Blog 12: Tradition
makes for billions of Hollywood’s Stars. 
Thinking of tradition, I realize how much tradition we
are losing. In Opelousas, little town
in Louisiana existing since the 1600s, even in New Orleans, I discovered not
long ago that small, family-owned pastry shops of my youth are no longer. Some familiar names still exist but they
have been purchased by corporations, and no longer are the breads and cakes
made by the hands of master pastry chefs.
And family-owned and operated
grocery stores where every child received a “lagniappe” as the purchases were
packed and often put on a lorry to be dropped off at home before you got there,
where are they? Most children today
think WalMart is a grocery store. They’ve never breathed-in the aroma of bread
baking.
In the early 1970s I came to Los Angeles to assist director
Joe Hardy put Lerner and Loewe’s GiGi on stage
at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. Once
it was en route to New York I was hired to produce the reopening of the John
Anson Ford outdoor theatre for free public Shakespeare. One of my duties was to create and tape the
radio spot announcements promoting the theatre and asking for subscriptions and
contributions. As the theatre was modeled
on Joe Papp’s Shakespeare in the Park in New York, we were a non-profit
organization, existing at the will of the Mayor of Los Angeles. My radio announcements asked for support in
all forms, especially attendance at the fund-raiser to be held across the Hollywood
freeway in Los Angeles’s Bowl.
One day I got a call from a man telling me he wanted to
give me five million dollars. He
repeated: he just wanted to give me five
million dollars. And he set a meeting for me to meet his “shareholders”
the next day at a bank in Hollywood. My co-producer was ecstatic, and practically
shoved me out the door. When I arrived
the shareholders were already deep into discussions around a board-room
table. They sat me at the head, opposite
the prospective donor of all that money.
And for a couple of hours I had
to listen to some gibberish about laundries. All
these men appeared to be owners of laundries.
Later when I reported to my co-producer my grave doubts that so much
money could be given to us by a bunch of laundry owners, he grew visibly pale but
insisted I had to continue going to these meetings because we sure could use
that five million dollars.
In the middle of my daily sorties to yet another bank to
listen to more talk about laundries, I received a phone call. This
man said he liked my voice on the radio and he too wanted to help our theatre
get launched. He said his name was Gene. Gene Gelson, he announced. I was
new in Los Angeles; so Gene’s name meant
nothing to me.
I thanked Gene for wanting to help, and asked what he had
in mind. He turned the question back and asked me what
kind of car I had. Now, following on the
heels of the laundry-man, this odd request made me feel that California
deserved its reputation for nuttiness. “What
kind of car do you have,” my newest friend Gene repeated. His
voice sounded genuinely nice, so I told him, “a Datsun.”
“How big is your Datsun?
You know, two doors or four?”
I was slipping back into the weird-feeling zone, “two
doors. It’s very little.”
“Okay,” he came back, “this is what I am going to do for
you and your theatre. Get in your little car and drive over here to
my grocery store. Some of my boys will
be waiting for you. They are going to
load up your car with as much soda and candies and fruit and snacks they can
fit in it. Four times.
That’s what I am going to do for you.
So just come right on over.”
As said, I did not know the Gelson name, nor of the
tradition of the grocers in the city, nor that the Gelson family was tops for
fine and fresh and locally grown everything.
“There is only one thing I want you to do for me,” he continued as I was registering this good
fortune. “I would like to take you out
to dinner so you can earn more about Los Angeles. Would
that be okay?”
By the time I drove back up into the Hollywood hills and to
my overlooking office in the John Anson Ford
theatre with the fourth car-load of goodness we would be able to sell at the
concession stand, I had been given quite a tour of Gelson’s market and had
gleaned that in Southern California the Gelson family played a fine and
traditional role in that economy. And “his boys” were shelf-stockers; not in
the laundry business.
I never discovered more about the LA tradition of laundries,
nor accepted five million dollars from the laundry men. But I enjoyed another
Los Angeles tradition of the 1970s, dinner at The Windsor restaurant. Owner Ben Dimsdale, a friend of Gene Gelson’s,
came and personally flambéed out Steak Diane, and sat for a glass of wine,
telling me of the neighborhood we were in, near downtown. I began to understand that Los Angeles
functioned as a conglomerate of many neighborhoods filled with and enlivened by
local traditions.
To me that Los Angeles was like Champagne; alive with traditions; filled excitingly
with the gas of life, bub
bles
floating into the klieg-lit night air.
bles
floating into the klieg-lit night air.
So today, December 22, 2013, I call Los Angeles and her
traditions to be like Champagne.
Now you probably
know that the Commanding General next to
me, Julius Caesar, wants to say something.
And this is what I hear coming from his lips: "Nunc
bibendum est."
“Yes, Caesar,”I
reply, “it is almost Christmas. Almost
time for Champagne, your beverage. “
Soon you will
learn more about Caesar and his passion for Champagne in
The Night Julius Caesar Invented Champagne.
Madeleine de
Jean,
‘Madam
Champagne’;
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