A Show for the Ageless

From a distance, she can’t make out the words on the notice posted on a wall of the Burbank dance studio. She doesn’t have her contacts on. Except for one word in boldface caps that catches her eye: FOLLIES!

The old hoofer feels a surge of anticipation. “The Folies Bergere must be looking for dancers. Hey, that’s me. I almost did them when I was in Paris.” She comes closer and sees that it’s a casting call for the Palm Springs Follies.

“Never heard of it,” she thinks. “But this is interesting; it says 55 years and up.”

So the last weekend in May, Trina Parks, age 56, shows up at Screenland Studios II in Burbank to audition as a dancer and singer. They give her No. 70. She feels lonely. She looks around and wonders, “Am I in the right place? I’m the only African American here. But I’ve done that before in my life, where I was the only one.”

Once she toured the world as a principal dancer with the Katherine Dunham, Alvin Ailey and Geoffrey Holder dance companies. She appeared in the role of “Thumper” as the first black “Bond Girl” in the James Bond film, “Diamonds Are Forever.” She was on television specials with Dionne Warwick, Dean Martin and Sammy Davis, Jr. She sang in nightclubs across the country and in Europe and Asia. Now she occasionally baby-sits three grandchildren in Inglewood.

The director asks her to do a tap dance. “I don’t do tap,” she says, but she improvises. She doesn’t hear her number called--that would mean you’re dismissed, thank you very much--so she sticks around. The tryout groups dwindle down to 10, then to three. And Parks is still around. From the seated area, a commanding voice calls out, “Uh, I think I’d like to see No. 70.” Parks does an entire dance routine and sings “Misty” and “Stormy Weather.” When she’s done, she has been there almost five hours, from 12:30 to 5:30, and doesn’t know if she has a job.

The next day, Riff Markowitz phones her and says, “I’d like you to do this show, Miss Parks.” He is the founding impresario of the Palm Springs Follies and very formal in demeanor. Parks answers, “Is it all right if I call you Mr. Riff?”

“Whatever you want,” he says.

When “The Fabulous Palm Springs Follies” opened last fall for its 13th season as the premier variety show in the desert of Southern California, Trina Parks--the statuesque, 5-foot-9 grandmother, fresh from tap lessons--debuted as the “baby” of an antiquarian chorus line comprising six men and 11 women, including Beverly Allen. Eighty-six years old, Allen is in the Guinness World Records book as the “oldest performing showgirl.” All the old hoofers, you see, have a story to tell.

Nestled among the t-shirt emporiums and schlock shops on Palm Canyon Drive, the main north-south street through Palm Springs, is a shrine to gerontology and the reincarnation of vaudeville--the Plaza Theatre, home of the Follies.

The Spanish-style edifice opened as a movie palace in 1936 with the world premiere of “Camille,” starring Greta Garbo and Robert Taylor. Jack Benny’s radio show originated there. It is where Bing Crosby sang and Bob Hope cracked jokes, and where Riff Markowitz had his epiphany.

Markowitz is a marcel-haired, somewhat prissy Canadian-American of dual citizenship by virtue of being born in New York and raised in Toronto. Riff is derived from Rifael, Hebrew for Rafael. At 15, four weeks into the ninth grade, he ran off to join the circus but decided there was an easier buck to be made as a radio announcer in a remote Ontario outpost called Kirkland Lake. The train let him off at a place named Swastika. “It was an episode from the ‘Twilight Zone,’ ” he says. He moved into television and began producing, writing and directing. His credits include devising a Royal Command Performance by Red Skelton, an HBO tribute to Neil Simon and a TV series called “The Hitchhiker.”

At the age of 52, Markowitz retired as a television entrepreneur because, he explains, “corporate America had gone berserk with vertical integration,” and someone offered him a lot of money for his company, which had burgeoned into a Canadian cable network and postproduction facilities. He bought a house at PGA West in La Quinta but was quickly repelled from playing golf because he couldn’t stand the clothes. He spent a year roaming the Coachella Valley, his silky terrier Doodle at his side, pondering the meaning of life and whining to his new friend, Tuck Broich, that he had no idea what to do.

