Razzle Dazzle

by Michael Riedel

  To raise the rest of the money, Merrick offered the negative of Rough Cut, which had not yet been released, to Chemical Bank as collateral for a loan of $2.5 million. Because Burt Reynolds was at the height of his stardom, the bank agreed. “We stopped looking for investors,” said Bramble. Now they had to get Gower Champion back on the show. Champion had directed three flops in a row—Mack & Mabel, Rockabye Hamlet, and A Broadway Musical. Merrick heard he was hard up. So he offered him a generous deal to direct and choreograph 42nd Street. Champion accepted. The two men who had such success with Carnival!, Hello, Dolly!, and I Do! I Do! were back in business.

  They clashed immediately.

  Champion wanted to design the show in black and white, evoking the spare, hard edge of the Depression-era movie. Robin Wagner designed a set model that, said Bramble, was a “gray spectrum.” He and Stewart took one look at the model and ran to a phone booth to call Merrick, who was in Los Angeles. “The set is fucking awful,” Bramble told him. “You really need to get here now before a terrible mistake is made.” Merrick was in New York the next morning and within a day the “gray spectrum” set was red—David Merrick red.

  Champion asked the creators to give him two weeks alone with the cast. When Bramble and Stewart returned to rehearsals they were shocked by Champion’s appearance. This tall, elegant, handsome man had withered almost overnight. He was thin, gaunt, gray. He was wearing a heavy coat. “I have a cold,” he told them. It was June.

  In July, the company headed to the Kennedy Center in Washington for the out-of-town tryout. Merrick moved into the Watergate Hotel, which became his command center. “He was having a blast,” said Bramble. Which meant, of course, torturing his creative team. Bramble and Stewart were lovers at this point, and Merrick delighted in turning them against each other. He’d call Bramble up in the middle of the night and snicker, “Your partner is ruining the show.” Click. Then he’d call Stewart. “That book your boyfriend wrote? He just ran the screenplay through his typewriter.” Click. Then he’d call them both, “Gower Champion has never read an entire script in his life.” Click.

  Merrick wasn’t wrong. The show was a mess in Washington. Songs were in the wrong place, and Champion was so busy with the choreography he didn’t have time to direct the actors. But every now and then a happy accident would occur. At one rehearsal there was a problem with the scenery at the top of the show. The stage manager stopped the curtain just as it was going up, revealing a row of legs in tap shoes. Everybody said, “Wow! Look at that!” Champion kept the curtain at three-quarters of the way down and ordered the chorus to start tapping. One of the most thrilling openings in the musical theater was born.

  But the show wasn’t ready. Previews had to be canceled, the budget was soaring past $3 million, and advance ticket sales were negligible. Merrick said, “I don’t care what’s not finished. We’re playing a performance tomorrow night.” Somehow he rounded up about three hundred and fifty people to attend the first preview at the Opera House in the Kennedy Center—a theater that seats 2,350 people.

  “It was like a graveyard,” Bramble recalled. “The overture started and when it went into ‘Shuffle Off to Buffalo’ the audience started to laugh. And we thought, Oh, shit. They’re laughing at us.” As one chestnut after another was played, the audience tittered. When the orchestra went into “Lullaby of Broadway,” the audience started whispering. Bramble and Stewart were devastated. We’re fucked, they thought.

  What they didn’t realize was that the audience wasn’t laughing at them. The audience was laughing with them, enjoying songs they hadn’t heard in years. What they were whispering to each other was, “Do you remember that one?”

  The show ran three hours. It was all over the place. But the three hundred and fifty people in the theater loved it. “And that’s when David really started bearing down on everybody,” Bramble said. “He smelled it. He smelled a hit.” Merrick demanded new sets and costumes. He wanted everything bigger and brighter. Champion tried to resist—he still wanted to retain some of the edge of the Depression—but he was now too weak to fight Merrick. He was also preoccupied with his leading lady, twenty-two-year-old Wanda Richert. The sixty-one-year-old married director had fallen in love with her, and they’d begun an affair. Merrick knew about it, of course. He’d also heard that shortly before the affair began, Richert had had a one-night hookup with Champion’s son Gregg after a cast party. Merrick’s suite was next to Champion’s at the Watergate, and he’d put a glass to the wall so he could eavesdrop. “You should hear what goes on in there,” he told Bernie Jacobs and Phil Smith. “And this man is supposed to be sick.” He also told them about Richert’s hookup with Gregg Champion. He paused and, twinkling maliciously, sang, “She’s got the son in the morning and the father at night.”

