ARTHUR JONES IS NOT A HAPPY man, which seems odd considering that, at 65, he is working toward his second $100 million, and his fifth wife is a lithe and lovely 26-year-old former beauty queen.
Even stranger is what makes Jones unhappy: genes.
You’ve got good genes or bad genes at birth, he says. It was the genes he got from his physician parents, he believes, that enabled him to invent the legendary Nautilus physical fitness machine and make a fortune.
“So who uses the machine to get a body beautiful? Losers!” Jones complains. “I made a fortune off losers.
“You take a guy born with the genes to be Mr. America. The machine will help him get that body. You take Mr. 98-pound Weakling, or the guy with genes that make him fat and dumpy, and the machine won’t make him into Mr. America no matter how long he tries.”
Jones says a lot of things like this. Most of what he says is outrageous, usually on purpose, and most of it gets back to genes, the chemical units in the body that carry hereditary characteristics from parent to offspring — not only in people, but in gorillas, elephants, crocodiles and alligators.
Jones has had a lot of experience with each of those. He even keeps some around the house: one gorilla, 63 jumbo bush elephants, more than 200 crocodiles and 400 alligators. It’s all out in his back yard, making Jones one of the few men in the world — certainly the only one in Florida — with such an exotic private zoo.
Jones wants to breed some of the animals to save them from extinction. But he is even more interested in the function of genes in the hereditary process.
How the obsession with genetics came to dominate Jones’ life today is a saga worthy of a man who began his career running a roadside alligator stand for tourists in the Louisiana bayou and ended up working on his second $100 million.
It begins at the Jones compound, his mansion-zoo-jetstrip headquarters nestled among the live oaks and horse farms in the rolling hills near Ocala.
The compound rolls on for acres. Glimpses of the white clapboard mansion are seen through the live oaks as you drive up. Visitors are halted by wrought- iron gates with the estate name spelled out overhead: “Jumbolair.”
Jones bought the spread eight years ago when it was a modest 85 acres, suitable as a wedding present for Terri, his 18-year-old bride. Today, it has grown to 520 acres.
Jones likes his visitors to enter via the service gate a hundred yards down the road from the main gates. It’s not snobbery. He wants them to get a full view of the 7,500-foot jetstrip that he constructed to accommodate his personal air force.
Half of his fleet — three Boeing 707s — often are somewhere else, flying charters or returning from Paraguay, Nepal or Sri Lanka with another load of exotic wildlife destined for Jones’ back yard. The rest of his fleet is usually parked within the concrete blast-barriers he has built.
There’s a four-seater prop for short hops and a 12-passenger Gulfstream executive jet for longer hauls. Next to the two planes is a black jet with “Charlie” lettered in gold on the tail. It belongs to Terri, a former model who has a personal services publicity contract for Revlon’s “Charlie” perfume. She make appearances and flies aerobatics at air shows around the country. Jones, a licensed pilot, taught her to fly the plane.
A tunnel runs through the concrete blast-barrier and leads to the mansion. Inside the tunnel, hunched behind a bullet-proof glass enclosure, is Mickey, a 22-year-old, 500-pound black Lowland gorilla (the biggest of its species) who was formerly owned by the Ringling Brothers-Barnum & Bailey Circus.
“He’s our official greeter and resident bodybuilder,” says compound manager Ralph Cramer, who has been with Jones since the 1950s.
Behind the mansion are four giant Galapagos tortoises — two males, two females — which Jones likes to keep around for their genetic rarity.
Then comes a crocodile called Gomick, named after an Australian television clown. The huge croc is sunning on a sandbank by its own pond, which is surrounded by a steel fence — a prudent measure considering that Gomick is a 17-foot, man-eating crocodile weighing 1,700 pounds.
“He used to eat people off the riverbanks near Port Moresby in New Guinea,” Ralph Cramer claims. “Arthur says he just eats lawyers now.”
Actually, Gomick eats 50 pounds of nutrias, a muskrat-like rodent imported from South America years ago and accidentally released in the swamps of Louisiana, where it multiplied like rabbits. Gomick gorges on the 50 pounds at one sitting, then takes a week to digest his meal.
ONE BEGINS TO WONDER, AT this point of the tour, how Arthur Jones went from running a roadside alligator show to owning a wild kingdom.
A good place to start is with the Nautilus machine.
“I’ve always had an interest in physiology, always been a student of it,” says Jones, who is neither a college graduate nor a trained physical therapist.
He built his first exercise machine in 1948 at a YMCA in Tulsa, Okla. He tinkered with it for two decades, taking time out for exploits such as the Louisiana gator stand. Then, in 1970, he introduced a refined version of the machine at a convention of weightlifters in Los Angeles.
His timing was perfect, because the fitness and health-spa boom that took off in the ’70s was just beginning. By 1980, there were more than 2,500 fitness centers in the nation, and most of them had paid $40,000 each for a set of 18 of Jones’ machines, and the right to use the Nautilus name.
Jones finally grew bored with Nautilus and sold his interest in the firm. But he still likes to tinker with new inventions, and is now introducing a machine called the MedX that will diagnose and help correct lower back problems. That’s how he figures he will make his second $100 million.
JONES HIMSELF IS NO FITNESS NUT. He’s a short, bald, heavily wrinkled man of 65, and his fingers are stained from decades of chain-smoking nonfiltered Pall Malls.
He grew up in Tulsa during the Depression but escaped the hard times because both of his parents were physicians. Nevertheless, Jones often ran away from home and was a high school drop-out who joined the Navy in his late teens. After World War II, he drifted into the world of wild animals.
The highway gator stand that Jones operated in the ’50s was his first effort to hustle a buck.
