A Captain for a Queen : Landmarks: Joseph Prevratil has worked miracles for Long Beach before. But now he’s facing a truly formidable task: making the Queen Mary turn a profit.

When the Long Beach Symphony was in debt and foundering, supporters called Joseph F. Prevratil to save it. When the city’s Chamber of Commerce was nearly a quarter of a million in the red, officials called Prevratil to balance the books. When Long Beach’s largest developer filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, the company asked Prevratil to help shepherd it back to solvency.

Now the Queen Mary, the beloved ocean liner that has captured Long Beach’s heart even if she hasn’t added much to its coffers, is abandoned by the Walt Disney Co., forsaken by the Port of Long Beach, and dangerously close to being turned into a floating shopping mall somewhere in Hong Kong.

Who you gonna call?

Prevratil--part-owner of a Riverside hotel, former operator of a wax museum, respected fiscal mechanic and manager extraordinaire who seems to make almost anything he touches work.

The Long Beach City Council recently approved a five-year lease authorizing Prevratil to operate the Queen Mary and giving the ship what could be one last chance to make a profit in a beach city that desperately needs a tourist draw.

But making a success of the fabled ocean liner, where Winston Churchill held press conferences and Charlie Chaplin tramped the decks, poses a formidable challenge even for a man who started out as a buyer for a Vernon garbage disposal factory: The ship has lost money almost every year since the city bought it in 1967, prompting the city’s mayor to declare it a “tombstone in a cemetery no one wants to visit.”

Prevratil, 54, contends that the trouble is not the Queen Mary but the management. Disney, which had operated the ship for four years before pulling out last week, charged a steep $17.95 for admission, a price Prevratil believes turned away tourists who might have frequented the ship’s gift shops and grand Art Deco bars and restaurants.

The key to Prevratil’s rescue plan is free admission, a concept not unlike the one that made San Francisco’s Pier 39 a success. Tourists will spend money once they are on board, he reasons.

Prevratil intends to reopen the ship’s banquet facilities, wedding chapel, Sunday brunch and hotel, with introductory rates as low as $49 a night, within 90 days. He envisions replacing the tired on-board souvenir shops with a book shop, soap shop and a cafe offering cappuccino and a glorious view of the city skyline.

The Spruce Goose dome, vacant since the flying boat headed for a museum in Oregon, would be used for headliner concerts and major entertainment and sporting events, possibly as early as next spring.

The deserted grounds around the ship would be modeled after the Tivoli gardens in Denmark, with trees trimmed with white lights and rides for children.

Captain’s cards would entitle Long Beach residents to free parking.

“It’s a gift to the people of Long Beach for having some confidence in the Queen Mary,” Prevratil said. “I am returning the Queen Mary to the people. The people will come.”

The city seems divided between those too sentimental to part with the stately ship and those who believe 25 years of red ink is enough. But virtually everyone in Long Beach officialdom seems to agree that if anyone can turn the Queen Mary around, Prevratil can.

He managed the ship from 1982 to 1988, when it was operated by the Wrather Corp. City statistics indicate that the ship’s best years came during his watch.

From the start, he was enamored of the “grand old lady,” as he calls the ship, and is remembered as the man who could not stroll the varnished decks without stooping to clean up cigarette butts. About 1,200 employees staffed the ship, and he seemed to know them all by name.

“He would run into the most obscure steward and say, ‘Hello, Tom, and how are Mary and the kids?’ ” said Chris Davis, president of the Long Beach Area Convention and Visitors Bureau. “The man should run for office.”

Much of Prevratil’s professional life was spent running amusement parks, including the Japanese Village and Deer Park and Movieland Wax Museum in Buena Park. (He negotiated the sale of that park to Six Flags Corp., then stayed on as vice president of special attractions.) He built a string of small attractions, including a place called the Mystery Fun House in Orlando, in 1975, and sold most of them to a division of Ripley International Inc. five years later.

The Wrather Corp. then hired him to manage the Queen Mary, and Prevratil oversaw the construction of the Spruce Goose dome and marketed the dual attraction that opened in 1983--the Queen Mary’s most profitable year.

