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Dick Pope, promoter of Florida?╟╓s Cypress Gardens, has created more new royalty than anyone since Henry VIII by ARTHUR HERZOG THE KING OF BEAUTY QUEENS Florida, for most Americans, is a conditioned reflex. Mention of its name conjures up images of leisurely days, nights under tropical con- stellations, and mile on mile of readily available bathing beauties, all heiresses, all holding aloft giant beach balls. This picture of Florida, though it may seem that we have always had it, was put there by an indefatigable band of publicists and pro- moters who for the past thirty years have been convincing Americans that Ponce de Leon had the wrong century but the right idea. The grand panjandrum of these specialists in hothouse dreams is a fifty-seven-year- old transmogrified Iowan named Richard Downing Pope whose efforts on behalf of the Florida reflex make it difficult to pick up a newspaper without seeing some of his beachcake. It is a tribute to the persuasiveness of Pope and his fellow publicists that 7,000,000 tourists went to Florida last year when they might have gone elsewhere. Each tourist stayed an average of two weeks, which comes by rough calculation to two and a half billion hours of tourism. This is a great many hours to be filled and accounts for the fact that there are over 300 tourist attractions in Florida, with more on the way. Plans are afoot to construct a $70,000,000 permanent world's fair at Miami, and one group is struggling to find $100,000,000 to build a replica of the Eiffel Tower. (It may prove possible, of course, to buy the original directly from the French at a somewhat reduced rate.) Tourist attractions have made Florida a land of lands?╟÷Gaterland, Storyland, Marineland, Tropical Adventureland; of spectacles?╟÷Africa USA (?╟úRide through herds of wild animals,?╟Ñ say the billboards); and of warm springs where mermaids drink Coca-Cola under water. At the center?╟÷geographical and spiritual?╟÷of the Florida tourist- attraction business is Cypress Gardens, the $3,000,000-a-year botanical treasure which is Dick Pope's property and home base. Cypress Gardens, four miles from the town of Winter Haven and almost directly in the middle of the state, is among the two or three most publicized attractions in this country. To make it so, Pope has spared neither energy nor money. He has been compared with Mike Todd as a showman and a promoter. He is a man who was only prevented by the Civil Aeronautics Board from dropping 1,000,000 gardenias over New York City by plane in order to stimulate a mass migration south- ward. His publicity budget last year approached $500,000 which, as a one-man expenditure, is impressive beside the $1,000,000 the state itself spent to promote Florida as a tourist attraction. The neighboring state of Alabama, for example, spent only $50,000. His queens, his lush botanical charivari and his initiative have been responsible for making the Gardens the setting for five Class A movies (among them Cinerama, in which Pope's water skiers had the major portion, and Easy to Love, ostensibly the story of Pope's life, with Esther Williams playing one of his beauty queens), a good many television shows, including two recent editions of Wide Wide World, 1,000 news- reels, 350 movie shorts, 300 magazine covers, countless magazine stories and product advertisements, and, last year, 6,000,000 post cards. Pope's favorite publicity tool is the camera. Over the years he has accumulated in four fireproof office safes a collection of 300,000 pub- licity photographs, of which a few may not be of girls. A staff of eight photographers, working a six-day week, add 40,000 photos a year to his gallery.. He once covered the surface of the large swimming pool at the Gardens (this pool, built by Pope at a cost of $60,000, is shaped like the state of Florida, even to the white lines of tile meant to indicate the surf breaking on its beaches) with 27,838 grapefruit and innumerable girls, all to get one photograph. For Pope, who likes to see himself as a supersalesman of the South- lands, the returns are rewarding. On an average day, a hundred U.S. newspapers will carry a photograph taken at Cypress Gardens, and one of Pope's queen shots appeared in 3,670 newspapers. He is, in addition, the largest producer of what might be called publicity television films, sending out as many as ten TV films a week, all made at the Gardens, and he has bought a 200-foot television tower in order to be able to transmit directly from the grounds. Few Americans have not been exposed, at one time or other, to Pope's publicity. Pope's old reliable publicity stand-by has been the crowned and sceptered beauty queen. Pope did not invent the beauty queen (this, apparently, was the work of the late publicist, Steve Hannagan), but he has done as much as any man to make her an American institution. He is far more fecund than any of his competitors. From the most famous of the beauty contests, for instance, Miss America at Atlantic City, issues only one queen a year. Compared to it, Pope is a promotional Henry VIII. Since 1935, the year of his first crowning, a thousand queens have 120