Chapter 13: Hank Berger

Doctor Disco Is In

Hank Berger
1951-2006

Weekends after dark at Traxx nightclub typified the disco era of the late ‘70s in Cleveland’s Warehouse District. Just like a scene from "Saturday Night Fever," lines of revelers snaked down West Ninth Street in their clingy satin shirts, flared bell bottoms and platform shoes with two-inch heels. Once they ponied up their $2 cover charges to the doorman, they scrambled to the dance floor that glowed underneath spinning mirror balls and flashing strobe lights. And the thumping stereo speakers that flanked Larry Petrasek’s DJ booth overlooked the crowd of dancers as they boogied to the latest Donna Summer, Pointer Sisters and Lipps Inc. disco hits. “When you had access to the right records, the dancers wanted to perform,” club regular Ben Delfino of Mayfield Village remembered. “That was the only gay place I went to, because it was the hot spot.”

And rightfully so. The club trumpeted itself as the largest and most successful gay discotheque between New York and Chicago. "Rolling Stone" magazine called it the best of its kind in the country. But after its straight owner, Hank Berger, moved to Los Angeles in the midst of its success, virtually nobody knew about the controversy he stirred over Southern California’s most iconic symbol while Traxx’s reputation as party central exploded in downtown Cleveland.

Born in Lakewood on July 27, 1951, James Hank Berger was the only child of James Henry and his second wife, Joan Marie Wertz Berger. With the family’s home base at 1440 Wyandotte Ave., his father worked as a tool maker for his grandfather, Albert H., at Liberty Tool & Die at 3334 W. 46th St. in Cleveland’s Clark-Fulton neighborhood. His mother handled the switchboard for the American District Telegraph Company in its downtown headquarters at 812 Huron Ave.

Hank, who battled chronic asthmatic attacks, was an enterprising yet restless student at Lakewood High School. Performing magic as “the Wizard” for $50 a gig didn’t exactly boost his grade point average; he had to repeat the 10th grade. In the middle of his junior year in late 1968, he dropped out of school altogether. “I felt I was wasting my time in high school,” he told Cleveland Press reporter Bonnie Schwartz in 1980. “I would have rather been out working, so I quit.”

Hank immediately enlisted for a two-year stint in the U.S. Navy, where he earned his high-school equivalency diploma. Upon his 1971 discharge during the Vietnam War, he returned to Northeast Ohio and put his movie-star looks to good use by posing for Cleveland Tux ads in newspapers and magazines. He also enrolled in the interior design-and-graphics program at the Cooper School of Art on Euclid Avenue near the Cleveland State University campus, where he graduated in 1972.

Still in school, Hank partnered with classmate Dan Fauver to open an offbeat graphics studio, the H.M.S. Titanic, at 7016 Euclid Ave. Their layouts and designs -- “funk art,“ the pair called them -- left critics either delighted or disgusted. “Hank and I didn’t want to go to an agency or an art studio and be confined to doing routine work,” Fauver said at the time. “We wanted to be able to express ourselves. About the only way you can do that is to go into business for yourself, so we did.”

Business was steady at first, thanks to Edward Noel and Jerome Turk. While Hank was taking classes at Cooper, he freelanced for the Visual Techniques co-owners, who eventually offered some of their office and studio space to him and Fauver to start their company. The mentors also promised to assign the budding entrepreneurs enough projects to take care of their share of the rent so that they could work the telephones for more clients.

The plan worked. Orders streamed into Titanic’s office. Hank himself took charge of the Dragonwyck account, designing posters for the Cleveland band’s rock shows. The relationship between artist and musicians morphed into that of manager and band, with Hank successfully booking the group as the opening act on a national Foghat-Edgar Winter tour. His career in entertainment and, by extension, nightclubs was born.

After Dragonwyck broke up in the early ‘70s, Hank pulled the plug on Titanic in 1973 and founded Hank Berger & Associates with business partner Phil Van Drasik to overhaul the aesthetic appearances of the bars where the band had performed. The clubs’ owners quickly dubbed Hank “Doctor Disco” for his uncanny methods to resuscitate financially struggling watering holes into cash cows. He reaped his rewards by drawing a salary from the clubs during their restorations and collecting a percentage of their alcohol sales for several weeks after each of them reopened. The revenue helped pay for office space in a one-story, white-stucco building at 19615 Lake Rd. in Rocky River.

