SID'S SHOWPLACE TURNS 70: HOLLYWOOD'S FAVORITE ICON TRULY A STAR.

Byline: Carol Bidwell Daily News Staff Writer

Picture it: Hollywood Boulevard, 1927.

You're standing in an excited crowd outside a theater like nothing you've ever seen before. And here come the stars: Norma Talmadge in feathers, Mary Pickford in furs, Pola Negri in sequins, Gloria Swanson dripping diamonds. And in tuxes, Douglas Fairbanks, Harold Lloyd, Charlie Chaplin.

Lights, action, stars! Can this be anywhere but Grauman's Chinese Theatre, designed to be the most fantastic showplace in the world?

That's exactly the reaction impresario Sid Grauman, the son of a minstrel man turned theater owner, wanted when he convinced investors to sink more than $2 million - a bundle of cash especially in pre-inflation times - into a theater designed in a style some call Hollywood-style Chinese Chippendale.

It opened in May 1927 with unprecedented fanfare.

``When you have visited Grauman's Chinese Theatre, Hollywood, you have seen the most wonderful playhouse in the entire world,'' an opening night program told guests, who had paid $11 apiece - about the price of a week's rent for ordinary folks - to attend the gala opening.

The theater turned 70 on May 18. The celebrating began early in the year, with the first-ever Tournament of Roses float depicting a miniature of the famed theater, complete with replicas of the hand- and footprint squares and live star look-alikes. Judges picked it as the best depiction of life in California, awarding it the Governor's Trophy.

Not bad for a septuagenarian.

Grauman's name is long gone from the outside, and the ownership of the theater has changed hands several times, but the 90-foot-tall facade of aged bronze supported by Chinese-red columns still stands, one of the last vestiges of old Hollywood. More than 2 million people a year come to what is now Mann's Chinese Theatre at 6925 Hollywood Blvd. to fit their feet into the footprints of their favorite stars or to see a first-run movie in 1920s splendor.

``It's the last emperor,'' said Mary Lyday, who for the past 20 years has overseen the theater's archives. ``It's like any other celebrity - it has charisma.''

Walking into the Chinese Theatre isn't like a visit to the neighborhood multiplex, she said.

``It's a very glamorous feeling. You walk in, and here's all this color and design. Going into the Chinese is going to an event.''

Despite its age and the ``considerable'' cost of maintaining the aging facade and mechanical systems, the Chinese regularly ranks among the top-grossing movie theaters throughout the nation - frequently among the top five - for new releases, said Mann spokesman Rich Given. New, larger screens and improved sound systems probably account for much attendance, he said.

``People seek out that theater when they want the best sound, the best picture,'' Given said. ``It's just unlike any other theater.''

And, just as in the 1920s, it's still a favorite spot for moviemakers to premiere their films, complete with stars, red carpet and klieg lights (a Grauman innovation). ``Austin Powers'' debuted there April 28, and ``Fathers' Day'' premiered May 6.

Among the more than 9 million movie fans that descend on Hollywood each year, the theater is the No. 3 attraction, after Universal Studios and the Hollywood Walk of Fame, said Leron Gubler, executive director of the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce.

``It's enormous - the most famous movie theater in the world, one of the icons of Hollywood,'' Gubler said. ``It's the anchor for Hollywood.''

Hollywood's master showman

Grauman, who died in 1950, would have been proud. The man many called Hollywood's master showman saw the Chinese Theatre as the pinnacle of his theater-building career, which began in San Francisco before the 1906 earthquake. He once said theatergoers deserved a ``theatrical dinner, not just popcorn'' when they went to the movies.

When they went to the Chinese, they got an artistic feast for the senses.

It was just what Grauman - who earlier had built the Million Dollar, the theater named for its cost, and the fanciful Egyptian Theatre - had in mind to set Hollywood tongues wagging and imaginations soaring. And, of course, make ticket money roll in.

Ground was broken in January 1926 for the gaudy Hollywood theater, financed by an investment partnership of Grauman, Joseph Schenck (husband of actress Norma Talmadge) and actors Mary Pickford and her husband, Douglas Fairbanks.

Grauman sold his one-third interest in 1929 to Fox West Coast Theatres but remained the theater's managing director until his death. Ownership varied over the years until 1973, when independent theater owner Ted Mann purchased the assets of the National General Corp. for $67.5 million, becoming the sole owner of the movie house. Mann sold the circuit in 1986, and, although the theater retains Mann's name, it now is owned jointly by Viacom (Paramount) and Time Warner (Warner Bros.).

Grauman decided his ``dream theater'' would be more exotic than anything ever built in Hollywood. Walls and carpets - specially woven with Chinese motifs - were in different shades of red. Bronze chandeliers were in the shape of Chinese lanterns. Fierce fighting Fu dogs were imported from China to guard the entrance. Usherettes wore fantastic Chinese costumes.

Originally, the theater seated 2,258 theatergoers, but subsequent renovations have reduced the seating to 1,492.

