The Rubells in Miami

If you and your kid sister got a chance to develop a major hotel while still in your mid-20s, and you’d spent your whole lives staring at the most daring contemporary art without ever really leaving home, you might come up with something like what Jason and Jennifer Rubell are creating in a scruffy boho pocket of Miami’s South Beach.

Together with their parents, Don and Mera, they are renovating the 110-acre Albion Hotel, right around the corner from Ian Schrager’s recently opened Delano.

“South Beach isn’t Bali,” says Jason as he guides me past construction workers, through the still-raw and dusty entrance of the hotel on a muggy October morning. “It’s an urban resort, and what we’re trying to do here is take people off this very urban street and into our own intimate world.”

When the renovations are complete and the Albion opens, early this year, the hotel, built in 1939, in the first heady rush of Miami’s premelanoma glory, will look from the street like a great ocean liner and have some of the same free-floating sufficiency: The pool, for example, will be bordered by its own man-made beach, complete with palm trees and breeze machines. “The lobby is going to be very elegant and slightly dislocating,” says Jennifer, whose riffs bring to mind a young Susan Sontag who’d gone into hotels instead of criticism. “It will have this almost twisted modernist, sort of cubist chair, and a constantly changing water holographic element.” Employees will wear deconstructivist uniforms designed by Susan Cianciolo, and an enormous rendering of a Falabella horse, by Sarah Morris and Liam Gillick, will hang in the bar. The painting, Jennifer says, “will serve as a kind of starting gate for the dreamworld of the hotel.”

Like the family behind it, the Albion’s arty ambitions are striking and unique. As I learn more about both, I realize how closely this self-contained aquatic paradise, which allows guests to peer out at the funky streets from the cozy security of a luxury hotel, resembles the Rubells themselves, who look out on the world from the fortlike security of their cohesive family.

That a pair of siblings barely out of college, whose résumés might not land them an interview for your basic soul-destroying $21,000-a-year job, should find themselves conceiving and executing a $10 million hotel is the result of both avuncular largesse and parents willing to go to great lengths to ensure that their children feel good about themselves. The money and precedent came from their tortured, visionary uncle, Steve Rubell. Rubell will forever be remembered for his role in creating New York’s Studio 54, a nightclub so transcendent that on any given night one might have seen politicians hitting on movie stars or Bianca Jagger riding a white horse. But it is the small New York hotel that he and Schrager refurbished, after their rehabilitation in federal prison for tax evasion, that represents his most lucrative brainstorm: With Morgans, Rubell discovered that by hiring an outlandish European designer to redo the lobby, splashing a couple of coats of paint on the walls, an putting a Robert Mapplethorpe print in every room, they could turn a fleabag into a “boutique hotel.” The formula was so repeatable that two hotels (New York’s Royalton and Paramount) and less than 10 years later, he and Schrager were worth an estimated $200 million. When Rubell died, in 1989, at age 45, he left his share of the business to the only future he was still connected to- his older brother, Don, and Don’s two children.

The once-close relationship between Schrager and his new partners quickly deteriorated over what Don Rubell calls issues of “disclosure,” as Schrager negotiated to buy them out. The dispute was settled out of court, but the bad blood remains. Though Jason insists that the Rubells didn’t go out of their way to establish their first major project a block from where Schrager just spent $28 million to redo the 208-room Delano, he concedes that the proximity “adds some spice.” Nor is this likely to be a onetime shoot-out. Don, who says his family has discovered that “the hotel business satisfies a great many of its needs,” suspects that they and Schrager will soon be competing for guests in one city after another.

When I talk with Don the next afternoon, in the family’s nearly furnitureless Miami Beach apartment directly overlooking the Atlantic, I get a sense of what was driving Steve so hard.

At five feet eight, Steve was so small that he had to stand on a stool to man his velvet rope. Don is six four, and even on his back, with his recently operated-on knee propped up on a chair, he has the physical authority of a bouncer. Steve was good enough at tennis to play on the team at Syracuse University; Don was good enough to play in the U.S. national championships at 18, and at 45 he was a top-ranked amateur in America. Steve was gay; Don is an obstetrician.

You also see why Steve never held it against him. Jennifer tells me that when that when her uncle and father were growing up in Brooklyn, Steve woke up one morning and drew a line down the center of their bedroom, announcing that from that moment on, his older brother was forever barred from crossing it. Don shrugged and said fine.

Even when you first meet him, Don, who describes his role in his family’s almost corporate structure as that of the dreamer, exuded the calm magnanimity of someone who refused to be distracted from the bigger picture. Not that he’s a pushover. After not playing tennis seriously for half a dozen years, he prepared himself for the national 45-and-over championship by reading books on torture, and he claims he has never lost a match during which the temperature exceeded 100 degrees. And so when Don learned about his family’s phenomenal windfall, he wondered what might be done to precent it from screwing up Rubells for generations.

The proposed solution was an offshoot of another major family undertaking. For more than 20 years, Don and Mera have been among the most active collectors of contemporary art in the world, concentrating for the sake of economy and adventure on young, emerging artists. “There is nothing the least bit attractive about the impulse to collect art,” says a New York art dealer, “but the Rubells at least bring a certain human warmth to it.”

They also bring their kids. For the Rubells, who for a number of years hosted a famous party after the opening of New York’s Whitney Biennial, collecting isn’t so much aesthetic as conversational, intellectual, and social grist for the family mill. Before they were 10 years old, Jason and Jennifer, who both later majored in art history in college, were not only ingesting the latest artspeak and accompanying their parents to studios but voting in the family’s kitchen-table elections on whether to buy or pass on a certain Keith Haring, Jeff Koons, or Paul McCarthy.

