THE MICHAEL DOUGLAS
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Spotlight: Bermuda
Travel and Leisure
September 1997
Two years ago actor Michael Douglas's family decided to fix rather than sell its Bermuda resort Ariel Sands, and already when Jack Nicholson shows up, by private jet and late to avoid crowds, wearing a lime-green suit and purple shirt and black shoes with white fur on their tops ("Would look like hell on anybody else," general manager Jaso,n Powell says, "but it looked pretty cool on Jack"), and asks, "Where's Mikey?" (Douglas), and wakes him up and when he finally retires asks, of the loud and seeming electronic chirping of the ubiquitous tree frogs, "What's that noise?", and is told, "It's little green frogs calling each other, Jack," Jack says, "Ain't that sweet."
Of the frogs and of the hotel, he is correct. By walking out your door you can snorkel a reef full of parrotfish and a beautiful cobalt-trimmed angelfish-shaped fish I'm too icthyologically stupid to identify. My companion, an appellation I find so cloyingly coy I'll herewith call her Compania, signed up for Yon-Ka Seaweed Body at the state-of-the-art spa and got herself packed in seaweed and rolled up in a space blanket to stew in there like, she says, a hot dog, and came out so much softer than she went in that I said, "Sei piu pelligrossa," which means You are more dangerous, when I meant "La sua pelle e piu morbida," which means Your skin is softer. And it was--is. Yon-Ka Seaweed Body works.
There is a half-serious joke about town that a facelift clinic that was planned for the hospital is actually going to be secretly operated by Ariel Sands' new beauty spa for Douglas's Hollywood friends to come down and get a quickie on the sly. There is an "old Bermuda" that is not happy with the prospect of things Hollywood, which are probably kindred to things jump-up, and Powell has taken actual heat about impending celebrity. He's staying the course: he threatens a star-hosted golf tournament, with Nicholson and Douglas of course, and Sharon Stone and Demi Moore and Danny DeVito. He laughs--he's not serious; nor is he altogether joking. Don't count it out: Nicholson dressed as the Joker, a natural for Bermuda shorts, disturbing the halcyon fairway morning: "It's tee time!"
A year and a half ago Powell at Ariel Sands and friend Stephen Jones at Newstead Hotel were plucked from their parallel positions as food &beverage directors at the two huge Princess Hotels and made general managers at their respective smaller establishments that had over time gone moribund. Jones's Newstead was landscape green and invisible on its hillside overlooking Hamilton Bay; it got yellow paint on the outside and became thereby a suddenly much larger property than even locals had thought it. Ariel Sands put yellow paint and plexiglas and sail cloth on the inside, a bright coral on the outside, and things are more abuzz about seeming small changes like this than you'd think they'd be.
Powell, who likes to spearfish, and Jones, a former SCUBA instructor and boxing enthusiast, slightly bull-necked and with a hint of a split lip to show for it, are what might be called Bermuda's Young Hotel Turks. They are looking to the smart and the casual. They have installed excellent restaurants at their hotels in efforts to escape what Powell calls the hotel dining room syndrome wherein "you shovel food to the guests of the hotel. We wanted a restaurant." At his Caliban's he has got that: locals eat there. At Newstead, Compania had the finest Bermudian fish cakes--a ubiquitous island dish of fish and potato and banana and chutney in a croquette--in the egalitarian world, by which I mean it was good, and the fish chowder, also pandemic, matched it. Their friend and third Young Hotel Turk at Newstead's sister property Horizon Hotel, Allen Paris, who bears edgy resemblance to John Cleese, serves a buffet of grilled local fish--wahoo and grouper (called rockfish) and tuna--that makes you wonder how the buffet ever got its bad name. The food on this island is exquisite, and free of the sun-dried tomato and anchiote-pepper-seed-confit salsa.
At Mr. Paris's buffet, Compania and I met a couple of Older Young Hotel Turks, June and Giff Stanton, who run Tranquility House and Marley Beach Cottages, which offers perhaps the most private beach on the island (they have trouble with guests going nude). It also offers an almost tame heron who feeds on land crabs poolside and patiently observes you clean up his mess.
Perhaps because I'd watched Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? on TV the night before (except for the two local stations and BBC World, Bermuda TV is American TV), or perhaps because June Stanton really does suggest her, I got the loveliest waft of Elizabeth Taylor when June Stanton says things like, "On Bermuda if something isn't critical, we don't do it. We just have a long lunch and a nap. We call this being oleandered." Once June Stanton took a long lunch and a nap while a ficus oleandered in her yard and she woke up and had to pay $10,000 to have it evacuated. Bermuda, then, is a paradisiacal paradox: the civilized beach town (with a tree of knowledge on it).
You cannot be more than half a mile from a beach, and no biker has tattoos, no bike has more than five horsepower, and no one, government or private, is messing with you. You rent your scooter and wring hard the handlebar, wild, as the late poet James Dickey put it, to be wreckage forever. Stop, eat, golf, serve and volley, spend some money, wring the handlebar home to your hotel.
It is hard to be wreckage forever at 20 miles an hour, even if you forget, as you will, to drive on the left and have to be gently coaxed over by the understanding opposing stream of traffic, and you wind up ultimately resting at your hotel, which is what it is for. Back at Ariel Sands, envious of Compania's more dangerous softness, I hire Caroline in the spa to lay hands on me (Sports Massage), wisely skipping Body Fat Testing.
Caroline tells me there are bad areas on Bermuda--"Well, not bad but . . . dodgy."
"Dodgy?"
"Yes, dodgy. But I'm a girl from a small village in Yorkshire, and everything must be just so."
As Caroline discovers and reduces crunchy things in me, I too begin to embrace the Just So. Bermuda is the Just So. And the Just So stops just short of the Fastidious. It is time this hotel knew Compania's real name.
I go in to the office and tell them that Mr. Douglas starred in The American President opposite Annette Benning playing a character named Sidney Ellen Wade, and Compania's real name is Sidney Ellen Wade, and she's from New Rochelle, New York, where the director of that movie, Carl Reiner, is from (where his father's Dick Van Dyke Show was fictively set, by the way, I keep on), and the writer of that movie, Aaron Sorkin, is from Scarsdale, about two minutes away, and they won't acknowledge that they used her name, probably because they are scared, when we are not even mad, and while we've come to expect quivery behavior of Hollyweirdos (I take this term from Lynyrd Skynyrd, with whom I went to school, I explain) we don't expect it of Mr. Douglas, so call him and ask him down to meet the real Sidney Ellen Wade, more soft and dangerous than the movie Sidney Ellen Wade. "Just so you know," I conclude, and repair to my room and sit out on my terrace in the cool, Atlantic moonlight, and then scuff around the property looking for horse teeth, because a cab driver told me 500 horses are buried here, who had to be slaughtered because the automobile had rendered them obsolete and the war had rendered them hungry, and management lives in fear of a child unearthing remains and terrifying itself, and not finding any teeth I admire all things cobalt and aquamarine and tangerine, and have a very good time awaiting Mr. Douglas or Jack, whoever shows up first.
Ariel Sands, 34 South Shore Rd., Devonshire, Bermuda; 800/468-6610 or 441/236-0087; doubles from $290.
The information in this story was accurate at the time it was published in September 1997, but we suggest you confirm all details and prices directly with the service establishments before making travel plans. |
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