(Papp did raise ticket prices, but by only a few dollars. And most of the money went to up the actors’ salaries from $100 a week to $200.)
News of Bennett’s triumph reached the Shubert offices. A few days later, a Shubert limo brought Betty and Bernie Jacobs, Phil Smith, and producer Manny Azenberg down to the Public. Alex Cohen—who had become a trusted friend and advisor to the Shubert ever since he defended them against Louis Lefkowitz—and his wife, the writer Hildy Parks, met them at the theater. After the show, the group headed to Pearl’s, a popular Chinese restaurant in Times Square, to discuss its prospects. Cohen delivered a long lecture about what was wrong with the show, concluding that it was fixable but that only he and Hildy knew how to do it. There were also concerns about whether an uptown audience would accept the candid accounts of homosexuality in the show. “The consensus was, It’s really good, but it won’t work uptown,” said Azenberg.I
“The audience was hysterical that night, but the show had flaws,” Jacobs recalled years later. “Michael called me the next day, and I told him I loved it, and then I gave him my notes, which was the most ridiculous thing in the world, in retrospect, assuming I could see anything wrong with the show Michael could not. But we went through this charade, with Michael pretending to listen to me.”
Bennett himself wasn’t sure Broadway was the place for A Chorus Line. He thought it needed to remain in an intimate house, that it would lose its emotional wallop in a fifteen-hundred-seat Broadway theater.
But a week later, he asked Jacobs and his wife, Betty, to come back and see the show. It was tighter, sharper, swifter, more dramatic and compelling. “Michael had accomplished a miracle in one week,” Jacobs said. “It was as good as anything I’ve seen on stage.”
Jacobs met Bennett in the greenroom after the show and told him he could have a Shubert house. He even offered him one of his largest, the Winter Garden. But Bennett was wary. He knew Hal Prince and Stephen Sondheim had a new show called Pacific Overtures that was headed to the Winter Garden in January 1976.
“You’ll kick me out in six months,” he said. “You’ve got a Hal Prince show.”
Jacobs replied, “Michael, if this show is what I think it is neither Hal Prince nor fifty sticks of dynamite will blast you out of the Winter Garden.”
“You like my show!” Bennett exclaimed. He threw his arms around Jacobs and “before I knew it for the first and only time in my life a male tongue was down my throat,” Jacobs said. “After that, I learned to always keep my lips tightly sealed whenever I was dealing with Michael Bennett.”
(“Bernie loved to tell that story,” Smith recalled years later. “As soon as he told it to me the first time, I knew we had the show.”)
The kiss was the start of an intense relationship that would come to affect many people who worked on Broadway. Michael Bennett had assembled his surrogate family, but he was missing a key figure: a father. And there was Bernie Jacobs, old enough to be Bennett’s real father, a powerful man who controlled the real estate of Broadway. (As an added bonus, Michael would also come to adore Betty Jacobs.) Bennett would have the shows; Jacobs the theaters. As Manny Azenberg observed, “I think, in essence, Michael was a hustler. And he thought he was going to hustle Bernie. He wanted a theater. He wanted things. And on the way to hustling Bernie, he fell in love with Bernie. And Bernie and Betty fell in love with him. And so what started out to be opportunistic, wound up being real.”
Whatever doubts there were about the viability of A Chorus Line on Broadway vanished the day the reviews appeared. “The conservative word for A Chorus Line might be tremendous, or perhaps terrific,” Clive Barnes wrote in the Times. Bennett, Martin Gottfried declared in the New York Post, “is now a major creative force and A Chorus Line is purely and simply magnificent, capturing the very soul of our musical theater.” And New York magazine’s John Simon, a tough critic, especially when it came to musicals, wrote: “A Chorus Line is something new and historic . . . the first musical-verité . . . You can find faults in A Chorus Line, even incontrovertible and not inconsiderable ones. But, in the last analysis, they don’t matter.”
With the critics on board, the Chorus Line train was headed to Broadway. The Public Theater would be the sole producer. Bennett wanted 15 percent of the profits plus 5 percent of the weekly box office gross. “We didn’t say no,” Gersten recalled. Not long after A Chorus Line moved uptown, that deal would make Bennett the richest director in the history of Broadway.
