After 7 Decades, Still Dazzled by the Stars

A.C. Lyles probably has the shortest resume in Hollywood history. For 70 years, he’s worked for Paramount Pictures.

In July, Paramount held a party for Lyles to celebrate his 80th birthday and his long tenure with the company.

Lyles has been a fixture on the lot since 1937. Before that, he worked for nine years as a page boy and usher at the Florida Theatre, a Paramount-owned movie theater in his hometown of Jacksonville, Fla.

Lyles worked his way up from the mail room to publicist to producer of such Westerns including “Town Tamer” and “Red Tomahawk.” He has a star on the Walk of Fame and his own building named for him at Paramount. Still a producer, he’s also Paramount’s Ambassador of Good Will and makes speeches about Paramount’s history.

“His history in the movie business is certainly unique,” says Sherry Lansing, chairman of Paramount’s motion picture division. “There’s nobody I met who doesn’t love him and there are very few people I’ve met who don’t know him.”

Lyles, Lansing says, “really takes the time to get to know everybody. When people come on the lot, he has been a wonderful welcoming committee of one. He really knows every nook and cranny. He’s really an inspiration to all of us and kind of defines the word ‘class.’ ”

The walls of his expansive office in the William S. Hart Building--it was good friend Fred Astaire’s former digs--are filled with a photo gallery of Hollywood’s most glamorous faces.

“There’s Dorothy Lamour,” says the dapper Lyles. “There is Claudette Colbert, Elvis, Clark Gable, Frank Sinatra, Gary Cooper, John Barrymore, Eddie Murphy, Ronald Reagan, Buddy Ebsen, Lucille Ball and Bob Hope.”

“There’s Jimmy Carter, Gerald Ford and George Bush and President Nixon. There’s Linda Darnell. The two of us were on a date, a premiere in 1941. She was the most beautiful lady I had ever seen.”

Lyles began his love affair with movies at the age of 10 when he saw “Wings,” the first film to win the best picture Oscar. Later, he became good friends with its stars, Richard Arlen, Charles “Buddy” Rogers, Clara Bow and Gary Cooper.

“I just fell in love with the movie,” Lyles says of the World War I epic directed by William Wellman. On the way out of the theater, he saw the manager and asked him for a job.

“He said, ‘I could use you, kid. Take these circulars and go down to the main corner and pass them out to people.’ I was doing that after school and putting bumper stickers on the cars.”

Lyles, though, soon convinced the manager the theater needed a page boy who could take the phone numbers and seat locations of doctors on call. Because he was tall, the manager promoted him to usher at 14. That same year, Paramount mogul Adolph Zukor came to town and attended a movie at the theater.

Of course, Lyles introduced himself. “I said, ‘Mr. Zukor, would you take me to Hollywood? I want to learn about making movies.’ He said, ‘Well, you are 14. You finish high school. Keep in touch.’ ”

Lyles kept in touch. Every Sunday for the next four years he wrote Zukor. “When I got out of school, I had saved about $48. I bought a one-way ticket on the train. I had a sack of apples, two jars of peanut butter and two loaves of bread--and I came to Hollywood.”

Before going west, though, he had written to Shirley Temple’s mother and got an interview with the young star. “By this time, I was writing a movie column for the Jacksonville Journal. I went to the paper and said I would send some columns on Shirley. I went to the theater and said if they would pay my mother my salary for four weeks I would write columns back because Shirley’s picture was opening [at the theater].”

No sooner had he arrived in Hollywood, Lyles went to Paramount and announced to the guard that Mr. Zukor expected him. “Mr. Zukor remembered me,” Lyles says with a smile. “A young kid was going on vacation, so they put me right in the mail room. But I was assigned to Mr. Zukor’s office to run errands and take visitors around.”

In these first weeks, he met a lot of Paramount’s top stars, including Cooper, Lamour and Joel McCrea, who all put in a good word for him with Zukor. “As a matter of fact, Mr. Zukor kept me on as his personal assistant.”

Part of the fun of talking with Lyles is that he loves weaving stories about his old friends--like the time he literally bumped into Bing Crosby. “I was here about 10 days and I noticed he would get on his bicycle and would go around the lot and he’d be singing,” Lyles says.

“When I would see him I would get on a bike and follow him. One day, he went one way and I went the other. I was so interested in hearing him singing, I hit him. We were both on the pavement. I didn’t know if I killed him or what. He said, ‘Kid, what didn’t you like? The song or the singer?’ ”

Then there was the time he took a scrawny young singer with the Tommy Dorsey orchestra named Frank Sinatra to lunch. Sinatra and the Dorsey band were on the lot to appear in a long-forgotten 1941 musical called “Las Vegas Nights.”

“I went to the set and Ralph Murphy was directing,” Lyles recalls. “This young fellow came over and said, ‘Mr. Murphy, could I walk around the lot? This is the first time I’ve been in a motion picture studio.’

“Murphy said to me, ‘A.C., do me a favor. Take him to lunch. Here is $5.’ I took Frank to lunch at the commissary. We went to the counter and had a sandwich and milk and some apple pie.”

On the way back to the sound stage, Lyles noticed Crosby in his car. “I flagged him down,” says Lyles, who introduced the two crooners. “Bing was kind to him. When Bing drove off, [Sinatra’s expression] reminded me of the young girls when Elvis Presley was on the lot. There was such exhilaration.”

Lyles met two of his lifelong chums--James Cagney and Ronald Reagan--within weeks of coming to Hollywood. He was introduced to Cagney through the actor’s sister Jeanne, who was under contract to Paramount.

“She said, ‘I told my brother about you and he’s coming here Friday. Come on the set.’ I went, and he said, ‘I’ve heard about you, kid. Why don’t you come to the house and have dinner with us Sunday?’ ”

Because Lyles didn’t have a car, let alone a nickel to his name, Cagney even picked him up.

Cagney also invited Lyles for lunch at Warner Bros. “He had Errol Flynn, Pat O’Brien and Frank McHugh there.” Also there was a newcomer named Ronald Reagan. “That’s how we become buddies,” says Lyles of the former president.

Twenty years later, Cagney directed his only feature, “Short Cut to Hell,” which Lyles produced. “It was a little gangster picture,” Lyles says. “He wouldn’t accept any money for doing it.”

Despite working in Hollywood during its golden age, Lyles proclaims Tinseltown has entered the “platinum” era. “I think there’s more opportunity in Hollywood today than ever,” he says.

“When I came here, all the ladies were typists. Now they are writers, producers and executives. Look at Sherry Lansing. When I came here, we had one [member of a] minority on the lot. Producers, directors and executives were all older men. Now, some of them are so young I want to burp them before I talk to them.”

As for the quality of today’s pictures, Lyles points out that filmgoers’ tastes run in cycles. “Today, people are going in to see pictures they want to see. It’s difficult to criticize pictures today when they are doing so much business.”

Lyles has been married since 1955 to his wife, Martha, a former escrow officer whom he met at a friend’s house in Palm Springs. He asked her if she’d like to go to dinner with him--at Frank Sinatra’s house. The couple, who have no children, live in Bel-Air.

“I go around the country telling students this is the greatest business, and they can be in it. When you hear people say you can’t get into this business--of course you can get in this business. But you have to be obsessed.”

Seventy years after “Wings,” Lyles still has stars in his eyes.

“I get the same thrill coming on the Paramount lot as I did the first day I came here,” Lyles says. “My whole life since I was 10 years old has been Paramount. I grew up here. I feel like this is my home. When people say, ‘Who owns Paramount?’ I’m almost tempted to say, ‘I do.’ ”