The Orchid Thief Read online

  “FASCINATING … A RARE AND EXOTIC TALE

  THAT SHOWS A JOURNALIST’S GIFTS IN FULL BLOOM.”

  —The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

  “Orlean is a superb tour guide through the loony subculture of Florida’s orchid fanciers, and a writer whose sentences can glow like rare blooms, as when she reports that the air above an orchid swamp’s sinkholes ‘has the slack, drapey weight of wet velvet.’ ”

  —Time

  “A zestfully informative and entertaining read. Orlean’s writerly verve handily matches the passions of her orchid-lovers, in a book that positively blooms with exotic sights and eccentric personalities.”

  —The Seattle Times

  “Uproarious or understated, [Orlean] often writes with a smile on her lips. And she’s game for anything. You have to admire an author who absolutely hates mucking around in scum-covered, alligator-infested waters, with companions as dubious as a work party from a local prison, yet does so to capture the story. And to deliver a priceless line: ‘I hate hiking with convicts carrying machetes.’ In Orlean’s position, hate was a perfectly understandable emotion. From where I sat, safe and dry in the reading chair of my orchid-free living room, a different feeling arose: Love at first read.”

  —San Diego Union-Tribune

  “Orlean’s gifts [are] her ear for the self-skewing dialogue, her eye for the incongruous, convincing detail, and her Didion-like deftness in description. The landscapes of John Laroche and the state of Florida elicit some of her best writing. Laroche has ‘the posture of al dente spaghetti’ and ‘the bulk and shape of a coat hanger.’ Of Florida’s beauty, she writes: ‘The grass prairies in sunlight look like yards of raw silk … beautiful in the way a Persian carpet is beautiful—thick, intricate, lush, almost monotonous in its richness.’ Such rapturous evocations are reason enough to read Orlean’s book; her overabundance of information is gravy.”

  —The Boston Sunday Globe

  “AN ECCENTRIC, ILLUMINATING, HILARIOUS BOOK THAT IS AS BEWITCHING AS THE RARE SPECIMENS IT DESCRIBES.”

  —New York Daily News

  “The delicate beauty of exotic blossoms inspires eccentric collectors and swamp-smart suppliers alike in this true-life South Florida smuggling mystery.”

  —People (“Worth a Look” feature)

  “If you liked Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, this new nonfiction work by Susan Orlean will hold you utterly spellbound. Like many orchids, it’s a beautiful hybrid: part crime story, part exotic read. Led by the title character, a charismatic plant smuggler, you’ll journey with Orlean through a strangely fascinating, almost mystical, subculture.”

  —Glamour

  “Between hardcovers, nobody but Carl Hiaasen can talk Florida to me the way Susan Orlean has in The Orchid Thief, which so richly captures the Sunshine State’s bizarre personality, its fevered optimism, its hurricane whims of passion, the hard heat of those not always legal dreams that have made its citizens notorious. Orlean has crafted a classic tale of tropic desire, steamy and fragrant and smart and entertaining.”

  —BOB SHACOCHIS

  “Orlean’s hilarious and clever take on the spectacularly hybrid culture of South Florida seems lifted out of one of novelist Carl Hiaasen’s black humor tales—but with a major difference: Hiaasen makes his stuff up and Orlean doesn’t.”

  —Orlando Sentinel

  “ENDLESSLY FASCINATING … VIVID AND DRAMATIC … [ORLEAN IS] AN EXTRAORDINARY GUIDE FOR A TOUR OF SUCH A MYSTERIOUS AND BEAUTIFUL SUBJECT.”

  —The Denver Post

  “[An] absorbing and frequently hilarious new book … Orleans excels at physical description and characterization. By the time you’ve turned a dozen pages of The Orchid Thief, the Florida humidity seems draped like a sticky shawl over your shoulders.”

