Comedian Bobby Kelton is pacing the stage at the Holiday Star Theatre in Merrillville, Ind.
”OK,” he says glibly, addressing the predominantly female audience that has filled the 3,400-seat theater to capacity in anticipation of the upcoming main attraction, ”how many of you just found out that Tom Jones is appearing with me tonight?”
Kelton smiles ruefully and acknowledges the applause. ”You know, when I decided to become a comedian I had three big goals,” he continues. ”The first was to be on the Johnny Carson show, which I`ve done 18 times now. The second was to perform in a Las Vegas nightclub, which I`ve also done. And the third . . . (he pauses and looks out at the expectant crowd) . . . and the third was to perform at the Holiday Inn in Merrillville, Indiana.”
The audience erupts with laughter, and even Kelton can`t suppress a smile at the obvious irony of his joke. But as Kelton knows, and as Tom Jones and a roster of other big-name stars will attest to, this not-so-little Holiday Inn in what was formerly an Indiana cornfield is something to be taken seriously. It was here, after all, that Liberace attracted 38,000 paying customers between April 26 and May 5 for 14 performances. Consider that this concert series alone grossed more than half a million dollars (and subsequently Liberace`s biggest paycheck from any Midwestern concert series) and it`s not too difficult to understand why the glittering pianist and his colleagues make a point of stopping off at the Holiday Star Theatre on their way to the bank. Liberace and Tom Jones notwithstanding, a wide range of other popular performers, including Liza Minnelli, Bob Hope, Kenny Rogers, Wayne Newton, Perry Como and Sammy Davis Jr., not to mention contemporary rock, country, and rhythm and blues acts, have discovered that there is gold to be found in the cornfields of Indiana. And like laborers moving through the stalks, they are descending upon the Holiday Star to harvest a cash crop hungry for their heartland beats.
The 61-acre Holiday Star Plaza complex–home to the Star Theatre–has become one of the richest and most fertile centers of entertainment in the Midwest. Located approximately 42 miles from the John Hancock Center, the complex has transformed the landscape of Merrillville with its spiderlike conglomeration of interconnected buildings, which include a ”Holidome”
(dome-covered swimming pool), an elaborate convention center, a 353-room hotel, 10 shops, a health club, several restaurants, lounges and the Star Theatre. And the theater has, despite its seemingly improbable location, been able to draw the entertainment dollars of thousands of Chicago-area residents. Last year the Holiday Star Theatre attracted more than 500,000 patrons, 350,000 of whom were from the Chicago area. To understand how this theater has cut its own unique piece of the American entertainment pie, it helps to remember the history of its all-important location, location, location. Today the area is easily accessible to major population areas, including Chicago, Indianapolis, South Bend and Fort Wayne, via a gamut of well maintained superhighways.
It hasn`t always been that way.
Easily recognizable on the northwest quadrant of Int. Hwy.65 and U.S. Hwy. 30 in the Town of Merrillville (pop. 28,000), the theater and plaza complex is only a few miles from what had long been known as the ”Crossroads of America,” that intersection of U.S. 41 and U.S. 30 that in the 1940s and 50s was reputedly the most heavily traveled thoroughfare in the country.
The ”Crossroads of America,” however, was a phenomenon of the post-World War II boom years when Americans became increasingly mobile, and the automobile was the major mode of transportation. But during the 1960s, with the increasing popularity of air travel and the gradual decline of the primary metals and petrochemicals industry in Northwest Indiana, fewer and fewer people traveled the crossroads through Northwest Indiana, and for years the tiny town of Merrillville was just another dot on the map.
But then an entrepreneur named Dean V. White, whose father founded the White Sign Co., heard about a new interstate highway that would be built through Indiana. Running from Gary south through Indianapolis and down to Louisville, the highway would intersect U.S. 30 in Merrillville, not far from the White family home in Crown Point. Dean White had long been making signs for the Holiday Inn, and he hadn`t forgotten the words of Kemmons Wilson, the founder of the hotel chain, who had told young Dean that there was more money to be made running a hotel than making signs for it.
”If you ever want to build your own Holiday Inn,” he told Dean, ”and the franchise hasn`t already been promised to someone else, then you come and see me and I`ll help you build it.”
Well, nobody had been promised a Holiday Inn in Merrillville, so Dean White bought most of the property (three quadrants) surrounding the soon to be intersection and made plans for the future Gary-Merrillville Holiday Inn. When his business partners and friends heard of his decision, though, they thought their friend might have been in the hot Indiana sun too long. They called the White household and implored Barbara White, Dean`s wife, to talk her husband out of this lunacy. Bruce White, Dean`s son, who is today president of the hospitality division of the White company businesses (known as Whiteco), remembers his reaction to the scene in his family`s kitchen on that day in 1965.