Another of Hank’s earliest projects in his new venture included the televised concert, "Music, You’re My Mother: U.S. Army," which was filmed on May 22, 1975, at the 101st Airborne Division’s “Screamin’ Eagles” base at Fort Campbell on the Kentucky-Tennessee border. With Cleveland Agora founder Hank LoConti and Belkin Productions’ owner Jules Belkin as co-executive producers, Hank and Cleveland music promoter Jack Craciun III recruited musical acts like Joe Cocker, Chaka Khan and Pure Prairie League to celebrate the evacuation of the U.S. Embassy in Saigon earlier in the week, which marked the beginning of the end of the Vietnam War. WWWE radio-news anchor George Jay Wienbarg III -- who later worked at CNN and major radio stations in New York City, Los Angeles and Chicago -- served as the master of ceremonies.

Back home, one of Hank’s most impressive trouble-shooting jobs for his nightclub clientele took place at the Déjà Vu at 1572 W. 117th St. in Lakewood. Once regarded as a run-of-the-mill shot-and-a-beer joint, the bar was revamped in 1976 with stained-glass windows, potted plants, an extensive restaurant menu and live entertainment on the weekends. Hank’s blueprint to reinvent the club was designed with his mantra for “uniqueness.” “I’ve managed both clubs and bands, worked in all phases of multimedia and have developed gut reactions about what attracts people,” he said soon after Déjà Vu’s grand re-opening. “If I don’t get any response from myself, I don’t pursue it.” (Ironically, the space became the comedy club-turned-gay bar, Bottom’s Up, in 2008.)

Hank also saw potential in the Flats of Cleveland, where he predicted that its nightspots would bustle if they simply paid more attention to their customers with better managers, menus and cocktail selections. He further envisioned an oasis of singles bars on a stretch of Center Ridge Road in Rocky River. At the same time, Hank’s dream to manage his own nightclub materialized at Traxx at 1812 Payne Ave. next door to Tackla Tavern and Restaurant and across East 18th Street from the Otis Elevator Company’s headquarters. (Cleveland State University eventually bought the block, where its soccer venue, Krentzler Field, stands today.)

Making its debut in the fall of 1976, the two-story nightclub with a rooftop patio fast became a see-and-be-seen watering hole for gay men. Interior decorator Joe Costa added to the vibe by moonlighting as the house DJ with his vinyl-record collection of the latest dance rage, disco. “It was the first place where I ever heard the Village People,” Delfino said.

Hank also found time to pop the question. On April 29, 1977, he married Rochelle “Shelley” Ann Kiehl, a statuesque blonde whose stunning beauty prompted many Traxx customers to anoint her a “trophy wife.” Despite the couple’s Ken-and-Barbie image, rumors circulated between patrons that the “Jewish mafia” was running the club. During Halloween weekend of 1977, about a year after the bar’s grand opening, fire raced through the building and burned it to the ground, sparking even more blather that the blaze was an inside job to collect insurance money.

The rumors didn’t faze Hank. Two months later on New Year’s Eve, he christened a new Traxx nightspot at 1273 W. Ninth St. in the old adult-movie theater, the Adonis, and next door to another gay club, the Vault. A gay bathhouse was also in the same block north of St. Clair Avenue.

Just 15 days before the club’s first day in business, "Saturday Night Fever" debuted in movie theaters across the country. Images of John Travolta as an uneducated Brooklyn teenager who’s the king of the dance floor were plastered on billboards, newspaper ads, even the album cover to the film’s soundtrack. And radio listeners couldn’t escape the BeeGees’ disco beats that helped generate a staggering $139.5 million at the box office.

Gays in America gravitated toward the music, and discotheques that catered to homosexuals suddenly popped up from Alaska to Florida and Maine to Hawaii. They adopted dance queens like Donna Summer, Gloria Gaynor and Amii Stewart as their disco divas. And Hank figured he could jump on the gravy train to further capitalize on the homo-fueled craze to which he had been initially exposed in the first version of Traxx.

