Once upon a time, there was a boy....He grew up in a time when movies were magic, and the places they were shown in were palaces of grandeur and light and beauty. And one of his first memories was being taken to the empress of all the teheaters in his town, with the big granite head on it side, the main room was vast and beautivul, and there were what he decided were Crhistmas trees depiced on the sides of the stage and had partridges in them, so he thought. At eight, he'd no idea of what art was, or art deo... it was just beautiful, hr thought.. And there was a monstoursly big chandelier way up above hanging miraculously from the ceiling.
The boy became enamoured of seeing stories unfold and became enraptured of all the tleles they told, thinking that they might be ones that would come ture for him one day. But he didn't go to that palace often, and changes abounded in the years he was growing up.
Ownership had passed from the father do the daughter, who married a man who had the same last name and she entrusted the running of the company to him, although his real interest lay in antiques, and the authenticating of the same. In that, he was so expert, he became an advisor to the highest official in the land, and renovated their ... and the nation*'s house. He was a proud man, and an arrogant man. Because, unlike the man who built a small cinema empire on his own, and was thankful for the employees who made him successful and rewarded them, he had grown up in a family of wealth and privilege.
Yet he was smart enough to know that if he wasn't savv about running a cinema chain, he trained and hired the best managers possible to run it for them, and mostly sayed out of their way, and prospered very nicely.
And for all his love of antiques... he had no sense of what a jewel he possessed in the Emprss of the one city where most of his assets were.
The Boy would later meet two of the people who had been there from the beginning An usher who had worked up through the rnnks to become a successful manager, and a cashier ticket seller who was rather odd and became outright dotty.
The manager presided over two palaces in Phlidelphia, which was a pretty exciting place to be in the Fifties... He learned how to throw benefit showings for good causes, and 'society' thanked him for it generously. Hollywood people mingled with mob types, and he handled it with aplomb. He was a heavy-weighted man, with jowls, and eyes that twinkled with an innate good humour hard to be found anywhere, and a sense of generosity that was unbounded.
He retured to his home town and to manage the 'Emrpess and it's subsiuaries sometime in the late Fifties. The Empress played host to live concerts, and one charity event that had the people of the city on their ears for the SCANDAL.... a midnight showing... for charity... of Fellini's 'La Dolce V'ita'.... one night only, and it was never shown in the state again. Shock levels were very low compared to what the world knows today.
Around the time that Ben Hur was shown, which the BOY attened, outraged that the price for a child had been jacked up from 59 to z5 cents, there had been a general remodeling. Gone was the high glorious atrium, the ceiling had been lowered to an everyday entry, gone were the glorious art deco paintings to the sides of the screen, and every thing was the color of dried blood, drab and dull.
And despite that, it still maintained the majesty it had always had, and to either side of the lobby the ceilings soared, and there were still remarkable chandeliers, and staircasee majestically rising to the upstairs level where the balcony and offices were.
In some of gthe auxillary palaces there were special events, and in the Fifties, there were late night monster flims where... so read the placards... the monsters came out of the screen and attacked the audiens... of tried to scare them at least. Unfortunately, that never worked so well The monsters were just poor ushers in costumes, and the local high school hoodlums were ginned up on beer or what not and beat on them. Not the best call one could make...
And through all this, there was Gertil.. She'd been a ticket chashier since day one, and had become old.... very old. Tiny, hawklike face, by the Fifties, hse had become every childs' nightmare
Her arthritic hands made her fingers claw like, and she had unnaturally odd blonde hair. Later the Boy would learn it was because she used coffee grounds in her shampoo, and thus the color, and believed that that was why they had never turned grey. But she terrified him as a child.
'PUT your money down! PUT your money down!' And the minute anyone did it was 'GEt yozur HANDS outta da box office!' She was terrifying.
Although the Boy would work alongsinde her for some years later, he only learned a few things from her. In quiet moments between shows, she woulod continue to pine over her deceased fiancé. 'We were engaged for 20 years, but he died before we could get married.' The 'Boy never figured THAT one out.
Her proudest day was woking a venue in Boston, and the origina lowner paid ehr a compliment. That one had no air conditioning, so on a hot day, you would seat people with spaces between them, so the air circulated better, and he told her 'Gerti, you really know how to seat a house'. And that, coming from the origtinal owner was something she carried to her grave with pride... that she really knew how to seat a house.
And it was something the subsequent owner would never have dreamed of saying. His employees made him even richer, but his opinion was..htey were lucky to have HIM, not the other way around.
Beginning in the Sixties, society began to chane, and would bring many to the Empress of theaters, and later ultimitely the decline and fall of the proud Empress. To which the Boy was witness
To be continued....
