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1627-12 Interviews J mh DIPLOMAT'S COWANS: THE INNKEEPERS AT HOME 12/30/1984 THE MIAMI HERALD Copyright (c) 1984, The Miami Herald DATE: Sunday, December 30, 1984 EDITION: FINAL SECTION: LIVING TODAY PAGE: 5G LENGTH: 219 lines ILLUSTRATION: photo: Marge and Irving, Marge and Irving and Jonathon and Cindy, Diplomat hotel SOURCE/CREDIT LINE: OLANDA W. WOODLEE Herald Staff Writer DIPLOMAT'S COWANS: THE INNKEEPERS AT HOME They met on a blind date at the Fontainebleau Hotel swimming pool. Friends introduced Irving Cowan, a 22-year-old cattle-buyer from Bartow, to Marge Friedland, a rich schoolgirl with a good figure who looked older than her 14 years. A year and a half later, Marge, then 16, and Iry were married at the same hotel. The romance born at the swank Miami Beach hotel 30 years ago has matured into a multimillion-dollar partnership at another ritzy hotel -- the Diplomat on Hollywood Beach, one of the few hotels that still makes a claim to glamour. Bob Hope, who'll perform there on New Year's Eve, calls the show there "THE way to bring in the New Year." • The Diplomat's influence is felt from the Chamber of Commerce to City Hall. It's Hollywood's largest private-sector employer, with 1,400 people on the payroll. It's Broward's largest hotel and brings in 10 percent of the county's bed tax -- money used to promote tourism. Iry Cowan is the president. Marge Cowan is the executive. He is reserved, stiff. He makes sure the hotel operates efficiently. She is relaxed, creative. She makes certain the hotel offers a personal touch, such as the chocolate-coated strawberries in every room. They share an office suite on the mezzanine of the family- owned and operated hotel. They share a double-desk office in their nine-bathroom home. They socialize with the likes of Peggy Lee, Sammy Davis Jr. and Liza Minnelli. Artist Andy Warhol has painted Marge Cowan's portrait. Since he was named executive president of the Diplomat Hotel in 1960, Irving Cowan has worked to make it, in his eyes, South Florida's one-stop paradise. That means top-name entertainment and spending $20 million to refurbish the hotel after two major fires and two minor ones in eight months. Co-owners of a nationally renowned hotel, co-producers of an unsuccessful Broadway musical and backers of legalized gambling in an anti-gambling state, the Cowans are, often found at the center of public controversy in South Florida. Angry elderly protesters recently convinced the Hollywood City Commission to block the Cowans ' plan to turn the Diplomat golf course into a housing development. Maybe, because their work is so public, they jealously guard their privacy. Calls to their office are automatically transferred to the hotel's public relations director. Their home phone number is private. A security guard in the driveway greets visitors to their home. If Marge and Iry don't want to talk to you, they don't. "Once we close the door to our house, we try to keep the business outside, " Iry Cowan said. "We've managed to keep our business life and our home life separate. " When the Cowans met at the Fontainebleau during the 1950s, it was Miami Beach's swankiest nightspot, where renowned entertainers and well-to-do Jewish residents mingled. Both were part of that society. She was born into it, he worked his way in. Marge Friedland was the youngest child and only daughter of Hattie and muel Friedland, board chairman and founder of the Food Fair-Pantry PrideNI/6 supermarket chain. She had skipped a couple of grades before she graduated at age 15 from Whitefield High, a private Miami Beach school. Irving Cohen, his surname when they were married, was an ambitious, hard-working teen-ager. After school, he had jobs digging ditches on Collins Avenue, busing trays in an Italian restaurant and even bagging groceries at Food Fair. He studied business administration at the University of Miami before enlisting in the Coast Guard. He returned to work for his father, Joseph Cohen, in the family's thriving meat- packing business. Iry was one of the youngest cattle buyers in Florida in the 1950s. "I was a cowboy, " he says of those boring days in Bartow, a small town in central Florida. He met Marge on a weekend trip to Miami. They courted by telephone and visits until they were married in December 1956. Two years later, his ther-in-law built the Diplomat. Friedland wanted family to manage it, but no relatives were hoteliers. Remembering the prestige and enchantment