  42nd Street opened in Washington to lukewarm reviews, including a pan from the Washington Post. But Merrick charged ahead. “I know where we are,” he told the creative team. “We’re not finished. I don’t care about the reviews. I believe in the show. And you can have anything you want to fix it. Anything you want. All it takes is time and money and we have both.”

  Merrick took advantage of the reviews. He invited his three Canadian investors to Washington to see the show. He took Bramble aside and ordered him to join them for dinner at the Watergate after the performance.

  “What do you want me for at that meeting?” Bramble asked.

  “Because I want you to look miserable. I want you to look like you are dying.”

  At dinner, Merrick appeared gloomy. “Gentlemen, I don’t know what to say about this. I’ve never been in this situation in my entire career. I am mortified at the mess that’s on the stage.”

  He kicked Bramble under the table. As instructed, Bramble began to moan.

  “I think,” Merrick continued, “I’m probably going to close the show here. I think that’s the only thing to do.”

  He kicked Bramble again.

  “No, don’t close. Please David,” Bramble pleaded.

  The Canadian investors looked ashen.

  “I might have to, that’s all,” Merrick said. “But you gentlemen believed in me when no one else did. You believed in what we were doing. And I will never forget it. I think you should let me give you your money back with a one hundred percent profit.”

  He took out three checks totalling $300,000 and handed them to the Canadians. They brightened and thanked him profusely. Merrick put them in a cab. And then he danced a little jig outside the hotel and said, “It’s all mine now.”

  • • •

  It was time to start playing games with the New York press. Merrick again took advantage of the poor reviews, this time to dampen expectations for the show on Broadway. He played theater reporters and gossip columnists “like a fiddle,” Bramble said. He took ads in newspapers, but then pulled them. He announced previews, and then canceled them. The show wasn’t ready, he said. It had to go back into rehearsal. Champion, meanwhile, was growing paler and thinner by the day. He staged one last number—“You’re Getting to Be a Habit With Me”—and then vanished. Only Merrick and a few of Champion’s close friends, including set designer Robin Wagner, knew where he was—Sloan-Kettering, dying of a mysterious blood disease.

  For most of the period when there should have been previews in New York that summer of 1980, the cast played to an empty theater. Merrick wouldn’t let anyone in. He was, however, forced to admit delegates from the Democratic National Committee, which was having its convention at Madison Square Garden. He’d donated a performance to the DNC months earlier and had to live up to his commitment. The performance was a disaster. The audience was “half loaded,” Bramble recalled. “They had no interest in being there. They talked throughout the show.” The next day Merrick canceled more previews and the cast continued to run the show every night to an empty theater. One day the actors brought stuffed animals and placed them in the front row. They had an audience. Merrick loved it. “We’ll start previews,” he said.
“We’ll let the audience in.” The critics, including a novice named Frank Rich who had recently joined the staff of the New York Times, were planning to attend the final preview. Merrick canceled it at the last minute, forcing them to attend the August 25 opening and file overnight reviews.

  At six that morning, Merrick phoned Bramble.

  “I don’t think Gower is going to live through the day,” he said. “I’m calling everybody to the theater at 1:00 p.m., and I want you to go and make sure that everybody just keeps busy because I don’t want them to find out how bad the situation is. I’m going to Sloan-Kettering and as soon as I know anything, I’ll come to the theater.”

  In the Winter Garden that afternoon the cast did warm-ups and drilled lines. Jerry Orbach, who was playing impresario Julian Marsh, kept spirits up with jokes and songs. At four o’clock, Bramble spotted Merrick backstage. “Come here,” Merrick said. They hid behind stacks of scenery.

