Alexander Pantages
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Alexander Pantages (1867- February 17, 1936) was an American vaudeville and early motion picture producer and impresario who created a large and powerful circuit of theatres across the western United States and Canada.
Born Pericles Pantages on the Greek island of Andros, he ran away from home at nine while with his father on a business trip in Cairo, Egypt, and he went to sea at the age of nine, spending the next 12 years working on merchant ships all over the world. He spent some time helping the French to dig the Panama Canal, but after contracting malaria he headed north to cooler climates. He settled in San Francisco where he worked as a waiter and also, briefly and unsuccessfully, as a boxer.
He left San Francisco in 1897 to seek greater fortune and made his way from there to Canada's Yukon Territory during the great Klondike gold rush. He eventually found himself in the mining boom-town of Dawson City, where he became business partner (and lover) to the saloon and brothel-keeper "Klondike Kate" Rockwell, operating a small, but highly successful vaudeville and burlesque theatre, the Orpheum. The relationship between Pantages and Rockwell was a stormy one; their unfulfilled egos and the instability of the theatrical world proved tinder boxes to their insecure temperaments.
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[edit] Entry into Exhibition
In 1902, Pantages left Dawson and moved to Seattle, Washington, where he opened the Crystal Theater, a vaudeville/motion picture house of his own. This took place a few months after Rockwell had opened up a small storefront movie theater in Vancouver, B.C. That same year, he married a musician named Lois Mendenhall. Klondike Kate filed a breach-of-promise-to-marry lawsuit against him (settled out of court) and later wrote that he had stolen from her the money with which he purchased the Crystal. It would be more than two decades before they saw each other again, at his rape trial, and then only briefly.
In 1904, Pantages opened a second Seattle theatre, the Pantages. By 1920, he was owner of more than 30 vaudeville theatres and controlled, through management contracts, perhaps 60 more, in both the United States and Canada. These theatres formed the "Pantages Circuit", a chain of theatres into which he could book and rotate touring acts on long-term contracts.
The starting point of the Pantages Circuit was the city of Winnipeg, Manitoba, where Pantages built the Pantages Playhouse in 1914. All Pantages tours originated in Winnipeg and moved from there around the circuit of theatres. If an act died in Winnipeg it would not go on the road.
While the majority of "his" theatres were owned by others and managed by Pantages, he became, from 1911 on, a builder of theatres all over the western U.S. and Canada. His favoured architect in these ventures was B. Marcus Priteca (1881-1971), of Seattle, who regularly worked with muralist Anthony Heinsbergen. Priteca devised an exotic, neo-classical style that his employer called "Pantages Greek".
[edit] Pantages Theatre Circuit
His theatres often set standards of elegance and good taste, not to mention cleanliness and efficiency of operation. He insisted that his customers receive the best service at a reasonable price, despite his shortsighted early refusal to allow African-Americans into his theatres. He was successfully sued by an African-American after being refused entry into a Pantages theater in Spokane, Washington.
A ruthless but intensely hard-working businessman, Pantages shrewdly invested his theatrical profits into new outlets and eventually moved to Los Angeles from Seattle to take advantage of his status as a powerful theatrical mogul. His showcase theatre at 7th and Hill Streets in downtown L.A. also housed his offices. While seemingly leading a stable family life with three children and eventually a fourth adopted daughter named Carmen, he had a reputation as an "old goat." It is reputed that several of his theaters had penthouses where he lead many after-show parties with attractive young starlets.
[edit] Business Dealings
Around 1920, Pantages entered into partnership with the motion picture distributor Famous Players, a subsidiary of film producer Paramount Pictures, and further expanded his "combo" houses, designed to exhibit films as well as staging live vaudeville, to new sites in western U.S. Throughout the 1920s, the Pantages Circuit dominated the vaudeville and motion picture market in North America west of the Mississippi River. Pantages was effectively blocked from expansion into the eastern market by the dominant, New York-based Keith-Albee-Orpheum Circuit (KAO).
