Hooray for Hollywood

By Gregory Jaynes

Leave it to Tinsel Land to stage a socko opening ceremony

Surprised to be so moved?

It could hardly have been anything less than moving, given the elements:

world's capital of show business; biggest show in the world; world's biggest audience. These Hollywood people are very good at what they do; they know more about emotional strings than most talented shrinks--and Saturday they pulled them all. Not that it was easy. Not that an ocean of perspiration hadn't been shed in the weeks leading up to that explosive curtain raiser.

Even the rehearsals had their heart-tugging moments. Day after wilting day in the Los Angeles Coliseum, during breaks in the strenuous practice of the opening ceremonies, a touching human exercise would take place. Tubas would be scattered across the grass like the wreck of a brassy train.

Dancers would be stretching the cordy tendons that tend to contract when activity has ceased. With attentions thus focused everywhere but on the track, a single figure, perhaps a choir member or a carpenter, but a name unknown outside of family and friends, would burst into a sprint, or commence a fast-paced lap, and at the end of the run raise the arms high to accept the imaginary tape snapping across the chest. Thus the irresistible fantasy was played out.

Across town another man might vicariously fulfill himself by stepping into Clark Gable's shoe prints on a Hollywood sidewalk, another woman might prove herself Lana Turner's equal in some way on the same boulevard. But these souls in the Coliseum had more action in their dreams: they had beaten the wind in the arena of the swift. Having achieved that, they would step back into the throng and go about their jobs.

In many cases, these were menial positions, tasks performed without public credit. But no matter how prosaic (geraniums planted by...), aesthetic (pigeons released by ...) or majestic (jetpack flown by . ..) the chore, the 9,000 performers who fashioned the splendor seen on television last Saturday saw themselves as putting together something of first importance--sappy as that may sound. But when was the last time you saw a casually tossed cigarette butt snared by a youthful groundsman before it hit the sod? "My job is to keep this area clean," he said, walking away with the dirty object in the empty yogurt cup he had used as catcher's mitt.

Even the flamboyant David Wolper (Roots, The Thorn Birds), producer of the more than $6 million extravaganza, ran afoul of an overweening zeal on the part of an employee well down the ladder of power. There were 300 placard bearers on the field trying to rehearse, and at the oddest moments an automatic sprinkler system would click on and reduce their practice to drippy disarray. At last the producer located a workman whose raiment included an enormous ring of jangling keys. The key holder was intractable at the start: "Watering that field is just as important to us as the opening ceremonies are to you." Some mean words later, Wolper prevailed. "I just made the most important note of the day," the producer later told a reporter. "On the day of the opening ceremony, I want my guy to have the key. I want to be able to turn on those sprinklers."

Then there was the trouble with the eagles, the one that died and the one that got the hook. The idea of using a live eagle came from Steve Hoddy, a professional bird trainer from Chatsworth, Calif.

Hoddy had a golden eagle, a twelve-year-old female named Fluff, and he wanted it in the show. The show, while accepting Hoddy's proposal, wanted a bald eagle--national bird and all that--instead of a golden. The one picked came from the Patuxent Wildlife Research Center in Laurel, Md., where it had lived for 22 years virtually without flying. Its name was Bomber, and according to Hoddy, "it looked like a little butterball turkey."

Hoddy put Bomber on a diet and set himself to winning the eagle's respect. At night the trainer would sleep in an easy chair, the bird on his arm. During the day, slowly, using meat as the incentive, he taught Bomber to fly.

Its job was to take off from the western rim of the Coliseum, soar down the field during the playing of the national anthem, and land on a perch built in the form of one of the Olympic symbols, five interlocking rings. Bomber, warming to the mission, "had a couple of crash landings," the trainer says, but it was game.

Then Bomber died -- from stress, the word was, though the specific causes were vascular collapse and an acute bacterial infection. The bird had been fat, coddled for years, and when called upon to behave like an eagle, failed.

