| Leroy Griffith | |||||
| Birth Date: | 26 March 1932 | ||||
| Birth Place: | Poplar Bluff, Missouri, U.S. | ||||
| Years Active: | 1949–present | ||||
| Known For: | Stage shows (Hello Burlesque, This Was Burlesque, etc.); chief executive officer of Club Madonna | ||||
| Children: | 5 | ||||
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Leroy Charles Griffith (born March 26, 1932) is an American theater and nightclub proprietor, former Broadway and off-Broadway theater producer and director, and burlesque and film producer. In a career spanning 75 years, he has owned, leased, or operated more than 70 stage and cinematic theaters across the United States, dating from the burlesque era of the 1950s to the present day.
During burlesque's heyday, Griffith was a prolific producer of live stage shows featuring showgirls, strippers, comedians, vaudevillians, and other stars of the era. As burlesque declined in popularity, he made the crossover to exhibiting as well as producing adult films and operating strip clubs, notably past and present Miami-area clubs such as Club Madonna, Deja Vu, and Wonderland.
His business endeavors in the adult entertainment industry have, for decades, put him at odds with restrictive municipalities, and he has taken legal action, often successfully, to defend his constitutional rights and be able to operate his establishments.
Griffith was born in Poplar Bluff, Missouri, to Stella Duncan and Floyd Roy Griffith. His father was a theater owner. The younger Griffith began as a projectionist, cashier, and usher at a local theater in his hometown.
At 17, he left for St. Louis and a job working concessions at the Grand Burlesque Theatre for East Coast-based theater concessions magnate Oscar Markovich (1895-1982). At the Grand, Griffith started as a "candy butcher," hawking candy and trinkets to burlesque audiences before and during intermission.[1] "In those days," Griffith recalled in a 1993 interview, "they had probably 30 people in the cast, a chorus line, an orchestra, two comics, a singer, a vaudeville act, and then five exotic dancers. It was a good show."[2] Griffith discovered that any profit to be made was not from the show itself but from the concession stand: "That's where I was. In between acts, the pitchman would sell prize packages, candy, stuff like that. Concessions was where the real money was, just like it is with regular movies today." After working his way up to concessions manager, Griffith began accruing money for higher ambitions.
A June 1955 Billboard magazine column noted that the 23-year-old "Leroy Griffith, concession manager at the Folly ['''Theater'''<nowiki>]]], Kansas City, Mo., is now the owner of the Missouri Coffee Shop with an enlarged dining room and a new air-conditioned system."[3]
In 1955, Griffith began service with the U.S. Army in Hot Springs, Arkansas. While stationed at Elmendorf Air Force Base in Anchorage, Alaska, he worked with Bob Hope's USO show (featuring Jerry Colonna, Mickey Mantle, and Ginger Rogers, among others) when Hope was on tour there in December 1956.
After discharge from the military, Griffith acquired his first theater, the Star,[4] [5] in Portland, Oregon. After a limited operation of a Kansas City, Missouri, restaurant and another period of short-term employment with Markovich, he opened a theater in Detroit, Michigan. He was in his mid-twenties.
According to a 1959 Billboard article, Griffith was described as one of the "brigade of regulars" employed by the popular King Reid Shows, a carnival that traveled the New England and Canada circuit and which was founded by Vermont showman and state legislator "King" Reid Lefèvre (1904-1968).[6] Griffith managed the carnival's popular "Club 17 Revue," which featured burlesque shows.[7]
Identifying "legitimate theaters" that were going out of business, Griffith began acquiring them. "These places would go under," he said in a 1993 interview, "and I'd go in and take over and make them successful with an adult policy." He gradually acquired scores of theaters throughout the United States.
Converting such theaters to adult fare proved popular and lucrative. He recounted to the New York Times in 1970 that he built a brand new theater and showed The Sound of Music, but lost money. Upon switching to an adult policy, he reaped $4,000 the first week (equivalent to $32,000 in 2024).[8]
From the late 1950s to the late 1960s, Griffith was one of the nation's leading producers of burlesque entertainment. Nightly, and during daytime matinees, the curtains went up in his circuit of theaters throughout the country — from small cities such as Fort Wayne, Indiana, to metropolises like Chicago and New York City — with live shows spotlighting showgirls, strippers, comedians, vaudevillians, and other performing stars of the era.
Even as burlesque's popularity faded in the 1960s, one of his Florida theaters was reported to be thriving as one of the 20 remaining burlesque theaters in the nation. When the genre ceased to be either a popular or profitable attraction, Griffith adapted to changing tastes and times, converting his burlesque houses to adult film theaters and strip clubs.
This Was Burlesque, a revue conceived by and starring burlesque star Ann Corio, was staged for 124 performances at Griffith's Hudson Theater on Broadway during the 1964–65 season, from March to June 1965.[9] [10] [11] It went on to tour across the U.S. in various productions over the next two decades.[12]
Griffith also produced Hello Burlesque, a 1965 show featuring showgirl Julie Taylor, "Miss Sex 5th Avenue".
He directed and co-produced The Wonderful World of Burlesque, an off-Broadway show that ran for 211 performances at the Mayfair Theater, from May to June 1965.[13] [14]
Griffith produced the sexploitation films Bell, Bare and Beautiful (1963), Lullaby of Bareland (1964), The Case of the Stripping Wives (1966), Mundo depravados (1967), and My Third Wife, George (1968).[15] These films were exhibited in nationwide screenings, then later released in video format.
He was one of the first producers ever to hire a bi-racial couple to star in a film when he cast Tempest Storm and Herb Jeffries, "Hollywood's First Black Singing Cowboy,"[16] as the stars of his 1967 film Mundo depravados. Storm's 1959 marriage to Jeffries, according to the New York Times, "broke midcentury racial taboos, costing her work".[17] Interracial marriage in the U.S. was not declared legal until a 1967 Supreme Court ruling.
In addition to various theaters throughout Miami and Miami Beach, Griffith has operated these Florida theaters:
Griffith's Miami theaters included:
He bought the Boulevard in 1970 for $165,000 and renamed it the Pussycat, creating three different theaters within: the Pussycat, the center theater, was a 900-seat theater that showed adult films; the Kitty Cat featured female performers; and the Tomcat featured male performers. Later rebrandings of the theater-turned-strip club would include the names Wonderland and Gold Rush.
On a visit to Miami Beach in 1961, Griffith noticed the Paris Theater was for sale. He originally leased it, then bought it, and staged burlesque there, under the name Paris Follies. Featured headliners included Tempest Storm and Blaze Starr. He sold it in 1986, then bought it back after its owners failed with the nightclub Paris Moderne, and later sold it again.
But while he staged burlesque at the Paris in the early '60s, Griffith didn't call it "burlesque"; doing so would have been against local law.
"You couldn't even use the word," he recalled three decades later. "I had one big stage show called 'The Top Stars of Burlesque,' with Blaze Starr and all these people. I told the city, 'It's not burlesque. It's the top stars of burlesque. There's no law against the people of burlesque.' The city decided they'd fix me by charging me $1,000 for a special license to do the show. I said fine. I was going to have to pay $1,600 for a regular permit anyway."
In February 1963, Griffith appeared before the Miami Beach city council to plead for live stage burlesque to "liven up a dead town."[18]
Griffith continued to open new venues throughout South Florida, from Broward County in the north to Key West in the south. In addition to bringing in live acts, he began showing movies. He also began producing films and exhibiting them in his theaters nationwide.
As burlesque was petering out across the rest of the country, Griffith added the Gayety on Collins Avenue to his theater chain in July 1964.[19] In 1965, the Gayety was reported to be thriving as one of the 20 remaining burlesque theaters in the nation.[20] In later years, as a strip club, its names would include SoBe Showgirls and Deja Vu. Across the street, he also operated the 21st Street Adult Theater.
On the city's storied Lincoln Road, he had three theaters: the Beach, the Carib, and the Flamingo. "I used to do [benefit] shows at the Carib, which seated over 2,000 people," Griffith recounted in a 1993 interview, "and donated the theater, staff, advertising, and helped get talent. This all went to the widows and orphans of the firemen and the policemen."
On the city's other major thoroughfare, Washington Avenue, Griffith operated the Cameo, the Paris, the Plaza Art, and the Roxy. Griffith generated publicity at the Roxy when, in 1967, he publicly invited city officials to a screening of the film, Man and Wife. "It was advertised as the art of making love 49 different ways," he recalled in 1993. "I don't remember inviting them, but I vaguely remember the incident. I think that was the first hard-core movie ever shown down here." According to press accounts at the time, the officials seemed to think the movie was boring, but not obscene.
A young Mickey Rourke once worked for Griffith as a cashier and projectionist at one of his Miami Beach theaters.
In 1994, Griffith converted the Roxy from an adult movie theater to an all-nude strip club (Club Madonna), which it remains today. Griffith successfully withstood an attempt by attorneys for the pop singer Madonna to prevent him from using the name.[21] [22] According to an April 1994 item in the Daily Mail —
The singer, who wants to open a parade of strip clubs herself, had her lawyer fire off a letter to the club's owner, Leroy Griffith, telling him he would have to change the name of his establishment "because it gives the impression that my client endorses your club and its activities." An attorney for the club hit back saying: "If Madonna wants to take down the sign, she'll have to stop by with a ladder and do it herself."[23]
Newsweek reported that her lawyers claimed she had been "injured" by her perceived association with the club and that its name was "a serious violation of our client's rights" under U.S. trademark law. Griffith's attorney countered that Madonna is a name "that's been in the public domain for a couple of thousand years." Griffith declared to a local TV station, "Our name is Club Madonna, Incorporated, and it will be there as long as we're legally allowed to do so, and I think that'll be for a long, long time."[24]
Griffith – once a guest aboard Donald Trump's private helicopter long before Trump became president – hired Trump's one-time sex partner and adult film star Stormy Daniels for a two-night appearance at Club Madonna in 2018, during her “Make America Horny Again” tour. "I got her at the right price," Griffith told a local newspaper.[25]
Griffith's theaters in the Mid-Atlantic region included:
Griffith's theaters in the Midwest included:
During the 1960s and 1970s, Griffith operated five theaters in New York City: the Gayety, the Hudson, the Mayfair Burlesque, and the Metropolitan, all in Manhattan; and the Shore on Coney Island in Brooklyn.
Griffith's theaters in the Northeast included:
Griffith was co-operator of Toledo's Town Hall Theater with "Queen of Burlesque" Rose La Rose (1916-1972), a nationally-renowned stripper who, having shrewdly saved and invested her earnings, retired in 1958, settled in Toledo, and purchased the Town Hall and, eventually, another local theater.[26] She was one of the rare and earliest women on the burlesque circuit to evolve from performer to independent business owner.
Griffith's other Ohio theaters included:
Griffith's theaters in the South included:
For a detailed table of Griffith's theaters and clubs, click here.
Griffith's Ritz Theater, in Indianapolis, Ind., began hosting burlesque performances in 1962 in addition to showing adult films. Outcry from neighborhood residents led to intense scrutiny from city officials and the local newspaper, resulting in the arrest of the show's star and Griffith on indecency charges and the confiscation of 15 film reels in a June 1962 raid. The city revoked the theater's license the next month.[27] [28]
In 1974, Griffith won a $32,038 judgment for damages against Linda Lovelace, who appeared in the 1972 hardcore film Deep Throat. He had hired her for $15,000 a week for four weeks[29] to star in a live, Las Vegas-style stage revue at his Paramount Theater in Miami, slated for November 1973, but she failed to appear. The judge awarded Griffith just half of the amount he sought.[30]
Griffith turned Hialeah's Atlas Cinema into an X-rated theater in August 1985, outraging Mayor Raul Martinez. "The issue is not censorship," Martinez said at the time. "It is morality. They will bring in derelicts, the sick of mind. They're like herpes – wherever they go, everybody gets infected. We don't need that."
The day after opening, in a pre-emptive strike, Griffith's lawyers sued the city, charging that a Hialeah zoning ordinance banning porn cinemas within 500 feet of residences was unconstitutional. His court challenge failed and the theater was ordered shut down.
Between 1976 and 1987, the Pussycat was raided 18 times. Efforts by the county to charge him with a felony for screening two obscene movies within 5 years collapsed when Griffith's attorney pointed out that too much time had elapsed between incidents. When prosecutors then indicated they might like to charge him with a simple misdemeanor for the more recent indiscretion (showing the film American Babylon), his attorney argued it had been two years since that film had been confiscated, thus denying Griffith his right to a speedy trial. The judge agreed and threw out the case.
In April 1987, the Dade State Attorney's Office filed a ten-page complaint demanding that the Pussycat be shut down. This time the charge was brought under the Florida Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organization Act. Because the Pussycat had been raided 18 times in eleven years, prosecutors contended, it must be an ongoing criminal enterprise. "That's not what the RICO Act was put in for," Griffith retorted. A judge agreed and dismissed the complaint.
In 1987, city officials confiscated movie projectors, a refreshment stand, and other property from Griffith's Pussycat Theater. He had just won a court fight with the city over his right to exhibit a film called Three Ripening Cherries. He was accused of owing more than $50,000 in fines dating back to 1978. The city bungled part of the collection process in a technical snafu, so Griffith ended up accountable for only $21,400.
An auction of his theater equipment was conducted to satisfy that debt. The winning bid came in at $13,500, from Griffith himself, effectively reducing his penalties by another $8,000.
Griffith's attorneys filed suit in November 1987 against Hollywood, Fla., asking a Broward County judge to declare the city's ordinances banning nude dancing unconstitutional. They asserted that the city's censorship was a violation of the First Amendment.
The suit followed a series of incidents in 1985 in which police raided Griffith's Cine 1 & 2 Theater a dozen times, dismantling projectors and arresting employees on obscenity charges.[31]
In late 1989, after the cities of Fort Lauderdale and North Miami Beach outlawed alcohol in establishments featuring nude entertainers, Miami Beach officials – led by Mayor Alex Daoud – feared strip club operators would gravitate to their city and that Miami Beach "would be overrun with sex-mad drunken men and immoral, naked women."
The imminent debut of the Gold Club, whose owners had intended to introduce nudity and alcohol in their new building on 5th Street, spurred the City Commission to pass local legislation prohibiting such a mix.
Griffith announced that if the Gold Club was allowed to open with liquor and nudity, he would move his hard-core films from the Gayety Theater to the Roxy, which then was showing second-run movies for general audiences. In turn, he would convert the Gayety into an upscale nude bar to compete with the Gold Club.
Daoud said, "We don't have to sit idly by and watch [adult clubs] open up. It would be detrimental to the growth of our city that has been developing so nicely."
The city passed an ordinance in January 1990 prohibiting not only nudity and alcohol sharing the same room, but also banning any nudity near schools and churches. The Gold Club did open with nude dancers, but soon folded under the handicap of the no-liquor policy.
Griffith, meanwhile, successfully changed the Gayety into the all-nude, alcohol-free Deja Vu (without local competition), and turned the Roxy into an adult theater, Club Madonna. Daoud was removed from office a year later after being implicated on unrelated corruption charges for which he was later convicted and imprisoned. Daoud said in 2012 that he supported the city's ordinance partly because of fears of a strip club deluge and also because he hoped to squeeze a $25,000 bribe out of the Gold Club's lobbyist, former mayor Harold Rosen.[32] Griffith and Daoud have since become close friends.
Since the early 2000s, Griffith has been involved in legal disputes with the City of Miami Beach over its 1989-1990 ordinances banning the sale of alcohol in any establishment featuring nudity. He sued several city officials in federal court, alleging they conspired to deny him a fair hearing before the City Commission after he sued the wife of one commissioner for libel, slander, and defamation after she waged a campaign against him, claiming, among other things, that he was a tax cheat.[33] [34] [35]
Griffith played brief cameo parts in some of his films.
His recollections of the burlesque era are included in Leslie Zemeckis's 2010 documentary, Behind the Burly Q.[36]
Interior theater sequences in Norman Lear's 1968 musical comedy film The Night They Raided Minsky's were shot in his Manhattan theater, the Gayety (now the Village East Cinema).[37]
Griffith married Linda Rivera in 1989. His children are from two previous marriages.
In May 1964, Griffith saved the life of his 18-month-old son, Cash, after pulling him unconscious from the family pool at their Venetian Islands home. He credited his effort to reading about mouth-to-mouth resuscitation instructions while on an airplane flight the week before.[38]
Griffith's son Charles was convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison after the 1985 mercy killing of his three-year-old daughter, who had been in a months-long coma in a Miami children's hospital following a freak accident. He was granted a retrial and, in 1995, took a deal to plead guilty to second-degree murder; he was released with credit for time served and good behavior.[39] [40] Charles Griffith later published an addiction recovery magazine and opened a sober house for women transitioning from substance rehab, both dedicated as memorials to his late daughter.[41]
Griffith, for years, hosted annual shows at his Carib Theater benefiting the Miami Beach Police and Firemen's Benevolent Association. In 1969, Miami Beach police chief Rocky Pomerance was disturbed by the publicity from Griffith's $2,200 donation to the association. Pomerance asked the group to give it back on the premise that "simple ethical morality" demanded it, but he was rebuffed. The group used the donation to create a scholarship fund for children of police and firemen killed before retirement.[42]
The city's police softball teams and the Miami Beach Policemen's Relief and Pension Fund have also been beneficiaries of Griffith's charitable giving. In 1997, the MBPD recognized Griffith for his donation of bicycles to the department, for use by its bike patrol officers.
Nationally syndicated gossip writer Earl Wilson thanked Griffith in a December 1965 column "for his welcome Christmas check for the 'Earl Wilson Help the Needy Fund' which arrived just in time to aid some deserving folk."[43]
Theaters he has owned and operated, been an ownership partner in, leased, and/or managed include these:
Note: Click the "sort" icon at the head of each column to view data in alphabetical order.
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| [55] [56] | ||||||
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