Leadership, Money Woes Beset Bowl Easter Service : Religion: Board head is criticized for involving Trinity TV ministry. City ordered event to halt fund raising.

During its 72 years as a Southern California institution, the Hollywood Bowl Easter Sunrise Service has overcome rainstorms, protest demonstrations and financial problems.

But it now faces a struggle that supporters fear it may not survive.

City officials have ordered the service to stop soliciting money. Once-generous donors have threatened it with lawsuits. And volunteers are divided over the actions of a controversial new president and the involvement of the Trinity Broadcasting Network, a popular Orange County-based television ministry.

At the center of the conflict is Bee Beyer, a minister who said she was ordained by an East Coast Pentecostal group whose name she does not recall, and who gained control of the Hollywood Bowl Easter Sunrise Service Inc. board last year.

Her critics accuse her of conspiring to hand over control of the event to televangelist Paul Crouch and his wife, Jan, who head TBN, the world’s largest religious broadcasting network.

They complain that Beyer stacked the board with supporters of the Crouches, including her daughter, Gemma Wenger, who was named vice president.

Beyer and Wenger quietly signed a memo of understanding with TBN on Feb. 5 in which the ministry agreed to produce and televise the service in return for control over the program, including the selection of all guests and the order in which they would appear.

“It was all very secretive,” said ex-board member Marjorie Tayloe of Beyer’s dealings with TBN. “At one point Bee held up a check at one of the board meetings and put her thumb over the signature so that no one would know who the donor was.”

Beyer said the arrangement with TBN was pursued quietly for fear that detractors would try to sabotage it.

Volunteers say Beyer’s alliance with the Tustin-based ministry undermined the service’s multidenominational character and all but chased away Hollywood stars who for decades accounted for much of its appeal.

Dissidents complain that this year’s celebrities were drawn from guest lists of the Crouches’ “Praise the Lord” TV show. Despite the ministry’s assurances to the contrary, critics also have suggested that TBN stood to benefit financially after contributing $42,000 to keep the service afloat.

“I’m not opposed to any of the fine things Paul and Jan Crouch do,” said volunteer Norma Foster. “But the sunrise service is about the diverse Hollywood community. I don’t think it should be the exclusive domain of any particular religious group.”

At least a few celebrity participants hold a similar view.

“They (the Crouches) usually talk about Hollywood like it’s the scourge of the world,” comedian Marty Ingels said. “What are they even doing in it?”

Ingels’ wife, actress Shirley Jones, said the event is the victim of “high-level hand wrestling for power and influence,” adding that the sunrise service “powers that be would do well to examine the loss of prestige . . . that invariably results from tampering” with such a venerable institution.

Even actress Rhonda Fleming, who says the Crouches are personal friends, expressed concern that the observance last April may have been too narrowly focused.

“I admire TBN, but I certainly think the service should be maintained as a Hollywood tradition,” she said.

Beyer has shrugged off most of the criticism as sour grapes from a few volunteers who failed to put the observance on sound financial footing and are resentful of the Crouches.

“The sunrise service is like a business,” she said. “If you don’t pay the bills, you don’t survive. Instead of being jealous, they should be grateful (that TBN got involved).”

Silent Film Stars

Begun in 1919 as a block party Easter celebration among silent film stars living in nearby Whitley Heights, the observance is among the nation’s best-known outdoor Easter services, thanks to television and the worldwide reach of the Armed Forces Radio Network.

The list of celebrities who have participated reads like a “Who’s Who” of show business, from “America’s Sweetheart,” Mary Pickford, to gangster archetype Edward G. Robinson, and a raft of others.

But from its zenith in 1948, when it attracted an estimated 30,000 worshipers, the observance has been in decline, with attendance in recent years often sagging below 10,000.

Since Beyer gained control of the board, the problems have become more acute. The event’s coffers are nearly empty. Two former financial angels are unhappy with Beyer’s administration and have demanded that their loans be repaid. And because of an invalid solicitation permit, the service’s ability to raise money has all but disappeared.

In June, the Los Angeles Social Service Department issued a “cease and desist” order, barring the group from soliciting funds, after persistent complaints from dissidents about the sunrise service’s finances.

Social service officials learned before Easter that the group had not filed financial statements for 1991 and was operating with an expired solicitation permit. Investigators said the permit had been falsified.

The department did not prohibit organizers from collecting funds at the service in April partly “out of consideration for the humiliation it would have caused,” said Lourdes Saludares, the agency’s chief auditor.

“I don’t think they wanted to be the grinches who stole Easter,” said a disgruntled volunteer, who asked not to be named. A department audit of the group’s finances was launched in June.

Beyer has admitted altering the permit. She said she replaced her predecessor’s name with her own after she became president, and changed the date to make it appear the document was valid beyond its December, 1991, expiration.

She said the action was “a mistake,” explaining that she was unfamiliar with the law.

Such explanations have done little to reduce discord within the group. The bickering intensified in September after dissidents claimed that Beyer brought in two security guards to intimidate them during a meeting at a Hollywood hotel. Beyer said the guards were needed to keep the peace.

A videotape of the meeting shows that about two-thirds of the roughly 50 people who attended called for a no-confidence vote in Beyer’s leadership, but her supporters shouted them down.

One supporter, Agnes Haddad, is seen on the tape telling the group Beyer was “the anointed of God” and warning that Jesus was “going to do a number” on them for attacking her.

