Not long after marrying his second wife, Darcy LaPier, a former Hawaiian Tropic beauty contestant, in a reported more-than-a-million-dollar ceremony (“The Daytona event of all time,” Snook said), Rice learned that she was leaving him for the actor Jean-Claude Van Damme. His family life, though, was a bit bumpier. He was devoted to his friends and was famously generous (he mentions close to a thousand people in the acknowledgments in his book). Jerry Lee Lewis played piano at his Christmas parties. He was close with countless comedians and actors and musicians and athletes. Julio Iglesias and Hugh Hefner were his good pals. He became close with Buzz Aldrin, who had ridden into space the day Hawaiian Tropic rode onto store shelves. He was friends with the Beach Boys (he sponsored their concerts on the Mall in Washington, D.C., for years). He had, among other fun things, a twelve-thousand-square-foot house with a disco and two swimming pools, in Florida, and a huge sailing yacht. Lubricated by all his suntan-lotion money, Rice lived extremely large. (Tiffany was born shortly before their wedding.) At a regional pageant in Panama City, Florida, Donald Trump served as a celebrity judge, and Marla Maples was one of the Miss Hawaiian Tropic contestants. In 1983, he launched the Miss Hawaiian Tropic beauty pageant-here comes the Tiffany Trump angle-with celebrity judges onboard.
#HAWAIIAN TROPIC MODELS HELLS KITCHEN DRIVERS#
He plastered it on billboards, on sailboats, on Nascar vehicles (among the drivers he sponsored was Donnie Allison), on élite racing cars (he once sponsored Paul Newman at 24 Hours of Le Mans), at the Daytona 500, on catamarans, on his three jets (one of which he named the Rice Rocket), and as the sponsor of every event possible across the country-rock concerts, comedy showcases, ski races, whatever.
“He went by the seat of his pants, but he was a marketing genius.” Rice’s foundational philosophy was to put the Hawaiian Tropic name everywhere. “He just knew what appealed to people,” Jeff Snook, who collaborated with Rice on his memoir, “Great Times and Tan Lines: How I Created Hawaiian Tropic, Turned It Into a Billion Dollar Company . . . and Had a Blast Doing It,” said. Arguably, it was pretty good suntan lotion, but what really goosed sales was Rice’s instinct for guerrilla marketing. In time, he had thirteen factories making Hawaiian Tropic, and he would sell more than four billion dollars’ worth of the lotion over the next thirty-eight years. But, in short order, he became the king of tan. Tall, strawberry blond, freckle-faced, he never bronzed at most, his cheeks would redden and flush. He was bottling it as fast as he could, hiring other assistant football coaches to help him push it at the beach and, eventually, in stores.Ī curious side note: Ron Rice was not a tan man. If anything, it seemed to sell even better with the new name. A small glitch arose when Rice discovered that someone already owned the name Tropic Tan, so he renamed his product Hawaiian Tropic and relaunched it, the same day that Apollo 11 took off from nearby Cape Canaveral. Whatever he had mixed together worked it was an instant hit. Rice launched his suntan lotion, which he called Tropic Tan. Let it be noted that, while it is impossible now to think of suntan lotion without immediately recalling the scent of coconut, back in 1969, as Rice was tinkering in his garage, this pairing of fragrance and product was not yet heard of. He gets a garbage can and a broom handle and stirs up a concoction of mineral oil and aloe, and, for good measure, tosses in coconut oil. Like Walter White-that other enterprising chemistry teacher-Rice decides to take matters into his own hands. Also, what doesn’t satisfy him-especially during his lifeguard stints-is the limited choice of suntan lotion available at the time. After graduating from the University of Tennessee, he lands in the Daytona Beach area, and cobbles together a four-figure-a-year income coaching high-school football, teaching chemistry, and working as a lifeguard.
Rice sees the ocean, is smitten, and vows to return someday. At some point, the family scrapes together enough money for a vacation in Florida. Confused? Let’s begin at the beginning: Rice grows up poor in the mountains of North Carolina. If it weren’t for Ron Rice (1940-2022), there might not be a Tiffany Trump.
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