A few hurdles remained, however. For one, the Public did not have the money to produce the show on Broadway. The estimated cost for the move was $550,000. Once again, the Shuberts and LuEsther Mertz came to the rescue. The Shuberts picked up the load-in cost of the show. The “load-in” is the moving of the show into the theater. Stagehand-heavy, it is often the most expensive part of producing a show. Back then it would have cost $15,000 a day. If it took two weeks, the cost would be $150,000. The Shuberts also paid many of the show’s initial bills, including advertising. And they agreed to cover the weekly overhead until the show got rolling. “We believed the show would be a hit, and we’d collect whatever we laid out over time,” said Smith.
Mertz, meanwhile, gave Papp a grant of $250,000 for the move.
The Shuberts also helped reduce the cost of running the show through their close relationship with Broadway’s unions. Smith called Robert McDonald, the head of the stagehands union, and asked him to go down to the Public, take a look at A Chorus Line, and let him know if he could see any problems with moving it to Broadway.
“You have one problem, Phil,” McDonald told Smith the next morning. “The mirror scene. You have all these people moving mirrors, and they’re actors. On Broadway, they’re going to have to be stagehands. That’s the contract.”
Smith reported back to Jacobs, who called McDonald and exploded. “We cannot pay four or five stagehands for one scene in the show—absolutely not!”
McDonald replied, “Well, I have a suggestion. Fly ’em in. Fly the mirrors in. One man is all you need.”
“You think that will work?” Jacobs asked.
“It will.”
And that’s the way it was done, saving the Shuberts and the Public Theater, over time, hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Another issue was which Shubert theater best suited the show. Bennett and Papp did not believe the show would hold up in a large house. They ruled out the Winter Garden. Jacobs offered them the Shubert. That was too big as well. Then Bennett spoke to his friend Mike Nichols, who told him the best house on Broadway was the Ethel Barrymore, which had 1,058 seats. “Mike’s right,” Bennett told Jacobs and Smith. “I’m going to put it in the Barrymore.” Jacobs and Smith were shocked. The Shubert had four hundred seats more than the Barrymore, which meant thousands of dollars more each week, hundreds of thousands more each year, millions more in the end.
Smith spoke up. “Michael, you’re giving up a fortune going to the Barrymore. You, Michael Bennett, are going to give up a fortune, and you shouldn’t do that. And don’t you want your show in a theater where it’s going to be seen by fourteen hundred people a night?”
(“We thought the show would run five years,” Smith said years later. “And that was a fortune. But, my God, it ran fifteen years. And that was an even bigger fortune.”)
Smith’s argument carried the day, and though Bennett eyed a few other theaters, he eventually settled on the Shubert, the theater named after Sam S. Shubert, the founder of an empire that, having struggled for a decade, was poised to rise again with the success of A Chorus Line.
In the spring of 1975, A Chorus Line was the hottest show in town. Within three months—July 25, to be exact—it opened on Broadway to even better reviews. The advance built to well over a million dollars (enormous in 1975) and the press coverage was endless. A Chorus Line appeared on the covers of Newsweek, the New York Times Magazine, and Saturday Review. Broadway, mired in the doldrums since the late sixties, was stirring again as a result of this one show.
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sp; “It was good for us all,” said McDonald. “It lifted all the boats.”
A small boat: There was a restaurant called Ma Bell’s across the alley from the Shubert. It was struggling. Smith had an idea. The Shubert Theatre had a second balcony, and second balconies, because they’re so high up from the stage, are always hard to sell, even for a hit. Smith offered to sell the restaurant fifty tickets a night, which the restaurant could use as a package deal. Eat at Ma Bell’s and see A Chorus Line. Ma Bell’s wasn’t struggling for long, and Smith was filling his second balcony.
