The Newsmagazine of Long Beach Island and Southern Ocean County

By Rick Mellerup | on July 27, 2022

PAGE TURNER: Beach Haven’s Surflight Theatre is the only performance theater in all of the United States to boast an entirely free entertainment lending library. Surflight owner Al Parinello donated 800 from his collection.

There are many live theaters across the United States. There is, however, only one performance theater in the entire country that also has a completely free “entertainment lending library” in its repertoire – and it happens to be Beach Haven’s Surflight Theatre.

In 2018, Surflight’s owner and Off-Broadway producer Al Parinello endowed the theater with 800 books that he had collected over the course of four decades from his personal curated collection. Since then, thanks to further acquisitions and donations, the library has expanded to more than 2,000 books related to all aspects of show business.

The tomes are shelved throughout the theater’s lobby, broken into categories such as Broadway, Dance, Music, Acting, Biography/Autobiography, Television, Radio, Movie Studios, Hollywood, Broadcast News, Comedy and more. The library includes books from the 1940s to the present and contains many best-selling and popular titles.

Any visitor to Surflight Theatre is welcome to borrow any book. Just make a selection and check it out at the box office window, listing your name, phone number, book title and date taken. Please return within three weeks so other Surflight patrons may enjoy it as well. And if you’ve arrived at the theater early and simply want to relax while waiting for the show to begin, you are also welcome to read any book while sitting in a comfortable lobby chair any hour Surflight is open.

Surflight hopes the one-of-a-kind library will continue to grow and asks readers if they happen to have any entertainment-related books, be they hard or soft cover, that they have already enjoyed and are just taking up room on a bookshelf or in a basement, attic or garage to consider donating them to the collection.

Now, Parinello can get happily excited when he’s talking about something that he’s interested in, such as a new Broadway show or an intriguing Surflight offering. But this reporter has never heard him as excited as he was when I called him for a phone interview regarding not only Surflight’s lending library, but also his own personal library. Book collecting has pretty much been a lifelong passion of his. Being somewhat of a bibliophile myself we had a spirited conversation.

He estimates he owns over 7,000 books and constructed a classic library for them in his home, complete with a sliding ladder so he can reach the top shelves. He had to admit, though, that his library is in somewhat a state of disarray.

“Now 70% of my library is in boxes,” Parinello said. “When the (COVID-19) pandemic hit, I couldn’t go to see a Broadway show, couldn’t go out to dinner, so I said, ‘It’s time to take my library seriously. Let’s clean up the library.’”

Of course, any serious bibliophile isn’t simply going to rearrange his collection, dusting it off and attempting to create a catalog on his computer. He’s going to take some time to crack open the pages; he’s going to fondly remember how he tracked down particular acquisitions; in short, he’s going to immerse himself. His library cleanup is far from done, especially since he keeps collecting.

It’s easy to understand why Parinello had an interest in books dealing with the entertainment industry – that was job related. But his interests once went far afield.

One of his early ventures was collecting autographed copies, and he amassed a collection of about 3,000. Still, it was easy for him to pick his favorite acquisition on that front. He has a first edition of Gone With the Wind, signed by Margaret Mitchell.

“I watched the movie and then said to myself, ‘There’s a book.’”

He quickly found a signed copy, but it was from a third printing. That didn’t satisfy him.

“I spent years looking for a signed first edition.”

Of late, Parinello has developed an interest in purchasing the private libraries of show business celebrities.

He had mentioned before, in a hurried between-acts conversation in the Surflight’s lobby, about obtaining the personal libraries of Burt Reynolds and Frank Sinatra. Now he could talk about his collections for a longer time, although he still talked fast because of his excitement.

What sort of books did Reynolds have in his collection?

“He was very interested in acting,” said Parinello. “He had a lot of books from the ’40s, about the great actresses at that time, and silent movie stuff. He was interested in the beginning stages of actors, back in the ’30s and ’40s.

“But he didn’t keep them very well. He always had that persona of being a rough guy; I think he was rough with his books as well.”

As for Sinatra, Parinello said his private library was stuffed with books about politics, not showbiz. That’s right, politics. Did you know the singer and actor known as the “Chairman of the Board” was heavily involved with politicians?

