Thomas Wolfe in Arizona

Arizona's Grand Oto Movie Houses

Text by Vicky Hay Photographs by Richard Maack Three generations of Americans grew up in movie houses. We thrilled to the exploits of William Holden and Ida Lupino, sighed over John Wayne, stared awestruck as Buster Crabbe streaked through space in something that looked like a tinfoil-wrapped cigar, giggled at the antics of Mickey Mouse and Bugs Bunny. Each Saturday we hurried back for the latest episode of Trail of the Octopus or Death Valley Manhunt. And never once did we think our favorite theater would soon pass into history.

By the time World War II began, almost every community of any size in Arizona had at least one movie house. Some of the theaters, like Prescott's Elks, Douglas's Grand, and especially the Orpheum in Phoenix, were elegant, indeed. Some were born in vaudeville days as "opera houses." Many belonged to moguls whose real lives were sometimes as colorful as the make-believe adventures they brought us.

Early movie houses accommodated both live entertainment and motion pictures. During the first two decades of this century, when "magic lantern" shows and then silent films began to circulate, the circuits traveled by vaudeville performers and concert artists expanded. Prescott native Budge Ruffner remembers his childhood visits to the Elks Theater, whose (OPPOSITE PAGE) The Grand Theater in Douglas was one of Arizona's first ornate movie palaces.

(ABOVE) Bas-relief details at the Orpheum Theatre in Phoenix were hand-carved by immigrant Italian artisans.

cornerstone bears the date April 3, 1904. "My mother was thrilled when Mme. Ernestine Schumann-Heink came to Prescott," he recalls. "Among the people who appeared at the Elks in the early '30s was Sir Harry Lauder, a Scots music hall singer and raconteur-he told tales and cracked jokes in the broadest, thickest brogue you ever heard."

Even more impressive to Prescott's 10-year-olds, Tom Mix once appeared on stage astride his horse, Tony. Budding cowboys so admired Mix that they would risk their necks to reenact his daredevil stunts on horseback. Ruffner broke his collarbone trying to pick a hat off the ground from a galloping pony, but he claims other kids did worse damage.

In Tucson, singer Rosemary Franco Henderson remembers the movies as a crucial part of a major rite of passage. "I was 16 before my mother let me have my first formal date," she says. "It was with the paper boy. He had red hair and freckles. And a Scottish name. We walked to the Fox Theater, and afterwards we went to T. Ed Litt's drug store and had ice cream. That was the way you spent your first date."

The Fox. The day it opened, April 11, 1930, The Arizona Daily Star devoted a whole issue to the "daring, modern, luxurious" building. Gilded columns stretched to a 35-foot ceiling, thick plush carpets covered the floor, and winding staircases swept to the balcony. The art-deco light fixtures glowed with gold trim. Murals covered the ceiling-not painted, as many believe, by the late Ted De Grazia, but possibly done by Centennial Hall artist Emil Lutz or California designer Robert Powers. Downstairs, marble rest rooms were tucked behind a foyer lounge. At

Grand Old Movie Houses

The Fox Theater was a favorite Tucson gathering place. The richly decorated stage and proscenium (OPPOSITE PAGE) framed Hollywood's most extravagant productions. Art-deco elements are reflected in design details and light fixtures (LEFT) and in the elaborate ceiling mural (BELOW).

orchestra level, beneath a scintillating chandelier, crowds sat in Morocco leathercovered chairs to watch a screen curtained in gold plush and "silver dream cloth." "You would walk into the Fox, and right away you were in another world," Henderson recalls.

Arizona Historical Society researcher Diane Boyer recently began a study of the Fox Tucson. She says it was part of a movie mini-empire run by a Greek family whose story might have inspired Horatio Alger.

Around the turn of the century, four brothers-Nick, Frank, David, and John Diamantatsikos came to the United States from Tripolis, a city in the Peloponnesus. Drawn with many of their countrymen to Chicago, they made their way west to California, laboring on railroads, in mines, and in restaurants. Along the way, the brothers shortened their name to Diamos.

A few years later, Nick Diamos returned briefly to Chicago and then took the Southern Pacific Railroad west. His train was delayed in Tucson. He got off, took one look at the adobe town beneath the massive Santa Catalinas, and decided he had found Tripolis in Arizona. He retrieved his suitcase and sent for his brothers. They all moved to southern Arizona, where their youthful uncle, James Xalis, later joined them.

By 1912 the Diamoses were operating a nickelodeon in Tucson. Between then and the late 1960s, family members built or managed theaters in Tucson, Douglas, Bisbee, Nogales, Phoenix, and northern Mexico. For a time, they ran Tombstone's famous Bird Cage Theater.

