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Serious Fun
Dan Weil
03/01/2008
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To be sure, they do party for causes. Cloutier thinks that all
the money people spend on preparing a charity event and on clothes and jewelry
for the shindig would be better spent on the charity itself. "But when they say,
‘Just send a check,’ no one does." He also thinks the charity balls in Palm
Beach tend to be dull affairs; the real party comes when the couple goes out at
10:30 p.m. after the balls end, and he indulges in Dewar’s and she in champagne
until the wee hours.
Inevitably, Cloutier will enlist support for this cause and others by hosting parties. |
"But I didn’t get here by being a fun and frivolous guy,"
Cloutier says. He grew up middle class in Portland, Maine; his father was a
program developer for the Department of Labor and his mother was a teacher. His
intelligence and ambition got him admitted to Harvard, where he launched his
first business—a very early computer dating service—with another student. In
recent years, Cloutier has set up the Lucile Cloutier Scholarship, named after
his mother, to help girls who graduate from public schools in Maine to go to
Harvard.
Twice divorced and childless, Cloutier had an active social
life before he met Spadafora, a former nurse. "But she’s augmented it, because
she’s much better-looking than I am," he says.
The two are notable in Palm Beach as a breed of Richistani who
do not merely wear their rather humble origins proudly, but believe that is the
whole point: They are living proof that anyone can make it big, and more or less
anyone who likes to have a good time is welcome to attend their parties and
witness five-star fun in action. For the past two Decembers the couple has
brought in wounded veterans of the war in Iraq, along with the usual party
crowd, for a fundraiser to help young men and women who lost limbs in the war
compete in the annual Marathon of the Palm Beaches. The host and hostess always
work the crowd, trying to meet everyone, if only for a minute or two.
"There are a lot of guys like him who come in with a splash and
throw parties," says Richard Rampell, a Palm Beach accountant. "I’ve been to a
few, and it’s a pretty vacuous life. But he seems to have more direction."
Rampell was impressed that when he went to a Democratic fundraiser at Cloutier’s
house, several top senators showed up, including Ted Kennedy.
Then there was the Cloutier-Spadafora party last summer in Nantucket where, according to a report in Roll Call, present and former senators
Maria Cantwell, Sherrod Brown, Debbie Stabenow and John Breaux unwound from the
Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee’s annual meeting by grinding on the
dance floor to the Village People’s "YMCA."
A guy who throws parties like that can make friends in high
places, but he also lives with a nagging worry about being taken seriously. "But we will be who we are," Cloutier says. "We know how much we contribute to
charity. We’re not promoting class warfare. We just want to have fun and do
things our way. We will continue doing things our way. If someone doesn’t like
that parade, that’s OK."
Dan Weil is a freelance writer based in West Palm Beach,
Fla.
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