  —Memphis Commercial Appeal

  “The Orchid Thief is the finest piece of nonfiction I’ve read in years: characters so juicy and wonderfully weird they might have stepped out of a novel, except these people are real. The Orchid Thief is everything we expect from the very best literature. It opens our eyes to an extraordinary new universe and stirs our passion for the people who populate the world. Susan Orlean is a writer of immense talent. I would follow her anywhere.”

  —JAMES W. HALL

  “Orlean’s true tale of smugglers, spies, and swamp things rivals the murky intrigue of Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. No author searching for a protagonist could have done better than Florida’s orchid thief John Laroche, who, when not scheming against the law, introduced her to the feverish world of botanical obsession. The result is a chronicle bizarre enough to entertain even those who’d kill a cactus.”

  —Marie Claire

  “Wondrously dark, oddly erotic … Orlean weaves a tale of greed, federal protection, and pistil lust as curvaceously compelling as Chandler’s detective noir.”

  —Philadelphia City Paper

  “ENCHANTING … MESMERIZING.”

  —St. Petersburg Times

  “Hot orchids are the starting point of Susan Orlean’s account of plants and people obsessed with them in the weird world that is south Florida. Along the way, she meets Seminoles, alligators, and a variety of crazy white men. The Orchid Thief provides further, compelling evidence that truth is stranger than fiction. In this case, it makes most entertaining reading.”

  —ANDREW WEIL

  “Damp heat, bugs, wild hogs, snapping turtles, poisonous snakes—and orchids … Wouldn’t have missed it.”

  —New York Newsday

  “[A] terrific, bizarre, often hilarious story about the strange lure of orchids, obsession, and that old devil, John Laroche … You don’t have to be a plant fanatic to appreciate the powerful forces that compel a person to collect these enchanting little flowers.”

  —News-Leader (Springfield, MO)

  “Susan Orlean’s prose is always lucid, lyrical, and deceptively comfortable, but with The Orchid Thief she’s in danger of launching a national epidemic of orchid mania. The passion is infectious and addictive.”

  —KATHERINE DUNN

  “OFFBEAT AND ABSORBING …

  Orleans shows an amazing deftness at weaving such dark history together with portrayals of wacky orchid fanatics, scientific explanations, and personal observation into a compelling, page-turning narrative. Like the best investigative reporters, she has found an eye-opening story in a place where you would have least expected it. Yet her prose is leavened by a down-to-earth sense of humor and poetic insight. Whatever species of book The Orchid Thief is, it’s a rare one, and one you don’t want to pass up while it’s in bloom.”

  —Sunday Tribune Review (Greensburg, PA)

  “Orlean writes in a keenly observant mode reminiscent of John McPhee and Diane Ackerman.… In prose as lush and full of surprises as the Fakahatchee itself, Orlean connects orchid-related excesses of the past with exploits of the present so dramatically an orchid will never just be an orchid again.”

  —Booklist

  “The orchid fanatics [Orlean] describes are mesmerizing and her vivid prose brings the intoxicating blooms right up to nose level. For less money than a plane ticket, The Orchid Thief will take you on a memorable trip from the dead of winter to Florida’s hothouse.”

  —Free Lance Star

  “Susan Orlean plunges into the world of orchid collectors to create a book that is meticulously researched and written in the pleasing, flowing prose of books like The Perfect Storm and Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil.… Anyone interested in orchids, Florida, the collecting mentality, fixation, or just good nonfiction will enjoy The Orchid Thief. Read it out on the patio, next to your orchid plant, but take care … obsession can be contagious.”

  —Gulfshore Life

 
; “Between the unearthly landscape, the eccentric orchid growers, and the objects of their desire, Orlean has forged a fascinating adventure inlaid with an oblique commentary on the sterility of mainstream American life. The fact that her story is about plants (plants!) testifies to the book’s greatest truth: that passion is blind, often misguided, and impossible to justify—but always worth the ride.”

