Babes In A Swampland

The most insistent, irrepressible and thoroughly outrageous promoter in sports and tourism today is a kinetic little man of 63 who likes to boast that his son is the "only Catholic Pope I know who's married to a beautiful woman." His name is Dick Pope Sr., and he is the apotheosis of press agentry, which is to say that he has the looks of John L. Lewis, the taste of William Randolph Hearst and the restraint of Attila on the march. In the last 25 years or so, he has done more for the well-filled bathing suit than the built-in bra, converted a fetid swamp in central Florida into a national shrine for tourists, left the impression that if he did not quite conceive or give birth to water skiing he at least gave it legitimacy and provided a constant and buoyant irritant for his bitter rival, the state of California. "I just love your state," he once told California-based Conrad Hilton, the hotel man. "I bought my first and only overcoat there."

All this has helped make Cypress Gardens, a 164-acre botanical sunburst near Winter Haven, Fla., into the nation's most implausibly successful tourist attraction. Built in a swamp some four miles from the nearest main highway, it now lures more than 1.1 million visitors a year, and it ranks, according to Pope—who can be believed about as much as P. T. Barnum could—along with Grand Canyon as the most photogenic sight in America. The difference is that the canyon was built by God and nature and merely exposed to man, while Cypress Gardens is strictly a phenomenon that was developed—virtually in defiance of nature—by man alone. In building Cypress Gardens, Pope had little to work with but his imagination, his industry and his unharnessed ambition. "Travel is the third largest industry in America," he booms, "and we want to be the biggest thing in it."

His success has lifted Dick Pope to a celestial level—financial as well as civic—that is as foreign to an oldtime press agent as thanks from a client. He and his family have become multimillionaires. The gardens gross, according to one estimate, some $7,500 a day. He has become a member of Florida's Hall of Fame—along with John Ringling North and Steve Hannagan, the late panjandrum of Miami Beach—and he has become an international figure of almost terrifying chic. At his soign� best, he likes to entertain everybody from the King of Saudi Arabia to Bill Hartack—wearing, in either case, a gold lam� dinner jacket with a velvet collar. His words and actions are followed breathlessly by the Florida press (FLORIDIAN KEEPS WATCHFUL EYE ON LEBANON headlined one paper of a Pope visit to the Middle East), and his spicy bouillabaisse of fact and flummery is accepted with a reverence that borders on the Biblical. Through it all, Dick Pope has been able to maintain the melancholy stigmata of the professional promoter: the conviction, though nobody understands it but himself, that sunshine is merely a portent of a total eclipse, that just around the corner lurks a man with an upraised club and that at the foot of every rainbow is a pot of burning rubbish.

To rise above all these fears, Dick Pope has applied his gaudy talents as relentlessly as the driving rods on a locomotive. He is inspired by the extravagant. Once he was restrained from throwing a million gardenias off the top of the Empire State Building only by a government order. He is sensitive to the impact of the trifling. He plugs Cypress Gardens on everything from place mats and menu covers in restaurants to jigsaw puzzles and the covers of phonograph albums (Chopin's piano themes). He is indifferent to the exactness of science—"What kind of romance is there in a flower called Philodendron eichleri? I'm gonna call it Sir Ivanhoe's Shield"—and the patience of friends. He insists they file all his correspondence under B for "Beautiful Cypress Gardens." He is splendidly indifferent about cost. He spent $200,000 to help out the producers of a feature-length movie being made at Cypress Gardens, including $63,000 for a swimming pool shaped like the state of Florida. Another time he contributed $15,000 to an $87,000 "expense fund" for a Wide Wide World TV crew shooting in Florida and Cypress Gardens (though NBC subsequently returned the money to its donors), and still another time he spent $40,000 building an intimate little "den" in his home for a brief appearance on Person to Person, then couldn't arrange to be around when the show was to be shot.

The expenses that he enjoys most are for photography. He keeps seven full-time photographers on his staff and claims to have spent $230,000 on their activities last year (compared with $280,000 for maintaining the gardens). Photography is quite clearly his obsession. "You can put a letter in front of him and he won't read it," says one associate. "You can talk to him and he won't listen. But you can give him a photograph and he'll study it for 20 minutes and then tell you 10 ways it could have been done better."

Through his pictures Pope figures to steal more magazine and newspaper space at less cost than in any other way. "I could always buy advertising space for the money I spend on publicity," he once said candidly, "but I could never get the position buying space that picture editors will give me for free." When he started Cypress Gardens he gave 10% of the action to a photographer named Robert Dahlgren, who among other things helped him be sure the grounds would be photogenic. Over the years he has sent out a million publicity photographs as well as contributing to the support—financial and esthetic—of some 1,000 newsreels, 350 movie shorts and three feature-length movies. When you consider that he is trying to publicize a garden, most of his photographs are triumphant irrelevancies—girls in bathing suits. (He once arranged 27,838 grapefruits around one bathing beauty to get one photograph of Cypress Gardens.) He insists on the value of the irrelevancy: few picture editors are interested in photographs of flowers, but all of them—"except those on The New York Times"—are interested in pictures of girls in bathing suits. The result is that plugs for Cypress Gardens have been on the covers of some 300 magazines, ranging from LIFE to the Holiday Inn publication, and one of his pictures appeared in 3,670 different publications around the world.

