The Show Must Go On

When Lewis Olivos Sr. died at age 80, relatives gathered at family matriarch Phoebe Olivos’ home in Santa Ana to make funeral arrangements with their pastor.

A religious man, Olivos had written in his Bible the hymns he wanted sung at his funeral. But recent family tradition also dictated that a song be sung summing up the relative who has died.

Someone suggested “The Wind Beneath My Wings,” but that wasn’t it. What about “My Way”?

Still not right.

After several others were rejected, Alfonso Olivos, 56, went upstairs to a bedroom he and his wife, Carmen, had moved into after his father suffered a stroke seven years earlier. “Dad, I’m going to find the right song,” he said aloud. It came to him suddenly. When he told the others, everyone agreed: it was perfect.

And so, at the funeral service Nov. 3 in the Apostolic church housed in the late Lewis Olivos’ old West Coast Theater in downtown Santa Ana, 400 friends and relatives listened as nephew and entertainer Rudy Pena delivered a rousing rendition of “There’s No Business Like Show Business.”

There wasn’t a dry eye in the house.

Irving Berlin’s theatrical anthem indeed sums up Lewis Olivos Sr., if not his entire surviving clan.

For the West Coast Theater on North Main Street was one of two theaters Olivos owned during five decades as an exhibitor of Spanish-language movies in Santa Ana. Beginning in 1940, a time when Latinos and other non-whites were forced to sit in the balconies of the city’s English-language movie houses, Olivos pioneered the showing of films from Mexico, Spain and South America.

His audiences were the Latinos living in the immigrant farm worker camps and the small barrios scattered around overwhelmingly Anglo Orange County.

Known respectfully as Don Lewis by his customers, Olivos was a familiar figure in his theaters. He worked day and night and was not above grabbing a broom and sweeping the front sidewalk. He also earned a reputation as a showman for bringing Latino film stars and entertainers to Santa Ana for live stage shows, for which he served as master of ceremonies.

A devoted family man, Olivos didn’t look far to find help in running his theaters.

His was truly a family business, in which virtually every family member--his four sons and daughter, two brothers, nieces and nephews and, later, daughters-in-law and grandchildren--were on the payroll at one time or another.

Family members helped manage the theaters. They served as doormen, ushers and cashiers. They passed out handbills of coming attractions and worked behind the concession stand. They even made the taquitos and tortas they sold along with the popcorn and candy.

“They were showmen; that’s what they are,” said family friend Pablo Rivera. “It’s a family of show people.”

Nor has the family’s show business tradition died with the old man.

Louie Olivos Jr. is carrying on the tradition with Actores de Santa Ana, Orange County’s only bilingual theatrical troupe, which he founded in 1971.

The acting troupe operates on a shoestring, depending on donations from local business people and small grants to subsidize productions typically budgeted at no more than $1,000.

Olivos, who once handled screen advertising for the family’s theaters, writes and directs four productions a year. He also trains the actors, the majority of whom are high school students and young adults who hadn’t been on stage before he took them under his wing.

Since Actores de Santa Ana lost its professional home when the Olivos family sold the Yost Theater in 1985, troupe members have performed in parking lots, the Amtrak station in Santa Ana and a string of colleges and churches throughout Southern California.

“We’re like gypsies,” said Olivos, 58. “Wherever we can, we perform.”

Like his father before him, Olivos enlists family members to work on and appear in his shows.

His wife, Macaria (Mickey)--a driving test examiner for the state Department of Motor Vehicles whom he affectionately refers to as “my Juliet”--reluctantly co-starred in an early production. Now, she serves as cashier. Their daughter, Gaye, handled wardrobe before marrying two years ago. Their son, Roman, who studies music and business at a New York university, has played small parts and served as his father’s “gofer.”

Son Louie Olivos III did the lighting and sound until his alcohol-related death at age 30 two years ago.

Indeed, the family has endured more than its share of tragedies.

Olivos’ brother Adam died in a hunting accident in 1988. A year later, another brother, Aaron, who frequently was Olivos’ leading actor, went out for a late-night taco and was shot to death while driving into a fast-food restaurant.

“It’s like Greek tragedy,” said Louie Olivos.

Today, his niece, Karla Olivos, and nephew, Aaron Olivos Jr., are members of his acting troupe; his son’s widow, Beatrice Olivos, dances in the group’s musical productions.

Despite the tragedies, the close-knit Olivos family adheres to the theatrical adage a grieving Lewis Olivos Sr. wrote in his Bible after his son Adam died: “The show must go on.”

