PERFORMING ARTS : A Satellite to Save the Arts : Lloyd Rigler decided to use his fortune to spread culture all over the hemisphere, 24 hours a day, for free. But can ‘Madama Butterfly’ and Astaire really compete with R.E.M. and Madonna?

Back in 1949, when a food critic showed no interest in Adolph’s seasonings, executive Lloyd Rigler turned up at her office with a chunk of meat, plopped it on her desk, tenderized it and told her to take it home and cook it. She did, and her resulting story led to nearly 4,000 requests for the new product.

Rigler, who turned stunts like that into a major fortune, is now applying his on-site hustle to Culture with a capital C. In a one-man effort at arts education for the masses, he’s making high-quality music, dance, opera and more available, for free, on as grand a scale as money can buy.

For more than a year, the Los Angeles arts patron has leased a transponder and beamed the arts to satellite dishes from Alaska to South America. Launched on May 3, 1994--Rigler’s 79th birthday--his Classic Arts Showcase broadcasts 24 hours a day to much of the Americas.

The white-haired philanthropist knows what sells.

“MTV is in,” Rigler says. “The kids like it. If we give them the same format and show them classics, will they look for five minutes?”

Assisted by his nephew and a tiny staff, Rigler is determined that they will. Using three- to five-minute segments of laser discs, archival film, television footage and similar materials, Classic Arts Showcase presents Fred Astaire one minute, Andres Segovia the next. Laurence Olivier is seen onstage as “King Lear,” the Vienna Philharmonic performs Ravel’s “Bolero,” and Renata Tebaldi sings “Un Bel Di” from Puccini’s “Madama Butterfly.”

All of this is funded--at an estimated $50 million during the next 12 years--entirely by the nonprofit foundation established by Rigler and his late partner Lawrence Deutsch. Classic Arts Showcase accepts no advertising. Its signal is not scrambled, which means that broadcasters and cable systems can rebroadcast it without charge and that anyone with a satellite dish in its broadcast range can tune in.

And people are tuning in. Rigler estimates his audience at about 5 million, including people reached by at least 20 university stations that air the programming. He keeps a growing stack of testimonials from Iowa, the Bahamas, Hawaii and such celebrity viewers as Anne Bancroft, Joan Fontaine and Shirley Jones.

Classic Arts Showcase is “the CNN of culture,” says “MASH” and “City of Angels” creator Larry Gelbart. “It’s a giant oasis in what becomes increasingly a vast wasteland. In the crack between shopping channels, degrading talk shows and murder trials, there are these examples of the positive, the hopeful and creative side of mankind.”

Still, Rigler is finding it tough to give the people what he thinks they want, even for free. In Los Angeles, for example, none of the 14 cable systems that serve the region are broadcasting Classic Arts Showcase directly. Gelbart sees it in his home thanks to the Beverly Hills School District’s Channel 36.

But Rigler is not a man who is easily discouraged. Determined to enlist in the U.S. Navy in 1942, for instance, he knew he couldn’t read the eye chart with his left eye so he memorized the chart while waiting in line. (They gave him a second eye exam before sending him overseas, discovered his vision problem and stationed him in San Pedro instead.)

He wanted to serve his country then, and he wants to serve the arts now.

“The arts are endangered!” he says repeatedly. “The arts are a mirror of our culture, but nowhere is arts education being given to young people. If we don’t have an audience, how will we have the arts?”

Rigler has been successfully selling one thing or another nearly all his life. He was born and raised in small towns in North Dakota and studied theater at the University of Illinois. His early jobs included demonstrating RCA television sets at the 1939 New York World’s Fair.

He landed in Los Angeles in 1941 as a salesman for Decca Records and returned here after his time in the Navy. He worked briefly as a Hollywood agent before getting into the food brokerage business, in which he was later joined by Deutsch.

Impressed by a meat tenderizer launched by local restaurateur Adolph Rempp, Rigler and Deutsch started demonstrating and selling it at the May Co. in 1949, then bought the product outright. Rigler says the recipe and name that would make him a fortune cost only $10,000.

Entrepreneur Rigler toured the country--he swears he visited 63 cities in 60 days--repeating his desktop tenderizing act wherever he could. He eventually made it to Reader’s Digest and says a subsequent Digest story drew 2 million pieces of mail.

Rigler and Deutsch sold Adolph’s in 1974 to Chesebrough-Pond’s Inc. (Rigler won’t reveal the exact price, but he will say that they were determined to get “the highest price-earnings ratio anyone ever paid for a business, and I think we did that.”) The two men later formed the Ledler Corp., a venture capital company, and when Deutsch died in 1977, he left his estate to their Ledler Foundation, later renamed the Lloyd E. Rigler-Lawrence E. Deutsch Foundation.

With Deutsch, Rigler gave Jacques Lipchitz’s massive sculpture “Peace on Earth” to the Music Center. Their foundation also funded projects to catalogue the recorded music holdings at several universities as well as programs at WNET-TV in New York. Its gifts to such organizations as the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the New York City Opera, American Ballet Theatre and the Joffrey Ballet total in the millions.

What Rigler learned from all his philanthropy, and from membership on arts boards, is that subscriptions are down, expenses are up, and supporters are aging and dying. “I could see the handwriting on the wall,” he says.

He wanted to make sure that his beloved art organizations saw that handwriting as well. For instance, he urged PBS stations to hold on to more program rights in order to maximize future income. In early 1992, he went to MIDEM, an annual music and video showcase in Cannes, France, to learn the ins and outs of marketing programs for himself.

When he returned from Cannes, he learned that the Ledler Corp.’s Burbank-based headquarters, designed by Raphael Soriano, had burned down. Lost were not just business records but also a significant collection of artworks and arts memorabilia, including such rare holdings as a first-edition score of Mozart’s “The Magic Flute.”

