Razzle Dazzle

by Michael Riedel

  Jacobs, who spent more time with Merrick than Schoenfeld did, had a different take on the impresario. While admitting that “negotiating with David gave me a stomachache,” he added, “I think the person David enjoyed fighting with was me. Somehow I represented a challenge. But I learned that, despite his penchant for fighting and being disagreeable and nasty, David was susceptible to flattery like no other person I ever met in my life. You could pour it on with David as if you were taking a quarter pound of butter and putting it on a piece of bread. I would say, ‘David? Why are you getting so excited? Without you there’d be no American theater. You’re the most important producer of our time.’ And he’d say, ‘You’re right,’ and all of sudden he becomes meek.”

  David Merrick was indeed “the most important producer” of his time. His hits included Gypsy, Irma la Douce, A Taste of Honey, Oliver!, Hello, Dolly!, Play It Again, Sam, and Promises, Promises. At his height in the mid-1960s, Time magazine estimated he employed 20 percent of the workforce on Broadway. His face—cold black eyes, a black moustache nearly hiding a permanent sneer—appeared on the cover of Time in March 1966. Merrick hated the picture and, with typical verbal flair, threatened to sue for “defamation of caricature.” Howard Kissel, Merrick’s biographer, said the image was “an uncannily accurate portrait of a brooding, wary, deeply disturbed man.”1

  He was born David Margulois in St. Louis on November 27, 1911, the youngest of five children of a failed salesman, Samuel, and a mentally unstable mother, Celia. They were divorced when he was seven. Years later he’d say they were both alcoholics and that his childhood “was like living on the set of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?”. He bounced from relative to relative, never experiencing the warmth of a stable, loving home. Later in life, the only relative he ever spoke of was his older sister Sadie, who looked after him as best she could. Once established, he brought her to New York and took care of her for the rest of her life.

  His unhappy childhood made him secretive and misanthropic. “I have the soul of an alley cat,” he liked to say. As an associate of his once said, “His whole career is a colossal plot to prove he doesn’t need anybody.”2

  He was smart enough to win a scholarship to Washington University in St. Louis and then went on to earn a law degree from St. Louis University. He spent his free time hanging around theaters in St. Louis and was friendly with Tennessee Williams when both were at Washington University. When he became famous, he often claimed that he placed second in a playwriting competition. Williams entered as well—and didn’t place at all. There’s no record of such a competition and, as Howard Kissel notes, Williams never mentioned it in interviews. But it gave Merrick a good quip: “It only proved that the judges knew nothing about playwriting.”

  Merrick acted in plays in school, but he never thought about pursuing a career as an actor. There wasn’t any money in it, and money was what he sought. Money and power. He wanted to be a producer, making the decisions and collecting the box office receipts. Penniless, he needed a stepping-stone to get out of St. Louis. That turned out to be a young woman named Leonore Beck, who’d recently inherited $116,000 from her mother. David married her, and with her money at his disposal, took her to New York in 1939. He changed his name to Merrick, a combination of Margulois and David Garrick, the eighteenth-century English actor and manager. He invested $5,000 of Leonore’s money in a play by James Thurber called The Male Animal. It was a success, earning him $18,000. It also gave him valuable behind-the-scenes experience working alongside the show’s producer and director, Herman Shumlin. He was quick to pick up on all the scams and secret deals associated with the theater, in particular kickbacks and ice.

  Merrick hung around Shumlin for a couple of years before going off on his own to produce a comedy called Clutterbuck. It’s all but forgotten today but it does have the distinction of being the first production Merrick publicized with a gimmick. Every night during cocktail hour, he called bars and restaurants to page a “Mr. Clutterbuck.” Success came in 1954 with his first musical, Fanny, which had a score by Harold Rome. The show got good reviews, but the box office faltered a few months after opening night. Stickers began appearing above urinals in men’s rooms all over the city that read: “Have you seen Fanny?” There was a sexy belly dancer in the show named Nejla Ates. Merrick had a nude, life-size sculpture made of her and, in the dead of night, installed it in the Poet’s Corner in Central Park. He called the police, who came to take it away in the morning, surrounded by photographers and reporters. Merrick’s Fanny antics did the trick. The show returned its investment in seventeen weeks and ran another two years.