“Why don’t you take over the theater?” suggested Broich, the mayor pro tem of Palm Springs in the Sonny Bono era. Broich took him into the empty, antiquated showplace on Palm Canyon Drive.

“It was like from a musical,” Riff says in his office, a windowless warren in the two-building complex that now houses both the theater and production facilities. “I stood there and looked at this old theater. I just had a sense that what I wanted to do was perform, like retirees dream. This was an opportunity. I’d always wanted to be a performer in vaudeville, as a kid. Life didn’t take me there.” His long-sleeved white shirt is open at the neck. He wears white chino trousers. This passes as summer casual dress for a man who is rarely seen publicly without a white or black tuxedo jacket.

“Apart from me being able to play in the sandbox, I was immediately aware there were ghosts in the town and in the theater,” he continues. “Jack Benny had been on that stage. Red Skelton, Frank Sinatra. They were in my head as I stood there in the dark.”

He signed a lease with the city, which had purchased the theater, and went back to look at his prize possession. There was a single naked, dangling light bulb. Markowitz flipped the switch and saw there were no wings for performers waiting to get on the tiny stage, no fly space for hanging backdrops or set pieces, no dressing rooms. “I was the proud owner,” he says wryly, “of this 1926 Buick that I was now going to drive across the country in. I sat calmly and said, ‘What have I done?’ ”

He went out and hustled backers to renovate the theater, for half a million dollars the first year, and almost as much since in improvements. He put together his risky concept of a vaudeville review, supposed to be defunct. Among the first he solicited was Ralph Young, who started out as a big band vocalist with Les Brown and had a successful two-man singing act with Tony Sandler. Young was semi-retired, living a mile from the theater. He declined to invest.

Markowitz invited Young to join the show as its headliner for the first year, opening on Jan. 29, 1992. “I wanted to see if I had anything left on the ball at 75 after teaming with Tony Sandler for 25 years. It was like getting a shot in the arm, ego-wise.” Markowitz determined that all the performers, including the chorus women and men, would be vaudeville-era vintage--even the ushers, who average 67 in age.

The first week, half the seats were empty. “Who wants to pay to see old ladies’ legs?” mocked the entertainment writer of the local newspaper, the Desert Sun.

But then the show caught on through word of mouth. Today, 13 years later, the Palm Springs Follies has played to 2.5 million patrons in a theater with 809 seats. The season runs from early November until the end of May, with a total of 230 performances. Ticket prices have risen from $18 to the current $39-to-$85 range. And the top ticket for New Year’s Eve was $120. Virtually every show is sold out. Motor coaches bring in some 1,200 busloads annually from Los Angeles, San Diego, San Bernardino and Phoenix. More than 20,000 hotel rooms are filled. The lease with the city recently was extended 15 years, through 2018, at $148,800 the first year.

It’s big business. The Follies started with a staff of six workers and three computers. In season, it now employs 165 people full time, and boasts 51 computers and a payroll of $2.7 million. Markowitz lives regally in a big house on a promontory overlooking South Palm Canyon Drive. Individual condominiums or a housing stipend are provided for the cast of up to 25 performers. He pays them what he calls “Las Vegas wages.”

From the beginning, he had a partner in the venture--his wife, Mary Jardin, a comely lady 15 years his junior who had started as a flight attendant and became an airline marketing manager. They were divorced a year into the Follies run--they share custody of Doodle, the silky terrier--but she remains co-founder and co-boss of the Palm Springs Follies. “I can work with him,” she says, “even if I couldn’t live with him.” Jardin handles the business end, sales and marketing, and Markowitz writes, directs and produces the show, though they consult frequently in each other’s spheres. There’s no doubt, however, whose imprint is on the final stage product, down to the very last detail.

The impresario is highly visible as a master of ceremonies, delivering jokes and one-liners and arch observations that border on political incorrectness. “This is a senior secret society,” he says, referring to the Follies patrons. “Within these walls, there is no au courant. When we were kids, the great acts on the stage took on ethnic tone. I am simply using a sensibility which is in me and fortunately also in the audience.”

There are frequent references in his monologues to his sage mother, who prodded his retirement to Palm Springs by telling him, “It’s important to know when to quit.” Her son now works 75 hours a week during the season, and 60 hours a week off-season. Edith Markowitz is 92 and still lives in Toronto. She has seen the Follies once.