of the Fontainebleau, the couple decided to try it for a year and loved it. They also decided to change their last name because there was another hotelman named Irving Cohen. A quarter of a century later, the Cowans have turned the Diplomat into an oceanfront landmark that attracts royalty and high-ranking statesmen. President Reagan addressed the International Longshoremen's Association at the Diplomat last year. After renting two floors at the hotel, Saudi Arabian Sheik Mohamed al-Fassi was arrested for not paying his $1.4 million tab. He unsuccessfully sued the Diplomat for $1 trillion in 1982. While events at the Diplomat keep reporters pacing the lobby, the Cowans i rarely permit a closer look at their personal lives. Iry is reserved, not relaxed like Marge, when they walk through the pp' 1, 160-room Diplomat. They occasionally steal a kiss, and he always reaches for f her hand at stairs. He stands with his back so straight that he could be I wearing a back brace. The Cowans, married 28 years, parents of Debbie, 26, Cindy, 25, and Jonathon, 9, will become grandparents for the first time in February. Marge, Ikl 44, wearing purple sunglasses with her once- long brunette hair now blond, short and feathered, drives to the Diplomat in a maroon-colored Porsche. "I enjoy life. I don't think I'm extravagant to the point that I 'm i opulent, " she says, two gold bracelets clanging together as she gestures. J When she talks, she raises her eyebrows and tilts her head to the right, I like a teen-ager talking confidentially to her best friend. She frequently interrupts her sentences with, "You know what I mean. " At their Hollywood-by-the-Sea home -- one mile from the Diplomat on the Intracoastal Waterway -- the butler serves hot tea on a porcelain platter. "It's too dark; can you make it lighter?" she asks. "Never mind. I 'll have iced tea. Thank you." At home, the Cowans can get "real funky, " as she says. He trades his suit for jeans. They play tennis on their tennis court and go out in the speed boat. At dinner, the family tries not to talk about work, but that can be difficult when the hotel business is the fabric of family life, said Cindy, who lives at home. Cindy, who is the hotel's director of touring, says that as the bosses ' daughter, "you feel like everyone is watching you. I definitely don't get any special privileges. My salary started like everyone else's -- at the bottom. " At least three days a week, the family eats together in the emerald green dining room. Sometimes they sit at the bar next to the game room, where pictures of the Cowans with Presidents Truman, Ford, Carter and Reagan march across a table. Iry Cowan is generally proclaimed as one of the czars of the South Florida hotel industry, but his horizon stretches beyond the penthouse suite. He is a director and a major stockholder of City National Bank of Florida and chairman of Royal Palm Beach Colony Inc. , a primary developer of a village of the same name in Palm Beach County. He also owns and operates 6, 000 acres of orange groves in Palm Beach County.46he Cowans own the 255-room Shelborne Hotel in Miami Beach, a thoroughbred race horse in Chile and seven other horses in Europe. Marge Cowan divides her time between the couple's youngest child, chairing fund-raising events and sitting on advisory boards at Nova University and Broward Community College. While the couple's successes are numerous, they have failed at other costly business ventures. For years, Iry Cowan has been trying to bring casino gambling to South Florida. Six years ago, despite talk that casinos would attract organized crime, Iry and his wife's father, Friedland, pumped close to $750, 000 into a campaign led by several powerful hotel owners to legalize gambling in Florida. Voters decided against it by an overwhelming 2-1 vote, but Cowan hasn't quit. Last fall, along with several other hotel owners, he started a new drive to bring casinos to South Florida. In 1981, a court decision blocked efforts by the Cowans, Friedland and Miami business associate Ronald Fine to turn Miami's Watson Island into a $55 million amusement park. The Cowans tried unsuccessfully to bring the Buffalo Braves basketball team to the Hollywood Sportatorium in 1976. But the owner decided not to sell the team when Buffalo sued to keep the Braves. Last year, the Cowans co-produced a Broadway musical called Peg with Zev Bufman. The show was based on the autobiography of their friend, Peggy Lee. It flopped after five performances. Iry