”I must have been 11 or 12 years old at the time,” says the 32-year-old president, talking from a couch in his office inside the Holiday Star resort`s food and beverage office. ”People were calling my father telling him he was crazy, that it would be a disaster. I was sitting at the table crying, thinking `My God, what`s going to happen?` ”
Dean White built the hotel as he had planned, knocking down a farmhouse to do it, and on May 2, 1969, Merrillville had a typical 120-room roadside Holiday Inn, not far from the corner of U.S. Hwy. 30 and spanking new Int. Hwy. 65.
Dean White didn`t lose his shirt on the hotel, but while the sign company flourished the hotel business wasn`t keeping pace with the other Whiteco businesses. In 1975 Dean called his son Bruce, a graduate of Purdue University working on the west coast for Hyatt Hotels, and asked him to come home and offer advice on what could be done to get things moving. Bruce, who denies his interest in rock `n` roll in particular and entertainment in general had any influence on the situation, decided the hotel needed a theater and conference center, and he set about conducting a feasibility study.
”The people who thought we were crazy for building the hotel in the first place really thought we were nuts when we decided to go ahead and build the theater,” Bruce laughs, ”but we did it, and it has been a tremendous success.”
The success wasn`t immediate, however, and it followed a $14.5-million investment that in 1979 transformed the 120-room Gary-Merrillville Holiday Inn into what is today the $30-million Holiday Star Plaza. The Star Theatre alone cost $8 million, and since its conception, its focus has shifted considerably. As Bruce had originally visualized it, the theater was to be a place for grand musicals and major Broadway shows. Bruce hired architect Tom Hickey of LaPorte, Ind., to design the theater. Together they borrowed a book on theater design from nearby Valparaiso University, and they settled on a concept and Hickey went to work.
He designed a spacious, carpeted 3,200 seat theater (200 seats have since been added) with a balcony (no seat is further than 103 1/2 feet from the stage), excellent acoustics, a wide flat stage, a backstage rehearsal room, and large dressing rooms with enough makeup mirrors to service the cast of
”Hallelujah Hollywood.” Bruce also hired the Nederlander Organization of New York City, which owns several theaters across the country and books and produces major shows, to help him book the Star Theatre.
On Dec. 9, 1979, the theater opened with a concert by Donna Summer. Opening night was a sellout. And as planned, many of the patrons ate in the hotel restaurants before the show and stayed in the hotel after the show. The White family was delighted. They calculated that 40 percent of their audience came from Chicago and 60 percent from Indiana.
Unfortunately, the family`s initial delight was short-lived. Although the premier concert was a sellout, subsequent shows, featuring major and expensive musicals, became washouts. One production after another, including ”Grease,” starring Christopher Atkins, ”Man of LaMancha” starring Ed Ames, ”Bubbling Brown Sugar,” starring Cab Calloway,” and last year, ”Woman of the Year”
starring Barbara Eden, failed to fill the theater.
Last month the Holiday Star staff made one final attempt to promote a successful musical by staging Bob Fosse`s ”Dancing.” The show did not sell well, and Bruce White declares that he is closing the curtain on any future major theatrical productions at the theater.
”They just didn`t work,” says Bruce, ”and I`ve gone bald scratching my head trying to figure out why. I think maybe we haven`t produced an image for theatergoers. Theater is just one area where we have not been successful. We would love to do it, but it became a philanthropic thing for us.”
Bruce and his staff were forced to reorient the focus of the theater`s entertainment. The entertainers who were drawing the largest audiences to the theater were the ”adult-contemporary,” the middle of the road (M.O.R.)
performers. Bruce began to focus almost exclusively on these entertainers. Raised and educated in Indiana, he felt he had an obvious advantage over the Nederlander Organization in assessing which acts would appeal to his Midwestern audiences, and he became more and more involved in booking the theater. The ”Crossroads of America” was not far from his mind as he criss- crossed the country in the Whiteco company jet scouting entertainers to fill his theater.
Combined with an aggressive group sales department that capitalizes on its ability to offer discounted lodging and theater packages, the M.O.R. marketing strategy paid off. Today, other private jets carrying entertainers ranging from Bob Hope to Sammy Davis Jr. regularly wing their way through Indiana air space in search of the landing strip in Valparaiso. And virtual busloads of residents from the Chicago area, Indiana, Michigan and Wisconsin now fill the theater to what frequently are capacity audiences.
In January, Bruce created Star Tickets Inc., another division of Whiteco, and assumed responsibility for booking all entertainment at the Holiday Star and at the independently owned 1,150 seat Vic Theatre in Chicago. By offering entertainers the opportunity to play two venues in the Chicago area back-to-back, Bruce now has the added leverage to attract entertainers who might otherwise hesitate to play only one or two shows at a 3,400-seat theater outside of the Chicago area. In addition, he tries to make up for any inconvenience to the entertainers by giving them ”star” treatment.
Tom Jones, whose nocturnal lifestyle and penchant for big city discotheques are legendary, says he doesn`t really mind the inconvenience of a theater located outside of Chicago. On this trip he didn`t even venture out of Merrillville. Speaking casually at a lavish honorary dinner following his concert, hosted by Bruce White in a private hotel banquet room, Jones explains why he has returned to Merrillville every year since the theater opened.
