Stage Struck -- After Breaking The Glass Ceiling At Microsoft, Ida Cole Resurrects A Seattle Landmark

LAST SPRING, IDA Cole announced her multimillion-dollar renovation of the Paramount Theatre, and her plan to reopen the historic showplace this March with the Broadway musical "Miss Saigon."

It wasn't your standard press conference.

True, Cole did summon reporters, camera crews and arts mavens to the Paramount, a swell old relic of a theater that she has owned since 1992. And a blue-ribbon panel of speakers (including King County council member Ron Sims) assembled to talk about the glorious economic and cultural impact a new, improved Paramount will have on Seattle's downtown Pine Street hub.

So what role did Cole herself play in this event?

As the houselights dimmed, and the palpitating thunder of a simulated helicopter landing rattled the speaker system, she was missing in action.

Would Cole, the former Microsoft Corp. executive and budding entertainment mogul, skip this shindig - an event she'd spent over a year making possible? And a hefty chunk of her own fortune (along with beaucoup bucks from Microsoft chairman Bill Gates and other deep-pocket investors) backing?

No way. Suddenly, in a flurry of strobe lights, a figure garbed in white cotton overalls and cap sprinted down the center aisle of the theater, brandishing the kind of hand-held flares used to guide in planes on an airstrip. As she bounded up to the stage, the cap was whipped off to reveal the flushed, beaming face of a dark-haired woman in robust middle age.

"Ladies and gentlemen," boomed a voice over the PA. "Miss Ida Cole!"

Mischievous. Exuberant. Kinda hokey. That prankish "theme" entrance ("Miss Saigon" takes place during the Vietnam War and features a helicopter crash among its effects) was not what you might expect from one of the city's most successful businesswomen. Yet it was quintessential Ida Cole.

Cole is a self-admitted ham at heart. And what role is she cultivating as Seattle's premiere pop-culture purveyor? The 47-year old Cole answers in her high, soft-buttered voice, "I want to be Queen of the Paramount. That would be perfect!"

TO THOSE who know her well, Cole will be anything but a Monarch of Mean at her impressive hunk of downtown real estate. Friends, former employees, colleagues and even professional rivals extol the woman's authentic kindness and generosity. They also praise her analytical savvy and flair with a spreadsheet. And they admire her civic commitment.

The sassy-queen analogy aside, Cole describes herself as "a very normal, average person." She drives a dented van when she could afford a chauffeur-driven limousine. She'd rather be at a Mariners game than an opera opening. And sitting in her rather drab office on the ninth floor of the Paramount tower, dressed in well-tailored but unflashy blazer and slacks, Cole insists, "I'm really just like everyone else."

Don't you believe it. Though she wears her All-American wholesomeness with pride, Cole is a gentle paradox: a woman with the perkiness of Mary Tyler Moore, the marketing smarts of a Fortune 500 tycoon and a fierce determination that won't quit. And her achievements are hardly average.

Average people don't go from serving drinks on United Airline flights in the 1960s to a brilliant career in the hottest go-go businesses of the 1970s and '80s.

Average people don't stand up to billionaire boy wonder Bill Gates at his most bullying. Or waltz out of Microsoft after five years' service with a stock portfolio worth (in today's terms) roughly $40 million to $50 million.

Even exceptional people rarely take on a civic project fraught with as much high-wire risk as the $37-million Paramount renovation juggernaut.

And most theater owners don't enjoy mucking around on construction sites as much as Ida Cole.

On a drizzly Seattle afternoon last month, she ushered a visitor on the umpteenth tour she'd given of the Paramount in mid-renovation. Her jet-black hair covered by a hard hat, Cole led the way around piles of debris and gooey mud puddles. She seemed oblivious to the wet cement gunking up her expensive suede boots and the plaster dust dirtying her designer raincoat.

Cole was too excited about the handiwork of the 80-member construction crew to care. "Look at that," she exclaimed, pointing to the elaborate plaster grillwork emerging from decades of grime in the Paramount lobby. "They're cleaning it inch by inch, with something like Spic 'n Span."

Moving into the auditorium, she pointed to the raw, gaping pit where the theater's original seats and stage had been. "When they first tore out the floor to make way for the new seating system, I just wept," she confided. "Suddenly it looked like a place where you'd hold a rodeo."

By the time Cole, architect John Savo (of the NBBJ Firm) and a large contingent of workmen get finished with the 1928 former film palace, it will be about as much like a rodeo corral as St. Mark's Cathedral. When "Miss Saigon" opens, the theater will boast spiffy new patron amenities and an expanded stagehouse big enough to accommodate every mega-show - "Showboat" "Sunset Boulevard" - in the pipeline.

And next year, if all goes as planned, the adjacent Paramount tower, which once housed modest apartments and music studios, will be the site of a restaurant, banquet rooms, offices and retail facilities.

Cole envisions the future Paramount as an "elegant, full-service entertainment center where you can spend an entire evening" - whether you're coming to see "Miss Saigon" or a Nine Inch Nails rock concert.

It all seems feasible now. But in 1992, when Cole bought the structure, it was an architectural grande dame on the brink of the same wrecking-ball fate that befell Seattle's historic Music Hall Theatre in 1991.

And despite her personal investment of millions and unwavering determination, not even Cole can guarantee that the Paramount will be economically viable in the long term. Especially if the city government, which in the past took a worrisome, laissez-faire attitude toward the loss of Seattle's theatrical heritage, doesn't pitch in enough support.

Still, if anyone can get this thing to fly it's probably Ida Cole. All her life, she's been pursuing her passions - and making them pay.

IT DIDN'T hurt that Cole started out with that increasingly rare underpinning: a happy middle-class childhood. She smilingly recalls scenes from her Virginia youth: fishing; bowling; playing classical music; solving math problems with her father, John Sherman (a career engineer for General Electric); her mom, Marie; and her older sister, Mary.

"Dad never let on if he was uncomfortable having daughters instead of sons," Cole reflects. "He just loved to communicate and share what he knew. I remember drawing fulcrums on the tablecloth, and I had a chemistry set at age 8. I didn't know how unusual that was for a girl until much, much later."

At public school in Lynchburg, Va., Cole established a pattern that still holds: study hard, and then have big fun. Maybe that's why after earning a B.A. in math from University of Massachusetts, the brainy, self-confident young woman became a stewardess.

"I wanted to travel," she says. "And there was an element of exclusivity about it. All the girls wanted to fly, but they only picked one out of every 200 who applied."

Cole won her wings and signed on with United Airlines. Based in San Francisco, in 1968 a bastion of West Coast good times and alternative lifestyles, she used her airline perks to fly often to Hawaii and Europe.

In 1970, at 23, she chucked flying to marry a UCLA grad she'd met at a wedding. Drafted into the Army out of college, Bruce Cole was sent to Fort Ord, near Monterey, Calif., to run a drug-treatment center for GIs back from Vietnam.

The Army sojourn was a turning point for Ida Cole. It gave her a heady taste of the fantasy California Good Life: "We had this cute little house in Big Sur near the beach and a sheepdog named Romeo."

But the far-away, escalating war in Southeast Asia cast a shadow over the idyll: "Bruce and I were both pacifists, but there we were in a military culture. He hated the Army, and had a terrible time. I had no idea how to help him."

The situation strained the marriage but introduced Cole to the brave new world of computers. When she heard that Litton Scientific Systems, a local military contractor, was hiring programmers, Cole "talked my way into a job. I had no experience at all, just a background in theoretical math."

Her duties? Analyzing computer data collected from war games.

"We had these tanks and helicopters, and staged mock battles. I was this cute girl in an army uniform, having fun writing these little codes. It was easy to see it as a game that had nothing to do with guys coming back all messed up from the war."

Cole's naivete was shattered the day she read that a Cobra helicopter, tested by Litton, had dropped bombs on human targets in Vietnam.

"My marriage broke up," she says. "I blame my husband's depression over being in the Army, and my horror at finding out the work I did killed people. I quit my job right then."

What happened next was a typical switch for Cole: She downshifted into play mode, taking off on a yearlong, cross-country van and motorcycle odyssey with Art Case - a "hippie programmer" who would be her live-in companion for the next 15 years.

But the nomadic life, like the stewardess gig, was more a lark than a lifestyle. Returning to San Francisco, Cole nabbed a new job at the monster Bank of America, where she got a crash course in market research and global profitability analysis.

