Mr. Show Biz Lights Up the Sky for Billions

You want Tommy Walker’s office to look like Versailles, but it doesn’t. You want him to come swinging into the room on a jib halyard like Errol Flynn and be dressed like Liberace, but he isn’t.

You think he ought to be able to strike sparks off a shag carpet in his slippers or genie up lightning with his bare hands or out-swashbuckle Zorro.

But he doesn’t.

What he does, dressed in conservative clothes, speaking softly and working out of an obscure Newport Beach office the size of a small apartment, is make people gasp. Millions of people, sometimes billions. All at once.

Walker deals in oohs and ahs. He gets paid to make people’s jaws drop. He assembles entertainment spectaculars for a living, and the tools of his trade are balloons and pigeons, fireworks and bands, singers and dancers, rocket men and space ships and lasers, all fueled by a fertile imagination.

He probably is the best-known practitioner of his trade in the world, his handiwork having been seen during the opening and closing ceremonies of the 1984 Olympic Games by a television audience estimated at more than 2 billion. Walker directed both shows.

A partial list of Walker’s credits could make P.T. Barnum weak in the knees. He has produced spectaculars for world’s fairs at New York, Spokane, Knoxville and New Orleans, the 1960 Winter Olympics at Squaw Valley, the 1980 Winter Olympics at Lake Placid, half-time shows for three Super Bowls and 10 Pro Bowls, inaugurals for Presidents Nixon and Reagan, Fourth of July shows at stadiums in seven U.S. cities, the finale to the film “The Music Man” and the opening ceremonies for Disneyland in 1955.

His office wall is lined with autographed photos and congratulatory letters from presidents and celebrities and includes one telling item, a reproduction of the front page of a newspaper published the day after the opening ceremonies of the Los Angeles Olympic Games. The banner headline on the page, referring to an accompanying story about the opening ceremonies, consists of a single gigantic word: WOW!

Contained in that word is Walker’s goal--and his reward.

“That’s the real payoff,” he said. “You feel very good when you can do something that’s meaningful, something that will get people turned on. That’s one of the happiest moments you can have.”

Although Walker, 62, doesn’t appear personally to fit the mold of a Florenz Ziegfeld or a Billy Rose, the tradition of show biz flash and dash has been a part of him since his youth. In fact, at his alma mater, USC--not a school known for turning out shrinking violets--he became, and remains, one of the university’s most famous and gaudy curiosities.

In his undergraduate years as a music major in the early 1940s, Walker was known as “Tommy the Toe.” The name evolved out of Walker’s odd double duty on football game days: He was the Trojans’ place kicker but was also the drum major of the Trojan marching band.

“I just did the pregame show with the band,” he said. “I wore my drum major’s uniform over my football outfit and I didn’t wear any pads.” When an extra-point situation materialized, he simply peeled off the band uniform, trotted on the field and kicked.

He kicked well enough to get a contract after his graduation, with the Washington Redskins. But after a short time, he said, “I looked around at all those huge guys and said, ‘Hey, this is stupid.’ ”

A call from USC saved Walker from the terrors of behemoth professional footballers. He was asked to return to the university and direct the Trojan marching band. He accepted and held the post until 1955.

Walker was responsible for the use of two of the band’s most famous musical numbers. He persuaded Hollywood composer Alfred Newman to allow the band to use an excerpt from Newman’s score to the film “Captain From Castille” at games. The song is known today as “Conquest.” Also, during his undergraduate years as “Tommy the Toe,” he wrote a six-note fanfare--actually more of a bugle call--that is known in every sports stadium in America today as a prompt for the crowd to yell “charge!”

In 1955, after Walker had assembled the band’s half-time show for the Rose Bowl game, he received a telephone call from Walt Disney. Over lunch, Disney asked Walker if he would be interested in producing the opening ceremonies for his new theme park in Anaheim. Walker ended up staying with Disney for 12 years as Disneyland’s director of entertainment and customer relations.

While at Disneyland, Walker helped design the Disney cartoon character costumes now so often in evidence at the park and used them extensively in other shows around the country featuring Disney themes, such as a Fourth of July celebration in Evanston, Ill., in 1956.

It was at that show that Walker used a synchronized fireworks display for the first time--fireworks timed to music and narration. That innovation still is used today at Disneyland on every summer night.

In 1967, Walker left Disney to begin his own production company.

“After you make the whole cycle,” he said, “particularly when you do it in the beginning years of something, like Disneyland, you start looking for further challenges. And I was still relatively young.”

He served tenures as entertainment director for the New Orleans Saints (1967-1971), entertainment consultant to the Marriott Corp. (1973-1974) and entertainment director at Knott’s Berry Farm (1976-1981).

But the one-shot extravaganza is Walker’s meat and potatoes. And he has become so closely associated with that entertainment form over the years that, he says, some see him as a purveyor of only three things.

