Back Where He Started

For the past eight weeks San Francisco has been lapping up a double-scoop, 15-act vaudeville show called Highlights of 1943. Its title is much the most up-to-date thing about it. Produced by Hollywood's fabulous cinemaestro, Sid Grauman, it offers, with crafty candor, the kind of variety show that was pulling them when Grauman left San Francisco 27 years ago. Headlined by Songstress Gertrude Niesen singing a batch of old songs, Highlights includes a trained-poodle act, harmonica players, highflying female aerialists, an impersonator, an oldtime clown, a Gay Nineties troupe, a ping-pong exhibition and two ventriloquists. Audiences, having the time of their fathers' lives, top it all off with some lusty community singing. Producer Grauman has given West Coast crowds the same kind of old time fun that Billy Rose has long since made profitable in the East.

Slight, soft-spoken Sid Grauman, who has long-term plans for San Francisco producing, was born 56 years ago in Indianapolis. The son of a minstrel-show manager, he was carted young all over the country: "I went to a hundred schools, and I never got out of the fifth grade." When still a boy, he went with his father to Alaska, where they "expected to pick up gold in a pail." After a few gleamless months, the father rushed home to a dying child and left Sid with $250, which he promptly lost in a crap game. He picked up the concession for selling newspapers from the States -- buying them for 18-c-, selling them for a dollar. He sold the first paper for $50 to the late, great and witty confidence man, Wilson Mizner, only to see Mizner charge 500 illiterate miners 50-c- apiece to read them the news.

Quitting Alaska a year later with $6,000, Grauman was cleaned out by gamblers on the trip home. In San Francisco he got a job as ticket taker in the city's first movie house (said his boss, "Don't let even the wind get by without a ticket") and was reunited with his father at the ticket window. The two rented a store, fitted it up with 700 kitchen chairs, put on 15 shows a day of assorted vaudeville and one-reelers. "So we wouldn't lose a show, we fed the actors right on the stage, throwing a baby spot on a steak, while the audience cheered."

Tent Shows and Temples. In Oakland young Grauman saw a cowboy revivalist vainly holding forth in a tent. Sighed the cowboy: "They don't want the Lord." Said Grauman: "I want the tent." He set it up in the middle of San Francisco as Grauman's National Theater, using church pews for seats, and did so well that he finally built a corrugated-iron edifice around it "and never even lost a matinee in the process." Soon he was operating other theaters.

In 1916 Grauman took a show on tour to Los Angeles, stayed there. In no time he had opened Grauman's Million Dollar Theater, the largest and most lavish Cinemansion of its day. Then he bought a Hollywood cornfield and built Grauman's Egyptian, a bewilderingly garish "architectural crazy house." So successful were its showings that in the first few years it ran only eight pictures. In 1927 came Grauman's Chinese, his masterpiece in Hollywood rococo.

Prologues and Premeers. From the start in Hollywood, Grauman concocted enormously successful madcapitalist "innovations." One of these was having movie stars make personal appearances. Another was the "prologue," the ancestor of today's stage show. The most famous and flamboyant was the "premeer"--the klieg-lighted, red-carpeted opening night, when crowds lined the streets for miles, cameras clicked, searchlights stabbed the heavens, movie stars drove up in state and were, one by one, escorted into the theater by Grauman himself.

At one premeer Wilson Mizner drove up to the Egyptian in a dilapidated Ford and ceremoniously presented it to the doorman. For the opening of The Covered Wagon, Indians were brought from their reservation "by special permission of the U.S. Government." Grauman's best-known stunt was to catch the footprints of such stars as Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford in wet cement--a trick that was later used for John Barrymore's profile. Quipped Barrymore, as he caressed the cement: "I feel like the face on the barroom floor."

A nervous, impulsive bachelor, Grauman has not drunk for 30 years. But he smokes four packs of cigarets a day, plays gin rummy for high stakes all night, breakfasts in midafternoon. He loves gags and practical jokes, once got Marcus Loew to give an impassioned pep talk in a darkened room to 75 dummies; once persuaded Charlie Chaplin to enter a Charlie Chaplin impersonation contest. Chaplin won third prize: $1. Grauman credits all his success to "the Big Boss Upstairs"--"God," he says, "does my shows."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.