Cecil B. DeMille's epic ``King of Kings'' opened the theater on May 18, 1927, with an estimated 50,000 gawkers gathered along Hollywood Boulevard.

The next day, the theater opened to the public, with tickets priced at 50 cents each, twice the ticket price in other Hollywood theaters.

Moviegoers still queue up outside daily to see films, but it's the 189 stars' handprints and footprints memorialized in concrete in the theater's forecourt that have made the Chinese an icon around the world. In fact, without its concrete shrine, the theater might have simply become another neighborhood multiplex as seediness began to creep into Hollywood in the late 1960s and early '70s.

``The forecourt's the most important thing about the theater,'' Lyday said. ``It's open 24 hours a day, and there's no time of the day or night when someone isn't there.''

No concrete confirmation

Nearly a dozen tales have been told about how the area outside the theater entrance - originally envisioned by Grauman as a tropical, vine-filled buffer between the outside world and the theater's mystic interior - became a sea of concrete. Grauman himself told at least two different versions; in one, he was the guy who stepped in the goo.

The official version is that Norma Talmadge, visiting the construction site one day, slipped and accidentally stepped in some wet cement. Grauman immediately saw the publicity potential.

He had Talmadge make another footprint impression, along with her handprints and her signature, and summoned Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks to do the same. When the event failed to generate the publicity he sought, he notified the local papers and restaged the whole thing the next day.

A ritual had been born.

Grauman pal Charlie Chaplin, who got his square in 1928, marveled that the stars went along with the messy procedure.

``For some reason, they did it,'' Chaplin wrote in his memoirs. ``It became an honor almost as important as receiving the Oscar.''

``It certainly was a lot of fun - kind of like playing mud pies,'' Charleton Heston told Stacey Endres and Robert Cushman, authors of ``Hollywood at Your Feet,'' which chronicled every imprint ceremony. (Heston got his square in January 1962.) ``Which among us hasn't longed to step on a slab of freshly laid sidewalk?''

Marilyn Monroe said she used to go to the theater and try to fit her footprints into those of her favorite stars before she got into the movies. ``It's funny to think that my footprints are there now, and that other little girls are trying to do the same thing I did,'' she said after her June 1953 ceremony.

Lyday's favorite forecourt ceremony was in June 1963 for Shirley MacLaine and Jack Lemmon.

``They brought champagne,'' she recalled. ``They opened the bottle and the cork shot up in the air and came down right in the cement. They buried the cork in the cement.''

Generally, stars are proposed for inclusion in the forecourt by studios with new movies to promote. Several stars - Lyday refused to say who they are - have been turned down because first Grauman, and later, Mann officials decided they weren't big enough stars.

``We've tried to choose stars that are charismatic, who appeal to the moviegoing public,'' Lyday said.

While most movie fans resist illicit souvenir hunting (there's no security guard in the forecourt, even after dark), theft has become a problem both inside and outside the theater.

The giant rhinestone Marilyn Monroe used to dot the ``i'' in her name has been chiseled out of her square (it's been replaced by a chunk of glass), along with coins several stars imbedded in the concrete with their signatures. Little chunks of concrete have been chiseled away from a few stars' squares and, inside, ``anything that's not nailed down - and some that is'' has fallen victim to souvenir hunters, Lyday said.

Among the stolen objects you'd think would be impossible to walk away with, like one of the expensive, rotund 18-inch-tall Chinese vases that decorate the upstairs ladies' room.

``One night, a very pregnant lady walked out of the theater,'' Lyday said. ``After she left, a vase was gone.''

But all most visitors want is to bask in the glitter and glamour that the Chinese Theatre has represented for nearly three-quarters of a century.

And it'll be there for the forseeable future, with Mann declaring it the flagship of the movie theater chain and the Los Angeles Cultural Heritage Board giving it landmark status as ``an example of an era in Hollywood that will never be surpassed.''

The Metro Rail project that has chewed up much of Hollywood Boulevard has left the theater untouched, and new retail-and-restaurant developments proposed along the street will gently curve around the old theater, using it as a centerpiece to draw in customers.

``According to Mann theaters, it stays there forever,'' Cushman said. ``I can't imagine it will ever be demolished. It means too many things to too many people. It's Hollywood's history.''

CAPTION(S):

8 Photos

Photo: (1--Cover--Color) Hollywood's last EMPEROR (Mann's Chinese Theatre)

(2--Cover) Stars leave lasting impressions on Chinese Theatre's concrete canvas

(3) During Grauman's Chinese Theatre's 70 years, the full-dress premiere, such as the 1953 opening of ``Shane,'' has been one of Hollywood's most enduring traditions.

(4) The celebrity cement event began with Norma Talmadge, kneeling with Sid Grauman.

(5) Grauman flanked by Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks.

(6) A Tournament of Roses float depicting the theater won the Governor's Trophy.

(7) Tom Cruise was among those to draw huge crowds.

(8) At 83, George Burns was the oldest actor to plant his footprints.