George Clooney Slept Here

If you’re a writer, Key West is on your bucket list, likely in the number one spot.

This bohemian island city, the southernmost in the United States, is where Ernest Hemingway
produced nearly half his life’s work including To Have and Have Not and For Whom the Bell Tolls. It’s where Tennessee Williams wrote Streetcar Named Desire, supposedly while listening to Billie Holiday records, and where he partied with Truman Capote, James Leo Herlihy and Thomas McGuane.

This two- by four-mile island that’s nearer to Havana than Miami is said to have more writers per capita than anywhere including 13 Pulitzer Prize winners. Whether drawn by the tropical climate or its famed zany hedonism, writers such as Ann Beattie, Annie Dillard, Robert Frost, Ralph Ellison, John Dos Passos, Judy Blume, Shel Silverstein and Elizabeth Bishop are just a few whose names have appeared on Key West mailboxes.

If you’re truly ambitious, your bucket list contains the hope to be an invited presenter at the prestigious Key West Literary Seminar, held every January since 1983. Or your list could be like mine, just wanting a little recognition for your wild-ass dream to make a living doing what you love.

When I visited Key West in the early 1990’s, I had already written a couple books, but hadn’t yet convinced a publisher they deserved airing. I’ll never forget gazing reverentially at the second-floor studio behind Hemingway’s Whitehead house, the place where he wrote every morning whether hung-over from a night of hard-drinking with Sloppy Joe Russell or sore from a dust-up with Wallace Stevens. I remember feeling giddy, inspired, thinking to myself, “Someday, like my fellow Kansas City Star alum, I,too, will be recognized for my words.”

So when I went back to Key West last month to celebrate the anniversary of its April 23, 1982 secession from the union, a raucous reenactment complete with parades and water balloons of the day the city declared itself an official nation–The Conch Republic–in protest of the roadblock that was deterring tourists, I couldn’t resist returning to Hemingway’s home.

The six-toed cats, heirs to Hemingway’s beloved “Snowball,” a gift from a Cuban sea captain who believed the extra toes brought good luck, still roam the one-acre grounds. Pictures of his four wives still hang in the parlor. And, of course, the studio with his leather writing chair, his books and his typewriter still looks as it did between 1931 and 1938 when he was there every day pounding the keys.

But this time, as I descended the steps leading to and from the famous studio, it suddenly hit me. The vow I made 20 years ago had come true. Fifteen times, in fact, I’ve signed a contract with a publisher who believes in my work.

I noticed a certain bounce in my step and as I looked up at Key West’s clear, cerulean sky, gave a nod and a grateful, “Thank you, Papa.”

Now, if I can just get the Key West Literary Seminar to call.

The Florida Keys, a necklace of coral islands stretching 127 miles from the tip of the Florida peninsula, epitomizes the art of reinvention. Not only have the Keys and the people who live there survived countless floods and hurricanes, including three that finally put the kibosh on Henry Flagler’s Overseas Railway that connected these free-standing tropical islands to the rest of the country, but they’ve managed to do it all with an uncommon panache.

Pilgrims from other places end up here with a dream to try something new and the cojones to create a whole different reality for themselves.

Take Joe and Ronnie Harris, for example. New Yorkers through and through, they worked for NBC until Joe, on a diving trip to Key Largo, turned around and saw what he called the world’s most beautiful sunset. That was in 1991 and, before he was able to regain his senses, he was the proud owner of a small beach and the 11-room hotel that fronted it.

And since what’s a Florida hotel without tropical greenery, he and Ronnie, his eventual wife, started buying plants, so many that they noticed their two-acre property had morphed into a botanic garden.

Today, Kona Kai Resort still features nightly, knee-weakening sunsets, but Joe and Ronnie watch them under the tropical fronds of their very own botanic garden, a 501c3 non-profit complete with an ethnobotanist, educational programs and tours of their more than 250 species of plants.

Joe, who has been known to say that “plants are people, too,” sees this as his new life mission.

On the tour, led daily by Rick Hederstrom, a bright, eager young ethnobotanist straight from London’s Kew Gardens, I learned that West Indian mahogany contains catechin, an anti-oxidant that reduces the risk of heart disease, that the seats of Henry Ford’s first Model T’s were stuffed with Spanish moss and that if you place the top of a pineapple in your backyard garden, it’ll eventually grow into a pineapple bush — if you happen to live in the appropriate climate. With the plants in this botanic garden, I could have waterproofed a blow gun, plucked a needle used in Haitian voodoo or temporarily stunned some fish, making them easier to catch.