Not that its successor came without its problems. After its New Year’s Eve party, Cleveland’s building department dispatched a team of inspectors, who ordered Hank to shutter the bar until he corrected a slew of code violations. At first, he ignored the reprimand until the city issued another shutdown notice. In February of 1978, the department approved a temporary certificate of occupancy after he finally met all of the city’s building codes.

But a month later, businessman Edward Tuckey complained to Mayor Dennis Kucinich about the red tape that the city was giving him to open a five-story disco-and-restaurant complex at 733 W. St. Clair Ave., around the corner from Hank’s club. Building inspectors refused to grant him a temporary operating permit, claiming that the building didn’t have a fire-alarm system in place. They also ordered him to enclose two stairwells that had noncombustible material in them.

The city thrived on double standards, Tuckey cried. He pointed to Traxx as an example, charging that the club had been open, despite the absence of fire-alarm and sprinkler systems. Hank countered by assuring the inspectors that he equipped the nightspot with alarms. Fire officials also told him that he didn’t need sprinklers because he only operated on one floor, he said.

Squabbles aside, word spread in gay circles that Traxx again was the place to party. The club’s appeal prompted Cleveland Magazine to name Hank one of the city’s 78 most interesting people of 1978. And by the next year, throngs of disco ducks were tearing up the dance floor to Petrasek’s catalog of chart-toppers, such as Donna Summer’s “Bad Girls,” France Joli’s “Come to Me” and Unyque’s “Party Down.” Delfino -- who worked as a record-label promoter for Progress Distributing in Highland Heights -- even gave the club a rare Brazilian dub of Parisian pop singer Patrick Hernandez’s “Born to Be Alive” on Brasilia Records. “The DJs were very competitive at the time,” he said. “I was giving (Hank) records nobody else had. And he treated me special by giving me free drinks.”

With the club operating at full tilt, Hank, Shelley and Wienbarg -- the same newsman who emceed the "Music, You’re My Mother" show four years earlier -- drove across the country in the winter of 1979 to sunny Southern California. While Wienbarg worked as a substitute news anchor at KMET radio, Hank marketed himself around L.A. as a disco consultant. And the pair of 28-year-olds wrote the treatment for the rock-star biopic, "When the Music’s Over: The Jim Morrison Story," for Paramount Pictures producer Robert Evans in 1980, although the project never made it to the big screen.

Hank also claimed to have dabbled as the assistant to producer Mark Buntzman in the making of the ultra-violent "The Exterminator." But "The Motion Picture Guide" -- the bible of the movie industry -- made no mention of Hank’s involvement on the 1980 project. Maybe it was a blessing; the book gave a zero-star rating to the flick about a Vietnam vet in a gang of street thugs. It underscored its dislike by warning moviegoers that it was “a film to avoid.”

Furthermore, Hank bragged that he once was Frank Sinatra’s bodyguard and Arnold Schwarzenegger’s chauffeur. He then boasted that he managed actor Frank Pesce’s career, which, up to that time, amounted to bit parts in "The Godfather: Part II," "Rocky" and "American Gigolo." (Pesce’s life later was dramatized in the 1991 film, "29th Street," which was based on the true story of him winning the first-ever New York State Lottery drawing.)

Traxx manager Jimmy Cooper, meantime, held down the fort in the Warehouse District. With no advertising or flashing neon sign in front, the club still hopped with a steady flow of customers. While gays and lesbians made up nearly 100 percent of the clientele from Sundays through Thursdays, the patronage split between 60 percent homosexual and 40 percent heterosexual on Friday and Saturday nights. And nearly everybody behaved themselves. “We want everyone to have a good time dancing and enjoying the music, gays and straights alike,” Cooper told the short-lived monthly entertainment magazine, "Disco Beat." “But those who become rowdy and try to hassle the gays aren’t welcome. We won’t tolerate troublemakers.”