In the late 1920s, with the looming advent of talking pictures, David Sarnoff and Joseph P. Kennedy, the principals of the Radio Corporation of America (RCA), which held a number of patents in film/sound technology, established the film production company Radio Pictures and moved to acquire control of the KAO theatres through quiet purchases of the company's stock.
In 1927, Kennedy and Sarnoff were successful in gaining control of KAO, and, in 1928, changed the name of the company to Radio Keith Orpheum (RKO). They then approached Alexander Pantages with an offer to purchase his entire chain. Pantages rejected the offer.
[edit] Pantages Rape Trial
In 1929, in the midst of a meltdown on Wall Street, Alexander Pantages was arrested and charged with the rape of a 17-year-old would-be vaudeville dancer named Eunice Pringle. Miss Pringle alleged that Pantages had attacked her in a tiny side office of his downtown theater after inviting her in to audition. Pantages was tried and convicted and sentenced to 50 years in prison, despite his claim that he was "set up."
Pantages then engaged the young attorney Jerry Geisler (later to become famous as Hollywood's leading divorce lawyer) and San Francisco lawyer Jake Ehrlich, later to become a famous attorney in his own right, to file an appeal on his behalf. Geisler successfully petitioned for a new trial, basing his argument on the original trial judge's exclusion of testimony relating to Eunice Pringle's moral character.
Geisler triumphed in the second trial, picturing the alleged victim as a woman of low morals, theatrically demonstrating how impractical was a rape in Pantages' broom closet and planting in the jurors' minds the suggestion that Miss Pringle might have been paid by business rivals, particularly Kennedy, to frame his client. It was alleged later that when Pringle was to announce this to the press, she died mysteriously.
[edit] Significance of Rape Trial
The tawdry original trial exposed several fissures in American society. The trial took place at a time when American changed from a rural society to an urban one, with the consequent break in conservative, even religion traditions this implied. Not only was society becoming more urbane and "liberal," but women entered the social world, first as voters with passage of the 21st Amendment to the U.S. Constitution in 1920, and increasingly as members of the working world.
The hidden narrative of the rape trial, at least as expressed in newspapers at the time, was that women were too fragile to be out in the real world, that they would be safer at home. This subtle subtext was also prevalent in other famous trials at the time, most notably involving Hollywood comedian Fatty Arbuckle in the early 1920s.
Another important fissure the Pantages rape trial exposed was the deep-seated misgivings many Americans had for immigrants, especially those that dominated the Hollywood movie industry. The period between 1880 and 1920 has seen the largest influx of immigrants ever to the United States, when roughly 15% of the total population of the country was suddenly foreign born. In many ways, Pantages may have been a victim of the era as much as of circumstances.
[edit] Tragic End Years
Although Pantages was acquitted, the trials ruined him financially and may have broken him in both health and spirit. He sold the theatre chain to RKO for a lower sum than that originally offered - far less than what his "Pantages Greek" vaudeville palaces had cost him to build - and went into retirement. He owned and raced horses, even as he desperately yearned to return to the exhibition business. His plans for an encore as a theatrical mogul never materialized. Alexander Pantages died in 1936 and was interred in the Great Mausoleum, Sanctuary of Benediction, in the Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Glendale, California.
The rumour, begun at the second trial, that RKO and Kennedy paid Eunice Pringle to frame Alexander Pantages, was revived in Ronald Kessler's biography of Joseph Kennedy "The Sins of the Father: Joseph P. Kennedy and the Dynasty He Founded" (New York: Warner Books, 1997). There is only anecdotal evidence, however, to support this claim. It is claimed that the young dancer, Eunice Pringle, married a businessman and as Eunice Worthington moved to San Diego where she had a daughter, Marcy Worthington.
An apocryphal popular story about Pantages alleges that the boy who dropped out of school at 9 never learned to read or write; he kept atop a powerful, multi-million dollar business thanks to the extraordinary powers of memory sometimes developed by the illiterate.
