FOLLIES MAN
RIFF MARKOWITZ
CO-FOUNDER AND MANAGING DIRECTOR
The phenomenon of Riff Markowitz is decipherable by the numbers. When Mrs. Edith Markowitz’s precocious son, Rafael (Rifael in Hebrew), emerges from behind luxurious curtains and nimbly descends the steps to center stage to usher in the 18th season of the Fabulous Palm Springs Follies on October 28, 2008, it will be 3,710th consecutive time he has faced a live audience in the historic Plaza Theatre.
Riff has never missed a Follies performance! And the digits continue to grow before our eyes.
There have been historic consecutive appearance streaks in American lore, particularly in sports where such statistics take on life. Lou Gehrig became a national icon by playing first base for the New York Yankees in 2,130 straight games. More recently, Cal Ripken of the Baltimore Orioles extended that record to 2,632 games. Riff Markowitz is beyond their class for persevering and performing.
It all began when Riff, preternaturally retired to the Coachella Valley at the age of 52 after a successful international career as a theatrical and television producer and pay-TV network mogul, was lamenting to his friend, Tuck Broich, that he had nothing to do – he couldn’t play golf because he hated the clothes.
“Well,” said Tuck, then Mayor Pro Tem of Palm Springs, “there’s this old theater downtown….” Riff went inside and had an epiphany. “It was immediately apparent to me,” he recalls, “there were ghosts in the town and in the theater. Jack Benny had been on that stage. Red Skelton, Frank Sinatra. There had been shows staged by (legendary choreographer) Ernie Flatt. They were in my head as I stood there in the dark. I just had a sense – what I wanted to do was perform. And I hadn’t performed since I was a kid. This was an opportunity. I would get my chance. I knew exactly and precisely what the show should be.”
Riff turned on one naked light bulb and saw “this old place that was being restored. There were no wings, no flies, no dressing rooms. I signed for it and went back to look at my prize possession. I was the proud owner of this 1936 Buick that I was now going to drive cross country.”
He and Mary Jardin co-founded the venture and brought in investors to form a partnership putting half a million dollars initially into added renovation of the Plaza, a fraction of what they ultimately put into the show. They started with a staff of six people and three computers. Now there are 150 employees and 60 computers. Just one gauge of the change.
In the process, the immaculate Mr. Riff, as he is known to those who scurry around the maze that surrounds the Follies’ epicenter, has become a theatrical legend all unto himself, not only by his ubiquitous presence – he works a 75-hour week in season – but by exerting a creative force that permeates every aspect of the three-hour show.
Murray Olderman, who wrote this study of Riff Markowitz, has spent a lifetime analyzing achievement. His career as a nationally syndicated sports cartoonist and columnist in New York and San Francisco led to his induction into the National Sportswriters and Sportscaster Hall of Fame and the International Jewish Sports Hall of Fame. He currently lives in Rancho Mirage and has been a viewer of the Fabulous Palm Springs Follies since its very first season. He was impressed from the start by the athleticism of its performers. “Wayne Albritton was on his way to being a major league shortstop,” he says, “until he got the measles and his doctor prescribed dancing to get him back in shape.” Former Follies dancer Eddie James told him he was a tight end on the gridiron. “In Oklahoma,” said native son James, “if you’re going to be a dancer, you better play football.” Olderman’s art work hangs in the Pro Football Hall of Fame. Also the author of 13 books, he first wrote about the Follies in a long story in the Los Angeles Times Sunday Magazine.
Like him or hate him, the Follies is his baby, and nearly three million (!) paying customers corroborate a leaning to like.
The urge to perform manifested itself when Riff quit school four weeks into the ninth grade and ran away from home at the age of 15 to join the circus as a clown. Home was Toronto, Canada, where the Markowitzes moved when he was three years old. His father, born in Poland, was drawn to show business, too, but wound up as a candy butcher in a burlesque house. Even in puberty, Riff was a stage-door Johnny (take his youth into account), drawn to theaters as a milieu in which he reveled. He developed an acute passion for the vanishing world of vaudeville. Most kids of his background would want to be Maurice Richard swooping on ice toward the net or Hank Greenberg blasting a baseball over the fence. But Riff’s heroes were the troupers of the Orpheum circuit that featured such acts as Fred and Adele Astaire, and if he wanted to be anybody it would be Florenz Ziegfeld, the nonpareil impresario of Broadway’s Ziegfeld Follies, which ran from the second decade of the 20th Century until his death in 1932 (and whose tenure has been surpassed by the Palm Springs Follies).