They started construction of the Fox Text continued on page 40

'Most Luxurious Playhouse' is Reborn

We're under the old Orpheum Theatre, walking beneath Adams Street through dank catacombs that call to mind some 19th-century Gothic novel. Cars and trucks roll overhead and pedestrians march along the sidewalks, but no noise seeps through the solid layers above us. The atmosphere is still, quiet as a primeval cavern. Tom Brightwell, the Phoenix Civic Plaza's assistant technical director, is leading our tour, accompanied by an effervescent Junior Leaguer named Linda Messenger. "This was not just a motion picture theater," says Brightwell. His voice echoes against yardthick concrete walls. "This was an entire complex down here. Storage. Rehearsal. Meeting rooms."

Dating to 1929, the Orpheum was the first Arizona theater built specifically for talking pictures. It also accommodated vaudeville, stage plays, concerts, and civic meetings. Long a Rickards-Nace theater, it became the Paramount in the 1950s. A decade later, Denver's Nederlander Organization renamed it the Palace West and tried to run it as part of Nederlander's legitimate-stage operations. After that venture folded, Spanish language movies played there. Now, the Orpheum belongs to the City of Phoenix. The Phoenix Junior League has adopted the old theater, and Messenger heads the service club's project to restore it. She helped spearhead a bond issue voters approved in April, 1988, earmarking $1.5 million to renovate the property, now recognized on the National Register of Historic Places. "Symphony Hall, the Herberger Theater complex, and the Orpheum will form a theater district," Messenger says. "The three facilities will complement each other in size." "Symphony Hall has roughly 2,500 seats," explains Brightwell. "The Herberger will have a maximum of 837 in its main theater. This renovated building will be targeted in between." "Fifteen hundred seats," Linda confirms. "The Herberger will have an anchor tenant in the Arizona Theatre Company. Ballet Arizona is interested in the Orpheum-but more than just having an anchor tenant, we want the whole community here."

Upstairs, we are shown a wonderland of fading elegance. Gilded peacocks decorate wide staircases. Rococo plaster gargoyles overlook two lobbies and a basement lounge, graced with fancy tilework and hand-carved wood panels. Inside the auditorium, gold columns frame the proscenium. The 30-foot-deep stage still has its original hemp rigging. Old playbills plaster the stage loading door: Tobacco Road, Man of La Mancha, Peter Rabbit.

Old-timers speak of clouds moving across a sky-blue ceiling and restful murals covering three-story-high walls. "They had cloud machines," says Brightwell. "They could project the image of clouds on the ceiling. The lighting effects gave the appearance of a sunset."

"See those black panels?" Messenger points to several broad tar-colored arches. "Someone painted over the murals." They can be restored, she says, or, if necessary, reproduced from surviving drawings. New York architect Malcolm Holzman will direct the restoration. "When we're finished," he says, "the Orpheum will be both historically accurate and highly usable. We will return it to the original appearance.

"I think people will be surprised. It's been a long time since anyone has seen it that way." -Vicky Hay (OPPOSITE PAGE) Once a jewel of downtown Phoenix, the Orpheum Theatre awaits renovation and reopening as a performing arts center.

(THIS PAGE, TOP) Seating will accommodate 1,500. The dark panels on the side walls hide mural garden scenes that will be restored.

(LEFT AND ABOVE) Fauns and sylphs watch over the Orpheum.

Once boasting a richly decorated interior, the Elks Theater (LEFT) in Prescott is now relatively plain inside and out. The accordion-like facade around the stage obscures private boxes once used by patrons of live theater, and the entrance to an orchestra pit is hidden by the small platform at center. The opera house dates back to 1904. (BELOW) Backstage, it still sports its old hemp rigging.Continued from page 37 Tucson in 1929, hiring architect M. Eugene Durfee to design the $300,000 art-deco emporium. Before they could finish, though, Sidney Fox, whose enterprises controlled much of the production, distribution, and screening of first-run movies nationwide, demanded the right to lease it. The Diamoses decided to lease not only the new theater but their entire chain to Fox, planning to retire on the profits.

But within months, Sidney Fox went bankrupt and committed suicide. The southern Arizona theaters were returned to the Diamos family's Lyric Amusement Company, along with a large debt. The Diamoses struggled through the Great Depression to pay Fox's creditors.

