A Caribbean island where the surf rolls in on tranquil beaches and the art of doing absolutely nothing has been perfected to the satisfaction of connoisseurs : ST. CROIX

John Brooks, who heads the theater department at the University of Chicago, told his travel agent to book him into a resort with “absolutely nothing to do.”

His suitcase was packed with unread books, and he lusted for tranquillity. Brooks explained that he loathes discos and the regular resort routine. His wish was simple: a quiet beach where he could soak rays, recharge his soul and be bothered by no one.

No problem, said the travel agent, and he booked the professor into the King Frederik Hotel facing one of the loveliest beaches in the Caribbean.

The King Frederik is one of those funky, laid-back places the tropics is famous for. With a handful of rooms, it is surrounded by lush gardens, the only distraction being the sunsets, which are said to be unequaled in the Caribbean, what with the hotel facing straight west for an unobstructed view as the fireball extinguishes itself nightly in a performance that sets the horizon aflame while guests watch silently from the little seaside bar.

Bill Owens, an ex-L.A. educator, opened the King Frederik in the ‘70s. Tired of freeways, crowds and crime, he decided to skip school after discovering this hotel with a 2 1/2-mile beach at the door.

The King Frederik provides simple charms (with the exception of a trifle too much wrought iron botching up views from the patios).

Owens gets a big repeat business, with doubles going for as little as $26 a day in the low season, including a bottle of rum. Designed for self-sufficient vacationers, the King Frederik has no restaurant.

Instead there is a “market run” each day for groceries (guests cook for themselves) and a couple of restaurants (including the Brandy Snifter) that provide free pickups for vacationers preferring to dine off the property.

At this end of the island the idea is to hole up and lose track of the outside world. It’s a joke to call Frederiksted a town. Frederiksted is nothing more than a string of clapboard buildings the termites haven’t gotten around to attacking yet. But that’s the idea. Vacationers choose Frederiksted over tranquilizers.

1650 Great House Welcomes

At the other end of town, Jim and Joyce Hurd welcome guests at Sprat Hall, a Great House dating from 1650. Sprat Hall is big with honeymooners. Six sets of newlyweds arrived in a single day recently. Three huge rooms with four-posters are reserved for nonsmokers. Other guests are assigned cottages spread across the old plantation grounds.

Horses graze on the hillside and the Hurds do candlelight dinners in the great house and serve lunch on the beach--fresh fish, conch and lobsters. Besides snorkeling and sunbathing, guests ride off through rain forests and along the beach. Only don’t come looking for night life. Not on this end of the island, anyway.

Between here and Christiansted, which is where the action is, a couple of ex-New Yorkers, Carl and Dulcy Seiffer, preside over Cane Bay Reef Club that’s as peaceful as a full moon spotlighting the Caribbean. With only nine units in a two-story frame structure overlooking the sea, it tends to attract lovers and artistic types seeking surcease from the merry-go-round.

One guest described it as a place to write a novel or recover from a broken love affair. Well, why not? Vacationers are lulled by the voice of the sea and a breeze that funnels through the branches of trees rising beside the inn.

Watching the Sunset

Once a week Seiffer turns out a West Indian barbecue while guests gather at a six-stool bar to watch the sunset and the islands of St. Thomas, St. John and Tortola--providing it’s clear. And although the inn is directly on the water, it’s a five-minute walk to the nearest bathing beach.

Close by, Rockresorts soon will unveil a new property with 158 rooms in villa-like clusters. A cool $2.4 million is being spent on Carambola Beach Resort with its plantation-style construction.

Currently St. Croix’s only luxury small hotel is Walter and Robbie Bregman’s Cormorant Beach Club. Only five minutes from downtown Christiansted, it is a lifetime removed from city distractions. Bregman, 53, left corporate America to do his act in the Caribbean. As ex-president of International Playtex (“I got fired,” he says forthrightly) he sunk his last buck in an abandoned resort, turning a nightmare into a miniature Mauna Lani.

