Wax Museum:Melt down
By Reed Parsell

     SAN FRANCISCO -- As California struggles with an electricity shortage and consumers are absorbing the shock to their checking accounts, there is some talk of penny-pinching through the quaint use of candles. May I suggest there is a potentially large supply of them near Fisherman's Wharf, inside the recently reopened Wax Museum?

     Oh sure, there are several paraffin personages here worth preserving, but others so little resemble their real-life models that you might as well stick a wick in them and let the flame do its work.

     Steve McQueen, for example, is identifiable by name tag only. He could be almost any star this side of Diana Ross. Want to save a buck in utility bills? Let this wax dud star in a different sort of "Towering Inferno."

     Twenty years ago I visited Madame Tussaud's in London, and in 1994 I sampled another large wax museum somewhere near Disneyland. Throw in the San Francisco entry and that's two wax museums too many. Every one has been a disappointment, in pretty much similar ways.

     Many wax figures have the Steve McQueen problem: You simply cannot recognize them without a scorecard. Others have a pasty look, as if they have been embalmed and are lying in open caskets for viewings. Some have impossibly smooth, shiny faces, the texture rather like that of an apple that has been rubbed vigorously on pant legs.

     A high percentage, especially in San Francisco's museum, have oddly shaped bodies draped in poorly fitted clothing. Frank Sinatra, with his spindly frame, looks like a puppet.

     Last summer the Wax Museum at Fisherman's Wharf opened its $15 million facility at 145 Jefferson St., across from Boudin's sourdough bakery and cafe. More than 250 petroleum-enhanced statues are inside the building, which for some reason was modeled after a train station in Santiago, Chile, that was designed honest, I kid you not by that towering French engineer, Alexandre-Gustave Eiffel.

     Also housed in the structure is a Rainforest Cafe.

     Once past the museum's ticket desk, visitors descend stairs to the first, and one of the best, displays. The famous outstretched-arms-at-the-bow scene from "Titanic" is re-created. Leonardo DiCaprio's wax figure is good, but Kate Winslet's is superb. The subtle touch that caught my eye is the upper gums visible in her smile, which was so infectious in that 1997 blockbuster that it alone could have launched a thousand ships.

     Forgive me for waxing poetic about Winslet. Nothing past her at the museum compares. Practically the next face one encounters, jarringly, is Adolf Hitler's. Does he really merit a spot? Nearby are gathered six figures under the "Humanitarians" banner. The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., with graying hair, looks close to 60, an age he never attained before being assassinated in 1968, when he was 39."WWII Generals" are next, with a cigar-chomping Winston Churchill flashing a victory sign while leaning on a bullet-riddled jeep. He and Douglas MacArthur have that shiny, rubbed-apple complexion. Though they were not generals, presidents Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Harry Truman are included. They both look like FDR, frankly.

     There is lots of cheesiness in this place. "Vixens" has that sort of feel to it, complete with a pinheaded Marie Antoinette. I must admit to being a bit smitten with Jezebel, though, whose golden dress covers just one breast while a red robe is draped leisurely over the other. "

     . Ronald Reagan and George Bush (the elder) have grainy, brown faces that look as though they have been left out in a sandstorm. Richard Nixon has a goofy smile, totally out of character. Lyndon Johnson's not bad, neither is Jackie Kennedy, but John F. Kennedy could just as easily be, say, Richard Gephardt.

     On and on it goes. Major religions are depicted, including Judaism (Moses wielding a stone tablet) and Buddism (Prince Siddhartha Gautama on a serpent's throne). Christianity gets the star treatment with an interesting, three-dimensional adaptation of Leonardo da Vinci's "The Last Supper."

     Sir Thomas Lawrence's "Pinkie" and Sir Thomas Gainsborough's "Blue Boy" are among the other re-created paintings, the former much better realized.

© 1999 Scripps Howard News Service.