When the Depression lifted, D. T. went back into the theater business, once again with Lee and J. J. Shubert, even though they’d stuck him for $800,000. In 1940, D. T. and the Shuberts took over the Orpheum Theatre and renamed it the Shubert-Lafayette. By this time, Jimmy had decided he wanted to be a lawyer. He enrolled in a local prelaw program but soon ran out of money. He needed a job. So he asked his father if he could work for him. His father handed him a broom, and told him to start sweeping the lobby of the Shubert-Lafayette. He also worked as an usher, a press agent, and a box office treasurer. Around election time, he delivered envelopes full of cash to all the judges in Detroit. “Son,” D. T. said, “I’d rather know the judge than the law.”
Jimmy learned a few other things from his father as well:
“If you make a deal, stick to it. Lawsuits are for lawyers.”
“There are two things that will kill you in life—ego and greed.”
“Stay away from the backstage area or they’ll want you to paint their dressing rooms.”
“When they come to the box office, tell ’em you only have good seats on Tuesday and Wednesday and Thursday. Fridays and Saturdays take care of themselves.”
And, when it comes to looking for the next big hit, “Nobody can pick ’em.”
In 1942, Jimmy went into the war as an aviation cadet. He wanted to be a flier, but he had no depth perception. The first time he tried to land a plane, he missed the field by six hundred feet. He went to gunnery school, but he could never hit the target. The army didn’t know what to do with him. Then he heard about Winged Victory.
Written and directed by Moss Hart, Winged Victory was a play with music commissioned by the United States Army as a fund-raiser for the Army Emergency Relief Fund. With a cast of three hundred, including servicemen and actors, it was a smash on Broadway in 1943 and then toured the country for more than a year. Jimmy worked in the box office. He was also cast in the movie, directed by George Cukor. But he lasted only a day on the set. “They shot the first scene thirty times, and I thought, Get me outta here. I’m not an actor. I don’t want to do the same damn thing thirty times.”
After Winged Victory, Jimmy was sent to Guam. “Tropical thing,” he said. “One minute it rains, the next minute the sun’s out.” There wasn’t much to do, so, because of his show business background, he decided to produce plays to entertain the troops. He returned to Detroit when the war ended and struck out on his own, leasing a theater in Toledo from the Shuberts. It was a small house (a thousand seats), so he could only book plays. Musicals went to the bigger houses. He went broke. He then moved to Minneapolis to run a theater, but discovered the city was too far afield from the traditional Broadway touring route—Boston, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Detroit, and Chicago.
He learned how to deal with temperamental stars, however. “The best thing is to get along with ’em, keep ’em happy,” he said.
Beatrice Lillie was touring in a play called Inside U.S.A. She was doing a split week in St. Paul and Minneapolis. The show had a strong advance sale in Minneapolis, but died in St. Paul. She didn’t make a penny. Furious and humiliated, she wanted to close the show.
“Jesus, don’t do that,” Nederlander told her producer. “Play Minneapolis, and then close it when you get to Boston. I’ll get her the money she thought she should have made in St. Paul.”
He didn’t have it himself, so he went to three restaurants he frequented and borrowed $2,500 from the owners. He put the money in an empty ticket box and went to Lillie’s dressing room. “Here’s your money from St. Paul,” he told her.
She took the money and threw it up in the air.
“It went all over her dressing room,” he recalled. “But she went on in Minneapolis.”
Jimmy returned to Detroit and becme the booker for his father’s theaters. “We need shows,” D. T. told him. “Go to New York and get some.” Jimmy started making frequent trips to New York. He cajoled, wheedled, and begged for shows from agents, managers, and producers.
In 1957, the U.S. government ordered J. J. Shubert to break up his empire. He had to unload theaters in New York and around the country. And he had to dissolve partnerships either by selling theaters or buying out partners such as D. T. Nederlander in Detroit. J. J.’s lawyers offered D. T. a fraction of what his share of the Shubert-Lafayette was worth. Jimmy believed J. J. was “trying to force my father out.” Furious, D. T. told the Shubert lawyers, “Tell Mr. Shubert I am not ready to get out of show business!”1 After months of wrangling, D. T. bought out the Shuberts. He told Jimmy to go to New York and settle up the terms with J. J.
