Coming on Down

It was billed as the "World's Largest Birthday Cake"--32 ft. high, 75 ft. across and 20 tons heavy, topped by 50 electric candles. But it wasn't really a cake at all; it was made of steel and latticework and 30,000 growing plants. And this outsize inedibility was quite fitting. For the 50th birthday it celebrated was that of the wonderfully unreal stage show called Miami Beach.

Confections in Concrete. On March 26, 1915, when it officially became a city, Miami Beach was not much more than a spit of sand across Biscayne Bay from Miami. Beyond the sand lay mangrove swamps being reclaimed from the alligators by a few adventurers with a scattering of small houses and high hopes. Miami's present style is largely the doing of serendipitous Millionaire Carl Graham Fisher of Indianapolis, manufacturer of PrestOLite auto headlamps. One day in 1912, Fisher looked at the all but deserted beach and had a vision. He filled in swamps, paved roads, laid out golf courses and polo fields, and built five hotels.

He imported polo teams from abroad to lend glamour to the place, and put them up all winter at his expense. Once he had a great idea for a motorboat race--he built eleven boats, all exactly to the same specifications, and invited eleven of the best auto-racing drivers to race them, with the stipulation that they would not be allowed to practice or even get in the boats before the race. On the great day six of the boats sank in collisions, but the publicity contributed handsomely to the new resort's perennial aura of spectator glamour.

Today "the Beach" is an outcropping of some of the wildest architecture the world has ever seen, strung along nine miles of slim strand that often dwindles to the vanishing point. Miami Beach's famed hotels--there are 368 in all--are fantastically cantilevered, balconied and pictured-windowed confections in concrete. Inside them there is eating and sleeping, eating and talking, and eating and dancing in places with names like the Boom-Boom Room and the Cafe Pompeii. Outside there is eating and tanning around the pool on chaise longues all facing the same way. Rarely does anyone venture onto the beach.

Most of the dedicated suntanners are no longer young, but one of the carefully cultivated images of Miami Beach is the lissome body of a bathing beauty --the finals of one national and one international beauty contest are held there. A different-shaped image is Comedian Jackie Gleason, who last year was persuaded by the resort's superflack, Hank Meyer, to telecast all his shows from there, and is planning to build himself a $100,000 house just north of the Beach. Another image of Miami Beach is that of a grinning fellow with dark glasses and a palm-fringed background urging TV audiences to "Come on down!"

Overlush & Overplush. More Americans with more spending money have come on down this season than ever be fore, and the tycoons of Miami Beach have been working night and day to give them what they are supposed to want.

Last week Publicity Man Jerry Do-bin, of the two-year-old $12 million Doral Beach Hotel, spelled it out explicitly for a visitor: "Miami Beach was built for big-city people. It's the big city's idea of a tropical setting. Furthermore, it's primarily a Jewish resort. The reason Jews like Miami Beach is be cause it's a resort that says, 'Indulge yourself--live a little.' Drive out to the Bonfire Restaurant and have a piece of their chocolate cake. It's about a foot high. Sure, nobody needs this, but that's Miami Beach. Wolfie's delicatessen has pastrami sandwiches three inches thick --it's kind of a symbol. So if the hotels seem overplush--why not?"

The Beach's top architect, Morris Lapidus, from whose drawing board have sprung such pacesetting superhotels as the $40 million Fontainebleau, the $20 million Americana (in nearby Bal Harbour) and the $12 million Eden Roc, has the same idea. He explains: "I'm not designing hotels. I'm designing stage settings on which people will play out their two-week vacations."

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