Then came a career break: a position at Tymshare, an early Silicon Valley outfit that made a bundle selling online computer time to businesses without their own systems. As an applications expert, Cole arranged tailormade computer programs for Tymshare's corporate clients. And she loved it: "It was my first experience with a hot-shot, go-go company expanding like crazy. We did all these great applications, including the first banking by phone.

"I also discovered my favorite work paradigm at Tymshare. It's to come into a $100-million business, then leave when it gets to be a billion. When you get that big, some of the fun goes out of it."

AS THE NEW cyber-industry began taking the world by storm, Cole eagerly moved to the epicenter. The first time she saw an Apple II personal computer run a spreadsheet, her radar told her: "Who's going to rent computer time when they can own one of these for $2,500?"

It took more than a year to break in at Apple Computer, the feisty industry leader commandeered by nerd dynamo Steve Wozniak and its golden-boy CEO, Steve Jobs. But Cole does not discourage easily. An inside connection finally won her a job heading Apple's entire Applications Group - "way over my head at the time."

The stage-struck side of Cole flourished at Apple. "We'd do these road shows to introduce products, and I was such a ham!" she laughs. "I enjoyed dealing with the press, the public, getting quoted in the Wall Street Journal. We felt like stars, because the world told us we were."

And yet, as always, Cole knew instinctively how to reach the masses. Chris Espinosa, now manager of Apple's Media Tools division, remembers her as an imaginative marketing person and a clear leader.

"Ida was one of the strongest advocates of carrying the message of computing to regular people, not just technical types and businesses. Her viewpoint colored the whole Apple approach, and we're still pulling in two, three billion dollars a year from products she helped develop."

Apple in the early '80s was, says Spinosa, still loose enough to be collaborative. "We floated ideas and blue-skied a lot. The atmosphere was not dog-eat-dog." But it wasn't summer camp, either. During the many secret reshufflings, heads rolled with brutal regularity. And the Silicon Valley brand of ruthless machismo appalled Cole.

"It was a young person's idea of how to be rough, so it was very raw. I didn't prize that style, and it wasn't ever the way I wanted to be. I liken it to Tupperware: you were prized for the abuse you could take."

Yet however rugged the playing field could get at Apple, it was air-cushioned compared to Cole's next workplace: Microsoft.

Cole moved to Seattle in 1985, after an abrupt break with Case. ("He met this blonde lady in a sushi bar, and was gone.") It turned into another stroke of crack career timing.

By then, Apple no longer reigned supreme. Now Microsoft, the Eastside-based maker of DOS (Disc Operating System), the lingua franca of a daunting new array of personal computers, had the edge. After Microsoft exec and ex-Apple colleague Jeff Raikes touted Cole's abilities, chairman Bill Gates invited her to become his first Vice President of Applications - and Microsoft's top woman employee.

"Microsoft was successful when I got there, and a powerhouse when I left," Cole likes to say. But her tenure was a bumpy ride. At 37, single, with few friends in the area, she found Northwesterners cordial but distant.

And at work, Cole soon crossed swords with Gates - who, at 29, was a brilliant wunderkind from another planet. Though reluctant to criticize him today ("I respect Bill enormously, and he's grown so much in recent years"), Cole admits his scorched-earth management style and her softer, gentler approach didn't mix.

"It's true Bill and I did not hit it off, and on a day-to-day basis, we didn't work well together," she explains carefully. "I had very little tolerance for that raw, confrontational style of his. And I was way too old to sit at the feet of the young master."

In contrast to the party-down ambience at Apple, "the machismo at Microsoft was how many hours you worked, how little sleep you got. People barely married, let alone had families. I didn't like it at all, and thought I'd made a bad mistake."

Cole almost bailed out in late 1985, after surgery to remove some benign ovarian cysts. She had postponed the procedure to help introduce Microsoft's Excel software line, and returned to work earlier than recommended. But on her first day back, Gates unleashed a scathing tantrum about her absence.

"I can't imagine he'd do that now," she insists. "This was before his mother, Mary, got cancer, and he just didn't know better. But at the time I said, who needs this? And I wanted out."

The president of Microsoft at the time, Jon Shirley, urged Cole to stay - and Gates offered her a plum assignment out of the direct line of ire. As a result, she spent the next four years as head of the fledgling International Division, trotting the globe to spread the Microsoft gospel. Under Cole's guidance, the international line swelled from 40 products available in five languages to 360 products in 22 languages - and Microsoft's overseas profits soared.

Cole's social life brightened, too. She became a den mother to younger colleagues, and made friends in her Pike Market condo complex, including future City Councilwoman Jan Drago. And she found the Intiman Theatre.

"I fell in love with the Intiman!" is how Cole explains her long-standing devotion to the Seattle drama company. She's currently president of Intiman's board, and remains the nonprofit theater's biggest fan.

Her drama fixation didn't stop there. Microsoft colleague Tina Podlodowski recalls a business trip in England with Cole: "Our big meeting ended early, so Ida said, `We've got to see "Miss Saigon!" ' We took turns standing on line at the box office for six hours to get tickets, because Ida was dying to see it."

COLE'S CURRENT THEATER obsession is why you won't often catch her at her elegant Queen Anne abode.

The four-bedroom home seems more formal than its sole occupant. The living room is like a small gallery, adorned with fanciful paintings and sculptures, by mostly Northwest artists. The sunny kitchen is cozier. Out back there's a guest bungalow, a swimming pool-patio area where Cole often holds fund-raising events for charities and Democratic candidates, and another panorama of ferries crossing Puget Sound.

This is the quiet haven Cole bought, and completely redecorated, after exiting from Microsoft in 1990.

"After 20 years in the computer industry I was just finished with it. I couldn't get excited about new products anymore," she says. Again, Cole took a hiatus to recharge. Wealthy now, she could indulge in an archaeological dig in Tunisia, a cooking course in Italy, a trip to Ireland with her folks.

But soon it was time for a new passion. And an ambitious local music producer named Chip Wilson led her to it.

IN THE PARAMOUNT'S high-perched offices, Wilson and Cole work at opposite ends of one long desk. They travel often on business together, brainstorm at midnight by phone.

They are so close many assume they are paramours. Untrue, both insist. "I should be so lucky to be with someone as wonderful as Ida," says Wilson, a softspoken yet scrappy Olympia native. "But we're like brother and sister, and great co-workers."

Cole concurs, adding with surprising casualness, "I'm a problem-solver, not a visionary. But I've always worked closely with visionaries, and Chip is right up there in my book with Bill Gates and Steve Jobs.

"It was Chip's idea, back in 1991, that I buy the Paramount," she insists. "He said the owners had money problems, and in two weeks their creditors would take over the theater and probably end up tearing it down."

The dilapidated old show house was not even for sale at the time. But Norm Volotin and Ulysses Lewis, the deeply indebted proprietors, were indeed about to lose control of the Seattle cultural monument. Since the 1970s, they had resurrected it from the dead with popular rock concerts and Dan Bean's Best of Broadway series. But they borrowed heavily to do it, and now Seattle was poised to lose yet another landmark. If it went, only six of the city's 17 pre-World War II theaters would remain.

That's where Cole stepped in, winning forever the hearts of many preservationists and concertgoers. She made an offer that was accepted, and though neither side will reveal the final price, Cole says $9 million to $10 million changed hands. (She estimates the entire renovation and sale package at about $37 million.)

Says Volotin, "It was hard for us to let go. But the city wouldn't move for us and it would for Ida. I have total respect for what she's doing."

Cole's decision to buy the Paramount was made in haste. But since closing the deal in 1992, she has devoted her life to the follow-up.

Her first plan was that only she, and ultra-wealthy former Microsoft financial officer Frank Gaudette, would bankroll the much-needed theater renovation. But Gaudette's untimely death from cancer, and a continual escalation of renovation costs, meant she had to line up more partners: 16, in all, including former Microsoft colleagues Gates, Jeff Raikes, Tina Podlodowski and Jeff Watkins.

Cole also lobbied for (and won) a $1 million capital grant from the Metro-King County Arts Council that went to the Paramount's nonprofit arm, the Seattle Landmark Association. Another million from Washington's Building for the Arts program is pending. And she negotiated a higher return on the Transfer Development Rights the city will purchase from the Paramount this year. (The TDRs can be resold later to businesses seeking permits for new high-rise developments.)

Last month Cole was still chasing $5 million for the Phase II renovation of the Paramount tower - a critical economic component of her plan, and one that theater restorationists in other cities say could be vital to its success.

Cole admits, "Raising the money was much harder than I ever expected. But this isn't any do-gooder project. It's a business investment, for the city and the private investors. They can expect a return - in jobs, in taxes, in profits. It won't be the return you'd get from Microsoft stock, but it will be respectable."

If more investors can't be found, Cole hopes the city will step in to buy up the remaining Transfer Development Rights for about $3 million. That would bring public support for the project "to about 20 percent."

Meanwhile, with Wilson, Cole and her adjunct for-profit company, Transactive Technologies, are branching into another risky but potentially lucrative business: the SuperTerminal. The high-tech, kiosk-style ticketing machine will get a Seattle test run in 1995.

"The Paramount will make money for Ida at some point," says Norm Volotin, "but she's clearly not doing this for the money. These old theaters are like priceless antiques, and she should get all the help she needs to save this one."

If Cole succeeds with the Paramount, it could become a premier West Coast arena, and a major pillar of downtown redevelopment. With the Eagles auditorium soon to be renovated by A Contemporary Theatre, a new downtown opera house in the planning stages, and the 5th Avenue Theatre in operation, the Paramount may become the linchpin of a reborn Seattle theater district.

That is the master plan.

But Cole would rather frame things in down-home and personal terms. Like the story she shares often about the first time she went to the Paramount. It was years ago, to catch the post-punk rock band the Violent Femmes with her stepson, John Paul.

"I remember going into the bathroom," Cole says, "and seeing this wonderful old powder room and all these giggling young girls in black putting on their makeup. I thought, this place must have been so classy at one time. You could just imagine the beautiful women in evening dresses down there, having a wonderful night out at an elegant theater."

At the opening gala of "Miss Saigon," and hundreds of other rock and theatrical events to follow, Cole's fantasy of restoring a grand old theater to its prime should come true.

And until further notice, Ida Cole will be reigning over it all, as the Paramount's benevolent queen next door.

Misha Berson is theater critic for The Seattle Times. Harley Soltes is Pacific's staff photographer. ----------------------------------------------------------------- Paramount Facts

- The elegant, 3,000-seat Seattle Theatre (later renamed the Paramount Theatre) was designed by prominent Seattle architect B. Marcus Priteca. It opened on March 1, 1928, at Ninth Avenue and Pine Street, with a gala premiere party, the live "A Merry Widow Revue," and the silent-film comedy "Feel My Pulse," starring Bebe Daniels. Later the theater presented both stage shows and Hollywood films, while the tower next door was used for music studios and apartments. Since the 1970s, the Paramount also has hosted many rock concerts in addition to Broadway touring musicals.

- Ida Cole purchased the Paramount in 1992, after it had been partially restored by previous owners Norm Volotin and Ulysses Lewis. Total purchase and renovation price for the theater and the adjacent nine-story tower: approximately $37 million.

- After extensive renovations, the Paramount reopens in March for an eight-week run of a new $12 million touring production of "Miss Saigon." The hit Broadway musical, which begins rehearsal this month at the Paramount, is set in Vietnam and based on the "Madame Butterfly" opera. It previews March 16 through 25, followed by an opening night gala on Sunday, March 26. The run continues through May 7. Ticket information: 292-ARTS.

Paramount Facts II

Major improvements to the Paramount include:

- Plush new burgundy theater seats based on the "ergonomically correct" chairs at Davies Symphony Hall in San Francisco.

- An innovative Italian seating system that can be quickly reconfigured from standard theatrical seating to cabaret seating with small tables to a flat dance floor for rock-music events (will be installed in late 1995).

- Completely refurbished restrooms with 59 bathroom stalls (compared to 19 before renovation).

- Expanded 94-foot-by-48-foot stage (before renovation: 76 feet by 29 feet).

- Back-wall extension, which gives access to larger sets for such big-scale musicals as "Miss Saigon" and "Sunset Boulevard."

- New box-office area on the Ninth Avenue side of the building. Patrons will line up under an awning, be warmed by space heaters and divert themselves with interactive video displays.