Olivos Sr. Started Out as an Usher

Lewis Olivos Sr., whose parents fled Mexico during the Revolution of 1913, was born in Santa Ana in 1918 and raised on a ranch run by his father in the northern end of town.

Olivos had no interest in growing oranges and walnuts like his father. Just before graduating from Santa Ana High School in 1936, he accepted an offer to work as an usher at the small Princess Theater on East Fourth Street.

“He loved his work,” said his wife, Phoebe Olivos, during a small family gathering at her home recently. She was 15-year-old Phoebe Cisneros of Anaheim when she met Lewis in 1937. “Two years later,” she said, “I was Mrs. Olivos.”

By then, Lewis was assistant manager of the Princess, which had begun showing Spanish-language movies two days a week. But attendance had fallen off the other nights, so the owners were considering closing the theater. Instead, he convinced them that he could keep the theater filled by showing only Spanish-language movies. An eight-week trial period proved him right and he was made manager.

From the start, family members helped out at the theater. Lewis’ brother Charlie managed it on weekends. Another brother, Larry, worked as a doorman-usher and drove the bus Lewis bought to help ensure a healthy box office: On weekends, the bus would make the rounds of the worker camps and outlying barrios to pick up customers.

“We’d lose half of them; they’d go to the bars,” Phoebe recalled with a laugh.

Although she was a “housewife and mother,” she occasionally pitched in at the concession stand during intermissions. Once their children were old enough, they helped out too.

Louie Olivos Jr. remembers that as soon, as he was old enough to add and subtract, he’d strap on a tray filled with boxes of popcorn and walk up and down the center aisle during intermission crying, “Esquite!” (popcorn).

Louie and Alfonso also passed out handbills of coming attractions, and every Tuesday, their father would drive them to barrios in El Modena, Stanton, Anaheim, Fullerton and Huntington Beach to deliver handbills door to door.

“My dad used to say, ‘OK, you guys, time to beat the bush,’ ” recalled Alfonso, who now sells insurance.

After the Princess closed in 1948, Lewis Olivos put in a year managing the larger State Theater. Then he moved to the Yost Theater, a former vaudeville house on Spurgeon Street, which he turned into a Spanish-language theater after buying it in 1952 for $60,000.

“It was a dream come true for him once we got the Yost, to have his own theater,” Phoebe Olivos recalled.

Lewis continued his policy, begun at the Princess, of bringing Latino singers, dancers and mariachis to the Yost, which had a full-size stage and dressing rooms. Latino film stars such as Pedro Armendariz, Juan Gabriel, Vicente Fernandez, Javier Solis and Pedro Infante made appearances and signed autographs at a table set up in the lobby.

In bringing Spanish-language movies and Latino entertainers and celebrities to the county, “Lewis Sr. brought us closer to the big city,” said lawyer Jess J. Araujo of Santa Ana. “We credit him with having the insight and resourcefulness to do that.”

Lawyer Alfredo Amezcua, another family friend from Santa Ana, called the Olivos clan “the pillar of the Hispanic community when it was not fashionable to be an outstanding Latino or Mexican American.”

“The kids from families who lived around us always looked to the Olivos family as the model,” said Amezcua, 49, who grew up in Santa Ana.

At a time, when only a small percentage of the city’s population was Latino, “the Olivos family was already shining as business owners, and the main attraction was the Cine Yost--the Yost Theater--which provided many evenings and days of enjoyment to the local Hispanic community,” Amezcua said. “It was, as we called it, the only show in town.”

New Home, Old Prejudices

As if to mark Lewis Olivos’ growing stature as a businessman and community leader, the family in 1953 moved from a two-bedroom single-story house on Second Street to a large, four-bedroom, two-story Spanish-style house in north Santa Ana.

Not everyone was happy to have a Latino family move into the virtually all-white Floral Park neighborhood, however.

Alfonso Olivos’ most vivid memory of the move was finding a cross burned into their front lawn. Louie remembers another time a small wooden cross was burned on the frontyard.

“I never did go into detail with my dad about that, but I know that we weren’t welcome in white country,” he said.

His mother dismissed it as “just old people with old ideas.” Phoebe Olivos added that she personally never experienced any racial or ethnic incidents involving her neighbors.

But Alfonso recalled that when he would ride his bicycle to nearby Jefferson Elementary School, children would throw rocks and acorns at him and taunt him with ethnic slurs. At school, where he was one of only three Latino students, he’d find that his bicycle tires had been punctured.

“Dad told us to just behave and turn the other cheek if something happens or just walk to the principal’s office if there was any trouble,” Alfonso said. “They accepted us after a while, [realizing] that we were no different.”

