Palace of faded memory

UNLIKE old pictures which only fade away, old picture houses die. At

the end, Green's Playhouse, Glasgow, went in its own way. Like the old

elephant it was, it perished slowly. There was no sad fuss or popular

rites. Former fans failed to turn out to pay their respects. And the

Playhouse itself missed its own funeral. By the time the cinema fell

permanently into darkness it was called something else and no longer

showed films.

Ten years after, what remains of one of the most wonderful palaces of

entertainment in Europe is only the deepest, weediest hole at the centre

of the city.

For one former patron, however, the show has gone on. To Charles

Harkins, an out-of-town regular from Ayrshire, the Playhouse show has

been a continuous programme. He has never shaken off his Green's habit.

Memories kept reeling through his mind to the extent that he has

produced a scrapbook of the cinema's story.

We Want ''U'' In recalls an early house advert that had two wee

kilties lifting the U letter into the Playhouse's sign.

Charles Harkins's fascination goes back to 1958. He was 11 when his

father first took him to the big pictures. For a treat they had a meal

first in the cinema's cafe before the show. Only from his later

researches can he tell that they must have seen the Victor Mature war

movie, No Time to Die. But he has no recollection of it. Some other film

might as well have been on the screen.

''I saw very little of it,'' he said in what sounds a strange

confession for so loyal a historian. For an explanation he added: ''I

was quite overawed by my surroundings.''

His childhood filmgoing until then had been to the Regals at Saltcoats

and Dalry and Stevenston's Grange. Green's at the top of Renfield

Street, being the world's biggest cinema outside America, was another

world.

''After that first time I was never in Glasgow without going to the

Playhouse for my breakfast, lunch, or my tea,'' he said. ''And to see a

picture, of course,'' he added as an afterthought.

His pleasure in the Playhouse had little to do with what was on. He

felt most at home during the intervals. He revelled in the architecture.

His heart was fullest when the screen was blank. In his book he can be

at his most lyrical about the house's curtains -- ''a magnificent

combination of brushed velours, velvets, silk and satin''.

Charles Harkins's enthusiasm sustains an old Glasgow theatre tradition

that goes back to when pantomime audiences used to applaud the scenery.

When the Greens, a former showground family, planned the Playhouse,

their vision was for more than a plain dark box to show shadows in. They

constructed palatially. Their creation, in 1927, amounted to what is now

called an entertainments complex. Attached were two grand restaurants.

Waitresses were dressed as Dresden shepherdesses. On stage they had a

gorgeous dancing troupe, the Playhouse Girls. A miniature golf course

did not last long. But there were Sunday symphony concerts. For a

crowning attraction a rooftop ballroom was added. Doormen wore

Ruritanian uniforms. Altogether, there was room for 7500 customers

inside.

The dream house's style was sumptuous throughout. Really what the

Greens had built was a land-based ocean liner. When the cinema's opening

was delayed for a week, one reason was that the builders had run out of

white marble from Sicily.

After such early glory came sadder, seedier days.

Charles Harkins recalled: ''Finally, the Playhouse sat at the top of

Renfield Street like an ageing dowager, faded, and with no place to go.

The once splendidly draped grand proscenium was a shadow of its former

self.

''The final indignity on my last visits was to discover that strip

lighting had been installed above the once de luxe fauteuils -- the

golden divans -- thus removing the last vestiges of theatrical

ambience.''

It was the divans, red or gold, which made the Playhouse the acme of

posh picture-going. Yet although the Green's empire controlled 24

cinemas, its big house never became a film mecca. Its only sensational

season was with The Jolson Story. Like other independent owners, the

family organisation was starved by the giant exhibitors.

Fred and Bert Green made commercial mistakes of their own. Charles

Harkins berates how they had second thoughts about putting in a cinema

organ. He writes: ''The fact that no pipe organ was installed was a sad

loss because with the fine placing of the organ chambers and the

marvellous acoustics of the Playhouse, it would have been splendid to

hear.''