  Shows and stunts started piling up. When John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger struggled at the box office, Merrick hired a woman to sit in the audience, leap on the stage, and slap the leading man, who was being cruel to his wife in the play. The incident and the play were discussed in the papers for three weeks until Merrick, chuckling, admitted he paid the woman $250 to enact her little scene. Merrick took great pleasure in baiting critics. When Stanley Kauffmann, drama critic for the New York Times, announced he would start attending previews rather than opening nights so that he’d have time to write more thoughtful notices, Merrick sent him tickets to the final preview of his latest play, Philadelphia, Here I Come!. Enclosed was a note: “At your peril.” When Kauffmann showed up at the theater that night, Merrick announced the performance was canceled because a “white rat” had been found in the generator (Kauffmann had white hair). The New York Times carried the story on its front page the next day.

  In London, Merrick learned about a trashy sex novel, The Philanderer, that Kauffmann had written years earlier to pay the bills. It was out of print, so Merrick searched bookstores all over New York and, according to Vanity Fair, mailed eighty-nine copies to critics and editors at major American newspapers. The books arrived with a card that read: “Compliments of David Merrrickk,” a joke inspired by the spelling of Kauffmann’s name.

  Kauffmann lasted less than a year as chief critic of the Times. An awkward, shy man, he was uncomfortable being a public target, which inevitably comes with such an influential job. His replacement, Clive Barnes, approached the position with good humor. After his appointment was announced, Merrick sent him a note: “The honeymoon is over.” Barnes responded, “Why David, I didn’t know we were married. And furthermore, I had no idea you were that kind of boy!”

  Merrick’s most celebrated stunt involved his 1961 musical Subways Are for Sleeping. The show received mostly negative reviews out of town, so Merrick and his press agent, Harvey Sabinson, scoured the New York phone book for people who had the same names as the seven major newspaper critics of the day. He invited them to a preview and gave them a steak dinner at Sardi’s afterward. Then he created an ad featuring endorsements of the show by his “critics,” “Walter Kerr,” “Howard Taubman,” and “Richard Watts.” (This stunt had been in the works for years, but Merrick couldn’t pull it off until Brooks Atkinson left his post at the Times; he was the only Brooks Atkinson in the New York City phone book.) The Times spiked the ad. The Herald Tribune missed it, and ran it in an early edition of the paper. The publicity from the stunt was enormous, and despite poor reviews Subways managed to last a few months.I

  As he conquered Broadway, Merrick divorced Leonore (she found out he’d given a mink coat to a dancer in Gypsy) and bedded hundreds of girls. He married six times, one wife, Etan, twice. “Women either leave the door open or they find me dead on the bottom of the cage,” he once said. Asked by a female writer in the early sixties for his thoughts on feminism, he replied, “A woman’s place is in the oven.”II

  If, as Schoenfeld thought, a key to Merrick’s success was his indifference to what people thought of him, another was his ruthlessness. He fired people with abandon. Hello, Dolly! had its out-of-town tryout in Detroit. During the intermission of the first rocky performance, a furious Merrick was firing everyone in sight. Michael Stewart, who wrote the book, hid behind a door that opened
onto the lobby. Just before the second act began, an usher kicked the doorstop, and as the door began to close, Merrick spotted Stewart. “And you can be fired, too!” he yelled.

  He reveled in sowing seeds of anxiety among his creative teams. Merrick hired Peter Stone to write the book to Sugar, a musical version of Some Like It Hot. During the tryout in Washington, Stone went to take his customary seat on the aisle only to find Neil Simon sitting in it. That’s how he learned he’d been fired.

  Merrick ruled his empire from an office above the St. James Theatre. It was all red—red walls, red carpet, red lamp shades. “Really, the devil’s color,” said Richard Seff, an agent who represented several actors who appeared in Merrick productions. “He always looked at you like a coiled cobra,” Seff recalled. “That was the image I had of him. You never knew when he was going to strike.” One afternoon Seff went to the office to negotiate a contract for his client Anna Maria Alberghetti, who was director Gower Champion’s choice to play the lead in the 1961 musical Carnival!. Merrick offered Seff a cup of coffee and got right to the point.

  “How much does she want?”

  “Well, David, you know pretty much what stars of her caliber get on Broadway these days,” Seff said. “I’d say $2,500 a week plus a percentage over the break even.”

  The coiled cobra stared at the agent. “Are you out of your mind,” he hissed. “She’s a nobody. Her last movie [Cinderfella] was a stinker. Hollywood’s dumped her. She doesn’t have any talent.”

  “Well, what do you want for her then?” Seff asked.

  Merrick thought a moment and said, “Gower seems to like her. She’s not wrong for the part. It’s a good break for her. I’ll give her scale plus ten percent.”

  Seff laughed. “Oh come on, David.”

  And then the cobra struck. Merrick walked round his desk and snatched the coffee cup out of Seff’s hand. “Get out of my office,” he hissed.

  “I had to go home and wait for him to call,” Seff said. “Eventually he did, because Gower wanted her, and we got her asking price.”

  Because he was paying her so much money, Merrick despised the twenty-four-year-old Alberghetti. During rehearsals she fell ill and was temporarily replaced by her understudy, Anita Gillette, who worked for Equity minimum. Merrick told the press Gillette was better than Alberghetti. When Alberghetti returned to the show, he sent her a dozen dead roses.

  • • •

  By the end of the 1970s, the coiled cobra who baited critics, hissed at agents, taunted leading ladies, and produced hit after hit in the sixties was a has-been. His last major show of the seventies was songwriter Jerry Herman’s Mack & Mabel. It was a miserable experience for everyone. During the tryout in San Diego, Merrick confronted the book writer, Michael Stewart, in a crowded elevator and shouted, “You’re a hack.” The two men who’d had success with Hello, Dolly! and Carnival! stopped speaking to each other. But Stewart had a mole in Merrick’s office, a young assistant named Mark Bramble, who turned red every time Merrick spoke to him. This habit tickled Merrick, and from time to time he’d pop out of his office, point at Bramble, and say, “Blush!”

  Stewart feared he was about to be fired, so he asked Bramble, his spy, to keep him abreast of what Merrick was plotting. Not much, it turned out. Merrick was involved in producing a movie at the time—The Great Gatsby, starring Mia Farrow and Robert Redford—and wasn’t focused on Mack & Mabel. The musical, which starred Bernadette Peters as Mabel Norman and Robert Preston as Max Sennett, ran just sixty-six performances in the fall of 1974. Merrick’s next show, Stephen Schwartz’s The Baker’s Wife, closed out of town.

  Merrick, it seemed, had lost his touch. He abandoned Broadway for Hollywood. He had the rights to Semi-Tough, a novel about professional football. He thought it would make a good musical but changed his mind and decided to turn it into a movie. With Burt Reynolds as the star, it was a minor hit. His third movie, Rough Cut, was a flop despite the presence of Reynolds and David Niven (who had to sue Merrick to get nearly $100,000 in salary payments that were not forthcoming). Hollywood was not for Merrick. On Broadway, in his heyday, he ruled unchallenged. But he was no match for the studios, which were owned by corporations for whom the phrase “David Merrick presents” meant nothing.

  On a trip to Los Angeles, Bernie Jacobs and Phil Smith ran into Merrick at the Beverly Hills Hotel, where he was living. “I never leave the grounds,” he told them.

  “We knew then that he had gone completely wacko,” Smith recalled. “He never leaves the grounds? What is he, a fucking prisoner? But he was around the hotel night and day. It was pathetic. He thought he was going out there to be a producer. But there was nothing for him to do. We were told by some people that they gave him a chair with his name on it and told him to sit right there while they went about doing their job making the movie. It drove him fucking nuts.”

  Merrick returned to New York, but there was something different about him. He had, of course, always been diabolical, manipulative, and mercurial. But he could outfox a forest of foxes. And he was always in control. Even when he yelled, which was rare since he preferred a chilly monotone, it was done with calculated effect. Now he seemed “off the wall,” said Bob McDonald, the head of the stagehands union. “We heard he was on something.”

