IT’S THREE O’CLOCK ON A FRIday afternoon and the boys in the back room at Merlin’s Restaurant are swapping gossip and tall tales and playing Liar’s Poker.
Across Sarasota Bay out on the beaches, the usual crowd will boogie all night at Donovan’s Reef on Siesta Key.
Come Saturday, scuba divers will probe the wrecks a few miles off Longboat Key on the Gulf of Mexico’s sandy bottom, and by Sunday afternoon, an unofficial bikini contest will be at full tilt for the six-pack survivors lying out on Lido Key’s North Beach.
It could be a typical summer weekend anywhere in Florida, except that in Sarasota — the self-proclaimed “arts capital” of the state — they add their own version of class to fun-in-the-sun.
For example, the weekend also offers a combination barbecue and wine-tasting: a little dry chablis with your sliced pork sandwich, or a robust burgundy with Brunswick stew.
The eclectic menu is part of an art and antique auction, with live music, to benefit the Florida West Coast Music Center, one of the many art, theater and music organizations that routinely enrich local life.
This particular weekend’s choices also include six plays, an opera, a community orchestra performance, a jazz concert, a Harry Belafonte concert, a dozen art gallery showings and the annual NCNB Cup polo match.
Leisure time can run you ragged in Sarasota.
It is a matter of local pride that more nationally known writers, artists and performers live in this small city of 50,000 than anywhere else in Florida.
And it is the presence of these artists that keeps the back room at Merlin’s reserved every Friday afternoon for members of the Liars’ Club, which was established just after World War II.
Every Friday at noon, 15 to 20 members and guests drop in at Merlin’s to find relief from their solitary work routines. They pull out dollar bills and bet poker hands on the serial numbers, a bluffing game known as — what else? — Liar’s Poker.
Over the years, Liars’ Club members have included John D. MacDonald, author of the best-selling Travis McGee books; MacKinlay Kantor, who won a Pulitzer Prize for Andersonville; Larry L. King, who wrote the Broadway hit The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas; biographer Alden Hatch; Erskine Caldwell, best known for Tobacco Road and folksinger-actor Burl Ives. Today’s members include Joseph Hayes, screenwriter and author of Red Dawn, and cartoonist Dik Brown, who draws Hagar the Horrible.
VACATIONERS CAME TO SARASOTA long before it became an artists’ colony. It all started in the 1870s when entrepreneur John Webb opened Webb’s Winter Resort on Little Sarasota Bay and advertised his guest cottages in northern newspapers.
But it remained a sleepy fishing village with about 1,000 residents until 1911, when John Ringling, flamboyant circus promoter, oil and real-estate tycoon, and one of the world’s richest men, arrived looking for winter quarters for his “Greatest Show on Earth.”
Ringling was a legendary figure by the time he arrived in Florida. He and four of his brothers owned Ringling Brothers Circus and the Barnum & Bailey Circus, founded by the equally legendary Phineas T. (“Never give a sucker an even break”) Barnum.
Ringling also owned part of New York’s Madison Square Garden. Among his friends were the likes of Diamond Jim Brady, producer Flo Ziegfeld and President Warren G. Harding.
Ringling was so taken with Sarasota and its offshore islands that he decided to turn it into a gathering place for the elite and a winter refuge for his friends.
With typical enthusiasm, he plunged into real estate and development, buying 66,000 acres inland on the Myakka River, all of St. Armands and Bird keys and much of the south end of Longboat Key, as well as 38 acres of Sarasota Bay frontage on which he would build his mansion.
Ringling’s laborers dredged canals, built a causeway, installed roads, sewers and streetlights, began work on his masterpiece hotel — the Sarasota Ritz- Carlton on the south end of Longboat Key — and constructed a pier and casino at Lido Beach. They also renovated the El Vernona Hotel, renamed the John Ringling Hotel, where a circus giant was installed as the doorman.
Ringling was a man with many interests — business, civic and social. He passed much of his time in his radio station in the John Ringling Hotel, persuaded his friend, John J. McGraw, to bring the New York Giants to Sarasota for spring training, kept his yacht, the Zalophus, ready at hand, and entertained the likes of Will Rogers at his lavish Sarasota mansion Ca’d’Zan (“House of John”).
The facade of the 30-room mansion, now open to the public, was copied from the Doge’s Palace in Venice, Italy, one of Ringling’s favorite stops on his frequent European tours.
