Urban Razzle, Fatal Glamour

By R.Z. Sheppard

In writing as in real estate, the operating word is location. Readers like to travel, to escape to a setting, preferably hot, sticky and fatally glamorous. Certain television producers understand this instinctively, which is why Don Johnson and Philip Michael Thomas do not star in a show called Toronto Vice. Canada's rising cosmopolis may suggest a bright promise of public responsibility and efficiency, but it is Miami whose hard-edged pastels define the pitiless sensuality of the '80s.

South Florida is also alluring as a beachhead for Latin American culture, politics and business, some of it conducted conspicuously with drug money packed in suitcases. This, in turn, has attracted a large number of state and federal agents, whose aims and agendas do not always coincide. Such activities go far to explain the growing number of curious writers who have fattened their frequent-flyer accounts with regular trips in and out of Miami International Airport.

The best known is Joan Didion, a native Californian with literary and intellectual power bases in Los Angeles and Manhattan. Lengthy excerpts from her book, simply titled Miami (Simon & Schuster; 240 pages; $17.95), appeared over the summer in the New York Review of Books. Didion's credentials as ; novelist and essayist are well established. Play It as It Lays set the '70s standard for Southern California malaise, and her journalism was carefully calibrated to record fine cracks in sanity and personal relationships. She has expanded more recent reportage and fiction (Salvador, Democracy) to poke along the fault lines of the commonweal.

Didion is a virtuoso of the moods of violence and intrigue, but the complexity of public subjects frequently causes her chiseled prose to shift into the arabesque line that runs from Tocqueville to Murray Kempton. "I never passed through security for a flight to Miami," she writes early in her new book, "without experiencing a certain weightlessness, the heightened wariness of having left the developed world for a more fluid atmosphere, one in which the native distrust of extreme possibilities that tended to ground the temperate United States in an obeisance to democratic institutions seemed rooted, if at all, only shallowly."

T.D. Allman (Miami: City of the Future; Atlantic Monthly Press; 422 pages; $22.50) and David Rieff (Going to Miami: Exiles, Tourists, and Refugees in the New America; Little, Brown; 230 pages; $16.95) feel less threatened by Miami's possibilities: the former because he finds the city's history, architecture and ethnic mingle fun; the latter because he is distanced by irony.

Allman, a Florida-born journalist who was educated at Harvard and Oxford, offers the livelier version of the city's emergence from alligator swamp to Casablanca, U.S.A. His candidate for founding mother is Julia Tuttle, the independent wife of a Cleveland industrialist who persuaded Henry Flagler to extend his Florida East Coast Railway to the shores of Biscayne Bay, where Tuttle had inherited land from her father. The area promised freedom from the occasional winter frosts that inconvenienced rich vacationers 70 miles north at Palm Beach.

The railroad begat hotels, including, naturally enough, Flagler's Royal Palm. By 1896 the city of Miami was incorporated, and, shortly after, racial segregation became a fact of real estate development. Blacks found themselves on the other side of Flagler's track with their backs to the Everglades; they would not return to the shoreline until 1945, when the municipality granted them use of a small beach accessible by boat. Despite their significant numbers (about 20% of the city's population of 372,000, compared with upwards of 60% for Hispanics), Miami's blacks get a small part in these books about < urban razzle. The unfortunate exception is the Liberty City riot of 1980, when white-owned stores were set on fire, more than 300 people injured and 18 killed, some dragged from their cars and beaten and burned to death. The violence was sparked by the acquittal of four Dade County policemen, on trial for various charges related to the killing of Arthur McDuffie, a 33-year-old black insurance agent who had been stopped on his motorcycle after a high- speed chase.

Miami Herald Police Reporter Edna Buchanan's graphic account of the McDuffie case and its aftermath is buried in The Corpse Had a Familiar Face: Covering Miami, America's Hottest Beat, to be published next month (Random House; 288 pages; $17.95). She reported the story and remains unconvinced by defense arguments that McDuffie died of crash injuries. The balance of the book is a recollecting of her 16-year career as Miami's murder maven. "I have reported more than 5,000 violent deaths," she boasts. "Many of the corpses have had familiar faces: cops and killers, politicians and prostitutes, doctors and lawyers. Some were my friends."

Buchanan writes in an old-fashioned whiplash style and loves her work. Her best years were 1980-81, when Miami became the homicide capital of the nation; she counts 1,191 killings for the period. Many were casualties of the drug wars. She describes gunplay as common, with morning pedestrians sidestepping the night's victims, senior citizens ducking for cover in hotel lobbies, and a New Year's Eve when hundreds of Miamians celebrated by shooting out car windows, power transformers and streetlights. A twin-engine Cessna carrying five passengers landed at Miami airport that night with bullet holes in its tail section. Buchanan provides the earth tones pinked over by the producers of Miami Vice.

But there can be no drowning out of the city's predominantly Latin beat. David Rieff, an editor at the New York City publishing house of Farrar, Straus & Giroux and the son of Critic Susan Sontag, is beguiled by old buildings that were inspired by fantasies of Moorish Spain and are now inhabited by cocaine cowboys from the Caribbean and South America. He forays among Cuban exiles and their U.S.-born children to talk to writers, artists, intellectuals and yuccas (young, up-and-coming Cuban Americans). He is impressed by their energy, ambition and sense of humor. Among the local jokes is this one about the marielitos, jailbirds and misfits that Fidel Castro unloaded on the U.S. in | 1980: "A marielito is driving along on Interstate 95 when he gets a flat tire. He pulls over and starts to change it. A second marielito stops behind him, gets out, and asks: 'What's up? Need any help?' The first guy starts to explain about the tire, but the second guy cuts him off. 'No, you get the tire,' he says; 'I'll get the radio.' "

Cultural divisions among Anglos and Latins have also prompted bumper-sticker humor. WILL THE LAST AMERICAN TO LEAVE SOUTH FLORIDA PLEASE BRING THE FLAG? is a popular example. Allman gets his kick when North meets South, as in the alliance of David Kennedy, Miami's former Anglo mayor, and Rosario Arguelles, an exiled Havana debutante who married Kennedy in 1984 and was elected to the city commission the following year.

Didion is drawn to explore the back channels of power. Her sources are mainly books, articles and public documents about the connections among anti- Castro Cuban refugees and anti-Communist activists in the U.S. Government. The ties -- clear, confusing and some crazy enough to be true -- are there, as the Iran-contra hearings disclosed. Veracity, rumor, deceit and braggadocio are hard to separate. "To spend time in Miami is to acquire a certain fluency in cognitive dissonance" is Didion's evaluation of her experience. Translated from the Latinate, this means she could not make sense out of the town. To compensate, she relies on her feel for the ominous, a proven ability that can make readers believe there may even be rough beasts slouching toward the teddy bear department of F.A.O. Schwarz.

For hard facts with a resonant ring, few can match the one dredged up by Rieff: Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot had its U.S. premiere at the Coconut Grove Playhouse in 1956. Quien es Godot? Quien sabe? The play is a masterpiece about waiting and making everything from nothing, a feat, these literary carpetbaggers convince us, that is not uncommon in Miami.