  “He’s dead,” Merrick said, and fell on top of Bramble.

  “I never saw him like that,” Bramble recalled. “He was devastated.”

  “No one can know this before we play the show tonight,” Merrick said. “If the public finds out that Gower Champion is dead, we’ll never be able to open.” He paused. “I don’t know how to tell the public.”

  Over the years there’s been speculation that Champion died several days before opening night and that Merrick kept him “on ice” as he cooked up his greatest publicity stunt. But Bramble and others who worked on 42nd Street say that is a myth. Champion died that morning, officially of a rare blood disorder called Waldenstrom’s disease.III

  To Bramble, Merrick at first seemed too distraught to plot any kind of public announcement. But his impresario instincts kicked in and he told his press agent, a young man from Queens named Fred Nathan, to invite camera crews from the local television stations to cover the curtain call. Nathan also called all the critics and told them to remain in their seats after the bows.

  The opening night audience filed into the Winter Garden not knowing what to expect from a show that had produced some bizarre rumors. Frank Rich, admitting years later he was a “wreck” since this was the biggest opening he’d yet covered, took his fifth-row seat on the aisle and composed himself by recalling the excitement he felt as a teenager watching Barbra Streisand at the Winter Garden in Funny Girl.3

  Bernie and Betty Jacobs settled into their aisle seats, not far from Rich. Somebody walked over to Jacobs, tapped him on the shoulder, and whispered into his ear. He got up and as he passed Phil Smith a few rows behind him, leaned down and said, “Merrick wants to see me.”

  A few minutes later he was back at Smith’s side. “Gower Champion is dead,” he whispered, “and David doesn’t want anybody to know.”

  The overture began, the curtain went up—only a quarter of the way—and the audience roared with delight as a line of legs tap-danced to the title song. But then the dramatic scenes began, and the show deflated. “My heart sank,” Rich would later write. “42nd Street was no match for Hello, Dolly!, Oliver!, Carnival!, or any other Merrick musical with an exclamation point in its title from my youth.”4

  Still, there was good buzz at intermission, except in Jacobs’s row. Word began spreading among the Broadway elite that Champion was dead. John Breglio and his wife, Nan Knighton, heard the news. They took their seats for the second act, stunned.

  The audience roared its approval throughout the second half of the show. Jerry Orbach brought down the house when he told Wanda Richert (playing the ingenue Peggy Sawyer), “Think of musical comedy—the most glorious words in the English language!”

  There were eleven curtain calls that night. Frank Rich stayed for one and then dashed out of the theater. A friend accosted him on the street. “I have to talk to you,” the friend said.

  Rich brushed him aside. “I’m on deadline!”

  “Gower Champion is dead,” his friend said, and then disappeared into the theater.

  Inside the Winter Garden the crowd roared. David Merrick, the greatest producer of his time, perhaps the greatest producer of all time, had returned to Broadway triumphant. He walked out on stage and the roar became deafening. Merrick had never before made an appearance at the end of a show. But he did not look pleased. His arms were folded, he was hunched over, and one hand covered his mouth. “This is tragic,” he said. The audience laughed. “No, no. You don’t understand. Gower Champion died this morning.”

  People screamed and collapsed into their seats. Merrick walked over to Richert and put his arms around her. Jerry Orbach yelled to the stagehands, “Bring it in! Bring it in!”

  And the curtain came down.

  • • •

  Merrick’s dramatic announcement of Champion’s death made the front pages of every newspaper in New York, and many more around the world. It also made 42nd Street the most famous show on Broadway. There were lines around the Winter Garden for three days, breaking box office records every day. Frank Rich’s lukewarm review did not dent the show. A few months later, on a cold day in November, Merrick summoned Bramble to the theater right before a performance. Pointing to the limousines lined up and down the block, he said, “That’s a hit. Now let’s go eat.” In the car up to Elaine’s restaurant Merrick told Bramble, “Gower Champion staged his exit perfectly. And nobody could have promoted it better than me.”