“I have imported more species of animals than any other person,” he says. “I’ve imported them by the hundreds of thousands. Monkeys by the ton. Enough tropical fish to fill up a cargo plane.”
During the ’50s and ’60s, Jones’ animal importing and salesmanship led him to syndicated television shows. He was host for the National Geographic series Wild Cargo, and several other shows, including I Search for Adventure, Professional Hunter and Call of the Wild.
Like many self-made millionaires, Jones is not noted for humility.
“I’ve killed 600 elephants and 73 men in my life — and I’m more sorry about the elephants,” he says.
Of his young wife, Jones says with typical bluntness, “She’s the kind of woman the more you undress her the better she looks.”
That Jones might embellish stories about himself doesn’t bother most people. Certainly not the administrators of the University of Florida. Jones donated $3 million to the university for research into the causes of osteoporosis, a degenerative bone disease that afflicts 25 percent of American women in their postmenopausal years.
Curiously, he doesn’t expect the researchers to discover a thing.
“Research is guesswork,” he says.
JONES PREFERS TO DO THINGS HIS way. Which brings us to the elephants.
In 1985, Jones decided to fly his fleet of planes to Africa and save 250 elephants from famine and slaughter by ivory hunters.
Great idea, said the producers of ABC’s news show 20-20. They asked to go along and film the adventure.
However, Jones did not return from Africa with the promised 250 jumbo elephants, but with 63 baby jumbos.
At first, the elephants did not take kindly to their new home in Florida.
One night, the herd ate all the trees in their communal pen. “They use their tusks just like chisels,” Cramer says. By morning, many of the cypress and oaks in the pen were dead or dying.
Of the trees that survived, Cramer and Jones lined the first 20 feet of the trunks with thick slabs of concrete. Then they installed an electric fence. Initially, they tried low-voltage electric fencing used by horse breeders and cattlemen.
“We were just kidding ourselves,” Cramer says. They had to replace the fence with a 4,500-volt system.
The keepers at Jumbolair also know now to put the elephants inside the custom-built barn when the temperature falls below 50 degrees. The elephants are fed coastal Bermuda hay grown on the estate and mixed with dry pellets of feed enriched to a high-protein diet.
All of which causes another unpleasant problem.
“I don’t know how many tons of manure we take out of the barn a day,” says Cramer, “but we’ve mechanized to do it.”
A couple of years after the elephants arrived in Florida, 20/20 decided to do a follow-up. But this time, they asked awkward questions about the treatment of the elephants, the 73 dead men, gun-running in Africa, and Jones’ theories on genetics.
“They did a hatchet job on me,” Jones says.”So I’m suing them for $4 billion in federal district court in Tampa. I filed it last summer. It probably won’t amount to much, but at least I can tie up their damn lawyers with my damn lawyers.”
BACK BY THE AIRSTRIP, about a half-mile from the elephant herd, is possibly the world’s most elite collection of crocodiles. Zoos in New York, San Diego, Paris, London, Beijing and Washington, D.C., are openly envious of how successfully Jones has bred — in captivity — the world’s rarest crocs.
For example, the Bronx Zoo made headlines just by breeding three rare and endangered croc species during a five-year period. Yet Jones’ crocodile keeper, Kenny Earnest, bred 10 rare and endangered croc species in two years at Jumbolair.
Among them are the needle-nosed Gavial crocs from India (a rare species whose nose evolved so it could catch fish), Ceylonese saltwater crocs (bred in captivity for the first time ever), the incredibly rare Cuban crocodile, and the black caiman, which has never been bred in captivity.
Earnest and his wife, Sharon, also tend more than 400 American alligators in 20 huge pens — an operation licensed by both state and federal wildlife agencies.
Now Jones and Earnest are planning to raise gators and sell the meat to restaurants.
Sometimes, Earnest’s charges decide to try and get out of their pens and slither off into the Central Florida night. The chicken wire and steel fence stops most of them, even the ones who can jump three feet straight up.
Even so, Earnest patrols nightly to keep an eye on his toothy charges, roping them like ornery cattle when they try to ram through the fences.
ZOOLOGISTS HAVE MIXED FEELings about Jones’ private zoo.
Maj. Kyle Hill, chief of inspection for the Florida Game and Fresh Water Fish Commission’s law enforcement division, says, “I don’t know Arthur Jones, but we’ve never had any problems with his operation.”
Other zoological experts, however, are critical of the fact that Jones is raising some of the rarest species in the world with little regard for the kind of expertise a professional zoo could provide. Jones, as usual, regards his critics with contempt.
“I took the director of (a major metropolitan zoo) out in the street one time at a convention of zoo directors and offered to kick his —,” Jones recalls. It was a dispute about Jones importing orangutans back in 1962.
Bill Zeigler, general curator at Miami’s Metrozoo, acknowledges Jones’ stunning breeding success at Jumbolair, but still wonders whether private owners can really save an endangered species.
“The species needs to be part of a program that would help sustain it,” Zeigler points out. “It may not be cared for properly. It may be inbred, which wouldn’t save it at all.
“Private owners don’t want to participate in zoo exchange programs and breeding programs. A lot of private collectors don’t want their collection known, for fear of theft or vandalism. Then, too, zoos run by government or by private trusts are fairly stable. Arthur may decide one day he’s tired of his crocs.”
Five years ago, there were exotic and poisonous snakes in the Jones collection. “We got rid of most of them. The liabilities were too much for the employees,” Ralph Cramer says.
Jones kept the snakes as long as he did because of their genes. He spent years trying to grow the biggest rattlesnake in the world. “Arthur wanted to see if he could breed an eight-foot rattler,” Cramer says.
Jones never succeeded in breeding the mutant rattler — but one can never be certain what might someday walk or slither out of the gates at Jumbolair.
