George Hamilton Is Palm Beach’s It Boy, Again

When George Hamilton moved back to Palm Beach, last year, friends in high places suggested that he run for mayor. They thought that the suave, impeccably dressed actor, who had spent his teen-age years learning to tan, wear loafers without socks, and act in plays at Palm Beach High School, embodied the city. “I’d be happy to be mayor if I didn’t have to get up and do anything,” Hamilton said the other day, over lunch at Swifty’s, the restaurant in the historic (and very pink) Colony Hotel. “Maybe I should ask if I can be honorary mayor instead.”

Or at least a mediator. In recent months, tensions have been running high on this multibillion-dollar sandbar, which is once again the off-site headquarters of the President. Residents are contending, again, with the noise of surveillance helicopters and with the regular closing of South Ocean Boulevard, the artery that passes Mar-a-Lago. “The security is beyond, and the people who own near him are being driven crazy,” Hamilton said, from behind a plate of salmon. “But he loves having his own personal army. It’s human nature.”

A natural diplomat, Hamilton, who is eighty-five, sees no point in talking politics. “Just don’t get into it,” he said. “Why pull on Superman’s cape?” But he did mention that the portrait of Donald Trump that hangs in Mar-a-Lago—the one of him in a white tennis sweater—is by the same artist who painted a portrait of Hamilton that used to hang in his mansion in Beverly Hills. He sold the place, all thirty-nine rooms of it, in 1987, when his career was waning and his marriage to Alana Stewart was long over. “My portrait was bigger than his,” Hamilton said with a smile, his white teeth and white hair gleaming against his ascot and deep tan.

He was calling Palm Beach a stage “for old money, new money, and no money” when two women of a certain age approached and apologized for interrupting. One, wearing a bejewelled cardigan, said, “My goodness—you are so handsome, you have beautiful hair, and your facial structure is still gorgeous!”

“Keep doing whatever you’re doing,” her friend, who was wrapped in a leopard-print scarf, added.

Hamilton was welcoming; he appreciates the adulation. He knows that he never had a career like Jack Nicholson’s or Robert De Niro’s. He made a few big movies, one, “Home from the Hill” (1960), directed by Vincente Minnelli; another, “Light in the Piazza” (1962), with Yvette Mimieux and Olivia de Havilland. “Where the Boys Are” (also 1960), in which he played opposite Dolores Hart, who left the business to become a nun (“Not my fault”), made him a heartthrob. But the studio actor and It Boy (he dated Lynda Bird Johnson and recorded a song by Burt Bacharach for a fangirl audience) had to scramble to stay relevant. He pushed to play Hank Williams and Evel Knievel, and then self-produced two camp comedies, playing Zorro and a disco Dracula in Manhattan. He also played Colonel Sanders in Kentucky Fried Chicken ads and danced with the stars.

But he’d rather talk about Palm Beach. “I know the underlying story here,” he said. “I saw the end of an era when the old-money lockjawed gentry dealt with new money like quicksand under them.” His mother, Anne (Teeny) Stevens Potter Hamilton Hunt Spalding, was a reigning socialite, and his half brother, William, a prominent decorator. They taught young George how to behave, and how to dress so as to be invited everywhere, including to the Bath & Tennis Club, whose cabanas, he said, are “far more modest than Mar-a-Lago’s, next door.”

On his way out of Swifty’s, Hamilton admired a photograph of Wallis Simpson and the Duke of Windsor (Colony regulars) and said that nobody dressed better, except Fred Astaire. Clothes, the more bespoke the better, are another favorite topic. (He was in a marine-blue hopsack double-breasted blazer by Paolo Martorano, of New York.) “The problem is that people don’t give me a discount, because they think I’m rich and to the manor born,” he said. “So they charge me more.” A shop he likes, Trillion, on Worth Avenue, is stocked with Italian blazers and crew-neck sweaters in go-to-hell colors.

On a quick tour of town, he gazed up at the old Paramount marquee (the theatre later became a church) where “Light in the Piazza” had a glitzy première in 1962. He stopped at Green’s Pharmacy, to look at the lunch counter where he’d hung out in his youth. He noted the display of Trump mints that promised to “Make Your Breath Great Again” near the register, and remembered the President telling Larry King, on TV, that his breath was bad. He asked Siri for the address of the old Kennedy estate, and recalled swimming in a pool there with a date one night, and catching a young J.F.K. doing the same. “Years later, when he saw me at events or at the White House, he would make a zip-your-lip signal,” Hamilton said. “That’s better than a breath mint.”

He had to get home to dress for a dinner at Wilbur Ross’s house. Fortunately, it was Inauguration week, and South Ocean Boulevard was open. Outside Mar-a-Lago, a supersized American flag flapped at full mast—its former height of eighty feet (almost twice as tall as city regulations allow) had been the cause of a lawsuit, now settled. “Betsy Ross would have been working overtime on steroids to make it,” he said. ♦