Alexander Pantages

"Pantages" redirects here. For theatres names Pantages, see Pantages Theatre.

Alexander Pantages
Pantages, c. 1914
Born	Pericles Pantages 1867 Andros, Greece
Died	February 1936 (aged 68–69)
Resting place	Forest Lawn Memorial Park, Glendale, California 34.125499°N 118.240807°W / 34.125499; -118.240807
Nationality	Greek American
Occupation	Impresario and vaudeville/film producer
Known for	Pantages Theatres

Alexander Pantages (1867 – February 17, 1936) was an Greek 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.

Early life

Born Pericles Pantages in 1867 on the Greek island of Andros, he ran away from home at the age of nine while with his father on a business trip in Cairo, Egypt. He then went to sea and spent the next two years working on merchant ships all over the world. Although he left Greece at a tender age he never forgot his home country and seems to have been conscious of his ethnic identity. Thus, he changed his name to Alexander after hearing about Alexander the Great. According to other sources he used to call himself "King Greek", perhaps in emulation of Louis B. Mayer's "Super Jew".

After having been at sea for two years he disembarked in Panama and spent some time there 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, and made his way to Canada's Yukon Territory during the Klondike Gold Rush, ending up in the mining boom-town of Dawson City.

After having worked briefly as a gold mine worker, he became business partner (and lover) to the saloon and brothel-keeper "Klondike Kate" Rockwell, operating a small, but successful vaudeville and burlesque theatre, the Orpheum.^{[citation needed]}

Starting exhibition

Pantages House in Seattle, built 1907, now a city landmark.

In 1902, Pantages left Dawson and moved to Seattle, Washington, where he opened the Crystal Theater, a short-form vaudeville and motion picture house of his own. He ran the operation almost entirely by himself, and charged 10 cents admission. This took place a few months after Rockwell had opened up a small storefront movie theater in Vancouver, and later built a theater there in 1907 that stood until 2011, and another in 1914. That same year, he married a musician named Lois Mendenhall (c.1870–1941). 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.^{[citation needed]}

In 1904, Pantages opened a second Seattle theatre, the Pantages; in 1906 he added a stock theater, the Lois, named after his wife. By 1920, he owned more than 30 vaudeville theatres and controlled, through management contracts, perhaps 60 more,^{[citation needed]} 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.

In Seattle Pantages competed with another impresario, John Considine. Their competition included such clandestine methods as stealing acts from each other and committing various forms of sabotage. This competition lasted for several decades and was one of the defining features of the vaudeville circuit of the times.^{[citation needed]}

Pantages Theatre Circuit

His theatres were elegant and efficiently operated.^{[citation needed]} He showcased both film and live vaudeville to his audiences. Despite initial refusal to allow African-Americans into his theatres he eventually yielded after being successfully sued by an African-American who had been refused entry into a Pantages theater in Spokane, Washington.

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.

While the majority of the 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".^{[citation needed]}

Pantages often sought out and judged performers personally instead of relying on New York agents like many of his competitors did.^{[citation needed]}

A ruthless but intensely hard-working businessman, Pantages invested his theatrical profits into new outlets and eventually moved to Los Angeles. His showcase theatre at 7th and Hill Street in downtown L.A. also housed his offices.

Entering Movieland

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.^{[citation needed]} Pantages was effectively blocked from expansion into the eastern market by New York-based Keith-Albee-Orpheum (KAO).

In the late 1920s, with the looming advent of talking pictures, David Sarnoff, the principal of the Radio Corporation of America (RCA), which held a number of patents in film/sound technology, established the film production company Radio Pictures in which Joseph P. Kennedy held an option and a managing interest 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.

Rape trial

In the midst of the Wall Street Crash of 1929, Alexander Pantages was arrested and charged with the rape of 17-year-old Eunice Pringle. Pringle, an aspiring vaudeville dancer, alleged that Pantages had attacked her in an office of his downtown theater after inviting her in to audition. Pantages was tried, convicted and sentenced to 50 years in prison, despite his claim that he was "set up."

Pantages then engaged attorney Jerry Giesler (later to become famous as a divorce lawyer) and San Francisco lawyer Jake Ehrlich, 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.

Pantages was acquitted in the second trial, after Geisler portrayed Pringle as a woman of low morals; he also demonstrated how impractical a rape would have in Pantages' broom closet, and suggested that Pringle might have been paid by business rivals, particularly Kennedy, to frame his client.^{[citation needed]}

Post-trial years

Although Pantages was acquitted, the trials ruined him financially. 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.^{[citation needed]} He owned and raced horses. Pantages died in 1936 and was interred in the Great Mausoleum, Sanctuary of Benediction, at 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).

See also

• John Considine (Seattle)
• Pantages Theatre

References

• Tarrach, Dean A. (1972), Alexander Pantages: The Seattle Pantages and his Vaudeville Circuit, University of Washington 
• Murray, Morgan (1960), Skid Row: An Informal Portrait of Seattle, The Viking Press 
• Berner, Richard C. (1991), Seattle 1900–1920: From Boomtown, Urban Turbulence, to Restoration, Charles Press, ISBN 0-9629889-0-1 

External links

• Pantages, Alexander from HistoryLink.org: The Online Encyclopedia of Washington State History
• "Alexander Pantages". Find a Grave. http://www.findagrave.com/cgi-bin/fg.cgi?page=gr&GRid=2093. Retrieved August 9, 2010.