Making a Big Splash

The 240-seat grandstand has been removed. The huge painted backdrop of a ‘50s-vintage high school has been dismantled. The cast has disbanded. And the Aquanettes--a one-woman, five-men-in-drag team of synchronized swimmers--are in dry dock.

Like Cinderella’s bejeweled coach that turns back into a pumpkin at midnight, Al Roberts and Ken Jillson’s Laguna Beach backyard is back to normal.

The 1996 Big Splash--their annual backyard romp that is one of the most successful annual AIDS fund-raisers in the nation--netted $536,000.

Over the past 11 years, the campy Splash has brought in nearly $3 million for the Irvine-based AIDS Services Foundation of Orange County, which Roberts and Jillson helped found in 1985. Part of what makes the fund-raiser different and appealing to donors, Jillson says, is that every cent donated goes directly to the foundation.

Longtime business and life partners, Roberts and Jillson are guiding lights at ASF, the largest provider of services for people with AIDS in Orange County.

Roberts, 63, is a businessman known for his keen organizational and fund-raising skills; Jillson, 49, once described by a friend as “a theater event waiting to happen,” last year co-produced an off-Broadway show, “Swingtime Canteen,” and has proposed building a replica of Long Beach’s onetime landmark Cyclone Racer roller coaster.

The two donate their time and talents to ASF throughout the year. But nowhere does the best of what they have to offer show up more than in their backyard each September.

Their show outperforms a number of higher-profile AIDS fund-raisers. The annual Morning Party on Fire Island for the Gay Men’s Health Crisis in New York, for instance, netted about $430,000 last year; the AmFAR Fall Event in 1995 netted about $115,000.

The Splash doesn’t compare, though, with the dollar power of big-production fund-raisers: July’s star-studded Commitment to Life variety show for AIDS Project Los Angeles at the Universal Amphitheatre netted $2.75 million.

But, for a “little backyard show,” as Jillson calls it, the Big Splash more than holds its own.

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Roberts works behind the scenes lining up major donors and arranging the gourmet dinner for guests and volunteers after the last performance. Jillson writes, produces, directs and performs in the show.

A handful of Hollywood celebrities supplied taped voice-overs to which the show’s strictly amateur cast members lip-synced their dialogue. Voices this year included Whoopi Goldberg, Carrie Fisher, Penny Marshall, Bea Arthur, Tom Bosley and Tony Dow (the Beav’s brother, Wally).

“I love the work they’re doing, and I think that Ken is enormously talented,” says Arthur, who provided the first Big Splash celebrity voice in 1991. The shows, she adds, are “absolutely outrageous!”

This year’s theme was a ‘50s-style high school spoof complete with cheerleaders, football players and the usual complement of adult authority figures ranging from the frumpy and slow-to-react principal to the officious school nurse.

The 90-minute production comes together with the help of a cast, crew and support group (ushers, waiters, bartenders and security types) that has grown to 200 volunteers.

Roberts and Jillson underwrite much of the production. Others--including Anne and Kirk Douglas--also help cover costs. As in past years, the carpenters, grandstand company owner, sound engineer and many others all donated their goods and services.

Other individual donations help boost the revenue from the sale of tickets--from $50 to $25,000--for the show’s three-night run.

Among the traditions at the Big Splash: sheets of plastic handed out to those who dare purchase poolside seats within splashing distance of the ever-vivacious Aquanettes.

“We joke that the more you pay the wetter you get,” Jillson says.

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So many ASF support meetings are held in Jillson and Roberts’ home that Priscilla Munro, ASF executive director, jokingly refers to it as “our branch office.”

“We got everybody here last night and talked about how well [the show] went and how much money we raised and how we can improve it,” says Jillson, standing on the upstairs deck overlooking the now-recovered backyard of the hill-hugging home in Arch Beach Heights.