The Fox Tucson became a social center of the growing town. Promotional and goodwill events took place weekly: bank nights, savings bond drives, amateur hours, the ladies' matinee, drawings for fancy cars, food drives for charity, Christmas parties, dog shows, Halloween parades. Daved's daughter, Jo Ann Diamos, describes fundraising teas that women's clubs held in the theater lounge. "It was about the nicest place in town that was well furnished and would not charge anything for the use," she recalls. The Fox continued in operation until 1983, when it was sold to a developer. The building still stands, but despite citizens' efforts to save it, its future is uncertain (see Arizoniques, Arizona Highways, January 1989).

Jo Ann's brother, Spyro Diamos, remembers when the Douglas Grand, a Diamos theater, hosted high school graduations.

In other towns, the story was similar. Winslow native Mike Hawkins says of the Rialto, "The town's life centered around high school sports, the pool hall, and the movie theater."

In Flagstaff, Paul Sweitzer remembers Santa Claus's visiting the Orpheum. "He brought you candy and oranges; you took tinned goods in for poor kids."

Claude Cline, for 38 years the Prescott Elks Theater manager, would attract several thousand people with his periodic automobile raffle.

Ask a Fox Tucson veteran what she most loved about the theater, and chances are she'll say the Mickey Mouse Club. Under the motherly guidance of Mabel Weadock, the Saturday morning kids' group had enlisted 20,000 children by 1948. Weadock instilled the youngsters with patriotic ideals while she entertained and chaperoned them each week.

"She was Tucson's first real Mary Pop-pins," her daughter, Virginia Weadock Barleycorn, told Diane Boyer. "I know there were times when a lot of the kids from the barrios did not have the dime for admission. Didn't matter. It was a place for them to come. She instilled in the children a sense of 'appreciate who you are.' Consideration first for yourself, and then because of that, for others." The Fox, like most Arizona theaters, generally enforced racial segregation, but Mabel Weadock would have none of it. To her, children were children, and she treated them all the same.

In Phoenix and Prescott, the Studio Theaters sponsored Mickey Mouse clubs. Other theaters also focused on kids. In Phoenix, the Fox Theater hosted a Sat-urday morning show for children who brought canned food for charity. This developed into the Fox Leaders' Club, drawing 1,835 kids a week. Emcee Lew King, who took charge in 1948, changed the group's name to the Lew King Rangers. Later, when downtown attendance dwindled, King took the show out of the theater and continued it until 1972 as a nationally televised children's variety program. Entertainers Wallace and Ladmo captured King's theater following with their act at the Chris-Town Theater. The Diamoses had a lock on southern Arizona theaters, but farther to the north, Harry L. Nace built another empire, begin-ning in 1912 with Phoenix's La Mara Theater. He entered a 40-year partnership with Joe E. Rickards and later stepped aside for his son, Harry L. Nace, Jr. By 1963 the $4.5 million Nace organization employed 259 people in 20 Arizona theaters, covering the state's central and northern regions. Under the younger Nace's aegis, the Kachina Theatre in Scottsdale became the state's first Cine-rama showhouse. The Nace and Rickards capstone was the Orpheum, a stage-and-screen palace still standing at First Avenue and Adams Street in downtown Phoenix. Believably billed as "the most luxurious playhouse west of the Mississippi," the Orpheum was a rococo extravaganza. Its hand-crafted gilt columns and bas-relief carvings sup-posedly reflected the influence of Europe's most patrician architecture. The Orpheum's rival palace was the Fox Theater, built in 1930 at 109 East Washing-ton Street. The large building housed five street-level stores and six more inside, above the foyer. The Fox was the first large public building in the state to acquire air-conditioning; big gold-leaf sunbursts hid the vents. All things come to an end. George K. Diamos recalls that the Fox Tucson, the Fox Phoenix, and other theaters began to decline in the early 1950s. "What kept people away was television, which was free," says Spyro. George adds that such trends as drive-ins and, in cities, suburban growth also cut into the business of downtown theaters. For all these reasons, the grand movie houses began to disappear. In Phoenix, the Fox made way for a bus terminal. The Rialto was replaced by a fast-food drive-through. The Strand, the Azteca, the Patton-one by one they disappeared. In Tucson, developers have proposed razing the Fox for a high-rise. The Bisbee Lyric is closed and crumbling; the Douglas Grand lost its roof a few years back. Wait, though. The story isn't over. Tucsonans who cherish the Old Pueblo's history are putting up a fight against the entrepreneurs who would destroy the Fox. Across the country, preservationists are striving to keep the few historic movie houses still standing. In Columbus, they have restored the Ohio Theater; in Dur-ham, the Carolina; in Hawaii, the Hono-lulu Theater. In Arizona, citizens' groups in Bisbee, Douglas, Prescott, Phoenix, and Tucson are working to save landmark movie houses. They're doing it for more than senti-mental reasons. Bisbee activist Jo Ann Cameron hopes a renovated Lyric can help keep commerce alive after dark. "You can have all the businesses you want, but if you have no entertainment, nothing to keep the people there, it becomes a ghost town at 5:00 Р.М.. As cities like Phoenix and Tucson expand into faceless Southern California-style metropolises full of carbon-copy franchise businesses and cloned vistas, the people who grew up in these and other towns cling to their old landmarks. The Orpheum, the Fox, the Grand, the Lyricthey help maintain a sense of place and belonging in a time of constant, disorient-ing change.

