Every kid who grew up in Palm Beach County in the 1960s and ‘70s remembers Tony Glenn — the weatherman on WPTV-Ch. 5 who doubled as local TV’s most debonair host.
Glenn was 6-foot-2 and handsome, with a booming voice and hair styled in a pompadour.
“His hair was so shiny and black, we used to joke, ‘Hey, Tony, is that Atlantic 40-weight oil on your hair?” the late Buck Kinnaird, Channel 5’s first sports anchor, once told me.
Channel 5 went on the air in 1954 and became WPTV the year I was born, 1956. It was the county’s first TV station.
Television technology was so primitive at the time, Glenn’s weather map was made out of the plastic lining of inner tubes, and icons for clouds, rain and low-pressure systems were stuck on the map with magnets. If there was a front moving from west to east, Glenn had to pick up the clouds and move them to another part of the map.
He did all this while dressed in the blue uniform of an Atlantic gas station attendant, because his weather report was sponsored by Atlantic Gas.
“For years, Tony was ‘Your Atlantic Weatherman,’” Kinnaird recalled. “He had to wear that uniform, with a little bow tie, and he didn’t like it very much, but there wasn’t a wrinkle in it. He was very professional. He wore Max Factor No. 7 pancake makeup, and he didn’t take the makeup off after the broadcast when we’d all go out to eat. People lined up for his autograph.”
Tony Glenn had the name and the look of a movie star. We didn’t realize until he passed away on Feb. 18, 2001, that his real name was Julian Bronstein.
For children of the ‘70s, Glenn seemed to be everywhere. He was the host of local programs “Whiz Kids” and “Let’s Dance” — Channel 5 had air-time to fill — and also of my favorite local show, “Opening Night at the Royal Poinciana Playhouse.”
I lived in Lake Worth, on the other side of the Intracoastal and a galaxy away from Palm Beach. When new plays opened at the Royal Poinciana Playhouse — every Monday night in season — I was glued to our 15-inch TV console to see a tux-clad Tony interview the richy-rich swells and celebrities walking into the playhouse on the red carpet.
Rubbing elbows with the swells who attended opening night
This was such a big deal for locals, onlookers would dress to the nines and crowd around, hoping for their chance to see, say, Ted Kennedy or his mother, Rose. They might even get on TV.
Glenn fancied this job more than doing the weather, Kinnaird told me. “He was in seventh heaven on that red carpet.”
Society photographer Bob Davidoff was stationed along the red carpet, too. “There was a show outside as well as inside,” Davidoff said in a 1982 press report.
The 13-year-old me was mesmerized. “Opening Night at the Royal Poinciana Playhouse” was my introduction to the power of paparazzi: glamorous people captured by the TV cameras and by still photographers with their big Graflex Speed Graphic cameras and giant flash bulbs.
Their photographs opened my eyes to a world beyond Lake Worth. For kids like me, just going to downtown West Palm Beach to shop at Burdine’s was a huge deal. The Royal Poinciana Plaza, with the playhouse fronting the Intracoastal, might as well have been on the moon.
And yet … here was Tony Glenn, the weatherman, shmoozing with Mary Sanford, then considered the “queen of Palm Beach.” Sanford often showed up at the Royal Poinciana with her best friend Rose Kennedy.
I didn’t know who she was at the time — just that she was a big shot.
Born in 1894 in Richmond, Mary Duncan went to Cornell University for a year, then dropped out to become a Hollywood star. She made a movie, “Five and Ten,” in 1931, with Marion Davies, and Davies introduced her to polo player and carpet magnate Stephen Sanford.
They married and came to Palm Beach in 1933, where they entertained at their mansion, Los Incas, near the Kennedys’ winter home.
Mary Sanford reigned over Palm Beach society for almost 50 years and died at 98 in 1993.
Schmoozing with the who’s who of Palm Beach
Sanford was hardly the only showgirl to seek a stage in Palm Beach.
Mary Howes, a beautiful blond heiress from Boston, got her first part on Broadway thanks to a family friend: Humphrey Bogart, who had performed with her in summer stock. She came to Palm Beach in 1949 and thought: “let’s build a theater.”
Her playhouse, the Palm Beach Playhouse, opened soon after in the Slat House — a strange building with an octagonal cupola that is the only surviving remnant of Henry Flagler’s Royal Poinciana Hotel, which was torn down in the mid-1930s.
Its first production was “The Animal Kingdom,” starring Veronica Lake.
In a curious twist: Channel 5 would open its first studio in the Slat House in 1954.
Mary brought big stars like Helen Hayes and Charlton Heston to Palm Beach. The Palm Beach Playhouse closed when the John-Volk-designed Royal Poinciana Playhouse opened in 1958.