In his office in the Sardi Building, J. J., ever the petty tyrant, snarled at Jimmy. “You’ve got my scenery from The Student Prince in the basement of your theater.”
“I don’t think so, but you could be right,” Jimmy replied. “What do you want me to do about that?”
“I’m going to hold back $2,500 until I get my scenery.”
J. J.’s son, John, overheard the conversation. He was fond of Jimmy, so he made a call to the Shubert warehouse in Fort Lee, New Jersey, and was told that the sets for The Student Prince were there. He took Jimmy aside and said, “Let’s not upset my father. Let it go, and in six months I’ll send you a check. He signs all the checks. I’ll put one in the pile and he won’t notice.”
Sure enough a check for $2,500 signed by J. J. arrived in Detroit six months later.
“John was a lovely guy,” said Jimmy. “J. J. was mean.”
Over the next few years, during his frequent trips to New York to get shows, an idea began taking shape in Jimmy’s head. John Shubert died in 1962; J. J. the following year. And Jimmy knew that Larry Shubert, the titular head of the company, was a boozer.
“There was really nobody to compete against the Shuberts, so I decided I would. I had the training from my father. I was the logical successor to the Shuberts. My father had been their partner. I wanted to be their competitor.”
The consent decree barring the Shuberts from buying theaters in New York gave Jimmy his opening. One day in 1965, walking through Times Square with his friend the producer Joseph Harris, he passed the Palace Theatre on Broadway and Forty-Seventh Street. “You know, RKO wants to sell the Palace. Why don’t you buy it?” Harris said.
“Okay,” said Jimmy. “Where’s the guy?” Harris took Jimmy to the office of RKO president Harry Mandel. Mandel told him he wanted $1.4 million—$400,000 down—for the fifty-two-year lease on the theater (the land was owned by two old ladies from the Upper East Side). “Okay, you got a deal,” Jimmy told him.
Jimmy didn’t have any money at the time, so he went back to Detroit and raised the $400,000 from his father and his father’s friends in the automobile business. His father thought he was “crazy” to set up shop in New York. “The unions will kill you,” he told his son. Jimmy replied, “Listen, New York’s the name of the game. And if it’s good enough for the Shuberts, it’s good enough from me.”
Jimmy opened the first Nederlander office in New York above the Palace Theatre in August 1965. A rickety elevator took him up to the seventh floor. Julius, who’d been working at the theater for nearly twenty years, operated the elevator. He always had his Bible with him, and he prayed for everybody who rode in his elevator. “Julius came with the theater,” said Jimmy, who would employ the elevator operator until his retirement in the 1990s.
Once the mecca of vaudeville, the Palace by the mid-sixties was ramshackle. Judy Garland, Danny Kaye, and Harry Belafonte enjoyed successful engagements there in the 1950s, but for the most part it was a second-rate movie house. Jimmy refurbished it and reopened it as a legitimate Broadway theater. His first tenant was Bob Fosse’s Sweet Charity, starring Fosse’s wife, Gwen Verdon. It ran over a year. “Should have run even longer,” Jimmy said, “but Gwen and Bobby were fighting, and you never knew when she was gonna show up.”
Jimmy started buying other theaters. He picked up Henry Miller’s Theatre (now the Stephen Sondhei
m) from the widow of producer Gilbert Miller, whose father built it. He paid $500,000. “Mrs. Miller went right out and bought a diamond bracelet with the money!” he remembered.
He took a half interest in the Brooks Atkinson Theatre for another $500,000. He also bought theaters in other cities, including San Francisco, San Diego, and Los Angeles. He’d go on to buy the Billy Rose on West Forty-First Street (which he renamed the Nederlander, after his father), the Lunt-Fontanne on Forty-Sixth, the Alvin on Fifty-Second Street (now the Neil Simon), and the 46th Street (now the Richard Rodgers), which he bought from two men in prison for fraud.
The New York Times, profiling Jimmy in 1967, asked him why he was buying theaters at a time when “some believe the legitimate theater is dying.” Jimmy replied, “Because we’re making money.”2 He told another reporter, “Ever since I’ve been in the theater business, I’ve heard one thing, that the theater is dying. Thirty years later it’s still operating. If you have something that the public is interested in, they will come.”3
But finding something the public was interested in, in the early seventies, was not easy. Jimmy needed shows. Like Schoenfeld and Jacobs, he was forced to become a producer.
