They tore down the Fox Theatre on Market Street in Philadelphia in 1980.
It had been Philly’s version of a New York movie palace, all exotic marble and opulent velvet drapes.
“The money was on the inside.”
What was really cool about it was the screening room above the theatre, known to the cognoscenti as Top of the Fox. There a select few reviewers would watch previews.
In the early and mid-seventies I was a half-assed film critic for the underground paper The Drummer where I was also twice the editor. Al Golde – I always loved the “e” – was a beautiful old PR man who was in charge of the previews at the Top of the Fox.
They weren’t just previews. This was before talk shows hit it big and movie stars would go on Carson et al to plug their new films. In those days, the stars – and sometimes even the directors – would go on promotion tours to the major markets and Al Golde had a list of the reviewers in Philly who would get to interview them.
I was a long-haired, bearded, buckskinned hippie “radical” but somehow Al took a liking to me and put me on his magic list. Probably because I always called his wife “ma’am.”
Anyhow, I was pretty cocky back then, which led to some memorable encounters.
Probably the wildest was with Otto Preminger. In addition to drugs, I was drinking pretty good and while I was waiting for the guy ahead of me to finish interviewing Preminger, I helped myself liberally to the V.O. at the bar in his suite. Also, my wife at the time was working at an ad agency and the art director there had once spent a week with Preminger on a film shoot and knew a lot about him, which he had passed on to me about an hour before my interview. So I was loaded for bear – or Otto.
I was half whacked by the time I got in, and I could see Preminger was a little taken aback by my appearance, giving me the once over like a Prussian martinet, which he strongly resembled. But we settled down and chatted amiably at first, until I asked him if he had heard from Irving Lazar lately. He freaked.
Irving “Swifty” Lazar was a big-time literary agent who had once conked Preminger on the head with a Jeroboam of champagne, according to the guy at the ad agency.
“How do you know zis?” he demanded.
“I’m a trained investigative reporter,” I answered.
That seemed to calm him down and we went on from there. He seemed to be taking to me, too, probably because he’d never had a one-on-one with a real live hippie and I seemed to be a decent sort, even if half-drunk.
Somehow the subject of LSD came up and he told me a story that was almost too wild to be true. It seems he had been considering a script that had LSD scenes, and he thought he’d try some to see what it was like. This was in New York and he put out the word, and, lo and behold, who should show up at his door but old Timothy Leary himself.
Leary produced a small pill box with two tabs of LSD and they each took one. Then Leary went into the satchel he had with him and took out a bunch of candles and lit them and put them all over the room and turned off the lights.
Things were okay until Preminger started to get off and by the time he was winging he was convinced that Leary and his candles were going to burn the place down so he kicked Leary out and put out all the candles.
He was tripping his ass off by then, he said, although not in those terms, and took to his bed to ride it out. His wife had been out and when she returned she came into the bedroom and Preminger said she appeared to be about six inches tall.
We ended the interview shortly after that and when my story came out with the LSD tale as the centerpiece, Preminger’s people got all over Al Golde about it, but he stood by me.
Jane Fonda did not suffer fools or fresh hippies gladly. My interview with her actually took place in a van. Three journos were aboard and were given the time from a suburban TV station to a station in Philly to talk to her. Hubby Tom Hayden was driving with Jane next to him. She had her arm over the seat to talk to us in the back and at one point I reached out and touched that arm. She gave me a look – a hard look.
“I just wanted to say I touched Jane Fonda,” I explained.
She moved her arm.
Later, I asked her if she would be going back to the Starlite Ballroom in Kensington, which was and still is a tough working class neighborhood in Philadelphia.
“That was one of the worst days of my life,” she admitted. Seems she had gone to the Starlite the year before to raise the consciousness of the women of Kensington and they had run her out of the building. She barely made it back to the car intact. I guess they liked their consciousness the way it was.
The strangest interview I did was with Cybill Shepherd and Peter Bogdanovich when The Last Picture Show came out. It was in the elegant art nouveau Drake Hotel on Spruce Street and that week Cybill Shepherd had been on the covers of both Time and Life magazines. She was 21 and, while she had been a model from an early age, she seemed somewhat stunned by the sudden vault into this kind of fame. She was also stunningly beautiful.
Bogdanovich was on the phone in the bedroom of their suite. He was married, but he and Shepherd had become lovers during the filming of The Last Picture Show. In the sitting room were Shepherd, me, and two jaspers from the Camden Courier Post and the Bucks County Times. They were literally gaga at being there with this dream of the silver screen. She radiated an aura of almost unbearable, unapproachable young desirability. As things went on, they got around to the frontal nudity scene Shepherd had done in the film. They harped on it. And harped. And drooled.
“Jesus Christ,” I said to myself. “They’re going to ask her to take off her clothes, these fucking frustrated horndogs.”
Bogdanovich must have gotten the same vibe, one ear cocked, because he came out and politely excused Cybill to scurry off into the bedroom. He had started out, like Truffaut, as a film critic, and launched into a brilliant, improvised lecture on the nature of film for the rest of the allotted time. I’ve always admired the way he handled those two assholes.
Robert Mitchum, that cool, sleepy-eyed legend, whose The Friends of Eddie Coyle is a modern classic to me, was in town for David Lean’s Ryan’s Daughter. He quietly dominated the room and at one point referred to himself as an “articulate flesh-prop.” That killed me and still does. That was right up there with Spencer Tracy’s “know your lines and hit your mark” as perspective on their art. Hard, edgy modesty, but modesty nonetheless. A working man’s take.
Somebody asked Mitchum how he liked a particular director’s stuff. “Okay,” he answered, “but he doesn’t roll very well.” He didn’t blink and it took a second for us to catch on.
When, inevitably, the question came up about his pot bust, he shrugged and said, “I fucked with the studio and they fucked back with me.”
“Were you set up?”
“You tell me. Next question.”
He was as cool as the other side of the pillow.
Yul Brynner was a kick in the ass. I told a woman I was seeing that I was going to interview him and she said she used to go out with his son, Roc, then an aspiring actor. I asked her to come along.
When we got to the interview, Brynner was surprised and happy to see her and most of that “King and I” hauteur vanished and they spent half the time talking about bygone days.
At one point, Brynner said that when he went to see Roc perform he was so nervous for his son that he gulped down valium by the handful. He was a good dude for all the screen strutting.
I once sat between James Earl Jones and Cicely Tyson at lunch and they spent most of the time telling the table that the most important aspect of film-making was the editing. I never forgot that.
And I’ll never forget the Top of the Fox. Thanks for the memories, Al Golde.
Editor’s Note: Thanks to Martin McCaffery for links to Fox Theatre images.