  Rumors spread through Shubert Alley that the legendary producer had become a cocaine addict. “Bobby McDonald was the first to spot it,” said Smith. “He said to me one day, ‘You know what the change is? He’s sniffing coke.’ I couldn’t believe it. David never smoked, he never drank—he wouldn’t even stand in the sun! But Bobby was right. I was friendly with Etan [Merrick’s third and fifth wife] and she once said to me, ‘Phil, you could have bought a beautiful house in the country for the amount of coke I ran down his toilet.’ ”

  Though his behavior was more erratic than ever, there were flashes of the old, calculating Merrick. One of the things he had always been good at was soaking up gossip. While in California he heard that his ex-office assistant, Bramble, and his ex-friend, Michael Stewart, had acquired the rights to an old novel by Bradford Ropes called 42nd Street, which, in 1933, had been made into a far more famous musical movie by Busby Berkeley.

  Bramble and Stewart hit on the idea of a stage musical of 42nd Street while they were writing another show, The Grand Tour, with Jerry Herman. They would work on the script in the afternoon at Stewart’s apartment near Carnegie Hall. When things weren’t going well—“and on The Grand Tour that was frequently the case,” said Bramble—they’d knock off work and take in an old movie at the Carnegie Hall Cinema. “It didn’t matter what was playing as long as it wasn’t The Grand Tour,” said Bramble. One afternoon the movie was 42nd Street. They both agreed it would make a good stage musical. They called Jerry Herman and asked him to write the score. “No way,” said Herman. “I don’t want to be compared to Al Dubin and Harry Warren,”who’d written the score to the movie, which featured such standards as “You’re Getting to Be a Habit With Me,” “Shuffle Off to Buffalo,” and the title song.

  “You really should use their songs,” Herman said.

  They took his advice and filled out the score with other songs from the Dubin and Warren catalogue, including “Lullaby of Broadway,” “We’re in the Money,” and “About a Quarter to Nine.” Gower Champion came on board as director, but he wanted to put the show together in Los Angeles with Cy Feuer and Ernie Martin as producers. Stewart and Bramble hated the idea of working in Los Angeles. “I don’t believe theater happens there,” said Bramble. And then Bramble got a call from Merrick.

  “Tell me about 42nd Street,” Merrick said. “I understand you have the rights to the novel.”

  “Yes, we do.”

  “Would you consider me as your producer?” Merrick asked.

  “Of course, I would!”

  Merrick chuckled. “Well, you’re going to have a problem with your collaborator. He doesn’t speak to me anymore.”

  “You’re probably right,” Bramble replied.


  “If you can get him to come to lunch tomorrow at the Plaza Hotel, I will fly in tonight,” Merrick said. “Shall we say one o’clock?”

  Bramble called Stewart. “Absolutely not,” Stewart said. “I have no interest in talking to David ever again.” Bramble persisted. “Look,” he said, “we have to be realistic about this. Your biggest hits, and Gower’s biggest hits, have been in collaboration with David Merrick. Whether you like him or not, the fact is he made you both wealthy men and he took very good care of the productions. We’ve got to talk to him and hear what he has to say.”

  Stewart agreed, but he entered the Plaza Hotel the next day ready for battle. Neither man extended a hand, exchanging only the most perfunctory of hellos.

  As they sat down for lunch, Stewart said, “It’s a big show, David. We want scenery, we want many costumes, and we want sixteen girls.”

  Merrick looked at him and said, “I don’t see it that way. I don’t see it that way at all. I won’t do it with fewer than twenty-four girls, and frankly I would prefer thirty-six.”

  “And he never lost the idea of doing a great big Broadway musical for his comeback in the theater,” Bramble later recalled.

  Bramble and Stewart agreed to work with Merrick, but Champion, who wasn’t speaking to Merrick after the debacle of Mack & Mabel, quit as soon as he found out Merrick was on board. Merrick offered the show to Michael Bennett, Bob Fosse, and Hal Prince. All turned him down. It was a bad idea, they said. The Broadway musical had changed. With Company, Follies, and A Chorus Line, musicals were darker, more adult, more dramatic. A musical comedy with a lot of tap dancing and a bunch of songs from the 1930s was old hat. The show must go on as its theme? How hokey.

  Merrick couldn’t raise any money. His investor pool had dried up, and even Warner Bros., which had made the movie, passed. Bramble and Stewart did a backers’ audition at the studio for five executives, including a lady who ran the theater department. When they were done, the woman said, “I really don’t know you, but I must tell you, don’t do this. It’s a terrible idea.” All Merrick could scrape together for a production budgeted at nearly $3 million was $150,000, put up by three Canadian businessmen.