David N. Martin 1898-1958

Soon Dudley Ward demolished William Pitt’s homely 1901 three-level auditorium with its forest of columns, and replaced it with a sleek two level auditorium with walls of trendy padded grey plastic. The stage was levelled so cameras could move about freely, and Martin had plans for a Sunday Night at the Tivoli TV show, based on the successful London Palladium model. The redevelopment was completed in time for the 1956 Olympics, and the theatre reopened, appropriately, with Olympic Follies – complete with a bizarre interpretation of an Aboriginal corroboree to close the first act. Excerpts from this show were a feature of the premiere telecast of Melbourne’s first television channel, HSV-7, in a ‘live’ cross hosted by none other than Edna Everage.

In February 1958 Martin departed on one of his regular overseas talent-buying trips. On 2 March, alone in his San Francisco hotel room, he died suddenly of a heart attack.

‘He was a wonderful showman, prepared to take a risk and good to do business with,’ said Kenn Brodziak. ‘We were never competitors. If the two of us were after an act, we’d go in together and share it. It always worked well. They don’t work like that any more. People outbid each other and pay ridiculous fees. And we restarted the Australian Entertainment Industry Association (today’s Live Performance Australia). David was a reserved man, not outgoing, shy really, but a hard worker. He was a non drinker but he was genial and he liked gossip – backstage stories and so on. A lot of people have compared me to David. We kind of looked alike and there even used to be a joke doing the rounds that I was his illegitimate son!’

After a period of fluid management, control of the Tivoli passed to David N. Martin’s son, Lloyd, and to Gordon Cooper.

Lloyd Martin had worked for the Tivoli in a number of capacities, most recently as advertising manager. Cooper, born in Collie, Western Australia in 1911, had been a protégé of David N. Martin since 1926, when he’d worked for him at Universal. He’d been Martin’s right-hand-man at the Liberty and the Minerva, and had joined him at the Tivoli in 1946, after his war service. As joint managing directors, Lloyd Martin and Gordon Cooper steered the Tivoli Circuit through its final decade. After the final curtain, in 1966, Cooper became involved in television production, the Melbourne Moomba Festival and the Keep Australia Beautiful Council. He died in 1985. Lloyd Martin became chairman and managing director of NLT, a television production house, and obtained a Bachelor of Economics degree at Sydney University. He was appointed deputy general manager of the Sydney Opera House in 1973, and served as its general manager from 1979 until his retirement in 1997. Lloyd Martin died in 2005. His daughter Wendy – David N. Martin’s grand-daughter – produces arts programming for television and the stage.

Frank Van Straten, 2007