During the 1940s and 1950s, Broadway shows and first-run movies were the main attractions in Times Square. But by the end of the sixties, the neighborhood’s unsavory elements began to overwhelm legitimate entertainments. “It sort of flipped,” said Weisbrod. Theater people with long memories are still haunted by a 60 Minutes report in the 1970s that showed a group of tourists from the South getting off their bus to see a Broadway show—and then getting right back on again because Times Square was so dangerous. “They were so scared, they wouldn’t walk one block,” recalled George Wachtel, who headed up audience research and development for the Broadway League, then known as the League of New York Theatres and Producers.
As Times Square slid into the gutter, Mayor Lindsay shrugged. “I don’t think that it’s gotten worse,” he said, adding that as a congressman in the 1950s he’d heard the same complaints. Theater people, many his friends, were appalled. If things continued this way, Broadway might unravel as well.13 A few theater people made an effort to brighten up Times Square. Producer Joseph “Kippy” Kipness bought several potted trees one day and put them at the corner of Broadway and West Forty-Seventh Street. “It was his way of cleaning up the place,” recalled his press agent, Shirley Herz. Under pressure, Lindsay created the Times Square Law Enforcement Coordination Committee in 1972. It made some headway but wouldn’t become a force in the area until the aggressive Sidney Baumgarten ran it during the Beame administration. As Sheehy reported in New York magazine, all of the massage parlors the police had closed down in the fall of 1971 had reopened by the summer of 1972.
As if Broadway didn’t have enough trouble by 1970, the great bull market that had begun in 1963—and created many backers of Broadway shows—came crashing down. In May 1969, the Dow Jones Industrial Average peaked at 970. A year later, it fell to 631. Money that could have been risked for a flutter on a Broadway show vanished. There were just fifty-nine productions (nearly a third revivals) in the 1969–70 Broadway season. Most were flops. “We went off the cliff,” recalled producer Manny Azenberg.
Broadway was facing its worst crisis since the Great Depression. But back then, it had two saviors, Lee and J. J. Shubert, who preserved their theaters and kept the industry afloat. This time around, Lawrence Shubert Lawrence Jr. was at the helm, running the business from his barstool at Sardi’s. If the Shubert empire was to survive—if Broadway was to survive—he could not.
* * *
I. Many years later, Bono and the Edge decided to write a rock score to Spider-Man: Turn off the Dark after attending a dinner party at which Andrew Lloyd Webber joked, “I want to thank rock musicians for leaving me alone for twenty-five years—I’ve had the theater all to myself!” Considering the fate of Spider-Man: Turn off the Dark, Bono and the Edge should never have taken the bait.
CHAPTER EIGHT
The Coup
By 1972, a civil war was raging within the Shubert empire. On one side, in the Sardi Building, were Lawrence Shubert Lawrence Jr. and his sycophants—Howard Teichmann, Hickey Katz, Bernard Friedman (Norman Light, who could match Larry drink for drink, had died in 1970). On the other side—across the street on West Forty-Fourth above the Shubert Theatre—were Gerald Schoenfeld and Bernard Jacobs. “You didn’t have to be around here too long to recognize that Bernie and Jerry were the guys that were good for the company, and this other group was bad,” their strongest ally, Phil Smith, said.
As Schoenfeld and Jacobs gained more influence due to Larry’s heavy drinking and lax work habits (he usually didn’t show up to the office until well after noon), the sycophants warned him that the lawyers were trying to take over. “You can’t trust them, they’re looking to do you in,” was a constant refrain in the Sardi Building. Booze exacerbated Larry’s paranoia and erratic behavior. He once interviewed a stagehand for a job. The stagehand announced, “I don’t drink, Mr. Lawrence.” Larry exploded. “What’s wrong with a guy who drinks?!” “He almost challenged the guy to a fight over that remark,” Smith recalled. The sycophants also encouraged Larry in the belief that he owned the company, when in fact, according to J. J.’s will, the Shubert Foundation did. Schoenfeld and Jacobs, he believed, could be fired at his whim.
The lawyers, meanwhile, were frustrated that, as the theater business was crumbling, Larry Shubert had no interest in trying to save it. By 1972, the Shuberts had lost many of their longtime tenants. Mame and Cabaret both closed in 1970. Fiddler on the Roof, which had earned the company a fortune in rent, played its final performance July 2, 1972. Not much had come along to replace them, and since the Shuberts had not invested in these hits, the company reaped nothing from touring productions.
