(FORTUNE Magazine) – Her fame still fresh from Queen of Outer Space, Zsa Zsa Gabor was the most glamorous guest at Ocean Club's opening in 1962. The party was thrown by A&P heir Huntington Hartford, who wanted to give a sexy sheen to the money pit he'd constructed on Paradise Island (nee Hog Island) in the Bahamas. The resort was one of the follies that would nearly suck his fortune dry.

Now, 38 years later, fairy dust is again being sprinkled on Ocean Club. Sol Kerzner's Sun International has flown down a plane of freeloading socialites, B-list celebrities, and puff-piece journalists (ahem) to fete the hotel's relaunch. We'll be wrapped in sarongs, stuffed with caviar, and doused with house-label champagne so that we may properly adore 50 new rooms and suites, a Tom Weiskopf golf course, 121 house sites, and a new restaurant by Jean-Georges Vongerichten.

Even with so much purposeful fizz, is there anyone among us--Serena Altschul? Jay McInerney?--who possesses the cop-slapping mystique necessary to confer glamour on the establishment? Who, in short, is our Zsa Zsa?

One guest, Kathy Hilton, married a Hilton (as Zsa Zsa once did); another, Nell Campbell, starred in a campy movie (as Zsa Zsa often did). Or maybe it's Star Jones. Right now the morning-show powerhouse sits at the water's edge, posing with skinny Prince Dimitri of Yugoslavia. A wave upends the unlikely duo. They're spun into a confusing ball of race, title, and Q-ratings, flailing their limbs in the surf.

Is it pointless even to attempt glamour on Paradise Island anymore? Attached to downtown Nassau by a bridge, the island is a less promising location for a rich-and-famous resort than it once was. Four years after the opening soiree, Hartford ran short of funds and sold his control. Casinos were introduced, and the glitz got grittier. During the late '60s heiresses were dropping acid here. By the early '70s honeymooning brides were flinging themselves at the croupiers who had bankrupted their husbands, and Howard Hughes was holed up in a Paradise Island penthouse watching Agatha Christie movies in a codeine stupor.

Today the bridge from Nassau takes you past a massive complex encrusted with huge cement sea horses and fish. This is Ocean Club's big sister, a mass-market casino hotel called Atlantis. Just hold your breath and let it pass. Your turn is farther along; it leads to a new, white-columned lobby. From there you're escorted to a room in the old Hartford wing or the new Crescent wing. In the latter the lavish oceanfront quarters feature giant bathrooms paved in mosaic and marble and sumptuous beds frosted with Frette sheets. The effect is fabulous--as it should be, considering the $885 rack rates.

Other island resorts have great, expensive rooms, but none has a restaurant to match Vongerichten's Dune. An open-air bar centers on a white-marble island that lights up at night. Teak decks nudge into the dunes, with umbrella-shaded tables. The dining room is the color of a clean slate, with brown tables, gray leather chairs, and twig chandeliers. At the inaugural dinner, our band of Page Six rabble ate quail with Thai spices; chicken and coconut milk with galangal and shitake mushrooms; and veal chops with kumquat-pineapple chutney and Madeira jus. An alternating current of barefoot ease and haughty minimalism made the place hum.

The open-air bar was then turned into a one-night-only disco. While Band-Aid heiress Casey Johnson wiped nonexistent sweat off her brow, socialite Ginny Bond Donahue danced on the bar with a barechested Bahamian hunk. For blondness or beauty, either Johnson or Bond Donahue could have been our Zsa Zsa--but then a camera popped a blaze of light on Juliet Hartford, Huntington's daughter, smiling nervously beside Vongerichten. Together, the child of a diminished empire and the creator of a growing one defined the allure of this place. Fortunes rise and fall. So do trends, and the reputations of chefs. On the mainland, the linking of hotels with brand-name food figures is old hat, but it's still fresh down here. Vongerichten's restaurant has helped lift a hotel that had seen better days, and it feels as if it sits on the crest of a wave.

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