”They built the theater like they used to build theaters: it`s a place specifically designed for entertainment,” he says. ”It`s a perfect place for the kind of show that I do, and I like the balcony, it reminds me of vaudeville. I can tell that the audience is comfortable, which is important to me, it really is. I would rather do three shows here for 10,000 fans than one show for the same number, say, in an ice hockey arena.”
Although the Arie Crown Theatre (4,319 seats) estimates that for M.O.R. concerts it attracts 40 percent of its audience from the Chicago suburbs, and Poplar Creek (seating 20,000) estimates that it attracts 50 percent of its audience from the Chicago area and 50 percent from out-of-state during M.O.R. performances, nearly 70 percent of the Holiday Star`s audience at similar concerts are from the Chicago area. The other 30 percent are from Indiana, Wisconsin and Michigan. Chicagoans seem to be adjusting to the theater`s location.
”We came here from Chicago to get away from the city and the crowds for a couple days,” says Kit Gurga, who attended the Tom Jones concert with her husband, Joe. ”It`s nice here. You don`t have to worry about the parking, the theater is connected to the hotel so you can walk right from your room to the show, and the crowds aren`t unruly. It`s a nice break, and it`s really not all that far from Chicago.”
The White family couldn`t agree more. Bruce still admonishes critics who questioned the logic of building such an expensive theater in a rural location. ”I think there are a lot of reasons to be out of Chicago. Most importantly, people like to get out of the intense urban environment of the city. We just have to educate them about how close we are and how convenient our location is.”
Even though the Chicago area represents the greatest number of ticket purchasers, this does not represent a decrease in tickets sold to the Holiday Star`s home state market, only an increase in the total number of tickets sold. Residents of the Merrillville area seem to be unabashedly proud of the theater`s success and the celebrity population it has attracted.
Beverly Topa, a housewife in Crown Point, typifies this sentiment when she casually mentions that ”Kenny Rogers likes to play tennis at the courts behind the high school,” and ”Bill Cosby loves McDonald`s cheeseburgers. He eats at the local MacDonald`s all the time when he`s here. And Tom Jones eats at Bon Appetit. Our neighbor`s son works there and says he`s a real gentleman.”
Bruce further argues that the success of the theater is anything but improbable. ”We spent five years on plans for this theater and the whole complex wasn`t designed to be any other place than where it best serves the market,” he says.
This last statement also serves as a firm answer to critics, among them Gary Mayor Richard Hatcher, who claim that downtown Gary is being deprived of much-needed business as a result of the construction of the Holiday Star Theatre. Hatcher, whose pet project is the ”Genesis Center,” a civic complex in Gary which began construction during his re-election bid in 1979–the same year the Star Theatre was completed–has never made a secret of his feelings that the Holiday Star draws Gary residents, and their money, out of the area to nearby and predominantly white Merrillville. Bruce claims that he is not aware of any resentment, and adds that ”I have never even had a telephone conversation with Mayor Hatcher.”
Bruce, in fact, claims that his family is a strong booster of civic pride in the Gary-Merrillville area. As early as 1979, prior to the opening of the theater, Bruce was quoted in Gary`s Post-Tribune as saying ”this is a much-maligned area . . . we`re trying to change the image. Obviously we believe in the area.” Today, he believes the White family business has had a significant economic impact on the area. ”I would hate to think what the area would be like without us,” he says. ”The Holiday Star Plaza is responsible for creating 2,000 jobs directly or indirectly.”
Those who have traveled to the resort no doubt have seen the blitz of recent and new construction underway across from the plaza. Within one small block a Super 8 Motel is under construction next to a recently built Days Inn, which is right next door to the Economy Inn of America. Even if you`re not looking for inexpensive lodging, you still have your choice of inexpensive restaurants. Interspersed with the hotels are Popeye`s Famous Fried Chicken, La Quinta, Red Lobster, G.D. Ritzy`s, McDonald`s, Angelo`s Italian/American Cuisine, Baker`s Square and Bob Evans, to name only a few.
”On a busy night at the Holiday Star,” says John Janik, executive director of the Merrillville Chamber of Commerce, ”the impact of the theater can be felt not only at these restaurants and motels in Merrillville, but at restaurants and motels in a 30-mile radius of the town. Obviously, the Holiday Star has had a lot to do with the economic development of the area.”
But all of this is far from the minds of the audience on a still summer night inside the Holiday Star Theatre, as the lights dim and a kettle drum begins to beat. A road crew wearing Tom Jones World Tour `85 jackets scurries about behind the curtains making last-minute preparations for the beginning of the featured show. Within seconds Tom Jones emerges from his dressing room to a full crescendo from his band and walks briskly on stage to a burst of applause from the audience.
He grabs his microphone and belts out the words to his opening song.
”Tonight`s the night we`re going to make it happen!” In the audience, Bruce White is watching the show. He`s just beaming.
