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❑ mh86 FROM 05/05/1986
THE MIAMI HERALD
Copyright (c) 1986, The Miami Herald
DATE: Monday, May 5, 1986 EDITION: FINAL
SECTION: LIVING TODAY PAGE: 1C LENGTH: 187 lines
ILLUSTRATION: photo: Polly de Hirsch MEYER, MEYER and Roz Richelson,
MEYER and Baron, Meyer (3-R)
SOURCE/CREDIT LINE: MARGARIA FICHTNER Herald Staff Writer
FROM
SHOW GIRL TO
BENEFACTOR
There are times now when memory swirls about her like the mists that
crown a dear and dignified mountain, effectively marking its place on the
horizon yet never revealing quite so much as one would like to know.
"Don't ask me for dates," she will say, neatly deflecting impertinences
as to when a photograph might have been taken or her age at the time some
event occurred.
"Let them guess," she says. "Let them guess. That's what I do at the
doctor's. I went to the doctor the other day, and he asked me how old I am. I
said, 'We'll wait and see. ' "
Yet one thing is certain: Polly Lux de Hirsch Meyer -- former Ziegfeld
show girl, masterful businesswoman, impressively widowed social grande dame
and avidly pursued philanthropist -- has been in South Florida half a century
now, and the traces of her presence are strewn like scattered pearls in the
sand.
She is a brainy fifth-grade dropout who made a fortune in real estate and
won the heart of Miami Beach's most eligible bachelor, that dapper lawyer,
banker and civic leader with the improbable name of Baron de Hirsch Meyer.
During almost a quarter-century of marriage, until his death in 1974,
they were an impressive team. Today, all five law school buildings and the law
library addition at the University of Miami bear Baron de Hirsch Meyer's name.
The Miami Jewish Home for the Aged boasts a Baron and Polly de Hirsch Meyer
Pavilion and a Baron and Polly de Hirsch Meyer Nursing Building. There is a
Polly Lux de Hirsch Meyer Variety Club and the Auxiliary Limb Bank and
Children's Orthopedic Rehabilitation Center at Jackson Memorial Hospital.
Project New-Born, which supports the UM neo-natal intensive care unit, has
established a Polly de Hirsch Meyer Award for service. In March, the Miami-
based Diabetes Research Institute's 25th annual Gallagher Dinner was held in
honor of you-know-who.
Thursday night, 160 people will gather in the Founders Dining Room at
Mount Sinai Hospital in Miami Beach to feast on lamb and lobster and to salute
De Hirsch Meyer's most recent gift: $10 million, the largest single donation
in Mount Sinai's history.
Back in 1941, Baron de Hirsch Meyer, then a member of the Miami Beach
City Council, was a signer of the hospital's articles of incorporation. He was
its first president and served off and on as chairman, honorary president and
honorary chairman until his death. His wife still sits on the board. In
November, there will be a substantial ceremony to name the hospital's main
building the Polly and Baron de Hirsch Meyer Tower.
Mount Sinai already brims with commemoration. Hallways are lined with
donor plaques, with the largest gifts acknowledged as part of the architecture
itself: The Sophia and Nathan S. Gumenick Ambulatory Care Center; the Jane and
Jerrold Goodman and Mrs. Ruth Cohen Reception Area. Even in the face of the
ample gratitude this latest De Hirsch Meyer gift inspires, naming the main
building was not a step to be taken lightly.
"For our board to approve it, it couldn't be just anyone, " says developer
Cal Kovens, the hospital's chairman.
Rest assured, it was not just anyone.
Polly and Baron de Hirsch Meyer do not go so far back as Miami Beach's
sandpile beginnings, but they got here early enough for her still to recall
that for $1.50 you could dance all Saturday night in the gardens of the
original Roney Plaza. "And you got a free drink. Imagine that."
The daughter of a Pittsburgh glass blower, Polly Lux de Hirsch Meyer
"came from a very poor family, and I'm not afraid to admit it," she says. She
was named Pauline, but that soon softened to Polly, and it has been Polly ever
since.
"When I was just 6 years old, " she remembers, "I dreamed about being a
big businesswoman, traveling all over the world."
After her father's death, the Lux family headed for New York, where
Polly's clear blue eyes and blond good looks got her a model's job and then
landed her on the stage. She spent a year in Earl Carroll's Vanities before
moving over to Ziegfeld.
The follies' heart was the dancers and singers who worked the hardest for
the least pay, but the soul of any Ziegfeld extravaganza was the gorgeous show
girls who glided up and down in costumes so exaggerated they were virtually
unwearable. "For one number, I wore a 30-pound hat, " recalls De Hirsch Meyer.
"You learned to move just your legs, not your head or your body."
Three years later, having decided the follies' gaudy glories could not
last forever, De Hirsch Meyer quit and opened a boutique on Broadway near 52nd
Street. She called it the Lux Shop and specialized in fine lingerie,
particularly pushing her own invention, a confection trimmed in rosebuds that
she called the Nobak bra.
"Somebody told me I ought to sell it to Bonwit Teller, so I took some
samples down, and eventually this woman came out, very dignified -- you know
how buyers are -- but she turned out to be very nice and ordered 30 dozen.
Thirty dozen! I rented two sewing machines and got a friend to help, and we
filled that order.
"It taught me that you have to take a chance. Someone who stays with a
job for 20 years, I don't admire nearly so much as I do someone who does 20
different things."
With the onset of the Depression, and believing "You've got to know when
to take a profit," De Hirsch Meyer sold the shop and, with her mother and
brother, resettled in the sunny promise of Miami Beach.
