, like Don Johnson on “Miami Vice.” That show’s stylish take on South Florida first brought the area to the attention of the rest of the country. At the time, the Sobe scene was laid-back and friendly as Solomon recently described it.

But Miami’s pastels and nonchalance are gone forever. Today, those same clubs are guarded like vaults by bouncers who scrutinize every potential customer before letting them into clubs whose sole purpose these days seems to be catering to L.A. VIPs dressed in black.

The women, in their late 20s and early 30s, look like fashion models in their tiny black dresses. Their men, in their 30s and 40s, all claim to be artistic directors, designers or producers. They all seem to have ponytails, black-silk collarless shirts buttoned at the throat; black jackets, often leather; black baggy pants, pegged at the bottom, and black pointy-toed cowboy boots with a silver tip on the pointy-toe. “Black is de rigueur,” says Tara Solomon. “Very in. Very Zorro.”

When Schrager built his Delano Hotel, he hired a French designer who wrinkled his nose at Miami’s Carribean pastels. The designer said those colors were a sign of Miami’s gaucheness and then designed the Delano entirely in white. And true to L.A. and New York form, the Delano doesn’t let just anyone off the street into its select bars and restaurants.

New York and L.A. celebrities were able to impose their own style on Sobe because Miami essentially is a provincial city eager to please its big-city brethren. Miami is no one’s final destination. Like L.A., Miami is a place where “people go to reinvent themselves,” Solomon says. And when they’ve done so, they take off for bigger cities.

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The Forge is one of the oldest restaurants on Miami Beach. Its previous owner was said to be a friend of reputed mob figure Meyer Lansky. The restaurant has the look and feel of a ‘20s speak-easy--all cigar smoke and dark wood and baroque paintings, and tuxedoed waiters balancing silver trays covered with silver domes over huge steaks and lobsters as they glide sideways through the crowd like old vaudeville soft-shoe men. It’s a boisterously loud, friendly restaurant with an early-dinner clientele that’s old Miami Beach. White-haired old men in colorful blazers and white slacks; their wives, with upswept, white hair, bedecked with jewels. The crowd changes at midnight, however, when the Forge becomes, according to Solomon, “a restaurant that thinks like a club.”

“It’s younger, trendier,” she says. “Reckless, demonically possessed, over the top. There’s a surreal decadence about them.” It’s also where she often begins her rounds with a midnight dinner.

Many of the men and women here smoke cigars because the restaurant’s present owner, Shareef Malnik, a handsome 30-something man of Russian and Irish ancestry, is cigar friendly--another trend the city shares with L.A. Malnik opened an adjunct to the Forge in late December called Cuba Club. There, a select clientele can have a private dinner, play billiards and smoke Cuban cigars kept in private humidors ($3,000 for 12 years after a $500 one-time membership fee) in a large, air-controlled room dominated by a cut-glass chandelier.

After dinner at the Forge, which ends at about 2 a.m., Solomon and her retinue hit the Sobe clubs, beginning with Liquid. The line of clubbers waiting to get into Liquid stretches for a quarter of a mile down Washington Avenue, the main commercial artery of South Beach. The doorman, with shaved head and one hoop earring, holds them back.

“When it’s the owners promotional night,” Solomon says, “it’s disrespectful to show up after 2:30 a.m. Once an owner puts his or her name on a night, it’s a big step. Ingrid is trying to market tonight for a different crowd. Girls.”

Ingrid is Ingrid Casares, the co-owner with Chris Paciello of Liquid. In a recent column, Solomon had written that Ingrid was “allegedly seeing bright young model Kara Young, whose boyfriend is not amused.”

Casares is “a nice Cuban-American girl from Miami,” Solomon says, “who is famous for being friends with the famous. Casares became friends with Sandra Bernhard at a concert at the club Warsaw, or so the story goes. Then she became friends with Madonna--and she wasn’t friends with Bernhard anymore. Then she became friends with k.d. lang.”

Solomon records it all from a great distance, as if verifying to herself some private truth about human nature. She sits demurely in the darkened background of clubs. A prim, almost prissy, precise small woman, she was once her high school civics class secretary. Her idols are Marcia Brady of “The Brady Bunch” and Ginger on “Gilligan’s Island”--Ginger because she always managed to show up in perfect makeup, even marooned on a desert island.

The first time Solomon met Madonna in Miami was at the Marlin Hotel. Madonna looked the columnist up and down without a word and then turned her back, dismissively. But when the columnist met Madonna again, at the singer’s birthday party at her Hollywood Hills house a year ago, the singer had decided to be nice to her, Solomon says. Among the guests at that party was Mickey Rourke, who was raised in Miami and now lives there again. Rourke is famous for disrupting bars and clubs, often getting into fights with patrons. He fancies himself a boxer and, every so often, steps into the ring to try to maul an opponent. Rourke is a frequent visitor to the Sobe scene and can often be seen at outdoor cafes, wearing a head bandanna and kissing his two small chihuahuas on the lips.

Solomon leads her party past the line of would-be clubbers to the Liquid doorman. He checks her name off a list, and she enters the club. It is so dark she chooses not to climb the stairs to the dance floor. She steps over spilled beer to approach the elevator. As she ascends, she says: “They’re all dark, loud, smoky and dirty. That’s why I try not to go to places like this.” She sighs. “But dark places are appealing to celebrities because they can be anonymous in them. They can dance themselves silly and drink champagne in a dark VIP room without being bombarded by noisy fans.”