  Merrick had made Champion more famous in death than he had ever been in life.

  But soon after opening night, Merrick’s behavior became odd even for him. He fired Nathan, his young press agent who had corralled the media on opening night. He also fired longtime associates, including Helen Nickerson, who had been his loyal secretary since 1963. “Pack your bags. You’re fired,” he told her.5 He demanded a meeting with Bernie Jacobs and insisted that the price of house seats be raised to a hundred dollars—at a time when the top ticket price was thirty. Jacobs balked. The press would play up the price hike, he said. The public would think every ticket was a hundred dollars. That perception could kill the show.IV

  Merrick countered with another plan. He didn’t think the Winter Garden was big enough to contain his hit. He wanted to increase the seating capacity from fifteen hundred to seventeen hundred by alternating the size of the seats. One seat would be eighteen inches. The one next to it would be fourteen inches. Husbands would sit in the bigger seats, wives in the smaller ones. “What are we going to do when somebody comes to the box office to buy a ticket?” Phil Smith asked. “Take out a ruler and measure their ass to make sure they can fit in the seat?”

  Merrick didn’t laugh.

  He came up with another idea. “I’m going to open a second company of the show on Broadway,” he told Phil Smith one day. Smith, who saw that Merrick was dead serious, replied, “Well, David, that’s a great idea, but you might have a problem with the press. They’ll rereview the show and they’re liable to say it’s not as good as they thought it was. Don’t forget that Gower died that night. Maybe his death influenced their reviews.”

  “You’re right,” Merrick said, and never spoke of a second company again. But he wanted out of the Winter Garden, partly because he hated the box office treasurer, Bill Friendly. “Bill Friendly is not friendly,” he’d say. He thought Friendly was stealing from him. Once he showed up at the box office pretending to be a ticket buyer. He pulled his coat up over his head and disguised his voice. “I want two tickets for tonight,” he mumbled. Bill Friendly replied, “How are you, Mr. Merrick?”

  Merrick stormed out of the lobby.

  Jacobs finally gave in to Merrick’s demand for another theater. The Majestic, which was larger than the Winter Garden, became available. Merrick could move 42nd Street there. The show was scheduled to close at the Winter Garden on Friday, move to the Majestic over the weekend, and reopen on Monday. On Friday, Merrick turned up at the Majestic to inspect the theater. He exploded. The curtain was brown. He wanted a red curtain—David Merrick red. “This will not do,” he said. He announced to the s
tagehands working in the theater, “I’m canceling the show. Go home.” That afternoon Jacobs received a letter from Merrick’s lawyer. “This is to advise you that 42nd Street is closing tonight,” it read. But then the lawyer called. “Bernie, David’s gone too far out on the limb this time, and he doesn’t know how to get back in,” he said. “Can you help? Can you get the stagehands back to the theater?” Jacobs used his influence with the union, while Phil Smith went from one Shubert theater to another in search of a red curtain. He found one at the Belasco that fit the stage of the Majestic. “It was crazy, but you know he was right,” Smith said. “A red curtain was the right color for his show.”

  But Smith and Jacobs became increasingly concerned about Merrick’s judgment and behavior. One day during the Jewish holidays when Schoenfeld and Jacobs were off, Smith got a call from Merrick. “I need to talk to you about something very important,” he said. “Where are you?” Smith was in his office in the Sardi Building. “I don’t walk down that side of the street anymore,” Merrick said. He’d been boycotting the south side of West Forty-Fourth Street ever since his landlord, Jujamcyn Theaters, refused to renew his lease on his office above the St. James. “Can you open Bernie and Jerry’s offices and we can talk there?” Smith thought to himself, Why am I going to open their offices for this lunatic? He persuaded Merrick to meet him in the Sardi Building. “He looked like he hadn’t been asleep,” Smith recalled. “His hair was askew. His wig wasn’t on straight. He looked pathetic.”

  “You know what my problem is, Phil?” he said. “I’ve got to find someone to maintain the show. Otherwise the show is going to fall apart.”