In the ‘70s and ‘80s, summer in Traverse City was akin to the greatest episode of The Love Boat ever, thanks to a revolving door of television stars – some a little past their prime – who shined in performances at the Cherry County Playhouse (CCP).

Rita Moreno, Phyllis Diller, Florence Henderson, Gavin MacLeod, Don Knotts, Jim Nabors, Hal Linden, Robert Goulet, Bob Denver, Buddy Ebsen, Martin Milner, Vicki Lawrence, Dick Van Patten, Gene Rayburn, Abe Vigoda, William Shatner and Ted Knight were just some of the stars who appeared on the CCP stage in its last decade in Traverse City.

Those performances took place inside the Park Place dome (demolished in 2017).

Before the dome was built, Cherry County Playhouse productions were staged in a red and white tent festooned with flags and banners in a parking lot across from the Park Place, where the Larry C. Hardy parking deck stands today.

Cincinnati socialite, soap opera star and Northport summer resident Ruth Bailey started CCP in the summer of 1955. Bailey, who’d starred in the radio version of The Guiding Light, was a larger–than–life figure who ran her theater with an iron fist for its first 20 years.

“She would walk through the lobby and through the buildings and just create a storm – sometimes a hurricane, sometimes balmy,” said Joan Miller Oswald, who worked as a hostess at the Park Place when CCP was still in the tent.

Bailey dressed like a movie star and carried herself with a kind of authoritarian self–assurance that seemed out of place in laidback Traverse City. 

“People would just step aside and let her through,” Oswald said. “[The feeling was,] ‘She will get what she wants, one way or the other.’ And she did.”

Productions moved to the dome in 1965. In a 1964 playbill, Bailey announced the move across the street: “We will have a new home in an air–cooled molded plastic dome next to the Park Place Motor Inn. We will still have arena seating and seating capacity will be approximately the same. However, the seating arrangement will be different as will ticket prices, to offset the cost of moving. We will endeavor, however, to keep the increase as low as possible.”

Bailey sold the theater company to comedian Pat Paulsen and television writer and producer Neil Rosen in 1975. 

In its early years, CCP brought Broadway and film stars like John Carradine and Burt Reynolds to Traverse City; later, Paulsen and Rosen brought more television stars. 

Allen said Bailey sold the theater because she was nearing retirement age. “It had been 20 years for her, and most of her friends, like Vivian Vance, the stars that she had brought to the playhouse, weren’t doing summer stock anymore,” Allen said.

Many big names that started out at CCP and went on to become stars, but one–time CCP manager Phyllis Lesser Allen said there were also lots of people who spent summers apprenticing and went on to behind–the–scenes careers in show business.

“It was astonishing, and you have no idea how many people it affected,” Allen said. “So many people went on to have careers in theater because of Cherry County Playhouse.”

Some of the most notable individuals who interned at CCP over the years are Peter Bogdanovich, who apprenticed in 1955, Meredith Baxter and Bruce Campbell. Another who got his start in Traverse City is character actor Dann Florek, who played Donald Cragen on NBC’s Law & Order.

Phil Murphy, the executive director of the Old Town Playhouse, was hired in the late 1980s to supervise the apprentices. He said he suspects many of the volunteers went on to careers in show business. The most notable from his era was Nick Demos, who went on to become a Broadway producer who won a Tony Award for The Frog Prince.

Summer stock theater is a relic of another age. Only one equity theater remains in Michigan -- the Barn Theatre in Augusta -- which stages a series of summer plays and musicals but doesn’t focus on attracting big names. Summer stock’s days in Traverse City ended in 1990 after Rotary Charities purchased the Park Place and declined to renew CCP’s lease.

With its lease up, CCP moved to Muskegon in 1991, filed for bankruptcy two years later, became a nonprofit and shuttered for good in 2003.

Dan Truckey, director of the Beaumier Upper Peninsula Heritage Center and former director of the Grand Traverse Heritage Center, produced an exhibit about the history of CCP in 2006. Truckey said there was something wonderful about Cherry County and the celebrities it brought to northern Michigan.

“The stars they were bringing in as the years went by, they were people who were basically on The Love Boat, you know?” Truckey said. “They weren’t getting film rolls; they weren’t getting star rolls in TV anymore."

Shopping with Phyllis Diller
When Phyllis Diller came to Traverse City in 1989, she just wanted to go shopping.

Former CCP manager Phyllis Lesser Allen said it appeared at first that Diller might be a high maintenance guest, but she turned out to be the opposite.

“I have to say, she had a contract that we had signed that came with a certain kind of wig stand and stuff to be in her dressing room, but when she arrived she just said, ‘Where’s my wine bottle?’” Allen said.

What Diller most wanted was to go grocery shopping, something her celebrity life didn’t allow, so some of the props workers took her on a late–night trip to Meijer.

“She took a cart and filled it with things she hadn’t seen in years; she bought an entire load of stuff to take back to her grandchildren,” Allen said. “She said the next day it had been one of the best nights of her life, she enjoyed it so much.”

Oversized Personality
The only time former Park Place employee Joan Miller Oswald remembers a stronger personality than Cherry County Playhouse founder Ruth Bailey was the week that Eva Gabor came to town to perform in 1981.

“She had four dogs, maybe five dogs, and she kind of gave Ruth Bailey, I don’t want to say a sort of run for her money, but she could create quite an audience,” Oswald said.

Sunday brunch at the Park Place was a big deal at the time, and when Gabor arrived with her dogs, people were aghast.

“There were folks who were pretty upset that she thought she could bring her dogs in here,” Oswald said. “I believe – I’m not sure on this – I believed she compromised and brought only one dog, which she held in her arms as she went through the buffet.”

Stars at Sun Perch
When the stars came to northern Michigan in the 1980s, they stayed at Sun Perch Condominiums in Leelanau County.

In 1981, Deb Callison was manager of Sun Perch. That was where comedian Pat Paulsen stayed with his wife all summer and it was where the actors used to stay when they came to Traverse City.

Callison remembers telling the housekeeping staff to ask guests to purchase laundry detergent from the office and not to use detergent in the laundry room. One day she heard a housekeeper yelling at Richard Thomas, who played John Boy on The Waltons, not to use the soap. Next she heard another maid say, “Missus is fighting with John Boy over the laundry soap.”

There were also surreal moments, like when Abe Vigota came to have a cup of coffee with her each morning or when William Shatner checked in and introduced himself.

This article is an excerpt of a longer feature penned by former Northern Express writer in 2017. See the entire story here.