The Decadence of the Indoor Jacuzzi

April 1, 2020 5:13 pm Published by Kelsey Lawrence

There are years of my life that are all a hazy 90-degree Saturday afternoon to me. The memories I tend to recall most precisely are ones involving multiple senses being overstimulated in some way. I don’t quite remember how circumstances led to me being alone in a beautiful Architectural Digest-ready home but I was, and I couldn’t believe my good fortune to have their eggshell-white-everything master bathroom jacuzzi to myself. I remember it was gray outside, the windows steamy, and some sort of intentionally soothing (Enya?) music playing. There were coral and shells and natural Malibu touches on the sides of the tub, and I remember thinking that if I can get this life, I’d be very good to it.

Indoor jacuzzis are a commitment to comfort. They are a boiling pot of water steaming up a room in your home, and they are for pleasure. (Health benefits, too, but that feels vintage somehow!) They’ve been sexualized because they’re built usually for two to four people mostly naked in close quarters, and they became a heart-shaped staple of the honeymoon motel tableau.

From Cove Haven’s Twitter

In a 1979 New York Times article, the hot tub is explored as a relatively new trend started, they hypothesized, by ’60s hippies in Santa Barbara looking to recreate the experience of bathing in hot springs. The potential sexuality of the tub is alluded to—and quashed with a smirk—by both Marvin Webster, former New York Knicks center, and a “young, unmarried homeowner.”

“Contrary to what most people imagine, I’m not going to open a singles club,” the young, unmarried homeowner said. “In fact, I find it hard to imagine getting into a tub with any other people.”

The outdoor jacuzzi is a reward for something—maybe a certain amount of savings set aside, an after-work treat, a cabin visit with friends that your parents saved up for. The indoor jacuzzi is somehow more decadent, just like most things naturally outdoors brought indoors. It’s a seductive choice to be extra comfortable in an already comfortable home!

From Jacuzzi.com

The jacuzzi was invented by Candido Jacuzzi, an Italian immigrant who dreamed it up for his 15-month-old son Ken after he developed rheumatoid arthritis. Candido created a pump to create the whirlpool effect and filed the patent for the first self-contained jacuzzi in 1964. Somewhere around that time, according to Ken’s book Jacuzzi: A Father’s Invention To Ease a Son’s Pain, a few Jacuzzi dealerships opened, one of them by former Dodgers’ baseball player and Mets’ coach Cookie Lavagetto.

The company hired Ray Schwartz, a freelance sports writer who was well-connected in Hollywood. He got celebrities like Joe DiMaggio, Jayne Mansfield, Marilyn Monroe, and Rita Hayworth to pose alongside the tubs. But according to Ken’s book, the best thing Ray did was get the jacuzzi on the daytime TV show Queen for a Day, a show where a group of women would tell personal, heart-wrenching stories to audience members who chose the story with the hardest plight. “Make every woman a queen, for every single day,” host Jack Bailey would sign off. And jacuzzis are made for queens, especially queens with medical issues. The program could reach 20 million people during a single show, which meant “jacuzzi” quickly became a household name.

In spite of the tub’s start as both for a young boy in pain and for moms who’ve been having a really hard time, jacuzzis became instead associated with sex and decadence—the cherry on top of an already lavish (whether in money or spirits) lifestyle. There was Tony Montana pointing at his jot tub and yelling “I work hard for this,” and Hunter S. Thompson getting into his hot tub each day at 6 a.m. with champagne, Dove Bars, and fettuccine alfredo.

In Hollywood Hot Tubs, a 1984 quickly forgotten film with a name as enticing as an Olive Garden appetizer, “a young man gets a job repairing hot tubs for the rich and famous in Tinseltown, thanks to his parents. As he moves from one bubbly tub to the next, sexual situations change accordingly.”

Remember as a kid staying at a motel, the jacuzzi felt taboo somehow? There was always a beer can or a sweaty drink on the turned-up edge of the pool decking, people laughing and talking. It was a pre-sex energy to be intuitively avoided but fleetingly wondered about. I don’t know why jacuzzis feel retro now, but they somehow do. It’s still a useful and pleasurable tub that people will presumably continue to install, but they feel inextricably linked to the ’70s-’80s, with a VH1 sort of presence in the early 2000s.

The content marketing blog for a “Diamond Spa Pools” written by “Cindy” thinks that the name jacuzzi is the outdated part. (She also thinks “junior high” is outdated, though, so I’m not sure what her frame of reference is…) She writes:

Someone called the shop the other day asking about our JACUZZI and our young employee had never heard the term. We had to explain that this term was something that was used back in the olden no cell phone days of the 70’s and 80’s, and it meant the same thing as hot tub or home spa. It got me to thinking. Who was this Jacuzzi and where are they today?

But varying Google search terms didn’t offer anything definitive on the outdatedness of jacuzzi, just a hunch maybe because it feels always glass block-oriented or heart-shaped. I liked this ad for a Valentine’s Day treat from a 1989 edition of The Victoria Advocate. “Sit anywhere in a Jacuzzi Whirlpool Spa and feel the difference, the water moves powerfully around you.”

Below, the different personalities of the indoor jacuzzi: