INSIDERS

Charlotte St. Martin

The Hotel Vice President

At first glance, most people can see that there must be a lot of brains behind the natural beauty of Charlotte St. Martin. She just has that unmistakable look of confidence in her eyes.

The North Texas State University graduate has come a long way in a short time. From working as manager of sales and catering at the Dallas Fairmont Hotel during the Seventies, she recently was named the regional vice president of sales for Loews Hotels, the management company for the Loews Anatole Hotel in the Dallas Market Center.

Real estate developer Tram-mell Crow recognized the brains. He wooed St. Martin for nearly seven months in 1978 before she agreed to leave her job at the Fairmont for a less certain future as director of sales for Crow’s Anatole Hotel, which she helped open in 1979.

Although she had extensive input into the original hotel design and into the hotel’s image, St. Martin’s talents really were put to use in the development and promotion of the hotel’s $110 million expansion earlier this year, which made it the largest luxury hotel in the Southwest. She recalls explaining to Crow how much easier it would be to sell the hotel to business customers if she could offer weekend packages that included a fitness club, sauna and pool. From that idea came the Anatole’s Verandah Club, a state-of-the-art private health club.

St. Martin says she also was largely responsible for bringing President Reagan and his entourage to the Anatole for the Republican National Convention in August. Contract negotiations began as early as 1978. “I worked very hard on it, and as you can imagine, in politics and in the media everybody is important. And everyone staying in the presidential headquarters will be significant. I’ve had everything come through to me so that we didn’t have a lot of people making decisions. I’m handling this one personally, which I don’t usually do and haven’t done for a long time. It’s frustrating when you don’t have 145 presidential suites.”

Although she spends 60 to 70 percent of her time at the Ana-tole, St. Martin also oversees sales at other Loews hotels in the Southwest, including new properties in Tucson and Scottsdale and a proposed hotel in Southern California. She logged more than 150,000 miles last year on the road.

When she’s not traveling, St. Martin takes time to work with students through Southern Methodist University’s Associate Board School of Business. She has also helped develop an internship program for SMU students studying the hotel business.

There’s yet another coup: St. Martin has been invited to be one of the women featured in a book entitled Texas Women, which is being compiled by writer Richard Pruitt and photographer David Woo. The book is due to be published in September by Taylor Publishing Co.

Jack Beckman

The Arena Manager

It’s 4 a.m., and Jack Beckman has just learned that a small riot has started at a Rainbow-Ticketmaster outlet over tickets for a Van Halen rock concert. It seems that the crowd had become so rowdy that ticket sales were suspended at the outlet, forcing sales to be handled through the mail.

It’s nothing new to Beckman. He remembers the time the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals wanted him to promise them he would kick rock singer Ozzy Osbourne off the Reunion Arena stage if Osbourne decided to bite the head off a bat or throw a kitten on the floor and stomp on it. Beckman knew the rock star’s antics were what he calls “media hype,” but he made the promise anyway.

Beckman has what is probably one of the most fascinating jobs in this city-perhaps in the American entertainment industry. As the only manager that the city-owned and privately operated Reunion Arena has ever had, Beckman has seen the facility grow in four years from a huge hole in the ground to what he claims is one of the top three entertainment facilities in the country.

Before Reunion Arena, Beckman had spent 15 years in entertainment management business. A couple of those years had been at Memorial Auditorium (before its name was changed to Dallas Convention Center). He knew that Dallas’ new enclosed arena needed things like doorways taller than the tallest basketball player, easy access to public entrances and exits, and lots of parking spaces. During its construction, he worked with architects to help design what he calls “the best building in the country, hands down.”

Beckman says that Reunion Arena is the entertainment hub of the Southwest, and, as such, can influence to an extent where an entertainer will or will not perform. For instance, Beckman says he often tries to dissuade some entertainers from playing in open stadiums, where the quality of their performance drops dramatically compared to an indoor show. He says entertainers can make more money in stadiums because of the greater number of seats, but adds, “We are interested in the whole of concert promotions in Dallas-whether it be in an amphitheater, in Texas Stadium, in Arlington Stadium or in Reunion Arena- because it’s our audience out there, and we want them to enjoy, enjoy, enjoy, go, go, go and spend, spend, spend. You can’t expect them to do that if they are mistreated.”

Beckman works every day, as well as every night there’s an event at the Arena. Last year, that meant working 365 days and 175 nights. Despite the long hours, he says he’s probably seen fewer concerts than the average person. He’s simply concerned with the business side of the event, such as ticket sales and crowd control.

“I would never go and get an autograph, for example. I’m not interested in seeing them. I’m not impressed. I’m not in awe.” He adds that the entertainers who most people would expect to be the hardest to work with are often the most pleasant. Young bands that have had “shotgun successes” are typically the most difficult to work with because they want to try and run the building, he says.

What Beckman is in awe of is the amount of money that events generate these days. He says that audiences are much more demanding than in the past, and ticket sales reflect that demand. The Frank Sinatra concert, for example, made $300,000 in one night-the most for any previous Reunion Arena event.

What would Beckman like to see changed about his business? “I’d like to see the tickets be more accessible to more people on a more fair basis. There is a movement on now, but I can’t discuss it.”