Inside, ASF Board President Roberts is winding up a meeting at the dining room table with members of a steering and planning committee for AIDS Walk Orange County next June. Roberts spends 20 to 30 hours a week attending various ASF committee meetings, nurturing new board members and reaching out into the community for donations.

As businessmen, Roberts and Jillson say they have always maintained a low-key, conservative lifestyle. They were charity-minded in the past, Jillson says, but from arm’s length as donors.

Then AIDS began claiming lives. Nearly 50 of their friends--including actor Rock Hudson--and acquaintances have died from complications of the disease.

“I’m committed to helping people with AIDS, and if AIDS weren’t around, I’d do something for children,” Roberts says. “I was brought up Catholic and taught at any early age that you always help other people.”

ASF of Orange County provides counseling, legal and medical referrals, transportation, food delivery, home and hospital visits and other services for AIDS patients and their families. At any given time, it has a caseload of more than 700.

Munro says the support of Roberts and Jillson has been key to the foundation’s success: “I’d say Al is one of the country’s outstanding fund-raisers for AIDS. He never stops. . . . He goes on vacation in New York and meets people and tells them about his cause, and he comes back with funds from perfect strangers. He is very unique in his ability to do that.”

And Jillson?

“Ken is able to take our events and make them fun for people,” Munro says. “To get people out of the morbid idea of AIDS and to have some fun for a good cause. That is really his forte.”

But the two are even more than that, she says: “This agency has its roots in their backyard--literally--and they have maintained, over 11 years, a constant commitment to the success and growth of the organization. They are at the core--literally at the heart and soul--of this organization.”

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Roberts and Jillson built their three-story California contemporary house in 1975. With its hardwood floors, cedar paneling and panoramic view of the coastline, it’s an ideal party house.

That’s what Roberts and Jillson, who both share a passion for cooking and entertaining, had in mind when they built it.

The two men met in Laguna through mutual friends in 1970.

Roberts is a Birmingham, Mich., native. He moved to Los Angeles in 1955 at age 21 after a stint in the Army and worked as a computer programmer. He was managing his real estate investments when he met Jillson, then a copy writer for a Los Angeles advertising agency.

Jillson, an L.A. native and 1965 Dorsey graduate, dabbled in drama in high school and was a regular on “Shebang,” Casey Kasem’s L.A. teen dance show in the mid-’60s. He majored in business administration at the University of Hawaii and, to earn money for school, worked as an extra on “Hawaii Five-O” and acted in a children’s show for Honolulu’s ABC affiliate. (“I played two characters: a robot and Morris Fixit,” he says with a grin.)

In 1994, Jillson and Roberts sold the successful business they founded in 1974: Jillson & Roberts Gift Wrap, a designer gift-wrap manufacturing company. They created a stir in the industry in the late ‘70s when they became the first to add bold graphic designs to gift bags, which until then had been available only in solid colors.

They worked 12-hour days and six, sometimes seven, days a week while building their business. But they always found time to host dinner parties and backyard barbecues for their large contingent of friends.

One good friend was Hudson, whom they met in the early ‘70s. The actor, who invested in their company, was a frequent house guest.

“He was 6-foot-5, and when he walked into the room, he was just a commanding presence,” Jillson recalls. “When we had dinner parties, he’d be the first to jump up and clean up the dishes and say, ‘Come on, eat some more.’ Talk about a gentleman.”

The dark, roughhewn plank table in Roberts and Jillson’s dining room--along with the wrought-iron chandelier--belonged to Hudson.

After Hudson died in October 1985, Mark Miller, the actor’s personal secretary, gave the table to Roberts and Jillson, telling them that “this table belongs in your house. He loved the house.”

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Roberts and Jillson first heard of what was then an unknown and unnamed disease while on business trips to New York City in the early ‘80s.

But AIDS didn’t really hit close to home until a Los Angeles attorney friend died several months before Hudson. After the friend died, another friend handed Roberts a check for $500, saying, “You’ll know what to do with it.”