Who had the time to raise an uproar? Everybody was too mesmerized with Petrasek’s talents at the turntables. A former member of the Los Angeles Thunderbirds roller-derby squad, the 27-year-old Akron native developed a following from a previous gig at another gay club in Cleveland, Bayou Landing, before Hank hired him to spin at Traxx in February of 1978. To Petrasek, disco would never die. “(It) will always be around, if for no other reason than the fact that the gay crowd likes it and will keep it going,” he said. “Gays love disco, and they love to dance and party too much for its popularity to ever diminish. There will always be a crowd wanting to get into a club like Traxx.”

As the nightclub padded his bank account in Cleveland, Hank was planting the seed of a scandal in L.A. that would bloom into an online confrontation more than 25 years later. A retired businessman would set out to tarnish Hank’s reputation. And the entrepreneur’s son would make sure of it. But to understand the accusations is to appreciate the history of a Southern California landmark: the nine-letter welcome mat that spells H-O-L-L-Y-W-O-O-D.

In 1923, the Hollywoodland Real Estate Group wanted to promote residential properties for sale in the country’s burgeoning entertainment capital. It appealed to film director Mack Sennett and Los Angeles Times publisher Harry Chandler to foot the $21,000 price tag to erect the sign, H-O-L-L-Y-W-O-O-D-L-A-N-D, on the side of Mount Lee, Los Angeles’ tallest peak in the Santa Monica mountain range. Each sheet-iron letter measured 30 feet wide, 50 feet high and up to 13 feet thick and was propped up by piping and wooden poles. And a network of 4,000 light bulbs was wrapped around the letters and synchronized to blink “HOLLY,” then “WOOD, then “LAND” that could be seen from as far as 25 miles away.

The sign made headlines on September 16, 1932. That’s when Welsh-born actress Peg Entwistle scaled a workman’s ladder to the top of the “H” and jumped to her death, despondent that she couldn’t impress RKO studios in her only film, Thirteen Women, after a successful run on the Broadway stage throughout the ‘20s. Like Entwistle’s state of mind, the sign started to deteriorate at the dawn of the Depression.

By 1939, the Hollywoodland realty company went belly up, and all maintenance on the sign came to a screeching halt. Thieves stole all the 20-watt bulbs. Vandals chipped away pieces of the letters. The structure had turned into an eyesore, and most of the town’s homeowners wanted their leaders to tear it down. To rescue Hollywood’s most recognizable symbol from demolition, the 455 acres of land that surrounded it were quit-claimed to the city of Los Angeles in 1944.

But even with L.A. as the sign’s caretaker, it wasn’t enough to save parts of the towering structure. In 1949, the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce permanently removed the last four letters. Pyromaniacs set fire to the bottom of the second “L;” the top of the “D” fell to the ground; and the second “O” collapsed into a pile of rubble. The sign was literally toppling off the hill. Still, the city’s cultural-heritage board declared the landmark a historic monument in 1973. But to residents, it was nothing more than a hunk of junk.

So, in true Tinseltown spirit, the Hollywood Sign Trust Fund was established in 1978 to raise money for a new sign. Celebrities dipped into their wallets to “adopt” all nine letters for $27,777 apiece to raise a quarter-million dollars for its installation. Singing cowboy Gene Autry sponsored the second “L.” Playboy publisher Hugh Hefner called dibs on the “Y.” Rocker Alice Cooper chipped in his donation for the last “O” in memory of Groucho Marx. A benefit at Hefner’s fabled mansion later that year raised enough cash to erect a sign made of a more durable steel. Its unveiling coincided with the 75th anniversary of Hollywood’s founding.

Days later, Hank was watching a television news report of helicopters transporting the sheet metal from the old sign off Mount Lee to a warehouse in Orange County. The thought of chopping it up into pieces and hawking thumb-sized keepsakes of it crossed his mind. He called the chamber and offered to pay $10,000 for licensing rights and donate a 15 percent share of his profits. The two sides struck a deal, and the original landmark -- all 480,000 pounds of it -- was his. And Wienbarg was drafted to help haul the sign from the warehouse to the backyard of Hank’s home in the Hollywood Hills, where they could turn the pieces into souvenirs and market them to the masses. “Instead of just cutting up this veritable legend and passing it around, why not make a really nice commemorative item out of it?” Hank told "People" magazine in July of 1980. “If sold properly, it would be worth millions.”

