If the story of The Potlatch Club is ever made into a movie, it could be called Eleuthera Jones and the Temple of Discretion. A big budget all-star extravaganza, it will boast cameos by Greta Garbo, Cliff Robertson and Dina Merrill, Mary Martin, Richard Widmark, Raymond Burr, Rita Gam, and even The Beatles. And the opening scene will plunge the audience into an incredible adventure story.
The stars of that scene are two school friends who’d fallen out of touch. Bruce Loshusan, an entrepreneurial son of a Jamaican-Chinese grocery store magnate, and his Cuban-born business partner, Hans Febles, a Bahamian hotel manager, reconnected on social media after Febles shared photos of an island in the Bahamas, and they tried to open a hotel there. That one fell through, but the duo persisted and found a 12-acre site while taking a beach walk on Eleuthera, a long, thin, uncrowded hook-shaped island with 210 miles of coastline and more than 130 pink-sand beaches.
On a seven mile stretch of pristine beach just outside Governor’s Harbor, the island’s main port, Loshusan and Febles stumbled onto buried treasure, a dilapidated ruin that dated back to the 1930s, when a two-bedroom house was erected on a pineapple plantation. In the decades that followed, it became The Potlatch Club, named for a Native American ceremonial feast in which the dispersal and destruction of worldly possessions demonstrated the wealth and prestige of the participants. Something similar happened to Potlatch: a secret hideaway for the New York, Hollywood, and European elite in the mid-20th century, it was sold, abandoned, and fell into disrepair in the 1980s.
Governors Harbour.
Though jungle had long since taken over, and wild papayas grew on what had once been tennis courts, Febles and Loshusan saw a marvel beneath the rot. Now, a seven-year restoration has resulted in a timeless Caribbean resort that balances historic detail in four original buildings—including Furthermore Cottage, one the original homes—with all the requisite modern amenities in a lush setting of green lawns, tropical plants, and meandering walkways. With only 11 rooms in suites and cottages, a four-bedroom villa (complete with butler service), two restaurants, two pools, and a spa, it updates the laid-back style of the original architect and designer, Ceylon-born, British-educated Ray Nathaniels, with understated enhancements by Nassau-based interior designer Amanda Lindroth.
The Potlatch Club’s charms are, arguably, matched by its secret social history. Its American founders’ names are known; photos of the trio—Diana Adams, Elizabeth Fitzgerald and Marie Driggs—hang on the resort’s walls, but the new owners don’t know much about them. PALMER has uncovered the truth behind their hush-hush accomplishments and what one of Adams’ grandsons calls the “slow-moving cataclysm” of their club’s collapse.
The Potlatch was discovered by Elizabeth “Betty” Taylor, a pianist, pilot, and golfer, and her friend Diana Adams. Adams was a child of a raw silk importer and art collector, who gave the Brearley graduate one of the largest debutante parties of the 1936 season. The next year, she was engaged to Daniel Nelson Adams, a Yale and Harvard graduate, who had just finished a stint as a clerk to Judge Learned Hand and would become a leading corporate tax lawyer and managing partner of Davis Polk.
Guests of the original Potlatch Club.
Adams brought Marie Knight, a fellow Junior League volunteer and a Daughter of the American Revolution, to Eleuthera. Marie, who’d gone to Miss Hewitt’s, Miss Hall’s and Bryn Mawr, was a 1939 deb who came out at a party at the River Club. She’d had a brief marriage to a Choate and Princeton graduate who worked in advertising and charged her with cruelty in their divorce. He wouldn’t be the last to criticize her. Her daughter-in-law says she was unhappy, difficult and litigious.
Marie was also gay in an era when that was barely tolerated, though inhabitants of her social strata accepted homosexuals so long as they didn’t “scare the horses,” as was said at the time. Marie and Diana built a home on Eleuthera that became the core of the Potlatch’s clubhouse after they decided to open it to others and brought in a third partner, Marie’s lover Elizabeth Fitzgerald, about whom less is known. Though it was a hotel, the Trinity “regarded [it] more as a private residence,” as Marie’s late son Tony put it in an email to the new owners before his death. They invited their ever-widening circle of friends, who greatly appreciated the serenity, luxury and most of all the privacy Potlatch provided. Even when Paul and Linda McCartney honeymooned there in 1969, it remained an open secret.
The Potlatch Club’s original GM.
Marie “was a storyteller who kept guests entertained,” says Loshusan. “Diana was the beautiful blonde with lots of money, probably the lead investor. When they needed money, she’d ask her husband to write a check. A lot of people didn’t like Elizabeth because she was the stern woman who made sure everything was done properly.” Problem was, “most of the wealthy, glamorous guests,” stayed for free “because Marie wanted them there,” says Terry Driggs, Tony’s widow. Unfortunately, upholding the standards they all expected on a Caribbean island—including furnishing it with European antiques, constant maintenance, and meals prepared by imported gourmet chefs—meant that “overhead was astronomical,” says Loshusan. “Inevitably, they were stressed to the point that a sell-off was inevitable.”
Bruce Adams, one of Diana’s grandsons, says the beginning of the end was Bahamian independence in 1973. But the three owners had also expanded, acquiring property elsewhere on Eleuthera, on Mallorca, and in Saratoga, New York. So, they first sold off homes, and finally gave in to the inevitable and offloaded Potlatch in 1979 to a Canadian who hoped to go back to growing pineapples. But he died suddenly and the property “got caught up in international probate,” says Adams. As most of the land was sold for conversion into a condominium resort, Potlatch remained, overgrown and forgotten.
Bruce Adams thinks its reputation as “exceedingly discrete” gave The Potlatch Club “a certain reputation.” Certainly, its owners’ desire to live freely but out of the spotlight was a double-edged sword. Its new prominence echoes their dilemma. “Raw, clean and quiet,” as Loshusan puts it, Eleuthera is a clear alterative to some of its “glitzy, glam and transient” island neighbors. “We went to keep it that way,” he concludes. But he sounds a little nervous when he says it.