After one season with the circus as a would-be Emmett Kelly, young Markowitz decided his evident gift for gab was more suited to the enticing world of radio and, passing himself off as a 22-year-old, he landed a job as a disk jockey in a remote northern Canada village called Kirkland Lake. He regarded it as a premonition when the train taking him there let him off at the hamlet of Swastika.
Peering off into the future, young Riff saw television as the medium of impact and veered into TV as a weatherman and newscaster, even doing commercials. “I developed a kids’ show as part of my duties,” he recalls, “which went on to be syndicated in Canada. I was producing, directing and performing. More and more, I moved to producing, writing and directing and stopped performing.”
His trail of accomplishment led to such coups as producing a Royal Command Performance by fabled comedian Red Skelton in London’s Royal Albert Hall, a tribute to Neil Simon as the first major variety special on HBO and ultimately the highly successful TV Series, The Hitchhiker. He also built a state-of-the-art TV post-production facility in Canada, where his company established a lucrative pay-television network.
His suppressed yen to perform wasn’t completely unrequited. “As I became a producer and director,” he muses, “there would be audience warm-ups before we taped television shows. The warm-ups would be problematic. In television, there were always enormous delays in production, and the audience would be sitting there. They never understood they might sit there for seven hours. I would go out and talk to the audience. I developed a gift for being able to do that, to quell the riot, so to speak. I did this for many, many years, and I always enjoyed it. That gave me the confidence I could do stand-up (some day).”
Riff’s evolution as the Follies Man was a gradual process. In the early days he was more a traditional M.C. But as he got his stage “legs,” the verbose Riff emerged – a man of many facets, all turned on, with shticks for every occasion and a growing rapport with the folks sitting out there, whether a busload from Cucamonga, a nonagenarian lady perched sedately in the front row or an anomalous teen-ager giggling shyly among the geriatrics.
Riff delivered cogent, slyly humorous comments on the lead issues of the day, the social scene in Palm Springs or hoary old burlesque jokes, sometimes with mouth-twisting disdain. The marvel of his routine is that it’s pure Riff. He writes all his own material. There should be a vault to hold the little slips of paper on which he is spontaneously jotting down new thoughts – at stage side, in a hallway, in his office – to incorporate into his monologues.
And true to the spirit of the old-time comics, he doesn’t duck ethnicity or sexual preferences as material for his humor; in fact, he thrives on political incorrectness, which has made him a sometimes controversial performer.
He gets away with it because one doesn’t doubt he believes in what he says. That extends to the belief in his Follies ensemble, though the main focus is on Riff. “No man is an island,” he counters. “An enormous number of people are involved. I’m feeling from the audience. I’m hearing. I’m here for every show, either on stage on just inside the door next to it, watching the people.”
Riff did that from the moment he arrived in Palm Springs, spending his early time “looking for the meaning of life, as retired people do. My dog and I drove the entire valley from the Salton Sea to Banning, literally every single street over a period of time. I understood the people here.”
It helped him get through the first angst-driven days of the Follies when he finally realized, “In this town you don’t buy green bananas. The folks here don’t buy tickets six months out like they do in New York because folks of our age don’t think six months out.”
So he devised the Follies as a beacon of hope. “The most important thing in doing the show,” he says, “is the change in the way that I view my life and the way that I view old age. That applies to everyone in the cast and to the audience as well to a limited degree, seeing old age in a different light. I don’t think anyone of us in the cast feels old. It’s attitudinal. Even though they’re not 20, they still view themselves from inside as being the same – sexual, sensual and still able to move. They see what is possible. They have hope.”
With December marking his 70th birthday, Riff himself is the fulcrum, the dapper figure of indomitability in a black tuxedo (changed to white dinner jacket by the third act), carefully marceled hair leaning liberally to gray, arched black eyebrows and precisely trimmed mustache.
Could you visualize Riff Markowitz in a tank top?
