Royal Treatment : Operators of the Queen Mary Have Big Plans for Ship’s 60th Anniversary Year

Decades of toe-tapping by the world’s socialites have pockmarked the floors, and countless trips across the icy pitch of the North Atlantic have rotted the teak decks. It’s fair to say the ship has seen better days.

But the current crew of the Queen Mary, that storied superliner berthed off the stony shores of the Long Beach Harbor, wants to point the bow toward one more comeback. The 81,000-ton vessel has been this waterfront city’s mainstay tourist attraction for the past quarter-century. Knocked as a perennial money-loser, it turned its first profit in nearly a decade just last year.

Now, in time for the 60th anniversary of its first voyage, the ship’s operators say they have hit on a new marketing strategy for the ship: as a cross between a 1930s historic icon and 1990s entertainment venue.

“It can be all things to all people,” said ship historian Ron Smith.

The city-owned cruise ship and hotel, leased to a nonprofit operating company, is planning such anniversary events as a $125-a-plate dinner (complete with dishes “inspired by” the menu of its 1936 inaugural trip: salmon hollandaise and crepes suzette) and a silent auction of items from vessel archives. Proceeds will pay for repairs to the linoleum-and-cork floors on the modern-day shopping promenade.

To city tourism officials, the anniversary and accompanying restoration are a signal of what they hope will be a formal end to years of turbulence over whether the sentimental value of the liner as a civic symbol is worth the red ink. With citywide hotel occupancy and convention bookings on the rise, tourism officials say the ship, while still valuable, is now simply the door-opener into the city’s burgeoning tourism industry.

“The ship will always be our icon,” said Gary Sherwin, marketing vice president for the city’s convention and visitors bureau. “Having an icon will always be important, but it can’t support an entire industry. That’s not to diminish the Queen Mary, but people have other interests, such as dining, retail and a pleasant downtown environment. We want people to think we’re more than a one-hit wonder.”

Thus, tourism officials now consider the city’s $100-million convention center, the redeveloped retail corridor of Pine Avenue downtown and a planned $100-million aquarium to be the draws of the future. Sherwin said the city is “going head-to-head” with Los Angeles and Anaheim for travel business.

“I wouldn’t trade the position we’re in with any city this side of San Diego,” said Councilman Les Robbins. “Things look pretty good for the ship right now. Sooner or later it’s going to have to be dry-docked and will have to be maintenanced, and those are going to be difficult [financial] decisions. It’s served us well, especially in the last couple of years.”

It didn’t always. The ship was sapping city coffers of $2 million a year after it opened as a tourist site in 1967, only becoming profitable in the early 1980s under the management of the Wrather Corp., an entertainment firm absorbed in 1988 by the Walt Disney Co. With the local job base and economy disintegrating, the ship was running losses as high as $10 million a year by 1992, when Disney abruptly abandoned the site. In 1993, the City Council shrugged off pressure to sell the Queen Mary to a Hong Kong firm for $20 million and instead voted to lease it to RMS Foundation Inc., headed by Joseph F. Prevratil, who had run the ship for Wrather Corp. and had rescued other city business flops.

Prevratil immediately lured customers to the permanently moored cruise liner by slashing Disney’s $17.95 admission fee to nothing. He planned a strategic renovation that would refurbish only those areas of the ship that could be converted to moneymaking ventures, such as cocktail lounges or cafes.

But his efforts to breathe life into the “Gray Ghost,” the ship’s wartime moniker, have been stifled by a slow local economic recovery and by the massive costs of restoring what critics revile as a floating money pit. To bolster revenue, Prevratil had to reinstate the admission charge, now $10 for adults.

“It was a hell of a lot harder than I anticipated,” Prevratil said in an interview from London, where he is negotiating to purchase or borrow exhibits left over from the ship’s christening. “The economy was worse than I thought.”

Even now, the ship’s profits, which exceeded $400,000 last year, must be poured back into the $4-million debt his foundation inherited on taking over the business, he said. But he expects his bottom line to be $1 million in the black this year, and says it may increase with the addition of a maritime museum and a theme park next to the ship.

He said there are other signs of the vessel’s long-term recovery: Its hotel occupancy is up to 50%--it was zero when he took over. Recent efforts to broaden the ship’s “audience,” with weekly bingo and holiday events, drew hundreds of new customers. A $1.5-million effort to restore the teak deck is expected to be completed later this year.

Still, critics contend that the new management of the vessel has been misguided.

Diane Rush, president of the preservationist Queen Mary Foundation, complained that Prevratil has failed to make good on many of his promises to restore the ship and build up the surrounding property. “I’ll believe it when I see it,” Rush said.