“Some people will say, ‘All he does is balloons, fireworks and pigeons,’ ” Walker said, grinning. “But what’s important is how you do it. You can release balloons and pigeons and set off fireworks and it may not amount to much. But if you have timing, well, I think that’s the most important word in our whole dictionary. People like to be surprised. Everybody has a little bit of kid in them someplace. They like to feel an aura of magic interwoven into the show.”

That magic, for Walker, often involves sheer size. For the grand reopening of the Sands Hotel in Las Vegas in January, 1982, Walker released, at night, a bunch of helium-filled balloons into the desert sky. The bunch, however, amounted to 208,477 and still stands as the world’s record for a balloon release, according to the Guinness Book of World Records.

That stunt went on to further fame as the object of a question in the Trivial Pursuit board game.

On rare occasions, such pageantry can backfire.

One Easter at Disneyland, recalled Walker, he had arranged for a band and a choir to perform outdoors and a costumed Easter Bunny to strew flower petals down Main Street. A helicopter was scheduled to fly overhead at one point.

“But the guy in the chopper came over too low,” said Walker, “and all the music’s blowing off the stands and I’m waving my arms around at him trying to get him to go up and he just waves back.”

Then, Walker said, with a groan, the helicopter flew slowly down Main Street to an area that, in those days, was lined with umbrellas set in stands. The wind from the helicopter blades blew all the umbrellas out of the stands and into the air.

“And the rabbit,” he said, “was trying to sprinkle the flower petals and they were coming out in clumps, like cow patties or something.”

At Super Bowl IV in 1970, a hot air balloon being used in Walker’s half-time show rose to a height of only about four feet and drifted into the crowd.

“No one was hurt,” said Walker, “but we ended up having to get a girl a new dress.”

Usually, however, the shows work. Some work perfectly. And there was one, said Walker, that worked even better than that.

“The Olympics (opening ceremonies) was one of my happiest moments,” he said. “There were so many things that could have gone wrong--the wardrobe, the timing, the entrances, the exits, the (threat of) terrorism--that didn’t go wrong.

“The people of Los Angeles were hopeful. They wanted us to be successful. We were lucky in that it went beyond that. I use the word chemistry, and it was just right. We knew we’d have a television audience of over 2 billion, and we were trying to give an honest-to-goodness feeling of brotherhood. Everyone was very sincere.”

Walker and his crew were hoping that the athletes gathered on the field would spontaneously participate in the show in some way, said Walker, “but we weren’t sure if they would. We were very happy about what happened, with them dancing and holding hands. Some of them were in tears. It was very gratifying.”

Size has apparently become a relative thing to Walker. The recent showy opening celebration for the California Lottery, staged at the Hollywood Bowl with fireworks, stars and bands was done, he said, “for kicks. It was a good little deal. Things like that are fun and they pay the bills.”

The bill for a Tommy Walker extravaganza can start at around $100,000, he said, and can “go quite a bit beyond that,” undoubtedly into the millions for the more lavish productions. Still, Walker’s permanent staff numbers only four, and that includes himself and his wife.

“You don’t have, say, a presidential inaugural to do every year,” he said, “so I keep the staff small. When we get a project, we hire experienced people from the outside and build teams of workers. For the Statue of Liberty, we’ll probably hire about 120 local workers in New York.”

For that show, to mark the unveiling of the refurbished Statue of Liberty over next Fourth of July weekend, Walker said he plans to put many of those workers to use manning 30 barges laden with fireworks. The July 4 fireworks show will be “the largest ever in the United States,” he said.

Also scheduled for “Liberty Weekend” are opening ceremonies aboard an aircraft carrier in New York Harbor, a parade of tall ships, a concert in Liberty Park, a concert in Central Park with the New York Philharmonic and closing ceremonies at the Meadowlands. All events, Walker said, will be televised.

“I hope,” he said, “that it’ll be something that’ll really turn America on.”

And the Statue of Liberty project is just one of three huge shows Walker has in the works. On May 2, he is contracted to stage and produce the opening ceremonies for Expo 86 in Vancouver. It will be Walker’s sixth world’s fair and will include a “royal barge” that will carry Prince Charles and Princess Diana to the formal ceremonies being held on the site.

Next September, Walker will stage Harvard University’s 350th anniversary ceremonies, featuring, once again, fireworks, stars and music by the Boston Pops Orchestra.

Walker insists he isn’t personally flamboyant, and it appears to be true. He lives in Irvine and says he continues to drive a car that’s 14 years old. He is obviously proud of his associations with presidents and astronauts, film stars and musicians and athletes. He is an essentially unadorned man who simply knows how to make people’s eyes pop.

And if detractors cry schmaltz, Walker says he has the answer in a homily he learned from Walt Disney.

“It’s one of the best things he ever said to me,” said Walker. “ ‘Play to the people and forget the critics.’ ”