![]() Friends of mine returned to their Palm Beach home one evening in November 2016 to find burglars had broken their safe out of the wall and carried it off with about $1.5 million in jewelry. Under her watch, the Shiny Sheet has changed from a good small-town newspaper with local columnists, ample news and local advertisers into a narrow shill for real estate and the charity machine. I had dinner at her modest apartment and did a number of recorded interviews with her about her life in Palm Beach. When I was writing my 2009 book about Palm Beach, Madness Under the Royal Palms, I got to know Donnelly. “If you promise not to get ‘personal’ with me, I will promise not to show you as the crude, fat and obnoxious slob which everyone knows you are.” “Let’s make a deal,” he wrote in a letter he sent to her as well as to the top executives at the Palm Beach Daily News and Cox Enterprises, the parent company. ![]() It was a subject that everyone who came in contact with the society editor at social events studiously avoided. In a town obsessed with thinness, Donnelly was overweight. When Trump was negotiating unsuccessfully to build a casino in association with the Seminole Indians, in 1996, Donnelly asked in her column “whether Florida’s Native Americans will forgive or forget his past indiscretions-such as his reported references to Connecticut’s dark-skinned Pequots as the ‘Michael Jordan Indians’ and his observation that ‘organized crime is rampant on the Indian reservation.’” Trump, then as now, had a way of knowing what would hurt a person most and then went there as hard as he could. It was one thing to attack Trump’s mistress, but it got serious when Donnelly struck out against the mogul’s business interests. A T-bone in a kennel has a better chance. Still, mistress to a married, then divorced man and mother to his love child. In her column, she wrote, “Marla Maples: Miss America looks and Mar-a-Lago, too. But Donnelly nevertheless made her the least likely candidate. Maples was happy mothering the new born Tiffany, and had absolutely no interest in leading society. The following month she wrote a column handicapping ten candidates to be the next social queen of Palm Beach society. Nowhere did the daily mention the unseemly business- and readers who are particularly sensitive should turn away right now-that Donald and Marla were not married.ĭonnelly, however, was not going to let this ugly business rest there. But what could she do when the story was all over the place? The Shiny Sheet had no choice but to give the birth front page coverage. Donnelly would clearly have preferred not to write about such a scandal. That October, Marla Maples gave birth to Tiffany Trump at Good Samaritan Hospital in West Palm Beach, its every moment chronicled in The National Enquirer. Her frequent assaults gave great pleasure to the scions of the old Palm Beach, who despised Trump and everything for which he stood. The columnist wrote about him with unrelieved savagery and ridicule. Soon after the flamboyant, studiously vulgar Trump arrived in the 80s, Donnelly treated him like Genghis Khan come to destroy everything of grace and honor on the island. “They think it makes them look more important to be not nice.” This held true with the king of new money, of course. “New Money thinks that the way to act is to be nasty,” she once told me. Given her background, one might presume that Donnelly would be sympathetic toward the New Money arriving on the island. No one wants to cross her since a few words in her column can make or break socially ambitious residents of the island. Traditionally, society reporters have been fallen daughters of the upper-class, fully conversant with the elite they cover, but Donnelly is the daughter of a police officer, and she views the social scene like an old time beat cop, perfectly willing to mete out a few taps with his bully club to keep order intact. It might seem a royal rip-off, but Palm Beachers gladly pay to look at the photos of partygoers and read the column by society editor Shannon Donnelly.īesides Trump, Donnelly is arguably the most powerful person on the island, and there’s almost no important social event that she doesn’t attend. During the week, the paper often is only four pages long despite its $2 price. That’s where the Palm Beach Daily News got its nickname: the Shiny Sheet. ![]() When Donald Trump wakes up before dawn at Mar-a-Lago, if he indeed ever gets there, a stack of newspapers will likely be waiting for him, including one printed on paper that will not smudge.
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