Markowitz honed his storytelling skills by doing the warm-ups for audiences at the television shows he produced through the years. He has never, Lou Gehrig-like, missed a single one of the 2,500 performances of the Follies.

Maxine Asbury is 83. Twirling batons and dancing to entertain American troops, she was in the first USO unit to land in France after D-Day. Following World War II, she and her husband, a captain she met in England, opened the Asbury School of Dance in Houston, which they operated for 35 years while raising three children who all went into show business. After Asbury was widowed about four years ago, a male dancer in the Palm Springs Follies, Randy Doney, suggested that she try out for the show, although she’d been retired for 19 years. Doney had previously teamed with Asbury’s daughter, Sandra, in the Ernie Flatt Dancers, featured on the “Carol Burnett Show.”

Asbury was in New York that May of 2000 on a family visit. (Her son, Cleve, had a supporting role as a dancer and actor in the Academy Award-winning film “Chicago”; her daughter-in-law, Donna Marie, is in the Broadway revival of the same show.) “It meant,” she recalls, “I had to fly back to California to do the audition. I said, ‘I can’t do it. This is ridiculous. I can’t sing and I never auditioned. What chance do I have?’ ”

Jay Johnson, a ventriloquist who starred in the sitcom “Soap,” is married to Asbury’s daughter Sandra. Johnson had accrued considerable airline mileage. He gave Maxine an award ticket for the trip to California. To prepare for the audition, Asbury took a six-week singing course. The graduating exercise was to do a solo. “Everybody in the class was in a choir or choral group and had nice voices,” she recalls. “They all got up and sang so well. I had no voice, but I could sell it. I put in a cartwheel and a split and blew them away.”

She made the cut.

Donna Marie Asbury does eight shows a week of “Chicago” on the New York musical stage. Her mother-in-law, partnered for some dance numbers with Randy Doney, does up to nine or 10 shows weekly for the annual run of the Follies. She has moved full time to Palm Springs and claims there has been a tremendous change in her persona, becoming a chorus girl at 80. “It was tough,” she admits. “Look at these heels.” The spiked pumps complement a crisply tailored cream suit; her silver hair is beautifully coiffed. “Before, I had worn heels only on Sunday.” She strides off with a purposeful gait you don’t expect in an octogenarian.

Markowitz caters to what is called the great generation, those who remember the good old days of the ‘40s, ‘50s and ‘60s. His shows have featured stars of the past such as Howard Keel, Donald O’Connor, Anna Maria Alberghetti, Julius LaRosa, Frankie Laine and the last surviving Mills Brother. From the audience, when he was still nimble, the late Bob Hope mounted the stage with his friend Alex Spanos, the owner of the San Diego Chargers, and they did a soft-shoe routine.

The headline act for the opening months of this season presented the Modernaires, a vocal group from the Glenn Miller orchestra. Supporting variety acts for the Follies have included ventriloquists, strippers, Borscht Belt comedians, jugglers, animal trainers, impressionists and the banjo-playing Mercer Brothers. One of them, Jim Mercer, 86, died last September.

The music is from the swing era. Only four pioneers remain from the original staging of the Follies--Riff, Mary, Doodle (who at age 15 is blind in one eye and has colitis) and Johnny Harris, the musical director. Harris is a 70-year-old Welshman born in Scotland and classically trained in England. The former big band trumpeter was the musical director for Tom Jones, Shirley Bassey and Paul Anka, with whom he wrote the song “Jubilation.” He was in the middle of a movie for Disney when Markowitz tapped him.

“I have complete control of the orchestra,” says Harris. “Because I am the orchestra.” During the show, he stands in front of the elevated stage, back to the audience, and vigorously conducts a phantom band playing the scores he has arranged and recorded from a keyboard in a studio in the garage of his house in Rancho Mirage. He simulates clarinets, saxophones, trumpets, string instruments, drums with startling fidelity and blends them--every single note--electronically. It’s a bit of wizardry that has had spectators down front peering into the pit to see where the musicians are.

