Hit Parades : Hollywood, Pasadena, East L.A. Enlist Bands, Celebrities for Annual Christmastime Festivities

If you love a parade, get ready for Super Sunday. There’s not one parade, but three.

The oldest, biggest and flashiest is the Hollywood Christmas Parade, which begins at 6 p.m. This 56th edition of the annual parade stars Jimmy Stewart as grand marshal and 90 other film, television and recording artists.

Earlier Sunday are the zany Doo Dah Parade in Pasadena, begun 10 years ago as a spoof of the Rose Parade, at noon, and the 15th East Los Angeles Christmas Parade, featuring Olympic gold medal-winning boxer Paul Gonzales and actor Ricardo Montalban, at 1 p.m. on Whittier Boulevard and Eastern Avenue.

Strike Up the Band

There are 19 floats, 51 cars, 16 bands and 12 equestrian groups--with a total of 2,858 people participating in the Hollywood parade.

Stewart, serving as grand marshal for the second time in 10 years since the reorganization of the event, said he signed up for this tour of duty because he feels that the parade “represents all the glamour and all the good things that the movie business has accomplished over the years.

“I think this year’s parade is especially important because of this positive-image program that has been going on for some time now,” he added. “To make Hollywood a place to be proud of and develop Hollywood’s old style again. I’ve always had a feeling about it. There’s always been something special about it, this place where pictures originated.”

Stewart admitted that he thought “today’s actors and actresses shy away a little from this type of thing. I don’t think they have the feeling about Hollywood we had in the old days.”

The parade’s executive producer, Johnny Grant, agrees.

Grant, along with John Golden, president of Western Costume Co., is credited with turning around the Christmas parade after it began falling off in popularity during the late 1960s. It was in a downward spiral that seemed irreversible until Grant and Golden took over in 1978.

“Nowadays, a studio can’t get you a star (for the parade),” said Grant, 64, vice president of public affairs for KTLA, explaining that studios no longer have as much control over their stars as the old movie moguls did.

“If a star rides in the parade,” he said, “it’s because he or she really wants to. But as far as the studios go, they could help a lot more than most of them do. The commitment is just not there from the studios. I don’t think they have the emotional ties to the community that the early studio heads did. They built this community.”

But the stars, old and new, have come out for Grant over the 10-year period.

“We ride in the parade to express our desire for peace, and we feel it’s important to us as it is one of the biggest and most prestigious parades around,” said Tim Reid and Daphne Maxwell Reid, stars of the new TV series “Frank’s Place.”

Said actress Angie Dickinson, an enthusiastic participant in many of the parades: “The spectators are mostly kids and families without a lot of luxuries in life, sometimes not even enough food. It’s great to be able to bring a bit of joy to them by providing them with a movie star to wave to. It’s important for us in Hollywood to keep alive what Hollywood represents, the glamour and bringing a little more fun into people’s lives.”

Grant got his largest lineup of celebrities last year when the parade served as the kickoff event for Hollywood’s 100th birthday. Grand marshals were Mickey and Minnie Mouse, who will attend Sunday’s parade, the final event in Hollywood marking its 100-year birthday.

Celebrity Participation

Among the celebrities riding in the 1987 event: Kirk Cameron, Candace Cameron, Betty White, Steve Kanaly, Mary Hart, John Tesh, Harry Anderson, Lorenzo Lamas, Nancy Stafford, Cindy Pickett, Soleil Moon Frey, Ed Asner, Norm Crosby, the Dick Van Patten family, John Saxon, Angie Dickinson, Chris Lemmon, Vicki Lawrence, Tim Reid, Daphne Maxwell Reid, Johnny Depp, Joan Van Ark, Ernest Borgnine, Dee Wallace Stone, Christopher Stone, Marilyn McCoo, Billy Davis Jr., Cesar Romero, Delta Burke, Lou Diamond Phillips, LeVar Burton, Gerald McRaney, Caryn Richman and Dean Butler.

“The most exciting thing in my life was pulling off that Stevie Wonder thing last year,” Grant said. Wonder, who was scheduled to ride in the parade but missed his plane in New York, had to be helicoptered from LAX to the KTLA parking lot to get to the parade.

Grant persuaded the L.A. City Fire Department to lend him a helicopter and pilot to pick up Wonder, who arrived at 7:40 p.m., 20 minutes before the end of the parade. “When it was over, we forgot he didn’t have a car, so the LAPD took him home,” Grant said.

Reminiscing about his first year as parade director, Grant said: “In ‘78, I called in every chit anybody in town owed me,” Grant explained. “It was really tough. The parade had gotten so bad, nobody wanted to be in it. And it was a financial burden. That’s when John and I decided to take it over and try to get it going again. Now, people don’t ignore us anymore. When we write and ask them, they respond and say why they can’t be in it or they accept. Before, they wouldn’t answer us. We didn’t even know if the letters were going to right addresses.”

