American Castle

The Notorious Legacy of Mar-a-Lago

By: Mary Shanklin

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Paperback | 8 October 2024

At a Glance

Paperback
290 Pages

Dimensions(cm)
22.86 x 15.24 x 2.54

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The unvarnished history of America's most notorious palace, its original American queen, and its current controversial king.

Moments between 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 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 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, Donal Trump, who pursued subdivision, threatened to sell to Reverend Sun Kyung Moon and the Unification Churchill, 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: The Notorious Legacy of Mar-a-Lago.

Industry Reviews

Praise for American Castle by Mary C. Shanklin

"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

"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 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."

—Tim Franklin, Senior Associate Dean of Northwestern University Medill 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...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

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