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Morris Wilkins, the man behind the heart-shaped tubs that lured lovers to the Poconos, dies at age 90

 
A room at Cove Haven Resort in the Poconos shows the heart-shaped bathtub. By all accounts, Morris Wilkins installed the Poconos' first heart-shaped bathtub, drawing a gush of media coverage and a steady stream of honeymoon business for the area. Wilkins, who died on Monday, May 25, 2015 at a Las Vegas hospital at 90, tried but failed to patent his tub, which then became a fixture of hotel love nests everywhere. [Cove Haven Entertainment Resorts via New York Times]
A room at Cove Haven Resort in the Poconos shows the heart-shaped bathtub. By all accounts, Morris Wilkins installed the Poconos' first heart-shaped bathtub, drawing a gush of media coverage and a steady stream of honeymoon business for the area. Wilkins, who died on Monday, May 25, 2015 at a Las Vegas hospital at 90, tried but failed to patent his tub, which then became a fixture of hotel love nests everywhere. [Cove Haven Entertainment Resorts via New York Times]
Published May 29, 2015

During the post-World War II marriage boom, when gas shortages persuaded honeymooners from New York and Philadelphia to stay closer to home, hoteliers began luring newlyweds to the Poconos instead of to Niagara Falls.

But it was not until 1968 that those northeastern Pennsylvania mountains would be unblushingly branded the libidinous Land of Love. That was when Morris Wilkins, a former electrician and submariner, in the unlikely guise of Cupid, sparked a romantic reformation in his own Poconos hotel, the nondescript lakeside Cove Haven resort.

Wilkins, by all accounts, designed and installed the Poconos' first heart-shaped bathtub.

By then the Poconos and Niagara Falls could both boast running water, but suddenly Pennsylvania resorts were marketing a distinct indoor aquatic experience that promised a sensual bonus. Business boomed.

"There was no particular reason that the Poconos should have been established as a honeymoon destination," said Carl Wilgus, president of the Pocono Mountains Visitors Bureau. "It was a true testament that advertising works."

Wilkins, who died at 90 on Monday in Las Vegas, tried but failed to patent his tub, which meant it could proliferate with abandon. It became a fixture of hotel love nests everywhere. (He was, however, granted Patent No. D294290 in 1988 for a tub shaped like a Champagne glass, which also became popular at Cove Haven.)

In 1971, in a two-page photo spread complete with a smooching couple, Life magazine gushed about the bubble-brimming, red-tiled "sweetheart tub" in Cove Haven's mirrored bathrooms. "A surfeit of affluent vulgarity," the magazine said, apparently good-humoredly.

If Wilkins did not single-handedly instigate the sexual revolution, he was on the barricades, brandishing a fleecy pink bath towel while exhorting newlyweds to enjoy his "cruise ship on land," as his son Thomas Wilkins put it.

Today, Cove Haven and its sister hotels, Pocono Palace and Paradise Dreams, boast 437 heart-shaped whirlpool-equipped bathtubs and 135 7-foot-tall Champagne-glass tubs, which, for the record, guests enter from the upper story of their suite.

"Morris Wilkins has done more for romance than a box of chocolates," the Philadelphia Daily News wrote in 2000.

Wilkins was a romantic at heart. He and his fiancée, Lois Faye Weitz, had eloped and remained married for 47 years, until her death in 2002.

Wilkins and his tubs achieved a kind of immortality when Cove Haven became the setting for a 1982 television movie titled For Lovers Only. In the film, which was shot at Cove Haven, the hotel proprietor, played by Andy Griffith and aptly named Vernon Bliss, advises his daughter belatedly that one reason her marriage is ending in divorce is that she never had a honeymoon.

"I'm sorry, Daddy, but I don't think five days of pink Champagne and smarmy Cupids would have made any difference," the daughter replies.

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"You're wrong, kiddo," Vernon insists. "Why do you think there've been honeymoons for 5,000 years? Why do you think the groom used to kidnap the bride and take her off away from the tribe? So they could be alone and just concentrate on each other. I'm telling you, everything that's special, and sacred, and magic, about marriage starts right here."

Writing about the film in the New York Times, John J. O'Connor suggested that its appeal was a little less lofty.

"Groups of pretty young people kept appearing periodically to stroke each other suggestively and then run off, squealing, to the nearest available room for an orgy," he wrote.

Morris Benjamin Wilkins was born in the Poconos area, in Stroudsburg, Pa., on March 21, 1925. His father, Benjamin, a tailor, had immigrated from Russia. His mother, the former Rose Katz, was from Hungary. The younger Wilkins enlisted in the Navy at 17, shortly after the attack on Pearl Harbor, and served in the Pacific on submarines.

He married Weitz in 1955. Their honeymoon consisted of two nights at the Astor Hotel in Manhattan. A week later, Hurricane Diane all but destroyed his electrical contracting business.

As Wilkins told the Morning Call, the hometown newspaper of Allentown, Pa., his career in hospitality began in 1958, when he and a carpenter friend, Harold O'Brien, were working at a particularly dour hotel. "One day," he recalled, "we looked at each other and said, 'Boy, if we can't make people happier than these people, it's a joke.' "

They soon bought the Hotel Pocopaupack on Lake Wallenpaupack in Lakeville, Pa., and, saving a lot of syllables, changed the name to Cove Haven.

They operated the establishment more or less uneventfully as a couples-only resort until, legend has it, Wilkins awoke with a brainstorm, bolted from his bed and went to his basement, where he drew a large heart on the concrete floor. (According to another account, an ordinary circular whirlpool was accidentally bent into a heart shape as it was being squeezed past a corner.)

Since then, heart-shaped tubs have been mass produced. Bonnie Reed, a spokeswoman for Bath-Tec, a Texas company, which has been making red and pink acrylic ones since 1985, said sales had declined some over the last decade.

But Reed noted that the company had shipped four last week to another hotel in the Poconos, where resorts still market themselves as destinations not only for newlyweds but also for other couples to escape and reconnect. (The whirlpool sells for $2,395, Reed said; the regular tub for $1,433.)

Wilkins sold Cove Haven to Caesars World in 1969, opened other resorts nearby and became president of Caesars Pocono Resorts. He retired in 1999.

Cove Haven Entertainment Resorts became part of Starwood Hotels and Resorts Worldwide and is now operated by Highgate Hotels.

Writing in a 2011 Moon travel guide for Pennsylvania, Anna Dubruvsky described Cove Haven as one of three remaining couples resorts where guests "uncork more than 20,000 bottles of Champagne and empty twice as many bottles of bubble bath."

"They splish-splash in hot tubs shaped like hearts and Champagne glasses," she added, "canoodle in private pools and 'sleep' on rounded beds under mirrored ceilings. They prove that kitschy and sexy can go hand in hand."

Besides his son Thomas, from an earlier marriage, Wilkins is survived by another son, Michael; two daughters, Lois Immerman and Jill Wilkins; seven grandchildren; and a brother, David.

After Lois Wilkins died, Wilkins moved to Palm Springs, California, before later settling in Las Vegas.

He died of heart failure in a hospital there, his son-in-law, Jonathan Kaplan, said.

Was Wilkins ever in a heart-shaped tub himself?

"He was," Kaplan said. "Sadly, I don't have a photo of that moment."