My main thought while on this tour is was why can’t every kid in America see this. Maybe they’d realize there’s more to life than the tiny screens they worship.

Kona Kai also has an art gallery, topped only by that sunset that I enjoyed while munching on Jamaican cherries, star apples and other exotic fruits grown right there in the Botanic Gardens at Kona Kai.

While in the land of reinvention, I also met Bob, a former pilot from Arizona, and Kristie Thomas, a former travel agent from Wisconsin, who have taken another plant — cacao — and turned it into some of the best truffles and chocolates this side of the Atlantic. The duo, who met a few years ago when Christie’s sailboat was hit by lightning in Brunswick, Georgia, poured their entire retirements into Key Largo Chocolates, a booming concern that, in less than a year, has already grown out of one location. Their slogan, “Nobody knows the truffles I’ve seen” is only topped in creativity by their pastel pink and green shop at mile marker 100.5 that turns out such handmade concoctions as three-dimensional chocolate seashells, key lime pistachio bark, key lime truffles and chocolate-covered wine bottles.

Suzanne Holmquist, a former producer for the BBC, resurfaced in Key Largo after marrying an American engineer and boat maker. They recently added the African Queen, the 100-year-old steam boat used in the 1951 movie of the same name, to their fleet. Even though the celebrity vessel is registered as a national historic site, it had fallen into disrepair after its previous owner, a Humphrey Bogart enthusiast, died in 2001. After a six-month, $70,000 restoration, the African Queen is now back plying the waters of the Florida Keys. And as for Holmquist, she and her husband run Calypso Sailing Company, a fleet of tall ships, out of their bullet-ridden home (it was once used in a stakeout of drug runners) in Marina Del Mar.

Further down the Overseas Highway, at mile marker 48.5, I witnessed yet another reincarnated career. Richie Moretti ran a successful Volkswagen dealership in Orlando before buying a little mom and pop hotel in Marathon that was going into foreclosure. He rescued it, running it as the hotel it had been since the 1940s.

Its salt water pool, almost a redundancy sitting next to the ocean, eventually became an “inn” for rescued ocean creatures. First there was a tarpon, then a school of tarpon, a Goliath grouper, some lobsters and eels. In the mid 1980s, when Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles were all the rage, the school kids who came to the motel on field trips kept asking Moretti “where are your turtles?”

They sure couldn’t miss them now. The entire motel has been converted into a rescue operation for injured sea turtles. Moretti even bought the nightclub next door for use as a hospital, complete with operating rooms, doctors (well, veterinarians) and a couple ambulances. Since it opened in 1986, Moretti’s Turtle Hospital, the only such facility in the world, has rescued more than 1000 turtles, releasing most back to their ocean homes after propeller injuries, flipper amputation and the removal of viral tumors caused by the fibropapilloma virus that affect 50 percent of the world’s sea turtles.

So watch out if you’re heading to the Florida Keys. It might just inspire a whole new life.

Being a parent changes everything. While most celebs pick Christmas and New Year’s to visit St. Bart’s, the posh Caribbean magnet for all things chic, Beyonce and Jay Z headed to the eight-square-mile island to celebrate Easter. It was three-month-old daughter Blue Ivy Carter’s first big vacation.

Not that the proud parents didn’t sneak in some alone time. They spent a day sunbathing at Ansse de Grande Saline, an isolated half-mile beach where development, at least for now, is verboten.

It’s one of the tiny island’s 17 beaches and to get there, B and J had to scramble over a sand dune and hope the anole lizards didn’t take a hankering to the drinks they sipped from coconut halves. After all, they only wanted to soak up some powder white beach time without a diaper bag.

Easter holidays in St. Bart’s certainly wasn’t the celebrity couple’s first trip to this secret little French paradise where the ruling families, descendants of the original 17th century settlers, purposely keep prices high, limit the size of the airport and import everything from France. Homes, even modest ones without a beachfront, can cost upwards of $7 million which is why you’ll find such names as Steve Martin and David Letterman on St. Bart deeds. Jimmy Buffet, also a St. Bart’s homeowner, supposedly wrote “Cheeseburger in Paradise” at Le Select, a nondescript, but fabulous restaurant (Mick Jagger has entertained there), one of many wedged in between the Hermes, Gucci, Cartier and other high-end shops.