As Jillson recalls, “Al goes, ‘Oh, my God, what do I do with it now?’ ”

He did what Roberts does best: He got organized. He assembled nearly a dozen professional friends and community leaders, including doctors, lawyers and a nurse who dealt with infectious diseases at UC Irvine Medical Center.

They met in Roberts and Jillson’s living room one evening in August 1985. It’s there, after several hours of discussion, that the AIDS Services Foundation of Orange County was born.

AIDS Project Los Angeles had been established the year before, but at the time there were no organized services available to Orange County patients.

To launch the foundation, however, they would need money.

At one point in the meeting, Roberts proposed a fund-raising idea that had Jillson laughing.

Two months earlier, to mark the completion of their swimming pool, the two had thrown a party for about 100 friends. This, however, was no ordinary backyard barbecue.

Taking his cue from entertaining friends and family with backyard shows as a kid, Jillson recruited seven friends to do an Esther Williams-Busby Berkeley-style musical spoof. Wearing swim costumes and bathing caps and holding plastic beach balls aloft, they performed a nine-minute choreographed romp in the pool.

Why nine minutes? That’s how long the taped medley of “My Fair Lady” tunes lasted.

Their friends loved it.

Why not, Roberts proposed at the meeting, put on the same show as a fund-raiser?

On a Sunday in September, about 200 people gathered around the swimming pool to watch the first Big Splash.

Unlike the current lavish 90-minute productions, there was no scenery--not even a microphone. Seats went for $50 and $250, but further donations were encouraged. Their “pie in the sky” fund-raising goal was $25,000.

Before the show began, Jillson read a letter to the audience from Hudson, then only weeks away from death. A choked-up Jillson barely made it through the letter.

“I’m sorry I couldn’t be with you today,” Hudson wrote, “but I want all of you to know that I’m very proud of what you’re doing. . . . It makes me feel great to know that when there’s a real life-threatening problem, everyone bands together. Keep fighting, and never give up.”

By day’s end, $33,000 had been raised.

That served as seed money to rent a two-room office for ASF in Costa Mesa the next month.

Today, the foundation has grown from an initial annual operating budget of $90,000 and a staff of two to a more than $4-million budget and a full-time staff of more than 40. Based in a suite of offices in Irvine, it also has satellite offices in Laguna and Anaheim.

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Since selling their business, Roberts has been able to devote more time to ASF and Jillson to what he calls his “fun” projects.

Those include “Swingtime Canteen,” a musical spoof he co-produced about an all-female band entertaining the troops in London during World War II.

“I got heavily involved in it financially, and I talked Al into buying one point in the show,” Jillson says.

The musical, which earned rave reviews from Time magazine and the New York Times, ran for nearly a year in New York. It opened this month for an eight-week run at the Tropicana Hotel in Atlantic City and has been optioned by New Line Cinema.

“I’m very excited about that,” Jillson says.

“Is that when I get my money back?” Roberts jokes.

Both Roberts and Jillson are investors in the Balboa Fun Zone in Newport Beach. The tiny amusement park, however, pales in comparison to what Jillson calls his dream project: building a replica of the world-famous Cyclone Racer, the 96-foot-tall, double-track wooden roller coaster that was a Long Beach landmark from 1930 to 1968.

Jillson, who rode the original as a kid, envisions the new roller coaster as the centerpiece of a 1930s-style street he’d like to build near the site of the old Pike amusement area.

He has presented his proposal to the City of Long Beach, which is planning a half-billion-dollar, inner-harbor redevelopment project. Jillson’s Cyclone Racer is one of several proposals under consideration for the project, which is due to be completed by spring 1998.

Meanwhile, there are upcoming ASF commitments and fund-raisers for Roberts and Jillson to plan. Like a night at Cirque du Soleil in February. And a country and western roundup at the Orange County Fairgrounds in June.

And, of course, the next Big Splash.