When it comes to mapping wealth and place, there are few writers who go as deep or as far as PALMER’s Editor at Large, Michael Gross. Gay Talese once called him America’s “premier chronicler of the rich” and if you’ve read 740 Park, his excavation of the world’s most expensive apartment building or House of Outrageous Fortune, his portrait of Fifteen Central Park West and the global super-elite who call it home, you understand why the label sticks. Gross doesn’t content himself with describing the world of money; he climbs inside it, asks the questions nobody else thinks (or dares) to ask, and comes back having turned over every stone.

His latest book, Treasured Island: The Story of St. Barth… and its Barbarians, Billionaires and Beauties (Harper, June 16), sets its sights on a place many people think they already know: St. Barthélemy to the French, St. Barth to regulars, and St. Barts to most Americans. The tiny French West Indies island that traded its identity as a barren volcanic rock for a harbor full of superyachts and a clientele running from Russian oligarchs to the Kardashians, has generated plenty of glossy coverage over the decades. What it has never had, until now, is someone willing to go back to the very beginning and ask how, exactly, a place gets remade in luxury’s image, and whether it can survive what that transformation does to it.

I couldn’t put the book down from the very beginning: a swashbuckling, possibly Nazi-collaborating Dutchman spots the island from an ocean liner, teaches himself to fly, lands a tiny red plane in a sheep field, and builds Eden Rock. From there, it follows St. Barth’s improbable evolution from sleepy outpost to billionaire playground, complete with Roman Abramovich, a missile-detecting mega-yacht, a yellow escape submarine and a private Beyoncé concert.

The question of whether St. Barth can survive what it has become runs through every chapter. Gross never quite lets you forget it, even as he makes you want to book a flight. Below, we get into all of it.

 

Alicia Pestalozzi: If you could pull up a chair at Le Select with one historical figure from St. Barth, who would it be and what’s the first thing you’d ask?
Michael Gross: My greatest St Barth regret is that I never met Remy de Haenen, though he was still on the island running Eden Rock when I first visited. At the time, the hotel was down on its heels. I especially wish I’d come earlier, when de Haenen was in his prime, his wife and daughters were island sex symbols, and the sizzle of sex and sin still attached to the place. But the first thing I’d ask is for him to recall his first impressions. An interview should always start with easy questions designed to get the subject comfortable telling their stories.

 

AP: Of everything you uncovered while researching Treasured Island, what surprised you most?
MG: The island is not what you read about in the press. I knew that, but the full force of it hit me hard. It’s not Christmas week. It’s not celebrities, though they certainly do go there. It’s a complex society in which natives, the French, who are called metros or metropolitans, and visitors from other countries, particularly, the US, but also South America, Italy, the UK and for a time, Russia, mix and mingle. It’s not always pretty. The tensions sometimes heat up into hatred. There was even once a riot during a protest against cruise ships. These are deep waters!

 

What does an island let you see about wealth that 740 Park or Fifteen Central Park West didn’t?
MG: How it relaxes or rather, never relaxes. I joke this book is 740 Park at the beach. The vacation styles of the rich and famous are different, and not just because they have more money. But you can’t generalize. Some of the rich on St Barth are pathetic wrecks. Others do really admirable things. For every coke snorting degenerate there’s a David Rockefeller, paying for a hospital here, a playground for island children there. It’s a complex, fascinating place.

 

AP: Was there an interview you conducted that changed the direction of the book?
MG: Oddly enough yes, but it wasn’t done for the book. In 1996, I interviewed Brook Lacour, an American married to a well-born guy from Guadeloupe. They started the villa rental business on St Barth, and I argue they inspired Airbnb. Over pizza one night at a restaurant called Topolino, she gave me the lay of the land and exposed the hidden layers under the island’s tropical sheen. I describe that conversation in great detail in the book.

 

AP: Is there a version of the island that died with Jimmy Buffett?
MG: It was long gone before Buffett died, but yes, the island’s sex-drugs-and-party years lasted from the Seventies into the early Eighties and you can get high yourself reading the pages about that. Today’s pay-to-party scene on the island pales next to what happened then.

 

AP: Who turned out to be more interesting than you expected?
MG: So many of them! Bruno Magras is the island’s George Washington. I had a cardboard cutout idea of him. The real thing is a complicated, deeply knowledgeable and hilarious man who loves the island dearly but doesn’t give a shit about scorching people’s feelings. He tells it like it is. And there are many restaurant, real estate agency and hotel owners whose stories knocked me out.

 

AP: You leave the question unanswered in the book, but, after all your research and work on Treasured Island, would Rémy de Haenen be, in your opinion, proud of what he started, or ask “My God, what have I done?”
MG: I think he would be, but he’d also be concerned because the central drama of the book is how St. Barth careened towards a tipping point, and whether it will manage to keep its balance in a world where luxury tourism destinations fall in and out of favor like the ball in a roulette wheel.  Will the house keep winning on St. Barth? That’s the question I couldn’t answer. Only time will tell, but good people are fighting hard for the island’s future.

 

AP: What did you have to cut (if anything) that hurt?
MG: All the good stuff is in there. And yet, it’s the tightest, shortest book I’ve ever published. Lean and mean. Just like a St Barth beach body!

 

AP: Is there a version of the island’s future that still feels optimistic to you?
MG: Let’s put it this way: I’ve booked the little house I rent through 2028. I’m a believer.

 

AP: What would you like the reader to take away from reading the book?
MG: The feeling that they’ve spent a week on St Barth, gotten tan, both stimulated and relaxed, had great food, wine and fun, and can’t wait to return.

 

Michael Gross