Sinatra’s mother had been a Democratic ward leader, and he campaigned for Franklin D. Roosevelt after meeting the president in 1944. Sinatra’s support for Dems went on for decades, and he campaigned for Harry Truman, Adlai Stevenson and, most famously, for his buddy John F. Kennedy in 1960. He broke with Kennedy – actually, Kennedy broke with him – in 1962 as JFK decided to stay away from Sinatra because of the singer’s alleged mob ties. But Sinatra still supported Hubert Humphrey in 1968.

However, in the early 1970s Sinatra endorsed Ronald Reagan for a second term as governor of California and finally switched parties in 1972 when he supported Richard Nixon in his reelection bid. By 1980 he was such a Reagan supporter that Sinatra donated $4 million to the Gipper’s campaign.

Did Sinatra and Reynolds write in the margins of their books? Book collectors can attest that many readers do so. Surely Sinatra had some bad things to say about some political opponents; Parinello had already said Reynolds didn’t treat his books well. But no, they didn’t. However, Parinello said they did make notes on slips of paper and tuck them into their books.

Parinello has also purchased the private libraries of Douglas Fairbanks Jr. and Al Hirschfeld.

Fairbanks Jr. is best remembered for starring in a string of hit films such as “The Prisoner of Zenda,” “Gunga Din” and “The Corsican Brothers” in the late 1930s and early 1940s before serving as a highly decorated naval officer in World War II. He’s also remembered for being the son of Douglas Fairbanks, the swashbuckling star of the silent movie age. Oh, he also had been married to Joan Crawford.

“It contained a gorgeous photo of Mary Pickford in all her black and white beauty,” said Parinello of his Fairbanks Jr. collection. Pickford was the senior Fairbanks’ wife and the greatest of all female film stars before “talkies” were invented.

Al Hirschfeld was a caricaturist best known for his black and white portraits of celebrities and, especially, Broadway stars. He drew so many Broadway performers over the course of an eight-decade career that he received two lifetime achievement Tony Awards and, shortly after his death in 2003 at the age of 99, had a Broadway theater named after him.

Permanent collections of Hirschfeld’s work can be found in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the New York Public Library and Harvard University. His personal library, though, is in Parinello’s library – he’s in pretty good company.

Where does Parinello find such acquisitions? He explained he has developed many friends in the world of bibliophiles, and they notify him when they see something they think would pique his interest.

Yet Parinello found one of his most prized books the old-fashioned way, by browsing.

“I went to an old bookstore in New York City,” he explained. “I found a book I didn’t understand. It made no sense; it had fold-out pages; it was all over the map. It was written in 1899 – I’m going from memory here – and it was written by an engineer.”

Apparently the engineer had collected writings from inventors and the like, and his book was a forecast of the wonderful miracles that Americans could expect in the 20th century. Parinello, flipping through its pages, found a chapter dedicated to the aeroplane.

“That’s how it was spelled in those days,” Parinello said. “The writer was trying to convince the readers that to make planes fly, we had to learn to ‘control wind.’”

The writer was talking about developing a system of flaps and the controls to move them. And then Parinello noticed the name of the chapter’s writer: a guy named Orville Wright, who along with his brother Wilbur would fly the world’s first successful motor-operated airplane in 1903.

“I gave the guy a couple hundred dollars for the book,” said Parinello, who added its estimated worth today is $27,000.

That was obviously a great find. Then again, Parinello has discovered all sorts of things inside books.

He finds it amazing what readers use to mark their place in a book or possibly hide away. He’s found a draft card, a Social Security card (which he mailed to a Social Security office), and – get this – a complete handwritten will.

Speaking of a will, Parinello is starting to think about securing the future of his collection, perhaps leaving it to an institution similar to the ones mentioned above. The last thing he wants, he said, is to have it broken up and sold in bookstores.

I suggested that I visit his library and have a couple of drinks, and then more drinks, until I got him drunk enough to write a will leaving his collection to me, basically restricted to picking up library discards such as the 1909 First Edition Harvard Classics Five Foot Shelf of Books that was being tossed out of the Toms River branch of the Ocean County Library. Alas, three volumes of the 51-book set are missing, a shame considering a complete set can draw up to $1,000 on the internet.

He laughed. So I guess I’ll never be able to get him to leave that will in a book. Can’t blame a man for trying.

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