Mary’s influence continued. She was one of the impresarios behind the quest for a major arts center, and her dream eventually resulted in the Kravis Center, which opened in 1992. Mary died in 2000 at 92.
Tony Glenn often chatted on the red carpet with Frank Hale, the vivacious president and general manager of the Royal Poinciana Playhouse. Hale was “a former vaudeville hoofer and president of the National Yeast Company,” writer Michael Gross noted in 2023.
Next to Hale’s Playhouse was the Celebrity Room, a glass-walled dining room overlooking the Intracoastal. The Celebrity Room was billed as “The Most Fabulous Place Under the Sun” and advertised “continuous dancing.” Season ticket holders and their guests were allowed in — but only if they were dressed in black tie.
“You couldn’t get a season ticket unless somebody died,” Davidoff said.
Errol Flynn showed up. Marjorie Merriweather Post brought her son-in-law, actor Cliff Robertson. The Duke and Duchess of Windsor were regulars. Joan Fontaine, Dinah Shore, Zsa Zsa Gabor … they all came.
Frank Sinatra tried to get in, but he wasn’t wearing black tie and Hale threw him out, Davidoff recalled.
“Looking down on it all over a trompe l’oeil Venetian-style balcony was a 45-foot-long mural on the domed ceiling with portraits of 125 social, sports and show business celebrities, including Clark Gable, Joan Crawford, and local luminaries like Lilly Pulitzer and the Massachusetts Senator and winter resident John F. Kennedy, whose father Joseph had bought Rodman Wanamaker’s house in 1933,” wrote Michael Gross in his 2023 story for Palmer Palm Beach.
Re-creating the glory days with new movers and shakers
Fast forward to 2026: The paparazzi is back, the mural is restored, and Palm Beach has a fresh new performance hall where the Royal Poinciana Playhouse once stood, Glazer Hall.
For celebrity spotters like me, it’s appropriate that Glazer Hall will be the site of a celebration of America’s most famous on-the-street and on-the-scene photographer, Bill Cunningham. Perhaps nobody snapped more stylish people than Cunningham, who died at 87 in 2016, after chronicling fashionable New Yorkers in the pages of The New York Times for years.
On March 13, filmmaker and author Mark Bozek premieres his director’s cut of his film, “The Times of Bill Cunningham,” with a conversation with Simon Doonan — former creative director of Barney’s and overall fabulous style maker — to follow, plus a birthday celebration for Bill, who was born March 13, 1929.
Of course, Cunningham has his own connection to the Kennedys.
In the late 1940s, Cunningham met and worked with the two women he considered the finest arbiters of French couture, Nona McAdoo Park and Sophie Meldrim Shonnard. “The girls,” as Cunningham called them, owned Chez Ninon, the most exclusive salon in Manhattan.
“It was the Social Registry of fashion,” Cunningham said.
Celebrities, such as Taylor Swift, at Palm Beach County restaurants
Discover which celebrities were spotted at Palm Beach County restaurants, from Guy Fieri to Taylor Swift and more.
Chez Ninon was famous for making authorized copies of couture designs — including the raspberry-pink suit that first lady Jacqueline Kennedy wore on Nov. 22, 1963. The pink suit was a Chez Ninon copy of a Chanel.
Cunningham said he was asked to dye a red suit that Mrs. Kennedy had purchased from Chez Ninon black, in case she needed it to wear to her husband’s funeral. He dyed it in his own bathtub, he told Bozek. Mrs. Kennedy chose to wear a Givenchy suit with distinctive tassel buttons, which she also had worn to Eleanor Roosevelt’s funeral in 1962.
While Bob Davidoff got the personal photos of Jackie and her children going into St. Edward’s Church or Hamburger Heaven in Palm Beach, it was Bill Cunningham who often captured her chic city styles in New York.
He photographed her for the rest of her life.
And what a coincidence that Cunningham’s uniform was a blue French worker’s jacket … in the very same hue as Tony Glenn’s “Your Atlantic Weatherman” outfit.
If you go
What: “The Times of Bill Cunningham,” the world premiere of the director’s cut, directed by Mark Bozek and narrated by Sarah Jessica Parker, will be shown, with a discussion following moderated by Simon Doonan, famed Barney’s creative director.
Where: Glazer Hall, Palm Beach, 70 Royal Poinciana Way, Palm Beach
When: March 13, doors open at 6 p.m., showtime at 6:30
Tickets: $55 for film with Q&A, $85 for VIP tickets including reception with Cunningham and Bozek
Info: glazerhall.org
Jan Tuckwood is the former associate editor of The Palm Beach Post and a frequent contributor to Accent.
‘ The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties ’
‘ Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.palmbeachpost.com ’
