Love Ya, Prometheus; Don’t Ever Change

Barney Sackett is a Promethean. It says so right on his business card.

So is he responsible for fire? Has he been chained to a rock? Does a giant predatory bird eat out his liver, which renews itself as fast as it is consumed?

I look for signs of scarring, but Barney means Promethean the other way: “life-giving, creative or courageously original,” as Webster’s New World Dictionary explains. His wounds aren’t visible.

Barney is 67 now; many of his contemporaries are retired. A few are dead. Barney himself must know that he is no threat to the memory of Sol Hurok; the lights of Broadway will not dim at his passing. But does he give up? Does he cry uncle?

Never! Barney’s a Promethean. He’s got Giselle McKenzie. He’s got Rhonda Fleming. He’s got Dean Jones. Not to mention Georgia Frontiere, James Earl Jones and the Korean Symphony Orchestra.

Sackett has organized this Olympian array for the Easter Sunrise Service at the Hollywood Bowl on Sunday. He’s producing it this year, bringing all his vast experience on the lower floors of show business to bear on this early morning extravaganza.

“India has never seen the Easter Sunrise Service,” he says. “This is the first time. It’ll reach over 200 million people.”

Enough about Guber and Peters, the Sony twins at Columbia. In this season of freedom and renewal, of Passover and Easter, who could resist a guy like Barney? He doesn’t wear Armani socks, and he’s unknown at Angeli. But he’s reborn every time the curtain goes up, and neither show business nor California would be the same without him.

Quick and tan, Barnard Sackett is still built like a wrestler and looks younger than he is. He’s also balding and overweight; he may be Promethean, but Apollo’s got nothing to worry about. Yet there is a directness to Barney, an alacrity. He listens, he enunciates, he puts on a show. On the way to breakfast, we pass the Lee Strasberg Institute like some signpost.

“I’m meeting with Frank Sinatra’s right-hand man this afternoon,” Barney confides.

How does he do it?

“Networking,” he says modestly. “In this business, it’s one hand washing the other. Sometimes one hand washes two hands.”

Given ecumenical Los Angeles, there’s a certain justice to a sunrise service run by Barney Sackett, whose resume includes such secular-sounding films as “Sweet Smell of Sex,” “All Men Are Apes” and “Eroticon,” which he calls a documentary.

Similarly, although the Hollywood Bowl sunrise service is 71 years old (“We started there in the weeds,” says Bill Lyons, services president), Barney is a relative newcomer, which seems somehow right for such a venerable California event. Is this not forever the land of immigrants?

Finally, in the ecumenism department, it should be noted that Barney is Jewish, although he attends church sometimes--”Nothing like being broad-minded,” he says--and isn’t using Jewish performers.

“I think the people who read Scripture should be Christian,” he explains. (The service has featured a rabbi in the past, but this year will have a more Christian focus.)

Barney moved out here for good from Philadelphia, his hometown, a couple of years ago after an unsuccessful crusade to free a young friend he says was falsely convicted of robbery.

“I had to leave,” Sackett says darkly.

One wonders if the local critics played a role. A crusader--a Promethean!--Sackett wrote a play about his friend’s suffering at the hands of the local criminal justice system. Douglas J. Keating, writing in the Philadelphia Inquirer, said it probably wouldn’t have been produced had Sackett not owned the theater.

Ensconced in one of our fair city’s better-known apartment houses, Barney’s car was repeatedly vandalized. Once he came out of his building to find it up on blocks, the tires missing.

Barney has been everywhere and done everything, as he will readily tell you. A favorite Sackett story concerns his adventures as a radio satirist whose biting parodies drove U.S. military authorities up a wall in “the E.T.,” or European theater of operations, during World War II.

He wrote a play about this too, a one-man show called “Rough in the E.T.” that prompted “a mass exodus of critics and a right fair chunk of the audience prior to and during intermission,” reported Philadelphia Daily News critic Nels Nelson.

“Sackett was a classic bore,” he added.

Barney perseveres in the face of such notices. That’s what it takes to produce something like the sunrise service. Otherwise, Barney would be eating his own liver out.

The logistics are daunting: 30 harpists, a 105-piece symphony, a 1,200 voice choir and not much chance to rehearse on the scene. With so many big names--the music director, for instance, is Bob Ralston, a former Lawrence Welk pianist--egos must be massaged.

“I’ve got stars introducing stars,” Barney notes.

But there’s almost no money.

“No artist gets paid,” he says. “I don’t get a cent either. It costs me money.”

The biggest expense is labor. Lyons says that because the show is at the crack of dawn on a Sunday, and a holiday as well, rates are especially high.

“The Bowl gets $1,” Sackett says. “But it costs us $33,000 to pay the union personnel.”

Barney can handle it. Show business is in his blood: He claims opera-singing aunts, a Russian playwright uncle and another aunt who served 17 years as court pianist for the Czar.

“On his father’s side he lays claim to history,” his vitae says. “Sackett is a direct descendant to the navigator for Columbus in the discovery of America.”

I suspect Los Angeles has not heard the last of Barnard Sackett, and I for one am glad of it. We need all the Prometheans we can get.