‘Mr. Miami Beach’ worked around the clock for tourists. Michael Aller dies at 82
Michael Aller loved Miami Beach. Practically every photo featured him with arms flung open in a welcoming, celebratory gesture.
At Government Cut. Off the Julia Tuttle Causeway leading to Alton Road. On a lifeguard stand at 12th Street Beach.
Aller, with a perpetual smile that seemed ideal for a toothpaste commercial, often upstaged Miami Beach’s own landmarks.
Miami Beach — its elected officials, dignitaries and Aller’s many friends in the city — felt the same way. Aller, as the city’s director of tourism, reached out worldwide in the early 1990s to boost gay tourism to the Beach. In so doing, he helped fast-track the South Beach renaissance post-”Miami Vice.”
Aller died Monday of a heart attack at Bay Oaks Historic Retirement Residence just off Biscayne Bay in Miami at age 82, according to longtime friend and colleague George Neary.
On call 24/7
William Talbert III, former CEO of the Greater Miami Convention and Visitors Bureau, shares a favorite memory of his colleague and pal of 32 years.
“The city of Miami Beach had a tourism hotline, an 800 number,” Talbert remembered. “And so ring-ring-ring, 800 number. It was answered 24 hours a day by Michael: ‘Miami Beach Tourism Hotline. This is Michael Aller. How may I help you?’”
Talbert, now interim president and CEO of the Miami-Dade Beacon Council, perfectly captures Aller’s upbeat, friendly voice. “I’m not letting him go,” he says.
“That’s my favorite story,” Talbert said. ‘Michael, it’s 3 am.!’ ‘Yeah, yeah, that’s what we do. That’s what customer service is about.’ That’s total commitment. He loved the city. The city loved him.”
His friend, arts writer and “The Woman’s Heart” health book author, Charlotte Libov, once tested her pal on his famed all-hours work ethic.
“One of the luckiest days of my life was when I met Michael shortly after I arrived here 16 years ago, as a reporter for Miami Today,” Libov said. “So much about him fascinated me. He told me tourists could call him, day or night, if they needed information or encountered problems in the city. And so I tested him on this, and would call him sometimes at 6:30 a.m. — he was an early riser and he loved that. Soon, we got into the habit of meeting at Balan’s for breakfast, where he would hold court.”
An outpouring of love
Soon after news spread Monday of Aller’s sudden passing, messages of love started to populate social media news feeds.
“One of a kind is an overused expression, but boy did it apply to Michael Aller,” Miami Beach Mayor Dan Gelber told the Miami Herald on Tuesday. “He was a confluence of so many interesting and special qualities. For a time when he was the protocol officer for the city, his number was who tourists were advised to call for help with issues. He would talk to visiting foreign dignitaries and a family from Nebraska in the same 10-minute period, but always treating both with dignity and enthusiasm.
“He kiddingly called himself the first gay man on Miami Beach but the truth is he was a trailblazer on LGBTQ issues as well,” Gelber said. “My father treated him like a son because they both had such a mischievous sense of humor and a common love of Miami Beach.”
Mr. Miami Beach
Gelber’s father, former Mayor Seymour Gelber, was the first to apply the descriptor “Mr. Miami Beach” to Aller’s name. The late, senior Gelber may have been inspired to do so by recalling a predecessor who similarly was a “Mr. Miami Beach” figure — publicist Hank Meyer, who helped bring Jackie Gleason to the Beach in the 1960s, and popularized the island as a “sun and fun” capital.
Aller was Meyer’s equivalent in the 1990s and early 2000s, helping to rebrand Miami Beach.
“He became one with the city,” Neary said. “I traveled all over the world for the Greater Miami Convention and Visitor’s Bureau and tourism. I worked in the arts and I worked in LGBT marketing. Anywhere I went. Any country of the world, people would come up to me and say, ‘Oh, you’re from Miami. And Miami Beach. How is ...,” Neary pauses. “And you almost expect them to say the mayor or commissioner or the city manager. Never. They would always say how was that guy who did the tourism? Michael...? I must have had it happen 1,000 times. People remembered his warmth, his welcoming manner.”