The understudy got the part and showed it had the mettle. Rehearsing to the strains of Fame, Fluff wheeled on a thermal, eyed Hoddy, heard the music ("I'm gonna live forever!/ I'm gonna learn how to fly!"), dive-bombed the field and hit the perch without a hitch. There was applause all around. The eagle had landed. But a vigorous press got wind of Bomber's fatal stress, and the controversy that followed sadly resulted in Fluffs being pulled from the show.

"The tone of the opening cere monies is going to be majesty, in spiration and emotion," Producer Wolper had said. "But the key is going to be emotion." To that end, as all but the Sherpas know by now, thousands of church bells were rung throughout the city for the first four minutes, followed by those trumpeters, that orchestra, choir and those pianos, all while the word WELCOME was being written across the sky. That, you saw. This, you did not:

Wolper had wanted 50 convertible automobiles, their tops up, positioned about the Coliseum. The band was to strike up a dazzling dance number, the tops were to come down, and scores of gorgeous show, uh, women were to come popping out. The number got the hook, not for any concern for dignity but because it took too long to get the cars off the field. A journalist who had been watching remarked, "Maybe there is a God."

The Hollywood in Wolper prevailed on other counts, however. Anyone consider, during the parade of athletes, the 300 beautiful young women carrying placards bearing the names of nations? "We got a lot of steam from the committee on this," Wolper said. "They said, 'You can't pick girls just on the way they look.' I'm in show business, folks. I don't give a damn about the rules. This is a show. I'm putting on a running event. You look good, you can't be an Olympic ard bearer." As it happened, they not looked good, they done good too.

Las Vegas got a piece of the action. When choreographers found they could not attract all the dancers the show needed from California ranks, they had to reach out. They also had to appeal to patriotism because the pay for out-of-town dancers was only $500 plus free room and board for three weeks of rehearsals and the show itself. It was enough to lure Anna Kuni and her twin sister Kana, who perform as the Cherry Blossoms, Redd Foxx's opening act in Las Vegas, ending up clad in top hats and tails, period. In the Coliseum they wore more. "We wanted to be part of the Olympics," said Anna, who with her sister came to this country from Tokyo five years ago. "We wanted to be part of that spirit."

So did the other participants, to hear them tell it. "We're doing history here," said Construction Worker Eric Crawford. "It's something to tell your children about," said Anita Saunders, a high-stepper with the Locke Senior High School marching band, "and everybody else." Said Judi Missett, president of Jazzercise and one of 263 Jazzercise instructors who danced to Sing, Sing, Sing: "When I'm 85, I can hold my grandchildren on my kee and say, 'Remember the '84 Olympics? Well, Grandma was there.'" Mel Carpenter, a Hacienda Heights dentist who brought to the show the 200 white homing pigeons that circled around toward the end, got into the act on a mission of peace. Carpenter thinks the doves mentioned in the Bible may have been pigeons instead. "I feel pigeons symbolize peace," he said, "and for an Olympic event I feel they are important in light of the world's problems." Carpenter, who lives 30 from the Coliseum as the pigeon flies, a serious pigeon man. He keeps 400, spending $300 a month on feed. He thinks "men who have pigeons relax and cope better with business problems and family problems." His very home, he went on, was bought because pigeons did not defy local zoning laws and because, once he saw the grounds, "I thought this was the place to pursue pigeon excellence." This year that excellence found a place in the Olympics. Producer Wolper, unintentionally alluding to yet another bird, had promised "a 20-goose-bump performance." Maybe it was more.

By the way, when was the last time you saw soft-drink vendors in the end zone of the home of the Los Angeles Raiders playing football with the only tossable item they had at hand, a rat-tailed pocket comb? This was a few days before the Olympics began. They huddled, faked, threw screen passes, ran broken-field, clutching that little comb as if it were a grail. "Man," said one, "I always wanted to play the Coliseum." You couldn't have counted the goose bumps.

-- By Gregory Jaynes. Reported by Holmes/Los Angeles

With reporting by Holmes