In a ceremony near Mount Lee a couple of weeks after the magazine hit the stands, Hank launched a line of plaques that featured 1.25-square-inch chunks of the sign affixed to art-deco lithographs. Each wall hanging also sported a tinted color photograph of the sign in its heyday alongside a printed timeline of its history. Hank presented the first in a series of 50,000 numbered pieces to Director Jean Firstenberg of the American Film Institute to display in the agency’s headquarters. He also gave a plaque to President and former California Governor Ronald Reagan, who reciprocated with a thank-you note. Hank thought he had hit a bonanza. “The sign is the epitome of Hollywood, and it was Hollywood’s logo for 55 years,” he said at the time. “Some people may never get a chance to visit Hollywood. But they can own a piece of it, literally, when they have one of these. There are film buffs all over the world that this will appeal to.”

All told, Hank only sold about 14,000 plaques for $29.95 apiece in department stores across the country, including May Company. Because of fizzling sales, he stopped manufacturing the plaques in 1982. And he left the rest of the sign in storage for the next 25 years. Besides, he was planning to open yet another discotheque, the Probe in Hollywood, to add to his stable of other business interests in Northeast Ohio, such as his “dance-a-teria,” Hank’s Café, on Detroit Avenue in Lakewood. “Out of sight, out of mind,” he reasoned about the unsold parts of the sign.

But by 1984, Hank wanted to revamp his life. He dismantled his Traxx empire that year. He shut down the Probe a year later, after the Southern California DJ Association ranked it the best disco club in the region. And in 1987, he and Shelley -- who, by then, had given birth to two sons, Justin Henry and Max Albert -- moved back to the Cleveland area after nearly a decade on the West Coast and opened Club Metropolis in the Flats.

Hank then partnered with Bert Manning in 1990 to found Berger Business Brokerage, which became a powerful consulting firm to many Northeast Ohio nightspots, including the Phantasy in Lakewood and the latest hotspot in gay discos, U4ia, on Berea Road. In his spare time, he coached his sons’ baseball teams in the Rocky River Little League between 1990 and 1995.

Hank eventually masterminded the sale of Peabody’s Downunder across from the Cleveland State campus on Euclid Avenue. Its owner, Dan Bliss, wanted to sell his portfolio of downtown Cleveland nightclubs to pursue his dream of making movies in Los Angeles. Consequently, one of Hank’s business deals in the City of Angels would come back to haunt him.

In 2003, a year before Bliss produced his popular poker tutorial, "Wise Guys On: Texas Hold ‘Em," on DVD, Hank told his 32-year-old client that he owned the Hollywood sign, and it was mothballed in a self-serve storage unit near L.A. Bliss flipped out. He couldn’t believe that a piece of Americana was languishing in a dark, dank warehouse. So he made a “six-figure” offer to take the “Humpty Dumpty version of the Hollywood sign” off Hank’s hands.

Bliss then broke apart more pieces off the letters and embedded star-shaped bits of them into kitschy necklaces, make-up compacts and key chains. He also assured that Hank would pocket a percentage of the profits, if any of the merchandise was sold on Bliss’ specially-designed website, AuthenticHollywood.com. “The sign symbolizes fame, fortune and glamour,” he gushed to a Copley News Service reporter. “People can wear it close to their hearts.”

But Bliss apparently wanted to make a few quick bucks in 2005 to produce a documentary about Elvis Presley. He sold a 15-square-foot chunk of the “H” to the Hollywood History Museum for $11,766. Five private investors also forked over cash for other pieces of the landmark. Bliss then put the rest of the sign up for auction on eBay with a reserve starting bid of $300,000, meaning he wouldn’t take anything less for it. “Unless the Eiffel Tower and Statue of Liberty are put up for sale, this will be your last chance to own one of the world’s most famous structures,” he told a Canadian media outlet. “There are six pairs of ruby slippers from The Wizard of Oz. There is only one Hollywood sign.”