Grand Old Movie Houses COLORFUL GUIDES TO Arizona's Great Outdoors

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In 1938 the young author of the classic Of Time and the River experienced his happiest sight-seeing spree. It was also his last.

In the summer of 1938, Ray Conway of the Oregon State Motor Association and Ed Miller, Sunday editor of The Oregonian, planned to drive 4,632 miles through the wonders of the West and cover the distance in two weeks. Conway would keep a detailed expense account and travel log so that, later on, Miller could write about the ease and affordability of such a journey for the ordinary vacationer.

Then Miller had another idea: why not invite Thomas Wolfe, author of Look Homeward, Angel and Of Time and the River, to ride with them? Wolfe, who lived in New York City, was in the Pacific Northwest visiting relatives.

Conway took a dim view of bringing this unconventional backseat companion, who had never learned to drive. He had heard that Wolfe liked to drink, stay out late, and sleep all morning; but he relented when Wolfe promised to rise promptly, eat regularly, and drink not a drop of alcohol.

Wolfe was ecstatic. He had never seen the Far West. He brought with him a brandnew brown gabardine suit and a bound notebook to use as a travel diary, intending to fill it with jotted impressions which he hoped later to weave into a new novel. Making this trip, he wrote his agent, was "the chance of a lifetime" even if it did postpone his return east.

On June 20, the trio sped south from Portland to Crater Lake National Park, then headed for California, stopping just north of the state line at Klamath Falls, Oregon, for the night. The next day, they covered 535 miles, streaking south past Mount Shasta all the way to Yosemite National Park. Upon rising the third day, they took a brief look at Yosemite, scurried over to Sequoia National Park, then pushed south toward the desert.

Wolfe grew edgy. Although he loved taking in the sights, he disliked spending all day sprawled on the backseat tryingto adjust his huge frame to the Ford's narrow confines. He passed the hours talking, asking Conway and Miller endless questions about the region's geography, plants, and animals. He took a liking to Miller right away; both, after all, were "writing men." But Conway was harder to get to know. A quiet, unemotional man, he inevitably turned conversations back to his main concerns-mileages, costs, and time. At first Wolfe was irked.Each night after sundown the travelers found a hotel, ate, and prepared for the next day's drive. Miller and Conway usually collapsed into an exhausted sleep shortly thereafter, but Wolfe stayed up for hours talking with anyone who would listen, then scrawling in his journal everything he had seen, eaten, thought, and felt along the road that day. He wrote his agent that these midnight entries "were turning into a tremendous kaleidoscope that I hope may succeed in recording a whole hemisphere of life and of America." Although his jottings were mostly staccato, disconnected phrases describing the scenery and people along the way, he also recorded his feelings. The first night before falling into bed he noted sardonically "the gigantic unconscious humor of the situation-C [Conway] 'making every national park' without seeing any of them the main thing is to 'make them.'"

The fourth day, June 23, dawned on the travelers in Mojave, California. They rose, ate, and took their positions in the Ford, which Conway pointed east toward Arizona. Again they raced headlong into the blinding sun. Wolfe wrote: "...and so the desert mountains, crateric, lavic and volcanic, and so more fiendish the fiend desert of the lavoid earth like an immense plain of...tar-and very occasionally a tiny blistered little house and once or twice the paradise of water and the magic greenery of desert trees and yet hotter and more fiendish-through fried hillscupreous, ferrous, and denuded as slag heaps."

tiny blistered little house and once or twice the paradise of water and the magic greenery of desert trees and yet hotter and more fiendish-through fried hillscupreous, ferrous, and denuded as slag heaps."

The temperature hovered around 115°F. when the white Ford pulled into Needles "at last...and the restaurant station and hotel and Fred Harvey all aircooled, and a good luncheon." After an hour's pause, the journey resumed, "and so out of Needles and through heat blasted air along the Colorado 15 miles or so and then across the river into Arizona-pause for inspection, all friendly and immediate then into the desert world of Arizona."