Another beneficiary of the success of A Chorus Line was Playbill, the theater magazine that had been handed out in Broadway theaters since 1884. By the early seventies, it was losing money, a victim of Broadway’s prolonged downturn. Metromedia, the company run by Shubert board member John Kluge, owned it, and Kluge wanted to sell it. Arthur Birsh, Kluge’s second-in-command, wanted to go out on his own and offered to buy it. Kluge sold the magazine to Birsh, with payments to be made in the future. “It was losing money,” said Birsh. “If it ever made money, I’d pay him. He didn’t think it would.” Birsh took control of Playbill in 1974. “We had three ads,” he said. His wife, Joan Alleman, the editor of Playbill at the time, was shocked. “Arthur had been doing very well under Kluge,” she said. “And now he owned a magazine that was losing money!” But a year later came A Chorus Line. Birsh, who was close to Schoenfeld and Jacobs, had access to house seats. Potential advertisers began clamoring to see the show, and Birsh had the tickets. The advertisers looked around the Shubert and saw fifteen hundred well-heeled consumers, all reading their Playbills. The ads came rolling in.
Papp and his Public Theater were, of course, enormous beneficiaries of A Chorus Line. The show would, over the course of its run in New York and around the world, earn $40 million for the Public, making it, as Helen Epstein writes in her book Joe Papp: An American Life, “the most affluent institutional theater in America.” Papp poured the money back into the Public, giving a home to actors, writers, and directors who continue to influence the theater today—Meryl Streep, Kevin Kline, Kevin Spacey, Larry Kramer, Tony Kushner, Ntozake Shange, George C. Wolfe, and JoAnne Akalaitis. Papp himself was affected by the success of A Chorus Line. The man who once called Broadway “shit” started dressing like a Broadway producer, with a long coat draped over his shoulders and a cigar in his mouth. He even appeared in ads for A Chorus Line on the sides of telephone booths. “Nothing’s more New York than a Broadway curtain call,” the ads read, picturing Papp wearing a tuxedo and a flowing white silk scarf. “Joe took to being a Broadway producer like catnip,” said Bernard Gersten.
Michael Bennett was now the most sought-after director in the world. He could create an empire of his own. He had, friends said, ideas for dozens and dozens of shows dancing in his head. And he was only thirty-two.
A Chorus Line reversed the fortunes of the Shubert Organization. Though the company was not the producer, the rental income from the Shubert in New York, as well as Shubert theaters around the country the show would play on tour, would add up to tens of millions of dollars. The Shuberts could now refurbish decaying theaters and produce other Broadway shows. Schoenfeld and Jacobs ruled an empire that was growing rich.
And, of course, Broadway itself reaped rewards from A Chorus Line. In 1974, attendance was 6.6 million. The next year, when A Chorus Line opened, it shot up to 7.2 million. In 1976, it hit 8.8 million. The “Fabulous Invalid,” as Broadway was called whenever it looked to be in trouble, was getting out of her wheelchair.
Decades later, Phil Smith summed up the impact of A Chorus Line this way: “Before A Chorus Line there was no money. After A Chorus Line there was nothing but money.”
* * *
I. Phil Smith has a different recollection: “There was never any doubt it would come to Broadway. Bernie and I had a conversation that night about where we would put it. We really needed something. And there it was.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
The Interloper
In 1963, Manny Azenberg got a job in David Merrick’s office. His first assignment was as the company manager for the national tour of I Can Get It for You Wholesale, which had a decent run in New York, with Barbra Streisand making her Broadway debut in the role of the secretary, Miss Marmelstein.
The first stop on the tour was Detroit. It was known in the business as “Nederlander country.” David T. Nederlander, or “D. T.” for short, controlled the city’s major theaters—the Fisher, the Riviera, and the Shubert-Lafayette.
Azenberg, just a few years out of the army, went to D. T.’s offices in the Fisher Theatre to introduce himself. As he walked into the office he saw a little man, shriveled up in a chair “ripping the kishkas” out of a tall man standing in front of him. The tall man was crying, while the little man, in a high-pitched nasal whine, yelled, “And you’re going to lose your job for this, you son of a bitch!”
A younger man in the room pleaded, in that same high-pitched nasal whine, “Dad, please don’t do this. He didn’t know.”
D. T. was having none of it. “Get him out of here!” he screamed, his voice rising so high dogs were fleeing Detroit.
Still crying, the man who’d been fired left the office. In the hallway he was stopped by a different young man who said, in the now-familiar high-pitched voice, “Don’t worry. You’re rehired.”
The man was being fired—and rehired—at the same moment.
Azenberg thought, These people are crazy. Maybe the army was better.
That was Azenberg’s introduction to the Nederlander family—D. T., the father who fired the man; Jimmy, the son who begged his father not to fire him; and Joey, the son who rehired him.