Hammocks stretch between palms. Guest rooms (presently there are 19) are large and airy, the grounds uncrowded. Corporate types swoon. Particularly since the room rate covers everything until 5 p.m.--breakfast, lunch, drinks, tennis, snorkeling and tips. After 5 o’clock, guests are billed for the extras.

Problems Popped Up

For Bregman it’s a big switch, operating a resort with 40 employees after presiding over an empire numbering 24,000 on the payroll. Turning from bras (at International Playtex) to bikinis (on his beach) simply wasn’t all that simple. Problems popped up. The first night there was no gas. Next it was the water.

But Bregman’s spirits remained undampened. In the corporate world crisis was a constant companion, and so he endured until the Cormorant Beach Club took on respectability.

At Harvard, Bregman majored in English, played football with Ted Kennedy and wrote on the Crimson with David Halberstam. Later he did stints with Gallo and was president of an ad agency. When he got caught up in a merger at International Playtex, he kissed the corporate world goodby, trading designer three-piece suits and a mansion in Connecticut for shorts and a sport shirt and a resort in the Caribbean. No regrets, says the youthful, chain-smoking Bregman.

“None at all.”

Ted Dale, a 66-year-old not-quite-grown-up Huck Finn beat Bregman to St. Croix by nearly a lifetime. After World War II the former Philadelphian and ex-Navy fighter pilot sailed into St. Croix, converted a Danish town house into an inn and named it for his yacht, the Comanche. The first guest house in town, it looked like the set for an old Bogart movie. Guests poured their own drinks and left behind IOUs at the bar.

Cross Bridge to Restaurant

Breakfast is still served on the balcony overlooking Christiansted. For other meals, guests cross a makeshift bridge to an airy restaurant with fans, wicker peacock chairs and a jungle of planters, all of it bringing to mind a scene out of Hollywood’s “Casablanca.” What’s more, the meals are first rate. Indeed, Club Comanche is touted as the town’s best restaurant, featuring fritters, black bean soup, fresh fish, conch chowder and curried chicken.

Muscular, white-haired Dale is a fixture in the bar. In his youth he roared through St. Croix like a sailor on a one-day liberty. Come to think of it, he’s still roaring. At a slower pace perhaps, but only slightly.

“C’mon,” he shouts to a pal, “let’s have a drink!”

The old town house-cum-restaurant has grown from nine to 44 rooms, including a sugar mill with three levels that serves as a honeymoon suite with a stunning view of Christiansted and the waterfront.

And there is Frank Cullace, a 59-year-old Italian, bald, with mutton chops and bushy eyebrows, who runs a restaurant down the street from Club Comanche called (what else?) Frank’s. You can’t mistake the place, what with walls plastered with pictures of Frank posing as the Statue of Liberty, the Mona Lisa, King Kong, Napoleon and Whistler’s Mother.

Gin Rummy With Buddies

His girlfriend, Jacque Vilmain, who hails not from Paris but Iowa, pounds away at the piano while Frank plays gin (and drinks the same) with buddies who look like refugees from a Mafia gang war. Frank’s is one of Christiansted’s better restaurants. Not just because of the pasta but the fresh fish, the veal, the lobster and the espresso that goes for 75 cents a pop.

Frank--he hails from Jersey--has no intention of cashing in and going home. It wouldn’t be the same. Besides, what would he do with all that art hanging on the walls, particularly the panel shot of six bozos arm-in-arm (all posed by Frank) that looks like a gang-shot on graduation day at San Quentin. Probably nobody in Jersey would understand. It’s what happens to a mug who discovers contentment on an island in the Caribbean when he should be home playing with his grandkids.

