Box office empire

ONE DAY in the winter of 1962, Leo Carlin was on the telephone in the glorified shoebox that was, at the time, the box office of the Walnut Street Theatre when the door behind him opened and in walked megastar actor Henry Fonda.

Fonda, who was appearing at the Walnut in a pre-Broadway run of a drama called "A Gift of Time" (his co-star was Olivia de Havilland, of "Gone With the Wind" fame) was not pleased that the then-24-year-old Carlin was apparently wasting his time chatting rather than attending to the business of moving tickets to Fonda's show.

"He said, 'Why are you on the phone and not selling tickets?' " Carlin recalled during a recent interview at his Lincoln Financial Field office. "Actually, I was on the phone making arrangements for Jane."

For most people, that brief, if unpleasant, encounter with show-business royalty might have been a big deal. But for a member of Philadelphia's Carlin family, it truly was just another day at the office.

Leo Carlin is the youngest of the three sons of Alexis "Lex" Carlin Sr., who was the first of the brood to enter what became arguably one of Philadelphia's most unique family businesses: theater management and ticket sales.

Since the Roaring '20s, the Carlins have played an integral role in the region's theatrical and sporting realms. Along the way, Lex Sr. and Jr., Joe and Leo crossed paths with several generations of show-business and sports titans, and were part of everything from pre-Broadway tryouts of legendary plays to the Eagles' 1960 championship win over Vince Lombardi's Green Bay Packers.

According to Joe, 87, the retired former manager of the Walnut and long-gone Erlanger theaters, and Leo, 75, who has supervised the Eagles' ticket operations since 1960, there was nothing in their dad's background that made him particularly suited to a life in show biz. "He was not theatrically inclined," offered Joe about his father, whom he described as a "feisty little Irish redhead . . . about 130 pounds of energy.

"He was a doughboy in World War I, and when he came home, his first job was working in Billy Ryan's ticket office at the Bellevue-Stratford ," explained Joe. "Then he went to work at Mae Desmond's theater at Kensington Avenue and Cumberland Street. He ran the box office there."

In the early 1920s, the elder Carlin was hired to manage Atlantic City's Apollo Theater, located on the Boardwalk at New York Avenue. At the time, the Apollo was an important Broadway tryout venue (among the shows staged there was Sigmund Romberg's "The Student Prince," which highlighted the 1924 season). As such, it was a way station for the biggest theatrical names of the day.

During his years at the Apollo, Lex Sr. forged friendships with the likes of legendary director George Abbott (whose credits include "Pal Joey," "On the Town," "The Pajama Game" and "Damn Yankees"), revue impresarios George White and Florenz Ziegfeld, and Al Jolson, the biggest singing star of the early 20th century.

"My father had a wonderful time down there," said Joe. "He was always over at Seaview Country Club, golfing with some of the biggest theater people of the time." That, he noted, wasn't his dad's only field of competition with the stars.

"He would be shooting craps with Al Jolson in the box office after hours," he said. "My father was always ahead, but Jolson didn't care. If he lost, he lost."

Jolson would also come into the box office before a show and actually sell tickets to people. Then, said Joe, before heading back to his dressing room to prepare for the performance, "He'd drop a couple hundred bucks in the cash drawer and say 'Just in case I make a mistake.' "

As the manager of Atlantic City's premiere "legit" theater, it's not surprising that Lex Sr. developed a close relationship with Enoch "Nucky" Johnson, the town's Prohibition-era vice overlord and the person upon whom Steve Buscemi's "Boardwalk Empire" character "Nucky Thompson" is based.

When the Great Depression hit in 1929, the good times ended. By 1932, the Apollo Theatre was shuttered (it wasn't demolished until the 1970s) and Lex Sr., who by this time was married and had started a family that would ultimately include two daughters in addition to his sons, was unemployed and penniless. As such, they had to leave their apartment which, almost 50 years later, served as the home of Burt Lancaster's character in the 1980 movie "Atlantic City."

Lex Sr. needed cash to move back to Philly, and he got it from the one person he knew could spare it. "When we were forced to leave Atlantic City," remembered Joe, who was 7 at the time, "Father was stone broke. He borrowed $250 from Nuck."

Back in his hometown, Lex Sr. ultimately found work - either as manager or treasurer - at such long-gone theaters as the Erlanger, Garrick, Broad Street, Lyric, Adelphi and Chestnut Street Opera House. His time at the Erlanger in the 1950s coincided with what many believe to be the greatest period of musical theater in history. During his tenure there, such classic shows as "Li'l Abner," "My Fair Lady" and "West Side Story" were staged prior to their New York debuts.