Azenberg later learned that the man who’d been fired and rehired was the new house electrician at the Fisher Theatre. He’d read the meter and given the electric company the correct number of kilowatts used that month. That was his offense. It was customary, in Nederlander country, to save money by shaving off at least a hundred kilowatts.
(The man got his job back—and worked for the Nederlanders for the rest of his life.)
Azenberg arrived at the Shubert-Lafayette—where I Can Get It for You Wholesale was to play its first performance that night—to find D. T. standing in the lobby yelling at the show’s star, Lillian Roth. Her offense? There was a snowstorm that night, and it was easier for her to get into the theater through the lobby than through the alley at the side of the building. It was an hour before the show, and although there was no one else in the lobby, D. T. was throwing her out. “Actors go in the stage door!” he shouted.
Azenberg steered clear of D. T. “I was afraid of him,” he said. But he got to know Jimmy and Joey. And he soon saw another side of the Nederlanders. If you were in trouble, they took care of you. If anybody in the business, a manager, a press agent, an actor, arrived in Detroit down on his luck, Jimmy or Joey would go to the box office and get some cash. “You’re in trouble, here, take this,” they’d say.
Azenberg got to know the Nederlanders at an opportune time, for in just two years—1965—Jimmy Nederlander would leave Detroit and try his luck in New York. In time, he would build his own empire on Broadway and become the Shuberts’ first rival since Lee and J. J. vanquished Abe Erlanger and the Syndicate in the 1920s.
• • •
James M. Nederlander—“Jimmy”—was born in Detroit on March 31, 1922, to D. T. and Sarah Nederlander. He was their third child, after Harry and a daughter, Frances. There would be three others—Robert, Joseph, and Fred. When Jimmy was born, his father had been in the theater business for ten years. D. T. started out as a jeweler and pawnbroker, but in 1912 he was offered a ninety-nine-year lease on the Detroit Opera House. He took it. Why? “Well, he was like me,” Jimmy said. “You gotta take a chance in life. You oughta do somethin’. If you don’t take a chance, you’ll never get anywhere. If you see an opportunity, grab it.”
The only trouble: D. T. knew nothing about operating a theater. So he
went into business with two people who did—Lee and J. J. Shubert, who at the time were expanding their empire in their battle with Erlanger.
The Detroit Opera House became the Shubert Detroit Opera House.
And Jimmy grew up there. When he was five, he saw comedian Joe Cook in Rain or Shine. He saw touring companies of the Ziegfeld Follies, George White’s Scandals, Earl Carroll’s Vanities. He laughed at Ed Wynn in The Perfect Fool. Al Jolson loved his mother’s roast chicken. He often went on stage at the Opera House eating a leg of it while singing.
D. T. made such a success of the Opera House that in 1928 United Artists offered him $850,000 for the lease. He turned it down and expanded his holdings, taking over some smaller theaters and other pieces of real estate throughout the city. Jimmy and his siblings grew up in a large house in a fashionable section of downtown Detroit. They spent weekends at an elegant country house on Pine Lake. And then the stock market crashed, and the Great Depression ruined his father’s business. The Shuberts declared bankruptcy, and stuck D. T. for $800,000 in back rent and various other bills. The Opera House was empty, and in an act of desperation, D. T. paid the leaseholder $100,000 to get out of the lease, a lease that five years before had been worth $850,000 to United Artists. The Opera House where Joe Cook, Ed Wynn, and Al Jolson had played to standing-room only crowds became a discount men’s clothing store called Sam’s Cut Rate.
Though D. T. was in trouble, he did not, like the Shuberts, declare bankruptcy. Jimmy and his siblings were pulled from their fancy private schools and sent to public schools in poor neighborhoods. “It was a shock,” Jimmy said. “We were comfortable, then we weren’t. But what are you gonna do? When things go bad, you adapt. We adapted.” Jimmy went to work as a caddy at the Pine Lake Country Club, where his father had once been a member. He got a dollar a round, and gave it to his parents. He also worked at a General Motors plant fitting valves. Somehow, with his older brother also working and his father holding on to what real estate he could, the family weathered the Great Depression. “I learned one thing,” Jimmy said. “Don’t be poor.”
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