The New Yorker:

Having starred opposite Lana Turner and Olivia de Havilland and done a stint as Colonel Sanders, the ultra-tan movie idol returns to the land of Mar-a-Lago.

By Bob Morris

When George Hamilton moved back to Palm Beach, last year, friends in high places suggested that he run for mayor. They thought that the suave, impeccably dressed actor, who had spent his teen-age years learning to tan, wear loafers without socks, and act in plays at Palm Beach High School, embodied the city. “I’d be happy to be mayor if I didn’t have to get up and do anything,” Hamilton said the other day, over lunch at Swifty’s, the restaurant in the historic (and very pink) Colony Hotel. “Maybe I should ask if I can be honorary mayor instead.”

Or at least a mediator. In recent months, tensions have been running high on this multibillion-dollar sandbar, which is once again the off-site headquarters of the President. Residents are contending, again, with the noise of surveillance helicopters and with the regular closing of South Ocean Boulevard, the artery that passes Mar-a-Lago. “The security is beyond, and the people who own near him are being driven crazy,” Hamilton said, from behind a plate of salmon. “But he loves having his own personal army. It’s human nature.”

A natural diplomat, Hamilton, who is eighty-five, sees no point in talking politics. “Just don’t get into it,” he said. “Why pull on Superman’s cape?” But he did mention that the portrait of Donald Trump that hangs in Mar-a-Lago—the one of him in a white tennis sweater—is by the same artist who painted a portrait of Hamilton that used to hang in his mansion in Beverly Hills. He sold the place, all thirty-nine rooms of it, in 1987, when his career was waning and his marriage to Alana Stewart was long over. “My portrait was bigger than his,” Hamilton said with a smile, his white teeth and white hair gleaming against his ascot and deep tan.

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