Having a father in show business meant that the Carlin siblings were brought up in circumstances far different from any of their Nicetown neighbors.

"The theater was my baby-sitter," said Leo, who last year was inducted into the Eagles' Hall of Fame. "My mother would put me in the back row of some theater to watch some show while she went out shopping and she'd come back and get me. That happened more often than you can possibly realize."

Not that the young Leo thought anything of it. He admitted that he was a teenager before he understood that his family's situation was unique. That realization occurred, he noted, while he was a student at St. Joseph's Prep. One day, he and a friend, whose father owned a brewery, were discussing dating options.

"He said, 'What are you doing this weekend?' " he remembered. "I told him I was going to see . . . it might have been 'My Fair Lady,' I'm not quite sure. He said, 'Well, you're lucky. You have access to all that. I can't take to a brewery. That's no kind of a date.'

"It never before occurred to me how lucky I was."

Lex Sr.'s last position was as manager of the Walnut Street Theatre, a post from which he retired in 1968 (he died in 1981). But his retirement hardly meant the end of the family's presence in the theater and ticketing businesses. Both Lex Jr. and Joe were prominent theater managers, while Leo forged an unprecedented career running the Eagles' ticketing operation. The 2013 season will be his 54th.

In 1962, Lex Jr., who died in 2011 at 87, began his 32-year-run as manager of the Forrest Theatre. (He was fired abruptly, along with Joe, in May 1994. According to news reports, a specific reason was never given for their dismissal.)

Joe, who "had no ambition to do anything" when he left the Marine Corps after World War II, "just kind of drifted into the business." He started out working the box office at the Erlanger, at 21st and Market streets. By the late 1950s, Joe was the venue's manager. And in 1960, Leo, who likewise started out in ticket distribution, was hired to run the Eagles' box office.

While younger Philadelphians are likely to be most familiar with Leo, older residents probably remember Lex Jr., who for decades was a local gossip-column regular. According to Leo, his oldest brother - and godfather - was "a hard worker" as well as someone whose bark was worse than his bite. "He might have had a rough exterior," said Leo, "but in 10 minutes, you knew how nice he was. He was very generous in his thinking."

Like his father, Lex Jr. regularly interacted with the biggest names in show business, thanks to such shows as "The Music Man," "Chicago" and "Funny Girl," which introduced local audiences to Barbra Streisand. He also hosted Elizabeth Taylor, who, in 1983, appeared with her ex-husband, Richard Burton, at the Forrest in a play called "Private Lives."

In a 2011 Daily News article, Lex Jr. spoke of Taylor arriving in Philadelphia with her constant companion, a parrot, and how she would exit her limousine with the bird on her shoulder and a cigarette holder in her hand, much to the delight of picture-snapping fans.

Lex Jr. had offered the star's dressing room to Burton, but Burton insisted that Taylor get it. La Liz requested it be painted violet (to match her eyes), but, as Lex Jr. remembered it, the space's most significant decorating was courtesy of the parrot and its uninhibited digestive system.

Not all was rosy in Lex Jr.'s career, however. In 1997, he was convicted of income-tax evasion on kickbacks he received from ticket brokers to whom he sold premium seats for resale at inflated prices. U.S. District Judge J. Curtis Joyner fined him $10,000 and handed down a sentence of two years' probation.

Although nothing has ever been proved, some of his supporters suggested that Lex Jr. was targeted by federal investigators in hopes that he would help them snare New York-based theater insiders suspected of being engaged in what was known in the business as "ice" on a much larger scale.

Unlike his father and brothers, Joe, who managed the Walnut from 1973 to 1983, always kept his dealings with actors to a business-only minimum. "I never hung around stars very much," he said. "Usually, when a star wants to see the theater manager, it's because the dressing room is dirty."

Despite the size of the Carlin clan (Leo alone boasts seven children and 22 grandchildren), the days of the family's involvement in theater and tickets are coming to an end, as none of the new generations are in the business.

When Leo leaves the Eagles organization, the Carlin family will belong to local history. But from Al Jolson and Nucky Johnson to Liz and Dick to Eagles greats Tim Brown and Tommy McDonald, theirs is a story that is unique to Philadelphia - and uniquely Philadelphian.