With $6,000 and guts, she leased a broken-down 46-unit South Beach
apartment house called The Trianon. De Hirsch Meyer rented a paint sprayer and
two sewing machines, bought paint and drapery fabric and set her family to
work renovating. When the season opened two months later, so did The Trianon.
De Hirsch Meyer rented her rooms by the day, welcoming guests many other
hotels did not want -- salesmen, musical- comedy acts and families with
children. Within a year, the
Trianon was in the black and the woman who had put it there had a nickname
that still sticks -- Lucky Lux.
Tired of correcting the mistakes of others, De Hirsch Meyer began to put
up her own hotels, learning the construction trade so well that she became one
of only three women in the country to hold a general contracting license.
Eventually, she would pepper the beach with about 30 small hotels, among them
the still-standing Majestic at 660 Ocean Dr., the Imperial next door and the
Royal at Washington and Eighth. D„DD, ' �pc
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Keeping workers' morale high with such incentives as coffee breaks and
new suits of clothes, she paid carpenters $1 an hour and laborers 50 cents,
and "I found that if you paid people $1.50 a door, you could get an awful lot
of doors hung on a Saturday morning."
Her success grew and, with it, the inevitability that she would meet her
future husband.
A small, thin man with caterpillar eyebrows, Baron de Hircsh Meyer was
the son of a Wisconsin fur trader. Impeccable and well-groomed, he favored
double-breasted suits and white carnation boutonnieres. His father had named
him for the famed 19th-Century German philanthropist and Baron Maurice de
Hirsch, hoping, says Rabbi Irving Lehrman of Miami Beach's Temple Emanu- El,
"that something good would rub off on him. And it did."
Baron de Hirsch Meyer had come to Miami in 1925 and gone into business on
a hope and a handshake with a young Rhode Island accountant named Leonard
Abess.
"Baron was not a ladies' man in those days, " recalls Abess. "What
happened was . we thought we'd bought this building. Baron sent his father
in my building?' Apparently, the guy had sold the building both to us and to
her. I remember Baron's father called up and said, 'Hey, there's some woman
over here who says she owns us, ' and that's how they met. "
Polly de Hirsch Meyer had been reared Catholic; Baron de Hirsch Meyer was
Jewish and the namesake of a Jewish legend.
"Sixteen years it took him to ask me to marry him," she says. "Finally,
his mother asked me to marry her son." They wed in Las Vegas in August 1951.
The bride wore gray embroidered organdy that showed her shoulders to keen
advantage. The bridegroom sported a suit, a white carnation and a smile bigger
than he was. "And after that, they both attended our services for the High
Holy Days," says Lehrman.
"I went to please Baron, and I enjoyed it, and I knew everybody," says
Polly de Hirsch Meyer. When well-meaning friends would suggest one or the
other should convert, "I'd say, 'Why don't you leave us alone? We're getting
along beautifully. ' I did my thing and he did his."
All these years later, the memory of his last words -- "I love you very
much" -- can still bring quick tears to her blue eyes. Still, she says, "I
never did sit back and feel sorry for myself. Except for the loss of Baron, I
have no regrets in anything."
Today, De Hirsch Meyer's Miami Beach apartment is filled with the
mementos of a long, satisfactory life: family photographs; pictures of her
racehorses, especially just-retired Sugar's Image, the star of her DeLux
Stable Farms; many trophies and plaques of the First-Lady-of-Philanthropy
variety; and two little toy dogs that are shadowy reminders of Caesar, the
piano- playing poodle.
"What a dog he was," she says. "Ed Sullivan was at our house once for
dinner with his wife and he wanted to put Caesar on his show, but Baron said,
'You're not going to do that, ' and so we didn't."
Today, people who raise money for South Florida causes know three things
about Polly de Hirsch Meyer:
First, they know she is not easily parted from her money. Her affairs -
-
the Baron de Hirsch Meyer Foundation, her racehorses and other investments --
are tended from a small Miami Beach office by a staff of doting nieces and
nephews, but the reins are short. De Hirsch Meyer has final say.
Says Mount Sinai's Kovens, frankly, " (Getting that $10 million) took a
long time."
Second, they know she wants her money well-spent. She has given $4
million to the Diabetes Research Institute; $250,000 to Project New-Born and
more than $3 million through the years to Jewish Home for the Aged. She has
bought benches for Camillus House and appliances for the Downtown Senior
$
Citizens Center at Miami's Gesu Church and serves on the Deed Club's board.
During the social season, she is everywhere, gracing a nonstop round of
charity events with her presence and support.
"I have the privilege of doing what I want," she says.
Says Myron Berezin, executive director of the Diabetes Research
Institute, "I think Polly is just a tough business lady. She sees something
that's paying off and she supports it." Third, they know that she likes to be
thanked. She is a devoted saver of newspaper clippings, stacking them in a
drawer until so many accumulate that they must be transferred to a suitcase.
Sister Maura Phillips, director of Gesu's senior center, recalls that at
the end of a party De Hirsch Meyer hosted last Christmas, "She sat like a
queen and shook hands with the people who came up to thank her. . . . The
thing that really counts is her presence. She comes here often and has a cup
of coffee. I always tell her our cut glass is in the attic. She has a paper
cup with the rest of us."
"I keep going, " says De Hirsch Meyer, "because I'm afraid to stop. One of
the women at Gesu made me a lap robe to keep my knees warm when I'm watching
TV. I just may need it someday. "
KEYWORDS: BIOGRAPHY MEYER
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