Larry Shubert never had a nose for hits in any case. He had the chance to put Hello, Dolly! into one of his theaters in 1964, but didn’t go after it. David Merrick had another show that year—110 in the Shade. The Shuberts took that instead. Schoenfeld and Jacobs, having attended backers’ auditions for both shows, urged Larry to take Hello, Dolly! He overruled them. One Merrick show was just like another, he said. 110 in the Shade ran a little over a year; Hello, Dolly! was a blockbuster.
Larry Shubert cultivated few relationships with producers and creators. When a producer wanted to book a theater for a stage adaptation of The Selling of the President, Joe McGinniss’s account of the marketing of Richard Nixon in the 1968 campaign, Larry balked. “We’ll get sued—Nixon will sue us!” he yelled. Never mind that Nixon was a public figure, or that the producer, John Flaxman, would have cleared the text with his own lawyers. Larry Shubert worried instead that the president of the United States would sue him. (The show eventually wound up at a Shubert theater, but it was a flop.) There were other kinds of shows Larry didn’t want in his theaters—black shows. The Shuberts had an unexpected hit in 1971 at the Ambassador Theatre with Ain’t Supposed to Die a Natural Death, Melvin Van Peebles’s musical about life in the ghetto. Peebles had a new show—Don’t Play Us Cheap—and wanted to put it in a Shubert theater, many of which were empty in 1972. Schoenfeld, Jacobs, and Smith wanted the booking. But when they brought it up with Larry, he resisted. “Wait a minute, wait a minute. My mother went to see Ain’t Supposed to Die a Natural Death the other day and she was scared for her life!” he said. “Those blacks talk to the stage!” When the lawyers suggested that it would not be helpful if the company were seen as discriminating against black shows, Larry barked, “Well, I’m voting for Lester Maddox—twice!”
Although Larry Shubert could barely understand the terms of his own theater contracts—“numbers went over his head,” said Smith—he insisted on signing everything. Which meant tracking him down at one of his haunts and attempting to explain the deal. His usual, drunken response was, “Are these Merrick terms? I don’t want Merrick terms!” He was convinced that David Merrick was always getting the better of him, even though he never negotiated with Merrick or even bothered to learn the basics of tenant-landlord agreements. And he remained suspicious of “the lawyers.” When they drew up a contract, they would go over to his office and talk him through the terms. After he signed the contract, he’d go drinking with his buddies, who would fuel his paranoia and convince him that his lawyers had given him a raw deal. Then he’d return to the office, summon Schoenfeld and Jacobs, and demand that contracts be renegotiated. When they tried to explain that the deal was fair—and that it had been signed—he would snap, “I went to the University of Pennsylvania. I was an English major. Don’t talk down to me!” Jerry Leichtling, Schoenfeld’s assistant, recalled, “Every time Bernie and Jerry would come back from their journeys across the street, they would be absolutely flaring. The whole place was thick with tension. There were factions everywhere.”
Above the Shubert Theatre, the lawyers, aided by a small but loyal team, did what they could to keep the company from falling apart. Despite the intrigue and backstabbing over at the Sardi Building, Schoenfeld and Jacobs tried to keep the atmosphere in their offices jolly. “It was an utterly wonderful place to work,” said Leichtling, “as
sweet and competent and generous a place as you could want. There was a real sense of family above the Shubert Theatre—that this was a family business. It wasn’t their family, but that was the climate they created.” The two men were a study in contrasts. Schoenfeld was always well dressed, courtly, and gregarious. Jacobs “dressed like a guy who gets his suits off the rack,” said Leichtling, and could be awkward and taciturn, though he had a sly wit. He liked Sinatra at Madison Square Garden, while Schoenfeld preferred Vladimir Horowitz at Carnegie Hall.
Though Larry Shubert came to despise the lawyers, he must have known he could not function without them. He never tried to throw them out. But he struck at them in petty ways, such as taking away their house seats or banishing them from opening nights. Meanwhile, producers were reluctant to deal with the Shuberts. “You didn’t want to bother with Larry,” said producer Manny Azenberg. “If you went up to audition a show for him, he’d be drunk and fall asleep. It was embarrassing. You could talk to Bernie and Jerry, but they weren’t the boss. Larry was. And he was a disaster. It was easier to deal with other theater owners—and there were a lot more back then.”