In the low-cunning tradition of the great press agent, Pope has always been vaguely dissatisfied merely with getting free publicity. He feels that people ought to pay him to plug his product. Curiously enough, some people do. Certain businesses and ad agencies rent some of the more exotic space in Cypress Gardens to make ads and commercials for their products. The location fee is $250 a day, except for the Aquarama pool, which costs $300. In addition, the agencies must agree to plug Cypress Gardens in the ad. "We pay Dick Pope," says one ad agency dryly, "$50,000 a year for the privilege of publicizing his own place"

Far more advanced and sophisticated is Pope's crafty appreciation of the tourist's unbridled passion for being exploited. He charges adults $2 apiece to enter Cypress Gardens (small children get in free), then enlists them as unwitting agents. While the tourists wander about inside, riding electric boats through the canals ($60,000 a year), buying film to take pictures of Cypress Gardens ($300,000 a year) and buying souvenirs that prominently mention Cypress Gardens ($500,000 a year), three of Pope's men are assigned the full-time task of pasting Cypress Gardens stickers on the bumpers of their parked cars. "Bumper stickers are a lot harder to get off than any other kind," says Pope happily.

The ne plus ultra of this technique is an approach he calls OPM[Sub 2]—"Our Picture Material plus Other People's Money." To provide the picture material, he has girls in antebellum hoop skirts scattered among picture-postcard scenes all through the gardens. "Vistas!" he cries, framing a scene with his hands, like a movie director. "You've got to have vistas! Not just views! Vistas! A panorama around every corner!" He makes sure everybody can get a picture of the water show by running it in one direction in the morning and the opposite direction in the afternoon, so nobody will have to shoot into the sun. To top it all off, he built an "octahedron-tetrahedron" photographers' stand ("30,000 aluminum struts, 33,000 joints, the biggest Tinker-toy in the world") on a dock stretching out into Lake Eloise and then assigned a photographic director there whose voice carries the authority and knowledgeability so dear to the heart of the amateur photographer: "Ektachrome Xor Kodacolor X with ASA of 64, shoot 1/100th or 1/125th at f/8.... All right, a cloud is coming over, so go down one stop on the light.... Frame up on the showboats, movies.... Here they come—all right, movies, r-r-roll 'em!" Not only is the photographer told what to shoot and how to shoot but also where to go immediately after the show to get a shot that will make a title board for a movie sequence. "We'll load the camera and shoot the pictures for them if they can't do it themselves," says one photographer. The idea, of course, is that when the amateur photographer comes to splicing and cutting his home movies he tends to discard the washed-out or overexposed shots he took of other tourist attractions—i.e., most of them—and highlight those shots that reflect the high triumph of his great art: the pictures he took at Cypress Gardens. These are the movies he will show over and over again to whatever captive audiences he can lure to his home. "It's the cheapest advertising in the world," says Pope. He even charges his amateur photographers 25� a head to get into position to get the movies that will best advertise Cypress Gardens. In return for the privilege, he gives them a badge that says OFFICIAL and PHOTOGRAPHER in very large letters and "guest" in very small ones. "Makes 'em feel good," he says, "and they only cost a cent and a half apiece."

Like all press agents, Dick Pope moves in a nimbus of excitement that is largely of his own creation. He is so highly keyed up that for a long while his staff smuggled tranquilizers into his water in an effort to calm him down. When he found out about it, Pope was more pleased than disturbed. "All my big-shot friends have ulcers or some other respectable disease. I don't have a thing. Why," he complains, "I can afford an ulcer." It is his nature to give ulcers, not to get them—he has a sign, "The Ulcer Maker," on his desk—and he likes to spend as much time as possible doing it. He frequently arrives at his office at 7 a.m. or earlier to start fretting and worrying and immersing himself in the exquisite bedlam of his operation. His office shows the distinctive touch of an interior decorator on a losing streak. It is wood-paneled, with a great kidney-shaped desk, behind which Pope, who stands but 5 feet 5� inches tall, looks like a pouty child adrift on a sea of paper. Pope has added his own singular touches. He has hung a sign by the office calling it "The Little Vatican" and another over by the washroom calling it "Marineland." He seems to have left his souvenirs and gifts pretty much where he dropped them. His office is cluttered with everything from a plumed helmet and a formidable suit of armor to an Executive Dart Board ("Ask your barber," "Call a conference," "Leave town"). He has hung bulletin boards and photographic transparencies all around the office, along with corn-soaked signs that reflect his personality: "Where there's life there's Pope" and "I never make misteaks" and "It's easy to arrive at a firm conviction about a problem after you know what the boss thinks." He tops all this off with a unique touch of total anarchy. Anybody who walks past his office, be he office boy or vice-president, is likely to be called upon to perform whatever task is, at that instant, uppermost in Pope's mind. This is an unsettling habit.