There is no pit. Johnny ascends to his conducting podium on a specially built elevator from what was once the boiler room underneath the stage. (The old boiler room was converted into dressing rooms for the cast, who have to mount 10 steps each time they go on stage.) One night, Howard Keel stepped forward during his curtain call and fell into the depressed elevator, disappearing from sight. Unfazed, impressionist John Byner shouted, “I’ll save you,” and jumped in right after him. They both climbed out unscathed.

the productions have grown exponentially and lavishly. the sets are designed by Tony Award winner David Mitchell, age 71. They’re broken down and wheeled in from an alley outside the theater (remember, no wings or flies) and put in place with specially devised riggings and hoists by a dozen stagehands.

The first year, there was just one stationary set. The costumes were rented and didn’t arrive until the day of the opening. Now the costumes for the women of the chorus are created in Las Vegas and run $30,000 apiece, which means more than $300,000 for one number that lasts 18 minutes on stage. Each chorus member has a dresser, and the male dancers share a dresser.

Each year brings a new show. This year it’s “Hooray for Hollywood,” an extravaganza that runs an arduous three and a quarter hours (with two intermissions).

The length doesn’t seem to bother the customers.

Arlene McCormack, 80, of Coronado Island in San Diego, first went to the Follies in its second year, when Phil Ford and Mimi Hines headlined the show, and has come back 350 times. Mrs. Mac, as she’s known to the cast, always sits in Seat 6 in the front row. “I don’t want to be the world’s oldest groupie at 80, so I always bring someone along,” she says. She’s generally accompanied by at least a dozen people. Does she buy all the seats? “Heavens no, my trust would be running out.”

Cynthia Shank, 41, a customer support manager for a computer company in Hagerstown, Md., made her annual outing in January, continuing a ritual that began in the fifth season, when “I went to see Kay Starr and fell in love with the show.” On a Thursday last May, she boarded a Jet Blue flight from Baltimore to Long Beach--”the best fare I could get”--rented a car on arrival and drove to Palm Springs. She took in the Friday matinee and flew back that night on a red-eye.

Such fanaticism is inspired ultimately by the spectacle of “the long-legged lovelies,” as the impresario calls his 11-member chorus line. They, and the six male dancers, are the backbone of the Follies in numbers that are colorful, energetically performed, with an illusory and surprising sensuality. You don’t see any wrinkles until all of them go out to the lobby after the show to mingle with the customers filing out.

Their jobs are strenuous and demanding. They arrive at noon. The matinee begins at 1:30 p.m. and ends at 4:45. They shake hands out front then change out of costume. They have about an hour for dinner. There’s a room with bunk beds if they want to relax. At 6:30 they’re back in the dressing room to prepare for the 7 o’clock show. That lets out at 10:15. They shake hands until 10:30 and get out of their costumes at 10:45. They’ve been there almost 11 hours. They thrive on the regimen.

“Look how young it made me,” says Leila Burgess, the troupe’s dance leader and creative consultant. “I am absolutely the ultimate chorus girl.” You still can see why the dark-haired, vivacious 68-year-old was hired to prance in the line at New York’s famed Latin Quarter at 19. She had stopped performing professionally for 30 years until a woman in a tap dance class in Newport Beach told her about the Follies. This is Burgess’ 12th year in the show. “I love my two grandchildren,” she says, “but I’m glad I’m here and not having to be called all the time to watch them.”

If Burgess is the ultimate, Glenda Guilfoyle is the prototypal chorus girl, tall and striking and perennially smiling. Her parents were dancers, and at 17 Guilfoyle fibbed about her age and joined the Rockettes in Radio City Music Hall for three years. Now 70, Guilfoyle claims the most grandchildren in the Follies family with eight at latest count. She raised seven children as a single mother between stints at the Moulin Rouge in Hollywood, doing TV during the day on the Fred Astaire and Dean Martin shows and modeling. Her oldest son is a captain in the Los Angeles Fire Department. The last two children were twins, and when they got out of school, Guilfoyle went back to Terpsichore, a natural for the Follies. She’s in her ninth season. Last January she broke a toe--tripped in the shower, she blushes--and still didn’t miss a show.

“I love being a chorus girl,” she says. “I love to dance, and I love the audience.” She furnishes a unique perspective of the paying clientele in Palm Springs. “When I look out there,” Guilfoyle beams, “I see a sea of eyeglasses.”