Listing #5640511574 stayed online for 10 days, before the auction ended on December 6. It mustered a high bid of $450,000, an amount that “pleased” Bliss. Too bad the offer proved bogus. But a phone call to a retired entrepreneur living in the Northern Rockies wasn’t.

In 1978, businessman Tony Wood claimed he was driving to his telecommunications company in La Mirada southeast of L.A., where he looked to the side of the road and saw demolition crews taking down the last remnants of the dilapidated sign. If nobody else wanted the rubble, he and business partner Bob Jones could make jewelry from it and sell the pieces to nostalgia freaks. They’d even wrap each bauble in a drawstring pouch of velvet and throw in an accompanying booklet that told the story of Entwistle’s suicidal jump.

So Wood said he brokered a deal with the Chamber of Commerce to buy the sign for $10,000 and donate 15 percent of the profits back to the city for the new sign’s upkeep. He even negotiated a contract with retail giant May Company to sell 15,000 necklaces in the shape of Mount Lee for $19.99 each in its chain of department stores. (Does all of this sound eerily familiar?)

But within a year, Wood’s telecomm firm filed for bankruptcy. And the feds padlocked and chain-linked an outside storage area behind his company with the sign, poles and anchors in it. Or so everybody thought.

Fast-forward to 2005. Quietly retired and modestly living in the Montana wilderness, Wood received a telephone call from a buddy, who congratulated him for auctioning off the sign for $450,000 on eBay. He told his friend that he had no idea what he was talking about. But after he tracked down the seller on the Internet, he discovered that Bliss had bought the sign from Hank. An online feud emerged.
Wood’s son, Stuart, engineered the war of words on Scams.net in 2006. On the website, he accused Hank of fraudulently obtaining the sign in 1978 by breaking into the back of his dad’s former business and hauling away the metal scraps. “In those days, bankruptcies of companies were a dime a dozen all over the country,” he blogged on the website. “One could easily steal high-value items without the courts ever knowing.”

The younger Wood then cited a 2005 article in the "San Diego Tribune," in which reporter Norma Meyer interviewed Hank about his reasons for storing it in obscurity in the corner of a tool-and-die company after his projections to sell 50,000 mementos didn’t pan out. He told her that he “forgot I even owned the damn thing.” After he read the story, Wood was stunned. “How do you forget you have the Hollywood sign?” he rhetorically asked. “Didn’t anyone bother to research this guy? For goodness’ sake, Mr. Berger should write a memoir!”

Better yet, the "Cleveland Free Times" decided to take up Wood and his dad on their plea to investigate “this exposed fraud.” In a June 7, 2006, story, writer James Renner described his meeting in Hank’s Bay Village mansion at 24446 Lake Rd. During the interview, the former “Doctor Disco,” now wracked with excruciating back pain after recent surgery, admitted he paid about $80,000 in fees over the years to keep the sign in storage. He confirmed that Bliss was sharing a percentage of profit of the sign with him. And he adamantly refuted Tony Wood’s story that he wasn’t the rightful owner of it. His bulging scrapbook of news clippings from "People," "Time" and "Us Weekly" magazines proved his point. “I just think this guy (Wood) saw it on eBay and thought he was entitled to a piece of it,” Hank said. “But he can kiss my ass. I’m Hollywood Hank.”

For three more months, Hank stuck to his story. Then, in late-October, his lifelong battle with asthma escalated, and he was rushed to Lakewood Hospital for breathing problems. Four days later, on Tuesday, October 31, he died, just a few months before Bliss sold the sign to Minneapolis relief sculptor Bill Mack. He also left a lasting legacy among Cleveland’s LGBT community. “Gay people have always been attracted to the big cities because you weren’t going to find what you were looking for in Podunk, Ohio,” Delfino said. “You had to wait and wait to get a drink in Traxx. There was nothing that could compare to Hank’s clubs.”

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Hank Berger’s body was cremated at the Jenkins Funeral Chapel & Crematory, 2914 Dover Center Rd. in Westlake. His remains were buried in Section 26, Lot 44, Plot 3 of Sunset Memorial Park, 6245 Columbia Rd. in North Olmsted. He was 55 years old.

Copyright 2010 Cris Glaser