Cowan casually dismisses the play's failure, saying that people just don't appreciate a personality's life story until that person is dead. Bob Hope, very much alive, will make a one-night appearance in the hotel's Regency Ballroom on Monday. He performed there New Year's Eve 1978. He recalls, "the other time I was there , I enjoyed it. And I 'm so anxious to get back. " Booking top-name entertainers isn't profitable, but the Cowans like the image the stars give the hotel. "It's more for the ability to create the atmosphere that I think people enjoy when they are on vacation, " Iry Cowan said. "Ambiance. It's nice to go the pool and see Burt Bacharach sitting there. People like that. " When celebrities appear at the Diplomat, they're often more to the Cowans than just paid performers. They're friends. Liza Minnelli usually stops by the Diplomat when she's in South Florida. Her mother performed there. Sammy Davis Jr. was best man when the Cowans renewed their marriage vows at their 20th wedding anniversary. Marilyn McCoo and Billy Davis, for instance, met the Cowans when they were singing with the Fifth Dimension at the hotel 12 years ago. They describe the Cowans as experts in the entertainment industry and as a fun-loving couple after working hours. Before McCoo decided to host the television show Solid Gold, she talked to the Cowans. "People we count as true friends are the people who will tell us what they truly think, " McCoo said. "Marge will come and say, 'You know, Marilyn, I don't think that song suits you as well as others I heard you do. ' She's tactful. " Humorous, too, McCoo said, recalling a night of frolicking in a New York hotel with the Cowans. "We were all hungry and trying to decide what to send out for, " McCoo said. "Marge was saying, why don't we send out for fried chicken. I said I had a taste for bagels and lox. Marge said, 'Isn't there something a little off here? ' " They ordered both. The stars add glitter to the Hollywood resort on the ocean. And the Cowans get both credit and criticism. "They really do give Hollywood a good name," City Commissioner Suzanne Gunzburger said. "I think the Diplomat projects the type of image Hollywood wants; upscale . . . upbeat." Broward County Commissioner Nicki Grossman said Iry Cowan definitely influences South Florida tourism with the national conventions and headliner attractions he brings to the Diplomat. But, she said, "He has a certain bias. He is first and foremost a partisan for the Diplomat Hotel. If he thinks something is going to compete with the Diplomat, he opposes it." "I don't want my dollars used where we're not going to get any benefits from it, " Cowan said. "There's nothing wrong with that. It's common sense. " The Diplomat gets its business in the form of everything from national conventions to local bar mitzvahs, weddings and charity banquets. The hotel uses 3, 000 pounds of linen a month, 22, 000 eggs a week and prepares 200 gallons of soup a day. After four fires and a four-month closing, the Diplomat reopened in September with a $20 million renovation of everything from the lobby to the penthouse suite. (Iry Cowan estimated that the hotel lost $150,000 a day while it was closed. ) That included construction of a $4.5 million beachfront Polynesian Gardens, a maze of cave-like rocks with built-in whirlpools and a tree top lounge. "Although the (Diplomat) isn't in Miami Beach, the Diplomat and Fontainebleau have been like bookends, " said Fontainebleau owner Steve Muss, a friend and competitor. While Muss and Iry Cowan talk about beefing up tourism in South Florida, they don't often discuss the conventions each is trying to land. Muss said he bumped heads with the Cowans on a hotel deal a couple of years ago. The Fontainebleau once owned a corporate jet and flew some businessmen down to look over the hotel as a site for a planned major convention. They looked at the Fontainebleau and decided to take a drive north -- to the Diplomat. They later booked their convention at the Hollywood hotel, leaving the Fontainebleau with a $17, 000 tab for travel expenses. "I 've been wondering how to charge the Diplomat, " Muss said, laughing. "That's healthy competition. I have never asked Mr. Cowan to reimburse me, nor will I ever." The Cowans still visit the Fontainebleau for dinner occasionally. "It's sort of like a businessman's holiday, " Iry Cowan says. KEYWORDS: BIOGRAPHY COWAN TAG: 8404050995 4 of 4, 5 Terms Transfer complete. Press [RETURN] to return to Menu: