The Atlanta Constitution from Atlanta, Georgia • 33

THE ATLANTA CONSTITUTION Aiming for GOAL State vocational-technical competition opens way to prizes, recognition, jobs 3D SECTION Friday, June 3, 1983 The End' for man ahead of crowd By Scott Cain Slatt Writer To the end, George Ellis was obsessed with movies. Although his health was not good, particularly since a heart attack in 1982, he was planning to open a theater in Little Five Points. When friends could not contact him Thursday, he was found dead at the Midtown motel where he had been living recently. He was 64. For two decades, Ellis was a key figure in Atlanta movie life.

He showed "art" films before they were called art films. Always in the forefront, Ellis made available in Atlanta the work of foreign directors Lina Wertmuller, Werner Herzog and R.W. Fassbinder long before they were recognized as masters. That was one of his failings as a businessman. Ellis was invariably so far ahead of the crowd that new films and timeless classics.

Throughout the '70s, Ellis' principal outlet was the Ansley Mall theater. Ellis manned the ticket desk and Michael popped corn. At the time, they were known to more moviegoers than any other exhibitors in town and, certainly, knew the names of more moviegoers than any other exhibitors. Ellis was an incurable ham and his oily character, called Bestoink Dooley, was a familiar figure on late-night TV horror shows for five years. Ellis' biggest stage assignment in recent years was at the Alliance's Studio Theatre.

He had the lead role in "Honey," a play written by his friend, Jim Peck. it According to Michael Ellis, a public "gathering of friends" will congregate at 3 p.m. Saturday at Peachtree Playhouse, 1150 Peachtree St. N.E., to honor his father. George Ellis will be cremated, and Michael stressed the Saturday gathering will not be a funeral service.

Arrangements are being handled through Patterson's Spring Hill. had an element of the Greek chorus about him. Good-natured in the face of adversity, he felt he was at least entitled to grumble. As a motion-picture exhibitor, he believed in the personal touch. Seated in a chair at the ticket counter, he would gladly chat for hours with anyone willing to talk about movies.

Ellis was often confronted by an ocean of empty seats and a favorite topic of conversation was the public's failure to appreciate his efforts, yet he was a hero to many film fanatics. In 1975, when Ellis was ousted from his Ansley Mall operation by an absentee owner who thought the theater could do without Ellis' touch, a boycott sprang up spontaneously. Its effectiveness was so complete that Ellis and his son, Michael, were summoned to return within a matter of weeks. Ellis' first venture as a showman was the ill-fated Festival Cinema on Spring Street. This opened in 1966 and quickly acquired a reputation for friendly atmosphere, complete with steaming cups of coffee.

Ellis offered a mixture of offbeat his audience was usually two or three years behind him. Ellis accepted all this as his lot in life, but he George Ellis as the memorable Bestoink Dooley 7 If I Cancer pain made Duke talk suicide4 Cdesline Sibley Still wringing out the Southern belle Just when I thought that between us, Frances Cawthon (in her last Sunday's column) and I (in repeated diatribes through the years) had done the definitive job on Southern women, here comes a gadfly letter from a man signing himself Ed Norman. "The reason you think Southern women are so strong," he wrote on the edge of SI. it" Frances' column, "is that you have only known working class women. Obviously, you are not yourself and have no acquaintance with the 'Southern How right you are, Mr.

Norman! If being a belle means a lively social life and swarms of masculine beaux, I never came close to Jeir-tv It At, s. CHERYL BRAYStaff Looking almost like the Phantom of the Fox, Van Camp practices on the second biggest organ in the U.S. dDd Vam Cfflmmp ttunime By Bob Thomas LOS ANGELES In a new book about John Wayne's final years, his secretary-lover Pat Stacy writes about how the late actor considered suicide when the cancer that ravaged his body forced hint into another round of painful hospital treatment, "Pat, I want you to go home and bring back my Smith and Wesson .38," the star said. "I want to blow my brains When she refused to bring him the gun, she writes, he exploded: "Don't you understand? I want to kill myself, get it over with. You'll all be better off.

I'll be better off." Four years later, the incident still makes Miss Stacy shudder. "I learned that Duke asked Pat (his son) to do the same thing, but of course Pat she said. "After he went home from the hospital, I didn't worry that he would use the gun. Not with Marisa (his youngest daughter) in the house. She was the one person he worried what would happen to after be died." Later, she discovered that when Wayne was entering his final surgery at UCLA Medical Center, he told the surgeon: "Well, here I am.

We have to try. Pat and my kids have talked me out of shooting myself." 'Duker A Love Story," by Pat Stacy with Beverly Linet, is an intimate view of the star's final six years, when he. delighted in his. role as the last American hero. No one else could have written such a closeup view, because Miss Stacy was Wayne's secretary, con fidante and lover.

Miss Stacy, a bright, petite, attrac-; tive Louisiana woman, was recommended by a mutual friend to replace Wayne's longtime secretary, Mary St. John, who had decided to retire. Their relationship was businesslike until June 1973, when Wayne was making "McQ" in Seattle and living on board bis boat, -the Wild His wife. Pilar, had visited the location, then left, and the marriage appeared in trouble. Miss Stacy writes about coming back to the boat after a festive dinner with the Wayne entourage.

She was about to head for her cabin "when Duke took me gently by the arm and escorted me topside to his stateroom. It seemed the most natural thing in the world to go with Wra." They were virtually inseparable until his death on June 11, 1979. Miss Stacy was left $30,000 in the Wayne will, and she has no complaints: "After all, Duke practically furnished my house. He loved to pick out furtiture; I think he was a frustrated interior belle-dom. In fact, I spent a lot of time in the bathroom, applying Tre-jur powder to my freckles and Tangee lipstick, at the few dances to which I was bid.

I was no belle and I'm not sure I even knew any belles. There were a few pretty and very popular girls in my circle of friends. They proceeded to "make their bow to society," as old Mobile society editors used to put it. One of them married a missionary and, as far as I know, is still caring for rickety babies in Africa. One, a real eyelash flutterer in her teens is a federal judge in California.

There was one who was an alcoholic and died very tragically but I am not sure that had anything to do with having been born in Alabama and popular in her girlhood. Working class women' No, "belles" are not my specialty. The term even amuses me because as a child I sold White Rose ointment to try to win a doll called "Belle of Washington." I pronounced it "belly." As for "working class women," aren't we all? I used to cherish the illusion that rich women lounged around the house all day, painting their toenails and eating bonbons. But I never met any of those. The ones I knew were up to their chic hairdo's in volunteer work at hospitals, centers for crippled or retarded children, the speech school or church soup kitchens.

Some, of course, labor for cultural and civic betterment, some for the beautification of the city and they have aching backs and dirt under the fingernails just as women in Rhode Island and Idaho must have. Frances was absolutely right to say I get angry when Southern women are dismissed as shallow, vain, idle and selfish with dumb flirtatious flutters and twitches. There are some of those but we have no corner on them. Because their men were busy taming a new land or fighting wars, the women of this region had to "take as we still say and do in the country. Eye-fluttering's not her exercise Maybe Miss Lily, a Southern woman of my childhood, is the reason I get mad at that disparaging cliche.

She must have been a very pretty girl. She was small with fine silky blonde hair and blue eyes and pretty feet and legs. She had no education but she could copy any garment she could see a pic 'I got up and walked out of the pit, then I heard a The bear had fallen into the pit onto the Bob Van Camp By Barbara S. Smith Staff writer Deep within the bowels of the Fox Theatre, a low growl begins, and ever so slowly, "Mighty Mo" rears her head for the expectant crowd. When the Fox Family Film Series begins its sixth season Friday night with Bob Van Camp once again taming the Mighty Moller theater organ, the throng won't be disappointed.

Van Camp has been playing the Fox's organ the second largest in the country, surpassed only by Radio City Music Hall's since his arrival in Atlanta to take a job with WSB radio in 1947. He will put the instrument through its paces during the concert and sing-along prior to the eight screenings of Steven Spielberg's "E.T." starting tonight, and before the 10 other films including four showings of "Gone With the Wind," which closes the series in September. Audience favorites, Van Camp says, are sing-alongs of chestnuts such as "Let Me Call You Sweetheart" and "Ma, He's Making Eyes At Me." Words are projected onto the Fox screen just as they were in the 1930s, using vintage glass slides. The audience simply follows the bouncing ball The 66-year-old organist began his love affair with theater organs as a child in Scran-ton, Pa. "I'd go to the movies every Saturday," he says.

"I never looked at the screen I only looked at the organist. Then one day she noticed me and said, 'Little boy, would you like to come and stand beside While he was a freshman at Duke University, the campus theater installed an organ, and since Van Camp said he was the only one who expressed an interest, he was hired as organist. "I didn't have any theater organ experi ence," he remembers, but he had played the organ in a Scranton church as a teenager. "There was a German Methodist church in town whose services were all in German. I didn't speak a word of German, but they needed a cheap organist, so I got the job.

I was making $1.50 a week." Van Camp began his radio career because of a suggestion from band leader Paul Whiteman. While at Duke in 1937, Van Camp, a physics major, was called upon to announce to a restless audience at the campus theater the movie would be cut to insure that the na-See ORGANIST, Page 4-B ture of and the pictures in the Sears Roe Zsa Zsa tossed out in dispute with handicapped buck catalogue were about all she saw. She manned one end of the crosscut saw when her husband cut timber. She dipped gum alongside him in turpentine season. In between, she had seven children without benefit of doctor or hospital and it was always fun to be at her house to pull syrup candy, wade the creek in search of calla lilies, sit on the front porch at dusk and listen to ghost stories.

Ed Norman might say she is not the kind of Southern woman people want to hear although I wouldn't use that word now to describe her." Miss Gabor said the theater management "would like to put the blame on me." She said that usually when handicapped people are in the audience she sends them champagne and cake at her own expense. Miss Gabor said she has made many charity appearances for the handicapped and feels criticism of her is unjustified. "This is the most unfair, awful aggravation anybody ever said about me," she said. "This is unfair." Daniel Tabas, president of Tabas Enterprises, which owns the theater, said stage manager Robert Brandenburg received "notice" from Miss Gabor that the handicapped guests were causing her distress during the performance. "He tells me that he went out and they were very kind and said they would move but then decided to leave," Tabas said.

"What was done was without management. We're just appalled." 1 strated outside the theater Thursday night. "Our position is that no matter who said what, rights have been violated here," said Sigi Shapiro, executive director of the Pennsylvania Coalition of Citizens with Disabilities who joined in the demonstration outside the theater. Thirteen handicapped people, residents of the Woods School in suburban Langhorne, left the show during the intermission Tuesday night, after they said they were asked to move to seats farther from the stage. Each had paid $20.05 apiece to attend the performance.

Deborah Missanelli, a direct-care supervisor, said a waiter told her that Miss Gabor had ordered him to move five people in wheelchairs from their seats near the stage to the back of the theater. "These are all patients who were normal until a certain point in their lives when a car accident left them brain-damaged." Ms. Missanelli said. "They knew what was happening. Women were dressed in formals and the guys wore coats and jackets.

It made them feel dignified to go out and see a star, By Michael Roody Th Asuciated Pre PHILADELPHIA Actress Zsa Zsa Gabor's contract was terminated Thursday night at a dinner theater where a group of handicapped people said she had asked that they be moved out of front-row seats. Miss Gabor, reached earlier Thursday at her hotel in nearby Downington, denied she had ordered the move. "This is the biggest insult I ever heard in my life." said Miss Gabor. "I didn't know they were there, how could I ask?" John Kinneman, producer of the show, "Forty Carats." in which Miss Gabor had been appearing at the City Line Dinner Theater, announced the cancellation at a news conference. Kinneman's announcement was applauded by about 100 people, some blind and some in wheelchairs, who had demon about.

Well, how about those who have labored in mills to send their children to law school and medical school? How about the hundreds today who are laboring with intelli gence, humor and monumental strength to support families A lot of them are pretty and sexy with soft voices and soft hands but they aren't dopes and I don't want anybody to think so..