Inside the house, he installed a 4,000-pipe Aeolian organ, a huge crystal chandelier which once hung in the lobby of New York’s Waldorf-Astoria, marbled bathrooms with gold fixtures, and room after room of period furnishings, Italian statues, Baroque paintings and Venetian glass.
Just a short walk from the mansion, Ringling built his own art museum, a massive, U-shaped palazzo styled after a 15th-century Florentine villa, with arched terraces, long, shaded loggias and a formal sculptured Italian garden courtyard filled with reproductions of classical and Renaissance sculptures.
In his will, Ringling left the entire estate to Florida, which now owns and operates the property as the official state art museum.
In 1948, as a memorial to Ringling, the state established a second museum on the grounds of the estate, the Ringling Museum of the Circus. It is a storehouse of memorabilia and documents illustrating the history of the big top.
During the early 1950s, a fourth attraction was added. The interior of a 1798 theater was purchased in its entirety from the small Italian town of Asolo, near Venice, and reassembled on the estate. It now serves as the official state theater of Florida.
Ringling’s plans to develop his island property across Sarasota Bay were devastated at the end of the 1920s when the Florida land boom collapsed and the Great Depression swept the nation.
Then, in 1929, his wife Mable died. In the next few years, Ringling lost control of his circus, gave up plans to complete the Ritz-Carlton Hotel, saw his yacht sink between Longboat and Lido keys, and went through a messy second marriage and divorce.
He persevered, however, opening both his art museum and the Ringling School of Art and Design in 1931. By the time he died in 1936, his influence had changed Sarasota forever.
Today, the city has four private theaters downtown: Theaterworks, the Players of Sarasota, the Florida Studio Theater and the Golden Apple Dinner Theater.
The Asolo Opera became the Sarasota Opera in 1983, and is one of only seven opera companies in the nation with its own house, the 750-seat Sarasota Theater of the Arts. There are also the Florida West Coast Symphony, the Florida Symphonic Band, a 26-voice professional chorus called Gloria Musicale, and the striking Van Wezel Performing Arts Hall on the bay.
Information regarding theaters and performances can be obtained from the individual organizations or through the Sarasota Convention and Visitors Bureau at 813-957-1877.
FOR ALL ITS RENOWN AS AN arts center, Sarasota recently returned to promoting the attractions that drew its artists to the city in the first place — the miles of white beaches on the keys across Sarasota Bay.
Siesta Key, southernmost of the county’s barrier islands, was home to the late John D. MacDonald, and it continues to be an artists’ and writers’ colony. Heading south from the Siesta Drive causeway leading to the key are Boyd Park, then Siesta Beach with tennis courts and playgrounds, Crescent Beach and Point of Rocks, the latter a favorite spot for snorkeling.
Lido Key, the next island north, is reached via the Ringling causeway from Sarasota. It has three public beach areas.
Longboat Key, where a scouting party sent by Spanish explorer Hernando De Soto landed a “longboat” in the 1500s, has limited public beach access.
John Ringling’s dreams of an exclusive shopping area surrounded by elegant homes on St. Armands Key lay fallow until the 1950s, when construction resumed in the post-war Florida tourism boom. Today, St. Armands Circle is lined with more than 100 smart shops, boutiques and restaurants, including the Columbia, a branch of the famous Spanish restaurant in Tampa’s Ybor City.
Six other attractions in the area include:
–Payne Park, spring training home for the Chicago White Sox (the Pittsburgh Pirates train in nearby Bradenton).
–The Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus winter quarters just south of Sarasota in Venice, home of the Clown College and testing grounds each January for new circus acts.
–Hermann’s Lipizzan Ranch, in Myakka City east of Sarasota.
–The Mote Marine Science Center, on St. Armands Key, with shark, turtle and fish displays.
–The Lionel Train and Seashell Museum, where 17 Lionel trains can be operated by visitors.
–Myakka River State Park, southeast of Sarasota, the largest and most primitive of Florida’s state parks.
HOW TO GET THERE
The best route to Sarasota by automobile, leaving from Fort Lauderdale, is Alligator Alley to either Interstate 75 or U.S. 41, which hugs the west coast. It’s about a 200-mile drive or approximately 3 1/2 hours. Leaving from West Palm Beach, the trip is slightly shorter. One route is U.S. 27 north to State Road 70 west into State Road 72, which takes you to both U.S. 41 and Interstate 75 and on into Sarasota. The quickest way to Sarasota is by plane. Round-trip airfare from Fort Lauderdale on Air Sunshine ranges from $98-$118. Round-trip communter service from Palm Beach Interna- tional on Eastern Airlines is $152.