The company was in trouble. In the 1971–72 season, the theaters lost $2 million. The nontheatrical properties earned $1.5 million, but that still meant an overall loss of $500,000 for the company. “Shubert officials believe this is the first time since the Depression that the overall operation of the Shubert businesses has suffered a loss,” the New York Times reported.1
From their offices above the Shubert Theatre, Schoenfeld and Jacobs began planning a coup. The power in the empire rested not with Larry Shubert but, as per J. J.’s will, with the board of directors of the Shubert Foundation. There were, in 1972, six directors—Larry Shubert, Eckie Shubert (John’s widow), Irving “Rocky” Wall (Larry’s lawyer), Jerry Schoenfeld, Bernie Jacobs, and the mysterious Irving Goldman, who had been appointed by Larry for, as some whispered, services rendered during the Surrogate Court battle for John Shubert’s estate. After her husband’s death, Eckie, like Larry, was suspicious of the lawyers. But over the years they courted her. “They were extremely solicitous of her,” said Leichtling. Schoenfeld was a frequent visitor to her large white house in Byram, Connecticut, taking up papers for her to sign and keeping her up to date on the goings-on at the company. It is likely that during those visits, Schoenfeld informed her of Larry Shubert’s manifest shortcomings. By 1972, Eckie Shubert was on the side of the lawyers. Rocky Wall was coming around to their point of view as well. Wall wound up on the Shubert board because he represented the choreographer Oona White, who was Larry Shubert’s girlfriend. Though recruited by Larry, he, too, recognized that an incompetent was running the company and began to throw his support to the lawyers.
The lone holdout was Irving Goldman. He supported Larry Shubert, not much caring, it seemed, about his drinking or the company’s growing financial concerns. Goldman wasn’t around the Shubert offices much. When he did show up there was a “sense of sleaziness” about him, Leichtling recalled. He was running his paint company as well as the Jola Candy Company, which operated candy vending machines throughout the New York City subway system. Schoenfeld, who was guarded about Goldman’s connection to the Shubert empire, would often whisper how his fellow board member was raking in a lot of “nickels and dimes” from all those vending machines. Goldman also had an interest in Shubert ticketing. Leichtling delivered theater tickets to Goldman’s good friend, Surrogate Court Judge Samuel DiFalco, exchanging them for envelopes he’d then drop off at Goldman’s office. “I never knew what was in those envelopes,” he said, “but my deep suspicion—cash.”
Goldman’s other area of expertise was backroom politics, primarily getting his close friend Abe Beame elected mayor in 1974. John Lindsay, who by now had switched from the Republican Party to the Democratic Party, had decided to run for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1972. Lindsay had defeated Beame in 1965, but with the city careening to bankruptcy, Beame, plodding and uninspiring, began to have some appeal. An accountant by training, he had served as city comptroller from 1961 to 1969. His financial expertise was desperately needed (or so it was believed at the time).
Though Schoenfeld and Jacobs were beginning to have concerns about Goldman’s reputation, they needed his vote to oust Lawrence Shubert Lawrence Jr. from the board. And they’d begun to sense his relationship with Larry Shubert was fraying. When Larry got drunk, he was capable of insulting anyone. One night he got into a fight with Goldman (nobody knows about what), and the next day, a fuming Goldman told Schoenfeld, “He’ll never talk to me like that again and get away with it. Ever.” Goldman was turning on his friend. But the support of someone like Irving Goldman always comes with a price. And so a deal was stuck. If Goldman agreed to vote against Lawrence Shubert Lawrence Jr., he could rule over the Shubert empire alongside Schoenfeld and Jacobs. The company would be run by a three-man executive committee, with Schoenfeld overseeing nontheatrical real estate operations and public relations, Jacobs running and booking Shubert theaters, and Goldman controlling vendors and concessions. Goldman held out for another plum: president of the Shubert Foundation, which would give him control over millions of dollars to be doled out in the form of grants to organizations of his choosing.
The fox was angling to guard the hen house.