Rigler was despondent. His longtime corporate home was gone, and so were his and Deutsch’s treasures. He’d had little luck persuading arts organizations to try new ways of snaring audiences and income. When a colleague suggested he start an arts-delivery system himself, Rigler was ready.

He investigated satellites at Hughes Communications Inc. and early last year leased 12 years of Hughes transponder time--the traditional life span of a transponder, which is the device that beams broadcast signals from space to Earth--for an amount he pegs at about $24 million.

Rigler next acquired laser discs and broadcast-quality tapes from record and video companies that held rights to present short excerpts on television.

Armed with the licenses, he set himself up a network. Drawing on 16 different arts disciplines, including art, architecture and animation as well as the performing arts, Rigler and company have built a library of about 2,000 clips so far, says James Rigler, the service’s program director and Lloyd Rigler’s nephew.

“Lloyd [got] waivers for additional time so that we wouldn’t intrude on artistic content,” the younger Rigler says. “Arias from ‘Tosca’ and ‘Turandot’ are over four minutes, for example, and we certainly wouldn’t want to chop off the beginning or the end of them to fit into a three-minute slot.”

On Classic Arts Showcase, an eight-hour segment of about 150 clips is repeated three times each day. New material is edited, titled and combined with previously broadcast material, then remixed by James Rigler and his assistants.

There are also specials. On Memorial Day Weekend, for instance, Classic Arts aired a five-minute segment from a documentary about George Stevens, director of the 1959 film “The Diary of Anne Frank.” And when Ginger Rogers died, the network played a clip from a documentary made about the 1936 Rogers-Astaire film “Swing Time.”

Supporting all of this is the Rigler-Deutsch millions. The funding, which Rigler says would otherwise have gone into arts grants, includes about $2 million a year for the transponder and an additional $2 million annually in editing costs, studio expenses, uplink and transponder maintenance and insurance.

Traditional broadcast facilities like Burbank-based Four Media Co. supplement Rigler’s small staff.

“He doesn’t have 50 producers, so we’ve done a lot to help him on the technical side,” says Four Media’s director of broadcast services, Rob Hause. “We have a special place in our hearts for Lloyd. People in my industry aren’t used to dealing with somebody who is not providing a service for profit.”

So far, the Los Angeles market has been the primary target of Rigler’s sales effort. PBS station KCET-TV Channel 28 ran the programming for two hours one weekend last July, but for technical reasons the station wasn’t able to pick up the signal readily from the satellite and needed to use tapes. Rigler declined to repackage Classic Arts Showcase for one station and moved on.

“The man is relentless,” concedes Ernest Fleischmann, executive vice president and managing director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic. Enumerating assorted marketing plans that Rigler has prodded the Philharmonic to take on, Fleischmann says, “When he believes in something, he goes after it.”

Things have gone better for Rigler with education-based broadcasters. Consider those university stations and, of course, Beverly Hills’ Channel 36. Sol Levine, the superintendent of schools in Beverly Hills, put Classic Arts Showcase on 36, one of the district’s two channels, the day Rigler first showed him a tape.

“I saw it as a wonderful opportunity to provide something positive to our community,” Levine says. “All we had to do was turn our satellite dish to the appropriate setting.”

Rigler has also won support for Classic Arts Showcase from City Councilman Joel Wachs and Susan Herman, general manager of the Los Angeles Department of Telecommunications. Largely through their efforts, Classic Arts Showcase wound up with air time on KLCS, the Los Angeles Unified School District’s wholly owned PBS station.

But because of engineering and other studio costs, the KLCS connection didn’t work over the long haul. “Conceptually we’re behind Classic Arts Showcase 100%,” says KLCS Program Director Sabrina Fair Thomas. “We had very strong viewer response. But we need additional funding to carry it further.”

Perhaps Rigler’s biggest disappointment has been his inability to get Classic Arts Showcase hooked up with cable companies. In recent years, the Federal Communications Commission has asked commercial cable companies to reduce their rates. And with income down, cable companies haven’t wanted to add new services, particularly services that prohibit advertising.

Except for the school-based stations, even cable’s community-access channels have proved elusive. Cable channel capacity is still limited, explains broadcaster Hause, and most community-access channels on those cable services are already in use.

Such realities frustrate Rigler, and he is always looking for ways to combat them. He hasn’t dismissed the idea of finding underwriters to fund the programming on stations like KLCS, and he says he is still talking with KCET. He makes on-air pleas to individuals watching via their own back-yard satellite dishes, asking them to press for cable commitments in their areas. He also pressures arts organizations in person to do the same sort of grass-roots agitating for Classic Arts Showcase.

What he won’t do is the kind of promotion usually associated with a TV network.

“If I were to market the network as commercial networks are marketed, the expense would be prohibitive to the foundation and to me,” he says. “I hate to think that I have to spend half of what it costs me to give something away to tell people that they should take it.”

Better he should show them what they’re missing. He says he’s toying with the notion of setting up a portable mega-screen, like the one in New York’s Times Square, to broadcast Classic Arts Showcase and “at least expose the programming to people on the street.” Likely spots: New York’s Central Park or Lincoln Center plaza. (He believes that the Music Center or a Los Angeles park would fail to get the same sort of foot traffic.)

He is also thinking about branching out from the two coastal media capitals and taking his quest for cable placement and more broadcaster commitments to such cities as Portland, Ore., and Phoenix. Rigler makes it clear that he and Classic Arts Showcase are not going away.

“We have been up there for one year and will continue to be,” he says. “We have a long-term commitment.”