Grant and Golden, members of the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce, which sponsors the parade, agreed in 1978 to take over running the event for one year.

“We said we’ll try it for one year,” parade chairman Golden recalled. “And if it doesn’t work, if we can’t put the glamour back into it, we’ll give it up. It happened to work.” Grant and Golden also added a posh party for participants in KTLA studios’ Green Room after each parade. In the ensuing years, it has become one of Hollywood’s hot-ticket parties.

It was Golden’s idea to change the parade’s official name. Since its inception in 1928, it had been called the Santa Claus Lane Parade. That original parade, put together by Hollywood merchants to promote Christmas shopping at their stores, featured only one entry, a reindeer-drawn sleigh with Santa Claus and a starlet named Jeanette Loff.

The first Santa Claus float, with model reindeer, sleigh and clouds floating over a miniature village, appeared in 1932. After growing steadily in popularity each year, the parade was discontinued from 1942-45 during World War II.

In 1946, cowboy star Gene Autry and composer Oakley Haldeman immortalized the Santa Claus Lane Parade by writing a song about it, “Here Comes Santa Claus.”

Autry, owner of the California Angels, would later say he got the idea for the song while riding his horse Champion in the parade and listening to the children shout “Here comes Santa Claus, here comes Santa Claus” as the Santa float drew near to them.

Autry, a veteran parade participant and the 1980 grand marshal, is also a member of the starry cast for this year’s event.

“We decided if we could make this parade go and have a positive image for Hollywood, then we should have Hollywood in the name of it,” Golden explained. “That’s when it became the Hollywood Christmas Parade.”

Autry Gets Some Credit

Both Golden and Grant give substantial credit to Autry for helping them rejuvenate the parade in the late ‘70s.

“I went to Gene Autry and told him the parade was in trouble,” Grant remembered. “He immediately offered his complete support. Without his support and that of KTLA, the parade wouldn’t be in existence today.”

Parade night itself is hectic for Grant, who says the event “has the logistics of the Normandy invasion.”

Stuck in Traffic

During the two-hour hoopla, Grant rushes around the KTLA studio lot and out in front on Sunset Boulevard with a two-way radio next to his ear, making sure celebrities are on time. If they’re stuck in traffic, he asks the LAPD to go get them. He sees that the floats, bands, cars and equestrian units get on the parade route in time to keep the television broadcast moving smoothly.

Grant describes himself on parade night as “a four-way cold tablet going in every direction.”

The 3.2-mile parade, which begins at Sunset Boulevard and Van Ness, is televised live on KTLA Channel 5. As a Christmas Day special, it is distributed nationally by Tribune Entertainment to 85% of U.S. households and 88 countries.

“When I look out there and see a million people, families and kids, smiling and laughing I really feel we’ve done something,” Grant said. “But that first year was a nightmare. I was sitting in my office with the veins popping out of my neck every day. They had a pool going on when I was going to have a heart attack.”

Uncertain Future

Grant’s biggest concern today is the future of the parade, which, he says, is on shaky ground because of the proposed route of Metro Rail in Hollywood.

“If it goes down Sunset, we’re in a lot of trouble,” Grant admitted. “Even if it’s underground, that area will be torn up for three years, so there goes our staging area. That’s what’s been so great for the celebrities. We could promise them security inside the studio lot. If it’s (Metro Rail) above ground, it’s totally ruined.”

“Metro Rail would really create problems for us,” agreed Bill Welsh, president of the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce. “If it’s above ground, which is what the RTD has proposed, there will be pylons down the center of the street. The floats could only go down one side, we’d have to split the bands. I don’t know about the grandstands (located in front of KTLA) and we absolutely could not televise it.”

The optimistic Grant has taken a wait-and-see approach to the Metro Rail problem as far as the parade is concerned, but has other ideas for future parades.

“The one area I want to see changed are the floats. I want them improved,” he said. “And this will shock you. A lot of people are out of town on Thanksgiving weekend and can’t be in the parade. They could come if we moved it up a weekend, to the first Sunday in December. And that’s what I’m going to suggest.

“People ask me how long I’m going to keep doing this,” Grant added, grinning. “These projects really are for younger people. You burn up a lot of energy working on any parade. But I tell them I’ll do it as long as it’s fun. I’ve had one helluva life out of Hollywood. But, one of these days when I go back to the farm and sit in a rocking chair, when the parade comes on the air, I’ll sit there and say: ‘I had a little hand in that. That was my contribution to Hollywood.’ ”