Among the dissidents are two longtime backers of the event who together have loaned the sunrise service nearly $100,000 to keep it afloat in recent years. After the 1991 service, the board agreed to repay $50,000 to Kathryn Etienne and $48,000 to lawyer David Overholt in annual $5,000 installments to be taken from the event’s proceeds.

But no payments have been made, despite Beyer’s acknowledgment that the board had between $5,000 and $10,000 in the bank after this year’s event.

In an interview, Beyer said she had reimbursed herself nearly $6,000 for expenses since becoming president. But she said the service had not begun repaying Etienne and Overholt because the organization “has to have some seed money.”

No one disputes that the service is in dire financial straits. To sustain itself, the service relies on volunteer labor and on raising $25,000 to $35,000 in donations each year.

Hosted TV Shows

Beyer, a former high school home economics teacher, was a fixture on Los Angeles television during the 1960s and 1970s as the host of several cooking and homemaking shows.

She is also the author of a book on food drying that she says God inspired.

Since 1967, she has marketed her own food dehydrator, a product she said grew out of a vision she received from God after graduating from Emporia State Teacher’s College in Kansas. Her book on food drying, in its 15th printing, has sold 500,000 copies, she said.

“I knew that God wanted me to write a book,” she said. “I knew I didn’t have the time, and I just prayed. I’d go into my room, shut off everything and concentrate. And He wrote that book.

“Sometimes when I wasn’t so close to Him there were a few mistakes in it, but mostly He wrote it.”

In interviews and in face-to-face encounters with opponents, Beyer often alludes to the Scriptures. “I don’t know why they’re intent on persecuting me,” she said of her detractors. “I would give up all of this responsibility in a minute except that I believe God has called me to it.”

Beyer said she has known the Crouches for 15 years, and that she and her daughter, Wenger, have appeared on their Trinity Broadcasting Network several times.

Wenger, a singer and actress, followed her mother into the ministry and has her own Christian talk show on an Inglewood radio station.

“There are people who are trying to drag the Easter sunrise service down just to glorify themselves,” Wenger recently admonished volunteers who had questioned the Crouches’ involvement. “Instead of reaching 5,000 people, we reached millions. How can people complain about that?”

But such arguments have failed to persuade dissidents who view TBN’s $42,000 contribution to rescue this year’s service as an investment rather than charity.

“Their involvement amounted to a cheap location shoot,” said former board member W. Tan, a professional dancer known as Tani. “They used the prestige of the service and the bowl to advance their own programming agenda.”

The ministry made an initial contribution of $22,000 in mid-March, followed by another $12,000 to expand the hour-and-45-minute program to three hours and improve the lighting. The remaining $8,000 paid for insurance and the cost of bringing Florida-based faith healer Benny Hinn and other TBN guests to Los Angeles.

However, suspicions within the sunrise service organization had reached the point where even increasing the program’s length proved to be controversial. Several guests not associated with TBN were edited out of the two-hour rebroadcasts.

Volunteers were upset that TBN’s “prayer line” number was superimposed on the screen during the live telecast and the two rebroadcasts. TBN has said the program was shown on more than 200 TV stations worldwide.

Beyer said TBN forwarded about $350 in checks from viewers who made their checks payable to the sunrise service.

During the previous 25 years that the event had been televised locally, the sunrise service board displayed its own phone number and post office box on the screen, said Foster, the volunteer who has produced the event four times.

“If anyone had surmised that TBN would have used its own number in televising the service there would have been a big protest, but frankly no one knew about it until it was done,” she said.

The Hollywood Bowl is owned by Los Angeles County, which leases it to the Los Angeles Philharmonic Assn. The association subleases the bowl to the sunrise service board each Easter for $1, waiving location fees and expenses it charges other productions.

Philharmonic officials said that Beyer took advantage of their generosity last Easter by misleading them about the sponsorship.

“She represented to us that the money was coming from the (previous) year’s collections and donations,” said Mark Ferber, production supervisor for the association. “If we had known who the sponsor really was, we would not have been so quick to waive the location fee. . . . (TBN) would have been treated like any other client.”

Spiritual Interest

TBN officials insist that the ministry’s only interest in the service is spiritual.

“The sunrise service was not used for fund raising,” said Colby M. May, a New York lawyer who said he was designated by the Crouches to respond to interview requests.

May said the TV ministry conducts comprehensive weeklong fund raising twice a year, and that a “prayer line” phone number is displayed on-screen at other times to let viewers ask questions and link up with a “prayer partner.”

Some Easter viewers “may have been touched in some manner” to make pledges to TBN after calling the number, May said, “but we have no way of knowing how much was pledged during the broadcasts.”

He said TBN considered its role in this year’s service as that of a “corporate sponsor.” “As far as the internecine warfare (among sunrise service board members and supporters), neither the Crouches nor TBN knows anything about that as far as I know.”

Dissidents, however, say TBN’s involvement goes beyond mere corporate sponsorship.

Four of the six candidates running for seats on the board are associated with TBN: Barry Pfeiler is the network’s program director; singer Vern Jackson is music director of the “Praise the Lord” show hosted by the Crouches; Laura Massey is the show’s guest coordinator, and Danny York is a network video engineer.

A spokesman for the Crouches said the ministry has not discussed whether it will be involved with the sunrise service next year.

The service’s supporters say they want to keep it as a Hollywood tradition.

“To me the sunrise service is as much a part of this community as the Hollywood sign,” said volunteer Juliet Parr. “I just hate to see it taken over from the outside.”