The Good Luck Charm : Meet Preview Henry, One of the Most Sought-After Men in Hollywood

One day on the street in 1954, someone from MGM handed Henry Bond a free ticket to a sneak preview of a Lucille Ball-Desi Arnaz picture, “The Long, Long Trailer.”

He took the bus to far-off Inglewood and loved being part of the Academy Theater audience. He met a studio extra who explained how previews worked. The extra began telephoning, tipping him to previews. He went to every one.

Publicists peered down at his baseball cap, multicolored shirt, and string tie, listened to his nasal, echoing, machine-gun-like speech cadence and were melted by his imploring stare. Despite his lack of ticket or press credentials, they let him in every time. They renamed him Preview Henry and said he was their “good-luck charm.”

They were right. Movies that he said he loved often attracted audiences like flies and made studios rich. Those he hated usually died. He liked emotional and action-packed movies, disliked films with too much “talk-talk-talk.”

One night he stood up in mid-show to catch a last bus. Bob Goodfried, the late Paramount publicity chief, who considered admitting him a “mitzvah,” a divine commandment, stopped him and gave him the first of many rides to Hollywood.

Over the years, reporters, critics and other members of screening audiences asked one another who he was.

“His uncle was a projectionist” and “his father was a studio boss” were two of the theories about him, and were, of course, untrue.

Preview Henry has appeared in three movies: as a crowd extra in “It’s a Mad Mad World” and “Hello, Dolly!,” and, in his only close-up--an inside joke by director Garry Marshall in “Young Doctors in Love”--he eats popcorn in the audience of an operating theater during surgery.

His favorite stars are the ones he’s seen most recently. Right after a screening of “Commando” at 20th Century-Fox, I asked him who they were. His answer: Arnold Schwarzenegger, its star, and Angela Lansbury, whom he’d seen on television the night before in “Murder, She Wrote,” a favorite show.

Preview Henry, after a screening, once told John Wayne, “I enjoy your pictures.”

“That’s your fault,” Duke replied.

A perfectionist, he puts in long hours. He reads the trade papers for free at a newsstand. While other evening-audience members rest, he’s at CBS watching game shows. Now 52, he’s still surprised when producers seek him out.

“When Jon Peters introduced himself in the Universal commissary, I almost dropped my Coke.”

You see, nobody takes chances with Preview Henry. In 1973, a new publicist, by mistake, turned him away from an MGM screening, and within a week, veteran studio publicists point out, James Aubrey Jr. was fired as MGM production boss.

Five years later, Universal turned him away from Michael Cimino’s “The Deerhunter.” Publicists at rival studios waited for catastrophe to strike, but the film won an Oscar. For a while, nothing happened.

A few years later, thieves broke into Preview Henry’s house, tied up both him and his 80-year-old mother and took, among other things, the unlimited lifetime theater pass that Jack Oakie and Jane Wyatt had presented to him. No help came for five days, his mother died, and he spent six weeks in the hospital.

In those weeks, Preview Henry missed the United Artists screening of Michael Cimino’s “Heaven’s Gate,” the most luckless event in the modern history of Hollywood.