Adds director Richard Jay-Alexander: “If anyone personified Miami Beach, it was him. ... He was one of the Beach’s greatest assets and deserves that place in history. Everyone has a Michael Aller story and I encourage each and every one of you to share it. That is how he will be remembered.”
Networking
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Michael Aller had nearly every lunch, nearly every single day, during his long tenure as tourism director, at the same outer dining room table at Joe’s Stone Crab.
“Grilled fish and steamed broccoli, no butter, no seasoning” in between constant, albeit friendly, interruptions from admiring judges, doctors, politicians, neighbors, who would approach his table and for whom Aller always stood to greet.
“I like to greet. I’m a greeter. I’m also a networker. There’s no point to sitting at your desk with a sandwich. In my job, it’s about being out there,” Aller told the Miami Herald in 2006.
Living at the Fontainebleau
Aller was born in Detroit on Sept. 2, 1939. His adoptive parents raised him in Miami Beach, and as a teenager, in 1954, Aller lived with his parents in a three-bedroom apartment at the Fontainebleau Hotel during and after the hotel’s construction. His father worked out a deal. He’d give the hotel stone and marble it needed for its construction at little to no charge and he’d get an apartment for his family.
When the Fontainebleau opened a few months later in December 1954, a young Aller called his companions Frank Sinatra, Judy Garland, Lena Horne, Nat King Cole and Jack Benny, he told the Herald. He was always hanging out in the back of the house where the entertainers readied their acts.
The stars didn’t seem to mind. They liked this kid. Blue comedian Sophie Tucker was his mother’s friend, so “Sophie Tucker was his babysitter!” laughed his friend, Libov. By most accounts, Aller’s life was idyllic.
“My mother was magnificent. She wanted her ashes strewn over Martha’s Dress Shop at Bal Harbour on a good sale day,” Aller told the Herald in 2008, 17 years after he became tourism and convention director in 1991.
“I’ve lived a totally charmed life,” Aller told the Herald. “The only tragedy was the death of my mother and father. I was in the Jewish Federation orphanage and they closed it and sent me to the county orphanage, but my [adoptive] parents had already held me and were heartbroken. So our rabbi got involved to help [the adoption] along.”
Aller studied a bit at the University of Miami in 1958, moved to New York to try an acting career and then got into the nursing home business, owning and managing two homes in Los Angeles.
In 1988, he sold the homes and returned to Miami Beach. Before joining the tourism department, he sold Polo clothing in the men’s section of the former Burdines on Lincoln Road, wrote gossip columns for Miami Beach Magazine, hosted a cable TV show, and hosted a radio show on then-South Beach radio station WSBH.
At one point, Aller recorded a song while hosting a piano bar on a 60-foot catamaran moored across the street from the Fontainebleau before becoming the city’s ambassador. That song’s 45-rpm single was among the treasures on his office desk at Miami Beach City Hall, Libov recalled.
Along the way, Aller, a board member of the Miami-Dade Gay and Lesbian Chamber of Commerce, Red Cross and National LGBTQ Task Force, collected industry honors. Among them: the South Florida Tourism Professional of the Year award in 2005 from the Academy of Hospitality and Tourism, and the Twelve Good Men of Miami Award in 2008 by the Ronald McDonald House.
“I am the pied piper of tourism,” Aller told the Herald in 2008. “I loved yesterday. I look forward to tomorrow. But right now is fabulous.”
Survivors, services
Aller’s survivors include countless friends. His friend and colleague at the Miami-Dade Gay and Lesbian Chamber of Commerce, George Neary, said there will be services for Aller in September.
This story was originally published August 16, 2022 at 6:16 PM.