All this was new to Wolfe, who had never seen a desert before. While speeding along U.S. Route 66, he noted "now and then a blistered little town-a few blazing houses and the fronts of stores." Around Oatman he watched "Mexicans half naked before a pit" mining gold, then mused as one of his favorite subjects steamed into view: "Across the Mojave the [train] fringed with black against the blazing crater of the desert sky snakes on, nakes on its monotone of forever and

humanity of the man." His feelings were returned.

The Ford covered only 210 miles that day. Wolfe had more time that night to record his impressions of the drive. He noted "four small Indian girls in rags and petticoats beside the road awaiting pennies (dimes they got), two upon a burro," then described the landscapes he had gaped at from the backseat: "the demented and fiend tortured redness of [Vermilion] Cliffs-red, mauve, and violet, passing into red again-and now the gorge, much smaller [here], and the Navajo Bridge-and the [river] brown-redyellow-a mere 1,000 feet or so belowand on...through desert land-now greygreening...into sage and stray Indians moving into road here and there and Indian houses-then the far lift of the rise, the road rising, winding into hills, and up and up into the timber and the forest now, and all the lovely quaking aspens and the vast and rising rim of sage and meadow land."

The travelers arrived at the North Rim with plenty of time to clean up and eat supper before taking in the sunset and the evening's entertainment at the lodge. Wolfe enjoyed everything, even the amateurish stage show. He wrote of "the tremendous twilight of the Big Gorgooby-more concise and more collected, more tremendous here-and dimmer then and darkness and the lights of the South Rim-and later on the moving picture, the two Canadian College quartettes in crimson blazers-the inevitable theatrical performance with the waitresses and bellhops performing...and naught but the clog dancers passableand then...colored picture slides-Bryce, Zion, the Canyon, and the Mormon temple, then the dance, the bar, Scotch highballs [Conway had relaxed the no-alcohol rule], and good talk with Miller, and the wind in the pine trees."

Morning found him in an equally expansive mood. He hurried past the hotel staff who had gathered outside to sing farewell songs like "Till We Meet Again" to departing guests, some of whom had tears in their eyes. So much for sentiment; he had postcards to write and breakfast to eat. The sunlight was brilliant; the view was glorious. A leisurely 265-mile trek through Bryce and Zion national parks beckoned him today, and later, equally appealing journeys to Yellowstone, Glacier, and Mount Rainier national parks remained, mostly in convenient, lowmileage bites.This trip was turning out happily after all. With the slower pace, he planned to have even more time to work on his midnight jottings. Sleep would have to wait until the trip ended. In any event, when he returned to New York he could shape these impressionistic travel notes into another novel which he planned to call A Western Journal, and in it he would capture "the blinding speed and variety of the trip...the towns, the things, the people...the whole West and all its history unrolling at kaleidoscopic speed...like a spool unwinding."

He had not felt this confident in a long time, and he knew that his agent would be pleased by the news: "I really feel ready to go again-I've had no rest but this movement, the sense of life and discovery, the variety has renewed and stimulated me." This journey, he felt, would not only end well; it would turn out to be the happiest sight-seeing spree of his life.

It would also be his last. The trip ended successfully on July 2 in Olympia, Washington: "And so our farewells, new addresses, final instructions-the casuallike wordiness of men with some sadness in their heart avoiding farewells...and a curiously hollow feeling in me as I stand there in the streets of Olympia and watch the white Ford flash away."

Wolfe was exhausted, but once again he refused to rest. He pushed himself instead, looking up relatives in Seattle, doing more sight-seeing, and attending several parties in his honor. When on July 4 he came down with chills and fever, he had no reserve of energy to fall back upon, and his condition quickly worsened. Pneumonia set in, reactivating a dormant tubercular condition. In a desperate attempt to save his life, his doctors sent the dying man east on a five-day train trip to Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, but it was too late. He died on September 15, two weeks before his 38th birthday.

During his short life, Wolfe wrote millions of words, storing his ponderous manuscripts in several overflowing wooden crates. He dreamed of spinning it all into a multivolumed epic of America, but his editors divided it into conventional novels. Although Wolfe seemed to have trouble ending his longer works, during his Western trip he wrote the perfect ending for his last literary effort: "In that lively rolling of the White Ford through Montana, in full afternoon-heat and the brightness of the sun of the transcontinental freight of the N.P. [Northern Pacific] blasting towards us up the grade, the interminable freight cars climbing past and suddenly-the tops of the great train lined with clusters of hoboesa hundred of them-some sprawled out, sitting, others erect, some stretched out on their backs lazily inviting the luminous American weather, and the mountain ranges all around, the glacial green of the Clark's Fork just beyond-and the 'boes roll past across America silently regarding us-the pity, terror, strangeness, and magnificence of it all."