“If you’re gonna be a theater owner, you gotta be a producer whether ya like it or not,” he said. “The only way you can make money with theaters is to keep ’em booked, so I had to give money to all these guys who were trying to do shows.”
He had plenty of flops and a few hits, his biggest being Applause with Lauren Bacall at the Palace, which ran a little over a year. Bacall could be a handful. When the run ended she asked if she could have her dressing room furniture for her house in the Hamptons. “Take it,” said Jimmy.
• • •
From their offices above the Shubert Theatre, Jerry Schoenfeld and Bernie Jacobs watched Jimmy Nederlander assemble his empire. They did not, at first, see him as a rival. He was buying theaters that, in their view, were not top-tier houses. And though he refurbished the Palace, he didn’t have the money to spend on his other theaters, which were in disrepair. “Jimmy was the biggest buyer of Scotch Mystic Tape in town,” an old producer joked. “Every time there was a hole in one of his carpets, he’d cover it up with Mystic Tape. There was Mystic Tape all over his theaters!”
“If you booked the Brooks Atkinson, chances were, in certain parts of the building, you could get hit on the head with plaster,” joked Harvey Sabinson, a Broadway press agent at the time.
The Shuberts, meanwhile, controlled the two most desirable blocks in the Times Square area—Forty-Fourth and Forty-Fifth Streets between Broadway and Eighth Avenue. Their theaters lined both streets. And they had A Chorus Line, which dwarfed any show that played in a Nederlander house.
But in 1977, Jimmy Nederlander stumbled on his own blockbuster, one that would make him so much money the Shuberts finally had to acknowledge they had a competitor on the block.
And it was all because of a little red-headed girl and her dog.
• • •
In December 1971, Martin Charnin, an actor turned lyricist and director, was shopping at Brentano’s bookstore on Fifth Avenue. He was looking for a gag Christmas gift for a friend and picked up a collection of Harold Gray’s Little Orphan Annie comic strips. As he was wrapping the book, he thought there might be a show in the beloved comic strip. He called his friend Thomas Meehan, a writer for the New Yorker, and asked him if he’d like to take a stab at a musical. Charnin wouldn’t tell Meehan what his idea was over the phone—“He was always a little bit paranoid; he thought Rodgers and Hammerstein had bugged his phone,” Meehan said—so they arranged to meet in person. Meehan was thrilled. “I’d never been involved in the theater, though I loved to go. But I was forty, and I thought that ship had sailed.”
When Charnin told Meehan his idea was a Little Orphan Annie musical, Meehan said, “I don’t think so.”
“I was thinking West Side Story or My Fair Lady,” Meehan recalled years later. “Not a comic strip. Besides, when I hear Little Orphan Annie I cringe. I was a Dick Tracy fan.”
“That’s too bad,” Charnin said, adding, “Charlie Strouse is writing the music.” Strouse was the successful composer of Bye Bye Birdie and Applause, with two Tony Awards on his shelf. Meehan changed his mind. “Who was I to tell Charles Strouse to go take a hike?”
Meehan went off to the library at the New York Daily News, which had the complete run (beginning in 1924) of Little Orphan Annie on microfilm. He spent hours looking at the strip—and grew more and more disheartened. “There wasn’t much there,” he said. “There was a rich man, a girl and a dog—and that was it.” A few days later, however, he found a way in. “I suddenly saw orphans in darkness. I love Dickens and I began to think maybe we could make this Dickensian. Nixon was president, and it was a dark time. I thought it might be interesting to write something set in the Depression that starts off dark but then becomes hopeful with a president—FDR—who radiates optimism and a New Deal. I want to be clear: We were not thinking of it as a family show. We wanted to write something about the American experience.”
As it happened, Strouse and Charnin captured the Dickensian spirit Meehan was aiming for in the first song they wrote, “It’s the Hard-Knock Life.” And they captured the musical’s fundamental optimism in their second song, “Tomorrow.”
“We decided we wanted to write an old-fashioned musical,” Meehan said. “At the time, Hal Prince and Steve Sondheim were doing the so-called concept musical—Company, Follies. But Little Orphan Annie was not going to lend itself to that form. We wanted to write the kind of musical we loved as kids—tuneful, funny, straight ahead with the story.”