Frank’s neighbors are a dive shop operator, a fortune teller and a guy who runs a fast-food joint called the Pig’s Ear. The island crawls with characters. Like the old bird who’s building a castle on a hilltop. It sits there like a scene out of Transylvania. No one would flinch if Dracula answered the door. You get the idea that Frankenstein might be a house guest and that bats are nesting under the eaves. Only no one goes up there. It’s that spooky.

Land of Oz on St. Croix

And there’s Dan Furman, a chemical engineer who worked for a weapons company in Connecticut and ran off to St. Croix to open a toy store called Land of Oz, where the most lethal item in stock is a water pistol with a 40-foot range. Adults love his toys. Robert Culp and Victor Borge are regulars. His hottest items: a $22 yo-yo and a repeating rubber-band gun that sells for $12.

But then, this isn’t your ordinary garden variety island. After buying the U.S. Virgins from Denmark in 1917, the U.S. got busy creating a tourist industry. Of the three islands--St. Croix, St. Thomas and St. John--St. Croix goes about perpetuating its Danish heritage. Especially Christiansted, one of the prettiest villages in the Caribbean. Restaurants lining alleys serve Danish meatballs and customers swill cherry herring.

It’s Copenhagen with sea grape trees and hibiscus blooms. It’s also great fun. The night crowd gathers at the Moonraker, a second-story pub on Queen Cross Street with fans, potted plants and a terrace for studying the crowd strolling along the sidewalk. When I stopped by several years ago a foxy lady behind the bar spoke of going home to Ohio. She never made it. Instead she moved on to another bar. Winter in Ohio had no appeal, she confessed.

Betty Sperber, another island character, figures she’s here for good, too. Sperber is a tough, wiry Jewish mama who reigns over the King Christian Hotel in Christiansted. While it’s not exactly Claridge’s, the rooms are comfortable, with unobstructed views of the bay with its yachts and Buck Island on the horizon.

Operate Fleet of Yachts

Once Sperber handled rock stars in Manhattan. Only she figured it was a lousy place to raise kids. So she hauled off to St. Croix where sons Mark and Miles played like Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer, grew up and now operate a fleet of yachts on trips to Buck Island.

Sperber’s hotel with its 40 rooms occupies a 200-year-old Danish warehouse dead center of the waterfront. The building--it’s a historic monument--contains a restaurant, an old-fashioned ice cream parlor and a dive shop. Is Sperber content? Utterly. Miss New York? You gotta be kidding.

She prays a lot for blizzards. “I want them to happen anywhere, I don’t care where.” The bigger the blizzard the better her business, she says. Her theme song: “Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow.”

Not in St. Croix, of course.

Accommodations:

--Bill Owen’s King Frederik Hotel, P.O. Box 1908, Frederiksted, U.S.V.I. 00840. Rates: $29/$55 single, $34/$70 double.

--Sprat Hall, P.O. Box 695, Frederiksted, U.S.V.I. 00840. Rates: $60/$70 single, $70/$80 double.

--Cane Bay Reef Hotel, Christiansted, St. Croix, U.S.V.I. 00840. Rates: $35 single/$45 double.

--Cormorant Beach Club, P.O. Box 708, Christiansted, St. Croix, U.S.V.I. 00820. Rates: $125 single/$150 double (plus tax and $12 - a - day for gratuities).

--Club Comanche, Christiansted, St. Croix, U.S.V.I. 00820. Rates: $30/$43 single, $40/$80 double.

--King Christian Hotel, Christiansted, St. Croix, U.S.V.I. 00820. Rates: $45/$60 single, $50/$70 double.

--The Buccaneer Hotel, Christiansted, St. Croix, U.S.V.I. 00820. Rates: $80/$120 single, $90/$130 double. (Golf, tennis, boating/water sports. Spread across 200 acres with a gem of a beach.)

--Kings Alley, Christiansted, St. Croix, U.S.V.I. 00820. Rates: $40/$75 single, $50/$85 double.

For other details, write to the U.S. Virgin Islands Division of Tourism, P.O. Box 4538, Christiansted, U.S.V.I. 00820.