“Bernie and Jerry recognized that in order to survive, they needed Irving,” said Phil Smith. “So that meant they had to give him more power.”
Bernie Jacobs put it this way: “The price of getting rid of Lawrence was Goldman. We didn’t know how high the price would be.”2
• • •
Albert Poland, a young producer, had a sense something was wrong at the Shubert offices one summer day in 1972. Jerry was “wound up tighter than a drum” and his secretary, Betty Spitz, “looked like she was on the verge of running to the nearest exit,” Poland remembered. Schoenfeld and Jacobs were fond of Poland, and did legal work for him on the side. Their main client was, of course, Shubert, but as they were not highly paid corporate lawyers, J. J. had always allowed them to freelance—provided they drop everything when he called. In addition to Poland, they also represented a young producer named Bruce Paltrow, who would go on to create some of television’s most popular shows, including The White Shadow and St. Elsewhere. Poland was a frequent visitor to the offices above the Shubert Theatre. He liked to wear a cape, much to Schoenfeld’s delight. “Here comes David Belasco!” he’d say whenever Poland swept in.
Poland met the lawyers in the mid-sixties, when he produced his first show, a touring production of The Fantasticks. His little show was orchestrated for four musicians, but many of the theaters he booked had contracts with the musicians’ union that required many more players. With his youthful charm and quick humor, Poland could get the union to waive the requirement. Except in Philadelphia. The Forrest Theatre required a minimum of twenty musicians. The union would not budge. The theater manager told Poland to call Gerald Schoenfeld, who negotiated contracts with the musicians. Schoenfeld agreed to look into the matter. But he wasn’t much help. “Look,” he told Poland. “The musicians are ready and willing to play. And if you don’t have orchestrations for twenty of them, that’s your problem.”
Poland was furious. He went over to G. Schirmer’s music store in New York and got an orchestration for “The Star-Spangled Banner” for twenty musicians. He told his stage manager to put folding chairs on the stage of the Forrest and order the musicians to play “The Star-Spangled Banner” at every performance. After that, he planned to lock them in their dressing room until the show was over. The press loved the stunt. The Wall Street Journal cheered him on. Poland called Schoenfeld and told him what he had done. Schoenfeld was amused. “Well, Albert,” he said, “you won the first round. Let’s see what we can do together.” From then on, Schoenfeld and Jacobs represented Poland and his burgeoning Off-Broadway career.
But Poland had noticed some strange goings-on lately. For one thing, Schoenfeld ha
d summoned him to his office and told him to take his and Jacobs’s names out of the Playbills for his shows. Schoenfeld also wanted to scrutinize the finances of an Off-Broadway show Poland was producing, The Dirtiest Show in Town, a raunchy revue with a witty script by Tom Eyen (who would go on to create Dreamgirls). Off Broadway, an umbrella term for small theaters outside of Times Square, was doing a tidy business in the late sixties and early seventies just as Broadway was spiraling downward. There was energy and excitement in New York’s smaller theaters. The New York Times was heralding such writers as Lanford Wilson, Sam Shepard, David Rabe, and Charles Ludlam. Tickets were also cheap. The Broadway establishment had taken notice—and was not happy. The League of New York Theatres and Producers began suggesting that its mortal enemies, the theater unions, close in on Off Broadway. When Poland told Schoenfeld that The Dirtiest Show in Town was making a profit of $6,500 a week on a gross of $12,000, Schoenfeld said, “That’s too much profit. You need some union stagehands down there.”
The unions went after Off Broadway in 1971 with a three-month strike by Actors’ Equity that nearly killed off many small theater companies. Shortly before the strike, Schoenfeld offered Poland a job as a house manager at a Broadway theater. Poland turned him down. Looking back, Poland thinks Schoenfeld was part of the League’s conspiracy to destroy Off Broadway. Since he and Jacobs were planning to take over the floundering Shubert empire, the last thing they needed was competition from non-union theaters. But Schoenfeld was also looking out for Poland by offering him a job on Broadway. “I think Jerry was trying to be a friend while destroying my turf,” said Poland. “And shortly after he and Bernie took over, he began referring to Off Broadway as ‘the sewer.’ I’d run into him on the street and he’d say, ‘How are things in the sewer, Albert?’ ”
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