No, B and J are what you might call “regulars.” In 2009, in fact, Beyonce performed a controversial New Year’s Eve show at a Nikki Beach party thrown by Muammar Gaddafi’s son. In the audience were Usher, Lindsay Lohan and Microsoft founder Paul Allen whose 416-foot yacht, Octopus, can often be spotted at Gustavia Harbor.

During the notorious holiday party season, when Beyonce and Jay Z were a little tied up with the impending birth, rooms at the handful of hotels leap in price ten times over. A week at a villa can run up to $150,000. A long-time resident described the season as “summer camp for wealthy, well-known New Yorkers, business tycoons, music stars, and Hollywood celebrities.

“It’s like the whole island is Studio 54 at its peak,” he said.

In recent years, the hottest, most over-the-top New Year’s bash has been thrown by Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich. Price tag? More than $7.8-million, but what do you expect when you fly in such entertainers as Prince, Gwen Stefani and the Black Eyed Peas? The Red Hot Chili Peppers rang in the 2012 party that was held as his $90-million Gouverneur Bay Estate, the same estate once owned by the Rockefellers. On the 400-name guest list? Jon Bon Jovi, Marc Jacobs, Harvey Weinstein, George Lucas and Martha Stewart, to name just a few.

Abramovich’s yacht, the world’s largest private yacht, measures 536 feet, has two helicopter pads, two swimming pools, a submarine and 80 onboard staff.

St. Bart’s, also known as St. Barths and St. Barthelemy, sits across from St. Marteen/St. Martin. It was originally discovered by Christopher Columbus and named after his brother, Bartolomeo.

Now go spend that trust fund?

Someone needs to tell Caitlin Brotz that she could get a lot more than $12 for the anti-aging serum she developed from pomegranate, blackberry and carrot seed oil.

After all, the big guns–the Lancomes and Crème de la Mers and La Prairies–charge up to hundreds of dollars per ounce for their anti-wrinkle creams.

“I always have to chuckle at their prices,” says the 30-year-old creator of Olivu 426, an all-natural beauty products business she runs from a small storefront in Sheboygan, Wisconsin. “I know exactly what goes into their products and the mark-up is insane. And I know good and well we could get a lot more for our products, but I chose not to go that route.”

But don’t let the meager price tag fool you.

“The reason our anti-aging products make up a good 30 percent of our business is because they work,” Brotz says. “We make everything fresh daily and use nothing but all-natural products.”

One of her most ardent fans, a 50-something teacher, decided to pit Olivu 426’s Night-Time Repairing Serum against a popular Lancome product. For a month, she applied Olivu 426 to the left side of her face and Lancome to the right.

“She appointed her husband as judge,” Brotz says. “Not only did our product win hand’s down, but her husband was so impressed, he now uses our products, as well.”

Men in Sheboygan, she says, don’t like to admit they use “product,” but thanks to the influence of Brotz’s newly-minted husband, a semi-professional football player who uses Olivu 426 to control acne caused from sweating in his football helmet, they’re starting to embrace the more than 120 products offered by Olivu 426.

Indeed, it was a male athlete who inspired Brotz to start making all-natural beauty products in the first place. When she was 22, her then-boyfriend, a semi-professional snowmobile racer, was building a track out of wood chips. When it accidentally caught on fire, he was burned on 60 percent of his body and life-flighted to Milwaukee. Because his body (and the resulting skin grafts) could no longer tolerate lotion with alcohol, Caitlin started researching all-natural products with healing properties.

The 426 in the business name, in fact, was Adam’s snowmobile number.

The other unique feature of Olivu 426 is that customers to the tiny 700-square-foot storefront are invited to make their own products, start to finish.

Just like paint-your-own pottery that spread across the country a few years ago, Olivu lets amateurs create such products as avocado whip lotion, emu oil body wash and lavender hydrating face mist. Or they can make lip balms, sugar scrubs, lotions and even insect repellent. The hard part is choosing which of the 150 types of herbs, scents and essences to add to their potions.

“We have everything from tomato leaf (it smells like a juicy Tuscan tomato) and orange Satsuma to baby powder and Brazilian water lotus,” she says. “But oatmeal milk and honey is probably still our most popular. It’s great for people with sensitivities or allergies or for those who can’t tolerate much of a scent.”