  —Metro (San Jose, CA)

  ALSO BY SUSAN ORLEAN

  Saturday Night

  Red Sox and Bluefish

  The Bullfighter Checks Her Makeup

  My Kind of Place

  A Ballantine Book

  Published by The Random House Publishing Group

  Copyright © 1998 by Susan Orlean

  Book illustrations © 1998 by Regina Scudellari

  Reader’s Guide copyright © 2000, 2002 by Susan Orlean and The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc.

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Ballantine Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

  Ballantine and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Ballantine Reader’s Circle and colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  www.ballantinebooks.com/BRC

  eISBN: 978-0-307-79529-8

  Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 99-90911

  This edition published by arrangement with Random House, Inc.

  v3.1

  For my parents, Arthur and Edith

  Acknowledgments

  My thanks to the countless orchid lovers, nursery owners, Florida historians, gardeners, attorneys, thieves, ramblers, wayfarers, adventurers, botanists, naturalists, Seminole Tribe members, staff people at the Loxahatchee and the Big Cypress and the Fakahatchee, and collectors who contributed so much to this book and in many cases do not appear by name in the text.

  I am especially grateful to the American Orchid Society for its assistance. Thanks to Ned Nash at AOS, who reviewed my botanical information for accuracy; and very special thanks to James Watson, who was so helpful and generous with his time for all the years this project was germinating.

  I am indebted to Tina Brown, who first urged me to pursue the story for The New Yorker, then allowed me long leaves of absence to work on the book, and after all that, cheered me on to the finish line.

  For Jon Karp, book editor nonpareil and source of great support, good counsel, and encouragement, a million thank-yous would not be enough. And a million more should go to Ann Godoff and the many people at Random House who helped see this through.

  To Richard Pine, I hope you do win that trifecta. In the meantime, thank you for so much, all these many years.

  I owe my family, my friends, my boss, and my colleagues for their zeal, tolerance, constancy, credulity, and overall niceness throughout. Oh, and by the way, Debra Orlean takes great frog photographs.

  Prologue

  Susan Orlean on ADAPTATION

  Recently, author Susan Orlean agreed to talk about the experience of having her book The Orchid Thief used as the inspiration for the movie Adaptation. The movie humorously details the chronicles of a screenwriter who suffers writer’s block during his attempt to adapt The Orchid Thief the book into The Orchid Thief the screenplay. The interview was conducted by writer Susan Orlean.

  SUSAN ORLEAN: Welcome. Thanks for agreeing to do this interview.

  SUSAN ORLEAN: You’re welcome. I mean, thanks.

  SO: Before we begin, I just have to ask you if we’ve met before—you look really familiar to me.

  SO: I don’t think so, sorry.

  SO: Are you sure?

  SO: I’m sure.

  SO: Okay, if you say so. In any event, my first question is, did you ever think your book would end up as a movie?

  SO: Never. Frankly, I wasn’t even sure it would end up as a book. The first time I heard about John Laroche and the orchid poaching, I thought it would be an interesting magazine article, although the story was so strange that I wasn’t even sure how it would work for the magazine. I definitely didn’t imagine it as a book at that time, and certainly not as a movie. The truth is, when I’m working on a story, I rarely think about whether it could be made into a movie. I’m too busy figuring it out as a piece of writing.

  SO: Really?

  SO: Yes, really.

  SO: That surprises me, because everyone I know thinks about writing for the movies.

  SO: Then obviously you don’t know me.

  SO: You don’t have to be rude.

  SO: I’m not being rude! I’m just saying that I must not be like the people you know, because I don’t think constantly about writing for the movies. I love movies. I like to watch them. I don’t want to write them.

  SO: I stand corrected! When did the idea of turning The Orchid Thief into a movie first come up?

  SO: The New Yorker published my original story “Orchid Fever” in 1995. Immediately after the story came out, I was approached by three or four different producers and studios who were interested in optioning it. At the same time, I suggested to Random House that I’d like to expand the story into a book, because I knew there was so much more I wanted to say. The producers who eventually bought the story, Jonathan Demme and Ed Saxon, agreed to let me write the book before they’d work on the movie.

  SO: And when did that happen?

  SO: Let’s see … I turned my manuscript in sometime around September 1998, if I remember correctly. And I first read the script of Adaptation in the spring of 2000.

  SO: Did you ask to write the script?

  SO: No. I’m not interested in writing screenplays. And I also thought it would be fascinating to see what a screenwriter would do with the book. It’s not a typical Hollywood idea: a movie about a guy who steals orchids.

  SO: Did you know anything about the script while it was being developed?

  SO: All I knew was that the producers had hired a screenwriter who had just written a movie called Killing John Malkovich. At least that’s what I thought it was called. It sounded pretty odd, but the producers were very excited about this guy and told me that I should be excited, too, so I was.

  SO: You mean Being John Malkovich.

  SO: Yes, that’s what the movie is really called, but it wasn’t released yet, and I mistakenly thought it was called Killing John Malkovich.

  SO: How did you feel when you first read the script?

  SO: Surprised.

  SO: Go on.

  SO: I had been warned that the script diverged a lot from the book, and my agent told me that there were a lot of people in the script who were not in the book—and that they were real people, not fictional characters. And she hinted that one of those people was me. But I still wasn’t prepared for what I read. The producer gave me the script at lunch. I went back to my office after lunch, shut the door, turned off my phone and started reading. I had to put it down several times to catch my breath. I think it was at the point in the script when I—I mean the character Susan Orlean in the movie—gun down one of the Fish and Wildlife officers in the Fakahatchee that I began to appreciate what an unusual experience this was going to be. The producer asked me to call as soon as I finished reading the script. I waited a day to let it sink in and then called him and said, “It’s not what I expected but it’s terrific, and please just change my name.”

  SO: Why?

  SO: Because I wasn’t sure I really wanted to be a character in a movie, and especially a character who gets kind of … unhinged.

  SO: I find that hard to believe.

  SO: You find what hard to believe?

  SO: That you wouldn’t want to be a character in a movie. Isn’t that everybody’s dream? To be a famous movie character?

  SO: I don’t know if that’s everybody’s dream or not, but I personally didn’t think I wanted to be turned into a m
ovie part. I don’t think that is so hard to believe. Would you want to be a character in a movie?

  SO: Who’s asking the questions here?

  SO: You are, obviously. But I’m just asking you to—never mind. What’s your next question?

  SO: What convinced you to go ahead with being a character?

  SO: A couple of things. I realized that if the book—my book—was going to be featured prominently in a movie but the author of the book in the movie was going to be named something other than Susan Orlean it would confuse people and eventually annoy me. I wouldn’t like seeing the authorship of The Orchid Thief attributed to, oh, Mary Smith or Jane Brown or some pseudonymous nonperson. Also, all the other people who were incorporated into the script agreed to allow their real names to be used. I decided, finally, that the best wasy to look at the whole circumstance was as an adventure, a big virtual-reality experiment.

  SO: Did you get a lot of money for it?

  SO: That’s not really anybody’s business, is it?

  SO: It’s an honest question. And anyway, everybody wonders about that.

  SO: I don’t think it’s polite to talk about money.

  SO: I don’t think it’s polite to not answer questions.

  [Silence.]

  SO: Shall we continue?

  SO: Please.

  SO: Did you have any particular objections to the script? Did you request any changes?

  SO: There were a few things I asked to have taken out—some details that were a little too personal. But I didn’t ask for any major changes. I gave them comments on what I liked and didn’t like, but only had specific requests about those few details, and they were all taken out.

  SO: Who did you want cast as Susan Orlean?

  SO: I spent about a year pretend-casting the movie. I considered everyone from Julia Roberts to Nicole Kidman to Holly Hunter to Jodie Foster to Cate Blanchett but I never settled on who my dream choice would be. My friends made suggestions, too—usually they thought of actresses with red hair, since I have red hair. Maybe people don’t realize that hair dye is available in Hollywood. Interestingly, no one ever suggested Meryl Streep, probably because she seems larger than life.