James Doolittle’s Contributions to Culture in L.A.--and Beijing

The Peking Opera, whose works are not grand opera in the European tradition but a lively melange of dance, mime, acrobatics and martial arts, arrives at UCLA’s Royce Hall Friday for a series of five performances and plays in Claremont tonight.

The 60-person company and its 200-year-old tradition of very lively tale-telling, is being presented locally by James A. Doolittle and his Southern California Theatre Assn. This puts Doolittle well into his fifth decade of producing culture for Southern California.

Doolittle has, he reckons, been the producer or importer of about 500 attractions with a total population of perhaps 20,000 artists. Doolittle has not always been a critical favorite, but for years the cultural diet of Los Angeles seemed to consist of the Philharmonic, the Civic Light Opera and whatever Doolittle had going.

Last summer Doolittle, 70, and Bette Bao Lord, the author and wife of U.S. Ambassador to China Winston Lord, were prime movers in the Beijing production of “The Caine Mutiny Court Martial.”

“Charlie Wick, who runs the (United States Information Agency), is a tennis-playing pal of mine,” Doolittle said in his West Hollywood condominium the other morning. “He told me about this idea of doing an American play in Beijing with a Chinese company. He and Bette were talking about another play. But I think ‘Caine Mutiny’ is one of the best American plays of the century and I thought the Chinese would respond to its ideas. I also said we should get Chuck Heston, who’d done it with great success, to direct it.”

Wick, Mrs. Lord and Heston all agreed. Heston spent five weeks in Beijing directing the all-Chinese cast through interpreters who became ever less necessary. Ying Ruocheng, China’s vice minister of culture and a renowned actor, did the Chinese translation of Herman Wouk’s text.

The initial two-week run, which opened Oct. 18, sold out the day the tickets went on sale; there were eight ovations in the first act alone. After an engagement in Shanghai, the production will join the permanent repertory of the Beijing People’s Art Theatre and may eventually tour the provinces.

“We’re already thinking about the next production,” Doolittle says. “We’d love to go to the other extreme and have them do Neil Simon’s ‘The Odd Couple.’ I think it’s the funniest comedy in recent times. It’s already been produced all over the world. It works in any language. It would be wonderful if Mike Nichols (who won a Tony for directing the play in 1965) could go over and do it.”

Doolittle, in whose honor the former Huntington Hartford Theatre on Vine Street in Hollywood is now named, had been a hot-shot tennis player at USC with only a passing interest in the arts. In 1945 he was running a sports shop in Beverly Hills when one of his customers talked him into helping raise money for an operetta.

The operetta, based on the life and music of Tchaikovsky, was called “Song Without Words.” Doolittle raised the $75,000 (a not inconsiderable sum in 1945), became producer, recruited Mia Slavenska (whom he had seen in a film) from the Ballet Russe and got Sir Anton Dolin to direct. One of the performers was a local 14-year-old named Mitzi Gaynor.

“We presented it at the Philharmonic Auditorium here and then took it to the Curran in San Francisco,” Doolittle remembers. The San Francisco engagement began a handshake association with Louis Lurie, the multimillionaire property investor, that lasted until Lurie’s death 20 years ago. Together they owned the Biltmore Theatre in downtown Los Angeles and presented 40 plays there, including Ethel Merman in “Gypsy.” Eventually, he and Lurie sold it, Doolittle says, because they feared it could not compete with the Music Center.

For two seasons, in 1950-51, Doolittle presented large-scale productions of opera in the Hollywood Bowl, including, for Rudolph Friml’s “The Vagabond King,” a small army that stormed the stage from a hilltop a quarter-mile away.

“But we were eased out and a new company came in and went bankrupt in 10 days,” Doolittle says. He frequently uses the editorial we, and it is not always clear whether he means the Southern California Theatre Assn., which is essentially Doolittle and an approving board of directors, or Doolittle solo.

Singular or plural, he is forthright, and once sought to ban Times Music Critic Martin Bernheimer from the Greek Theatre after an unflattering review of a Viennese ballet troupe Doolittle had imported. (Bernheimer bought his own tickets and attended anyway, thinly disguised.)

In 1953 Doolittle had taken over the dormant Greek Theatre, which was then said to look like an abandoned gas station, redesigned it personally and for 23 summer seasons offered a mixture of pop pleasures, like the perennial Harry Belafonte, and heavier-weight attractions, including opera, ballet and a memorable production of “Royal Hunt of the Sun.”

He and the association bought the Huntington Hartford, which was on the verge of being torn down, in 1964, and ran it successfully until 1986, when they sold it to UCLA. The initial concept, that the university would operate it jointly with the Center Theatre Group, did not work well. Even some well-reviewed attractions did not attract business.

At the moment James Earl Jones in “Fences,” which Doolittle negotiated into the theater, is prospering. Then, under a new arrangement with the Ahmanson, the Doolittle will house a Tom Stoppard play so “Les Liaisons Dangereuses” can have a long run downtown.

Doolittle’s one regret is that the refurbishing of the Huntington Hartford included a drastic change in the facade. “Things happen,” he says philosophically. But he adds that there are plans to un-do the avant-garde refurbishing and restore the front of the theater to its original chaste look. “We’ve told UCLA we’ll make a contribution,” Doolittle says.