As far as she knows, Olivu is the only place in the world that offers customers that make-your-own option.

“Oh, there are places you can go and add your own scent, but our customers get to do it from start to finish right in our own test kitchen using the same blenders we use,” she says.

Eventually, she’d like to franchise the make-your-own aspect that is highly-popular with the Wisconsin bachelorette party set.

Right now, she’s focusing on growing the internet business that makes up a good third of her business.

“People visiting Sheboygan stumble into our store and get hooked, particularly on the anti-aging serums,” she says, adding that she has regulars from across the country and as far away as Japan.

“I didn’t even think about that when I put up the website,” Brotz laughs now. “I hadn’t stopped to consider overseas shipping.”

All, I have to say, Caitlin, is you better get ready. Olivu 426 is going to be huge.

Olivu 426, 511 N 8th Street, Sheboygan, WI 53081, 920.783.0809.

When your room key features a black and white photo of Betty Ford dancing on the Cabinet Room table, you have to figure you’re probably not in an ordinary hotel. Other hints would be the spiritual menu that dispenses every religious literary work from the Talmud to the Koran. Or the 36 by 48-inch portrait of Michael Richards (Seinfield’s Kramer) hanging outside your door.

Yes, I’m at the Hotel Lucia, the downtown Portland boutique hotel that doubles as an art museum. I’m here, not to gawk at Hotel Lucia’s art, though I certainly did, but for the rare opportunity to take in a Mark Rothko retrospective at the Portland Museum of Art.

Not many people know this about the artist whose color-saturated abstract paintings made him so famous, but he grew up here (after immigrating from Russia with his family) and took his first art class here. In fact, his first one-man show, staged in 1933 long before his paintings were selling for tens of millions of dollars, was curated at the very museum hosting this current show, 45 pieces that trace his work from the late 1920’s until shortly before his 1970 suicide.

Curator Bruce Guenther assembled the impressive exhibit from private collections, museums, the National Gallery of Art and Rothko children that famously sued to reclaim the nearly 800 paintings in his estate. They were successful in securing the return of all but 100 paintings including Homage to Matisse that sold in 2005 for a record $22.5 million and White Center (Yellow, Pink and Lavender on Rose) that broke that record two years later, selling at Sotheby’s for $72.8 million. The exhibit moves from his early figurative works to the brooding subway series he painted for the WPA to the transcendent abstractions that created his legacy.

That Hotel Lucia is running a special Rothko promotion is not a big surprise. It has, after all, developed quite a reputation with its permanent exhibit of 680 black and white photos from the portfolio of another Portland original, Pulitzer-prize winning photographer David Hume Kennerly. In every corridor, guest room, bathroom and even elevator, Kennerly’s stunning photographs tell the story of American politics from Nixon on. In fact, it was a bit disconcerting sleeping in a bed so close to Dick Cheney and Leonid Brezhnev. Luckily, Kramer and Ansel Adams were there to weigh in. Even the 24-hour fitness center and the business office where I printed out my boarding passes showcased art, colorful pieces by Portland artists Mike Russo and Gregory Grennon.

One of my favorite features of Hotel Lucia is their “Get it Now” button. That means that, even if it’s 3 in the morning and you’re craving khao ka moo (a Thai dish involving stewed pork leg, for those who have never craved it), all you need do it push the button and voila!, they’ll figure out a way to make it happen. Which is another reason this hip and sassy boutique has a dedicated clientele of Hollywood and music stars. Although my lips are sealed as to who wanted what, here is a short list of “Get it Now” requests over the years: chocolate milk and Dom Perignon (at the same time), a fruit and vegetable juicer and an exotic, but legal mushroom, four unripe mangoes (don’t ask), a separate room for the luggage, 24-hour dog sitting and a TV mounted on the ceiling.

The other worth-mentioning feature of Hotel Lucia is the amenities They’re all local (I like that in a hotel) from Portland’s own Mada bath goodies to Portland Roasting coffee and Smith teas.

Included in Lucia’s Rothko promotion are tickets to the Portland Art Museum, a $20 certificate to the museum’s gift shop and two “Red on The Rocks,” colorful cocktails inspired by Rothko’s paintings.

The Rothko respective runs through May 27 as does Hotel Lucia’s “Rothko in Retrospect” package. To book, call 866.986.8086 or visit www.hotellucia.com.