Not everyone feels at home in South Beach, however. Real estate saleswoman Esther Percal once showed pop singer Sting and his wife around some houses. “They were turned off by the clubbing scene. They thought it too frantic, too hectic. They didn’t want to raise children there.

There was a time when locals could walk into any club on the beach without worrying how they were dressed or that they weren’t a celebrity. But the L.A. crowd has, by its presence, altered the scene in profound and, some say, disturbing ways. Liquid itself is responsible for what Solomon calls “a renewed interest in exclusivity” in Sobe clubs, which desperately need VIPs if they are to succeed. She wrote in her column: “Ask yourself this: If you were Jack Nicholson (presently the most fawned-over VIP in Sobe) or Demi Moore, would you want to be in a VIP room flooded with strangers gawking and striking up a vodka-lubricated conversation? Some outdoor clubs have special areas roped off for VIP tables only a few feet from the masses’ tables. When Stone hosted a “Nixon” wrap party at Bar None, it was by invitation only. However, there was a special room not accessible to everyone who was invited. In that room, there was another special area for only the most select VIPs, including Nicholson and Caine.

A number of clubs have become so celebrity-conscious that they will only let in those who know that week’s secret password, which can only be learned by calling a secret telephone number.

Inside Liquid, Solomon sees Casares and goes over to her. They talk for a few minutes, and then Casares introduces Solomon to the only celebrity at Liquid this night--the Puerto Rican fiance (now bride) of The Artist Formerly Known as Prince, Mayte Garcia, who is wearing what Solomon calls “an obscenely huge diamond” engagement ring.

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At a cocktail party at a handbags and accessories boutique called Glen Miller for Ann Turk--Miller designed all the bags for “Clueless”--Solomon notices a beautiful woman breast-feeding her infant daughter. Tara talks to her for a few moments. Outside the boutique, Solomon says: “That was Debbie Dickinson, a model. Her sister, Janice, is the one who claimed she had Sylvester Stallone’s baby. Stallone, you know, has become our arts ambassador, ever since he moved here a few years ago.”

Stallone has always craved to be thought of as a serious person and a legitimate actor, as evidenced by his round, wire-rimmed eye glasses, his attempts at collecting art and his own painting. And in Miami, Stallone became a big fish in the small provincial pond. There he was taken seriously, even given the key to the city, just before he contributed $50,000 to save the Art Deco Gusman Theater from being razed. He became known around town for his beefy bodyguards and gracious behavior to fans--”the top of our Cool Celebs list,” Solomon wrote. “An invitation to Sly’s is especially coveted because guests are able to mill about the house a bit without getting reprimanded by beefy security guys, as is the case at some other celebrity mansions.”

At one such party that Solomon called “glorious, very exclusive, only 250 people,” Demi Moore was breast-feeding her latest baby next to husband Bruce Willis; nearby were Pee-wee Herman, Tom Arnold, Jean-Claude Van Damme, Madonna and Gloria Estefan. Estefan, along with Andy Garcia, are the area’s native VIPs, who, ironically, keep a much lower profile around Miami than the L.A. celebs do.

“When Sly came here, Sobe clubs were untapped,” Solomon says. “He could rule the roost then. I’d see him being driven about in his red stretch Rolls-Royce limo filled with PYTs (Pretty Young Things) and at outdoor cafes. I never went up to him. I mean, I don’t ask him if he wants to go jet skiing. He was The King then. But who would want to be Sly? I mean, you’re always alone. There are always girlfriend problems. You have to spend all that time keeping your body in shape.”

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For the opening of Cuba Club, Shareef Malnik’s exclusive cigar club-billiard room-gourmet restaurant (duck smoked in tobacco leaves), Solomon wears what she calls her mermaid dress. She sits at one end of a long table, hovered over by tuxedoed waiters, that is crowded with beautiful Sobe models, male and female, along with this night’s VIPs--actor Stephen Dorff and mogul Quincy Jones. Most of the men, and women, are smoking Cuban cigars from Malnik’s private humidor--Cohibas and Montecristo. Among the models were Rebecca Gayheart, a former Noxema model who used to date an actor on “Beverly Hills 90201”--one who, Solomon says, “unfortunately was killed at the end of the season.”

Dorff and Jones are deep in conversation. The models, with vaguely European accents, are talking among themselves, mostly about upcoming “shoots,” while wolfing down food as fast as they can, chewing with their mouths open. One of the models, a dark-haired, dark-skinned woman from Italy, points across the table to an empty chair alongside an older man with a white beard.

“Save that chair for my friend,” she orders. “She’s very beautiful.” “Does she like old men with no money?” asks the bearded man. The model looks at him uncomprehendingly and turns back to her food.

Solomon looks up as a thought trudges across her brow. “Let me see,” she says to the bearded man. “I had four things I wanted to tell you. Let me go backward in my mind to find them.” She does. She brightens, then says: “I know. I was going to tell you that soon the L.A. power brokers will becoming to South Beach--like Barry Diller. Oh yes, and the other thing--the scene will probably last five more years, after which the locals will have to be the VIPs.” She forgets the two other things.