A greater loss of their showmen's nerve was to build their flagship

house behind an old tenement block on Renfield Street. Unlike their

Dundee place, destroyed the other week by fire, their Glasgow showpiece

lacked a theatrically exciting front. Essentially, the dream palace

created by cinema architect John Fairweather was a backlands

picturehouse on a grand scale.

''If it had been built with a proper facade, the building would be

there yet,'' Charles Harkins insisted.

His loyalty persisted through the dim days. It became his custom

always to take the same golden seat on the front row of divans next to

the aisle. Often enough there would be only two other patrons in the

1227-seat balcony. He always suspected they had got in on free passes.

Admission prices and the cost of scrambled-egg breakfasts in the

Geneva restaurant have been the least of Charles Harkins's expense. He

has been more out of pocket to the Playhouse since it closed than when

he had a movie thrown in for his entertainment.

Few cinema mementoes anywhere have been kept. There has been little

cherishing of bughut souvenirs. Few of even the ritzier houses have made

a sentimental journey into cinema history, and the Playhouse was no

exception. Without Charles Harkins, it might have vanished without

trace.

Writing a book had not been his intention. ''Nothing was further from

my mind,'' he said, his early obsession having been to make an archive

of the architect's designs and any other pieces of Playhouse bric-a-brac

he could unearth. ''Do you remember how wee boys always wanted to be

train drivers? Well, I wanted to be a cinema architect. It was never

on,'' he said. He became a bakery worker instead.

His We Want ''U'' In -- lovingly written but messily typeset here and

there --is an incidental short feature to his main programme that has

taken seven years of research.

They involved him in copying old newspaper adverts for pieces of

malarky like The Flying Fool, starring William Boyd, and Harold Lloyd's

The Kid Brother which the Green brothers promoted with a farmyard

setting of (live) hens and rabbits in the foyer.

For his outline history of the rooftop palais Charles Harkins lacked

the personal knowledge and good attendance that he gave to the cinema.

He only once visited the dance-hall, and it was not the happiest

experience. By then it had become a haunted wreck of a ballroom.

Upstairs dancing was the idea of Fred Green. During a visit to New

York in 1919 he became convinced he could improve on the rooftop hall at

the Ziegfeld Theatre. His original notion seems to have been that cinema

customers would complete their day out by going dancing. It was a double

treat that Glasgow never took to.

Then in 1940 -- 12 years after the hall opened -- Fred Green had one

of the brightest coups in Glasgow showbiz.

A three-week booking that included the Ne'erday holiday was made with

Joe Loss whose orchestra had been playing at the old Empire Theatre

round the corner from the Playhouse.

The band's date at Green's was to become a repeat engagement for 11

years. For many Glasgow revellers dancing to Joe Loss became as much a

part of their New Year as the midnight bells. The Playhouse made itself

the first ballroom outside London where the big bands played.

Fred Green's impresario touch had been to swing the deal by offering

Joe Loss half the takings. Nearly every namely orchestra in the country

followed. In an appendix to his book Charles Harkins has made a

toe-tapping list of them --Oscar Rabin, Harry Roy, Nat Gonella, the

Squadronaires, Dr Crock, Johnny Dankworth, Harry Gold, the Clyde Valley

Stompers . . . All-girl bands included Ivy Benson and Lena Kidd.

Fred Green was entitled to boast: ''I can take the pick of the bands

and expect them to study the job. What this hall requires is a stage

show played at ballroom tempo.''

What the hall did not need was an unexplained fire in the winter of

l988. It ensured the demolition of the whole complex that had already

been abandoned by the Apollo concert-hall which the cinema had become.

On his last visit Charles Harkins found grass growing in the former

restaurant. Starlings nested. He rescued a piece of the house carpet

with its once proud motto of IT'S GOOD. IT'S GREEN'S. just soggily

visible. When for the first and last time he made it to the ballroom,

he was not dressed for dancing. He was wearing a borrowed demolition

man's helmet and carrying an usherette's torch.

''On the few days I'm now in Glasgow and passing near the top of

Renfield Street, it takes me all my time to look at where it all used to

be,'' he said.

* We Want ''U'' In. By Charles A Harkins. Amber Valley, #l9.95.