It is as much Prevratil’s persona as his resume that has earned him respect in Long Beach, observers say.

Born in Chicago to Czech parents, Prevratil spoke no English until he was 7; the difficult language left him a pattern of speech that is deliberate and captivating. (“If Joe got up there and read the phone book, people would listen,” said one bureaucrat.)

He is Jesuit-educated, a non-practicing lawyer and father of four, punctual, private and impeccably dressed. His suits are conservative; in his lapel is a pin of the American flag. He arrives at his desk before his secretary and leaves after she does. Everyone at City Hall knows him, but he virtually never networks.

Prevratil’s secret to balancing the books of so many Long Beach institutions is strong leadership and the creed that everything is negotiable, city officials say; he whittles down debts in exchange for prompt payment, delivers more than he promises and rallies the troops by operating on the premise that a company’s employees are its best assets. (His secretary, Louise Moothart, has followed him for 22 years and through eight jobs.)

“He gives people the feeling that when he’s in charge, everything is going to be all right,” said Bud Rymer, West Coast regional vice president of the United Industrial Workers/Seafarers International, which represents Queen Mary employees. “I’ve been in this for 20 years, and I have never seen an employer command the loyalty and respect of his employees as Joe has.”

If not for Prevratil’s offer to manage the ship, the Queen Mary would almost certainly be steaming out of port a tourism failure. Some city officials insist that might have been best.

A Hong Kong firm was willing to pay the Port of Long Beach $20.1 million for the ocean liner, money the cash-strapped city sorely needs.

Long Beach Mayor Ernie Kell considered the historic ship a costly hulk and lobbied hard to sell it. The Long Beach Board of Harbor Commissioners, which took over the ship in the late ‘70s as a favor to the city, recently voted to get rid of it. Disney, the world’s greatest theme park operator, was citing annual losses as high as $10 million when it decided to pull out.

It appeared no one could save the Queen when Prevratil intervened with an offer to turn it around. The City Council, tormented by the prospect of giving up the city’s most famous landmark, voted to take back the ship once more and put it in his hands. Harbor commissioners agreed to let the ship stay in port.

“People say if Disney could not make the Queen Mary work, no one can,” Prevratil said. “I submit otherwise.”

His greatest challenge may not be repairing the Queen Mary’s rusting hull, but her tortured public image. Recent studies commissioned by the city and harbor department found the ship needed $6 million in immediate repairs. Publicity followed that the Queen Mary was unsafe, and the ship was tagged as a rotting white elephant, a tourist attraction that can’t attract tourists.

Prevratil counters that the city has earned millions in sales and hotel occupancy taxes from the Queen Mary’s draw. The ship’s positive cash flow ranged from $5 million to $7 million during the years he managed it, he said, and the surplus looked like a loss on paper only after legitimate tax write-offs were declared.

Indeed, city officials report that Long Beach has lost as much as $4 million in convention business since word got out that the Queen Mary was closing.

“The very reason Hong Kong or any other destination would want the Queen Mary is the very reason it should stay here,” Prevratil contended. “Information that the Queen Mary isn’t safe, that it never made any money, that simply isn’t true.”

Prevratil’s business undertakings are diverse--he is part-owner of a Sheraton Hotel in Riverside and is supervising the expansion of the Long Beach Convention Center--and there are certainly less risky ventures in which to invest. Yet he is putting some of his own money into the Queen Mary’s rebirth, although he will not say how much.

In his mind, the grand old ship is as much a commercial enterprise as a thing of dignity that needs rescuing. He is already working with historical groups to restore some of the originality lost to so many years of renovations. (The first-class dining room that was once the most exclusive nightclub on the North Atlantic now sells cheeseburgers, he noted.)

“The Queen Mary is a vehicle that bridges two great nations, a great troop ship of tremendous historic value with Art Deco artifacts you will never find again,” Prevratil said, looking up at the oak-framed portrait of the ship that hangs on a wall in his office, a gift from Queen Mary employees. “I think that ought to be preserved for the people.”