When Louie graduated from Santa Ana High School in 1958, he ignored his mother’s advice to go to college. While continuing to work at the Yost Theater, he spent the 1960s as a local producer and promoter of rock ‘n’ roll shows.

Advertising “rock ‘n’ roll dances” at the American Legion hall in Santa Ana, he would bring in acts such as Ike & Tina Turner, the Rivingtons, the Shirelles, the Midnighters and Cannibal and the Headhunters. When the act warranted a larger venue--say, Sonny and Cher or Junior Walker and the All Stars--he moved the event to the Orange County Fairgrounds, where he also produced an annual New Year’s Eve rock ‘n’ roll show.

But Louie’s interest in show business took a new turn in 1971, the same year his father bought the West Coast Theater. Alfonso, who was pursuing a singing career in Mexico, came home to manage the theater.

Louie had begun taking acting classes at the Nosotros Theater in Hollywood, headquarters of the group founded by actor Ricardo Montalban in 1970 to encourage Latinos in the performing arts, and to increase their presence in film and on television.

After six months, Louie was so fired up that he went on stage at the Yost Theater during an intermission to announce, “Yours truly wants to start an acting group. If anybody is interested, please meet me in the lobby.”

Actores de Santa Ana, whose members have included at-risk students Olivos enlisted from a nearby high school--has become like a second family.

“My wife gets upset sometimes,” he said. “She says I treat my actors better than my own children.”

The troupe lost its longtime home when the Yost Theater was sold in 1985. Required to bring the old building up to seismic code, Lewis Olivos took out a high-interest loan. The work was nearly completed, but he couldn’t make his payments, and the bank threatened foreclosure. The city bought the theater for $600,000, less than he owed on his loan, and sold it to Fiesta Marketplace Partnership for $50,000. But that, according to the family, happened after Olivos offered to buy the theater back for $600,000.

Although city officials have said they were trying to help Olivos, his family maintains they lost the theater through a series of unethical tactics and threats by the city. To his dying day, Lewis Olivos maintained that the city had stolen his theater.

“They just wanted us out of there,” says Phoebe Olivos; the family sold the West Coast Theater in 1991.

For the past six months, Actores de Santa Ana has been rehearsing in the basement of the United Methodist Church in downtown Santa Ana.

“He’s very energetic,” said troupe member Pablo Rivera, 34, watching Olivos run his actors through a series of improvisations and acting games. “I know he has had his troubles. But the thing about Louie is, he’s a fighter. He keeps going, and I feed off that.”

Rivera, a programmer for a communications company, is one of Olivos’ success stories.

“Pretty Woman” producer Gary Goldstein will produce Rivera’s screenplay, “Six Shots of Tequila.” It is expected to begin production in Baja California sometime next year, with Rivera directing.

“It wasn’t until I started working with Louie that I started thinking of writing, directing and producing my own plays,” said Rivera, who had done theater work before meeting Olivos and has appeared in commercials and done bit parts in films.

A Second Career for a Test Engineer

Jay Portillo of Fullerton is another of Olivos’ success stories.

Olivos invited Portillo to join the troupe in 1993, a year after the latter retired as a test engineer for Hughes Aircraft. He has since appeared in five Southland plays, appeared as “background” in 19 movies, 12 television show and six commercials.

Portillo, 61, was spotted by a show business manager while appearing in Olivos’ play “El Pachuco 1943,” which had a 10-week run at the Nosotros Theater in Hollywood in 1997. That led to a nonspeaking role as Dustin Hoffman’s butler in “Wag the Dog,” and he recently completed two small speaking parts in movies.

“Louie’s opened a big door for me, probably something I’d never consider and I thank him for that,” Portillo said.

In November, Olivos was given an “exceptional citizen” award from the city of Santa Ana. Amezcua and Santa Ana Latino bookstore owner Reuben Martinez had recommended Olivos for it.

“We nominated Louie not only because of his past contributions, but his current efforts in pushing young people into the theater,” Amezcua said. “And, through his plays, for being one of the original pioneers of [bringing] positive [Latino] culture into our community.”

Not unlike Lewis Olivos Sr.

“What Louie has been here in the city of Santa Ana and in Orange County is because of his father. . . . The theater is in his blood,” Martinez said. “That, to me, is the important thing he has done because we do not have much live theater here. In the Latino community, he is really it.”

“The Olivos family was already shining as business owners, and the main attraction was the Cine Yost--the Yost Theater--which provided many evenings and days of enjoyment to the local Hispanic community. It was . . . the only show in town.” Alfredo Amezcua, An Olivos family friend