Time will determine the quality of their choices but a tour through the former Miami Drug Enforcement Administration warehouse that now houses the Rubell Family Collection (open to the public three days a week) reveals that they didn’t play it safe. Much of its 40,000 square feet is devoted to artists whose work is raw, obscene, and nightmarishly immense.

In a space about the size of a small basketball court, Beverly Semmes has installed three towering gown with 70-foot trains; in another, Jose Bedia has created an overwhelming piece around a life raft actually used by Cuban refugees. Around the corner is Charles Ray’s hilariously provocative 'Oh...Charlie, Charlie, Charlie', which New York art consultant Jeffrey Deitch calls “among the most important pieces of the ‘90s.” It consists of a circle of eight hyperrealistic casts of a naked Ray engaged in their own exclusive orgy. As Jennifer, Jason, and Mera walk around the oral daisy chain, Mera, as if oblivious to the masturbatory rutting, observes that Ray uses the same flesh tones as the Renaissance masters. Jennifer points out a Charlie on the periphery sweetly patting the back of another Charlie’s head. “That’s my favorite,” she says.

Even with their recent cash injection, the Rubells have continued to focus on the newest artists, those on the first few stairs of the escalator. It’s turned them into professional cognoscenti who pride themselves on getting in early and cheap. Don saw in South Beach, where Jason had a small gallery after college, the same sense of frontier that they were without giving much thought to the enormous effort and inconvenience (that was the point, really), he packed his family off to Miami with instructions to start building a real-estate empire. In their current arrangement, only Mera and Jason are based in Miami full-time. In the summers, Mera commutes from the Rubells’ beach house in Sagaponack, Long Island; the rest of the year, Don flies south on weekends from Manhattan. Jennifer flies in and out as needed.

Drawing on Mera’s experience as a major commercial broker in New York, the Rubells quickly bought, refurbished, and filled two large retail buildings and bought the DEA warehouse. Then, as a hotel warm-up, they bought the Greenview, a dilapidated 45-room hotel, and in textbook Morgans fashion, right down to the photographic prints in every room, they turned it into a trendy little cash cow.

During my three days in Miami, I spent virtually every waking moment with the Rubells. They are incredibly seductive, particularly together. And they know it, dangling in their negotiations, whether for a piece of art or real estate or PR, the tantalizing possibility of their prolonged family embrace.

World-renowned artist like Ross Bleckner and Eric Fischl are always wandering in an out of their kitchen in Sagaponack. And in a letter published in the catalog for Jason’s collection (Jason started collecting in his own right at 14), Ron M. Fischer describes how as a young artist, Fischer “basked in their attention and loved them for it” and “felt abandoned...like a child” when inevitably the family redirected it toward some younger, fresher talent. The tacit promise of the Rubells’ friendship seems also to have been a factor in convincing the previous oner of the Albion, who for years had rebuffed all offers for her hotel, to accept theirs. “Not only did Mera convince her to sell it to us,” says Don, “but now we have to go to her nephew’s wedding on Montreal next month.”

Another family strength is the clarity of its management structures. Everyone has discrete responsibilities and seems to accept them without rancor or debate as the most appropriate for his talents.

Jason, who is 28 and the most driven and unassuming of the four, is in the pit doing the grunt work. He spends his days on-site, working with subcontractors, making sure the electric is up to code and the elevator passes inspection. Since the project began, he has lived in a room at the Greenview and, as his father says, “put his life on hold.” During our time together, he blurted out, without any protective irony, “I am desperate to succeed.”

Jennifer, 26, occupies the most exalted and fragile role in the hierarchy. She is the artist-princess, the genius daughter who went to Harvard; when she arrives in town, Jason is sent to the airport to pick her up. But she’s also the most maternal, the family cook, the one who “just wants everyone to be happy.”

“My role is to go out and gather information,” she says. A student of the Culinary Institute of America, in Hyde Park, NY, she travels to out-of-the-way ethnic markets in search of exotic foodstuffs and unusual products. While I am with them, she prepares a perfect lunch at her parents’ apartment that includes Spanish cheese (manchego) and a tropical fruit that no one else at the table has ever come across.

Jennifer is the one who broods over the irreducible essence of a hotel and its service and ponders how the Albion could spin it differently. When I ask what she is aiming for, she says, “The feeling you might get from a really good host, in a really nice country home, in a really nice century.”

Jennifer is also the most like Steve, and the only one who ever went to one of his clubs alone (she would leave a wig on her bedroom pillow to dupe her parents). Perhaps because of her closeness to her uncle, who never publicly acknowledged that he was gay or, as was rumored, that he had AIDS, she is the most in touch with the dark side of the family contract. When I comment on the Eden-like quality of her background, which manages to provide both security and excitement, she replies, “Would it seem so much like paradise if you could never leave?”

Just before I head off for the airport, Mera summons me for a last-minute chat. A warm, compact woman who wears long skirts and sandals, she is the unstoppable matriarch: According to family legend, she walked the width of Russia barefoot before immigrating to the country when she was 13. She has called me in to make absolutely certain that I understand that this story is about Jennifer and Jason rather than her, and to warn me that if I get it wrong, “it could be very hurtful.” Then she tells me that she hopes I and my kids will be her guests at the hotel after it opens.

If Don is the visionary, Mera is the expediter. “I deal with the realities of life,” she says. “I’m happy to do it, because I do it better than anybody else. I’m sure they could, too, but they have the privilege not to.”

As I leave, I imagine the Rubells’ projected fleet of hotels, with their tempting mix of comfort and stimulation, steaming through the scary night. Who wouldn’t want to
climb aboard?