Meehan fleshed out the comic strip, adding new characters, the most important of which was the villain, Miss Hannigan. She was inspired by a minor character in the comic strip—Miss Asthma, who ran the orphanage. “Hannigan was my grandmother’s maiden name,” said Meehan.
By 1976, with a first draft in hand, they began holding backers’ auditions. Nobody gave them a dime. At one audition at Strouse’s apartment, Meehan saw a woman pass a note to her husband. Meehan later found the note on the floor. It read: “I’ll kill you for having brought me to this thing!”
“That was our first review,” said Meehan.
The Shuberts passed on the show. Schoenfeld told Meehan, “A little girl and a dog are not commercial.” Michael Price, who ran the Goodspeed Opera House in East Haddam, Connecticut, also passed. Discouraged, Meehan took all his Little Orphan Annie research, put it in a box, and stuck it in his attic. He was broke and went back to writing freelance magazine stories to make ends meet. Charnin was out of money, too, and the rights to the comic strip, which were held by the Chicago Tribune, were about to expire. He needed $25,000 to retain them, so he begged twenty-five friends to give him $1,000 each.
And then he got a call from Michael Price. “I just got back from London,” Price told him, “and while I was walking through Hyde Park, I couldn’t get that damn song of yours [‘Tomorrow’] out of my head. So we might as well try the show.”
Charnin, who would direct the musical, wanted to cast adults as the orphans. He and Meehan took Bernadette Peters to the Russian Tea Room for lunch and offered her the role of Annie. “What can I say? She was short and she could sing and she had red hair,” Meehan said. “We were going to do the Peter Pan thing, and have a guy in a dog suit as Sandy. Thank God we came to our senses and figured out the thing had to be real, with real kids and a real dog. We needed a ragamuffin bunch of girls. We forbid them from washing their hair for two weeks before we opened at Goodspeed.”
Meehan was pleased with the character of Miss Hannigan, but the woman playing the part—Maggie Task—wasn’t landing the jokes. Lines such as “Why anybody would want to be an orphan, I’ll never know” were met with silence. After the first preview, Meehan was standing in the lobby with his notebook. A man came up to him and asked if he was with the show. “Yes,” Meehan said. “It stinks,” the man replied. The local
reviewers were split—half loved it, half thought it was the worst show they’d ever seen. Walter Kerr, from the New York Times, came up that summer to see it, and dismissed it as “a right-wing” musical. “He completely misinterpreted the politics because he knew that Harold Gray had been a right-winger,” Meehan recalled. “There were a couple of guys in New York who had an option on the show but, not surprisingly after the Kerr review, we couldn’t get them on the phone.”
Annie looked like it would open—and close—in East Haddam. But during the final week of the run, the producer Lewis Allen, who was friendly with Charles Strouse, brought Mike Nichols to the show. After the performance, Nichols told the creators, “You guys are sitting on a million dollars.”
A few days later, Sam Cohn, Nichols’s agent, called with the magic words, “Mike wants to produce your show.” Nichols met with Charnin, Strouse, and Meehan and told them, “I’m going to be the kind of producer I always wanted as a director: After the first day of rehearsal, I’m going to go away and let you do your work. You won’t see me again until the first preview out of town.” He did have one suggestion, however. He had a friend, a cabaret performer named Dorothy Loudon, who he thought would be perfect for the role of Miss Hannigan.
Tough, sharp-tongued, and bitter about a career that had stalled out—“people thought I was retired or dead,” she once said—Loudon auditioned with “Hard Hearted Hannah” and got the job. She landed all the jokes, and ad-libbed a few of her own. When Rooster, Hannigan’s brother, introduced his girlfriend, “Lily St. Regis, named after the hotel,” Loudon quipped, “Which floor?” Meehan added the line to his script. Loudon’s performance was helped immensely by the fact that “she hated kids,” said Meehan. At the first reading of the show in New York, Loudon went up to Andrea McArdle, who was playing Annie, and said, “Listen to me, kid. If you make one move on any of my laugh lines, you will not live to see the curtain call.”
Razzle Dazzle Page 20
