Razzle Dazzle

by Michael Riedel

  Ironically, Smith and Jacobs had been discussing that same subject at a dinner several days before with Michael Bennett. How do you maintain a show when the director is dead? Bennett said the best person to do it would be Marge Champion, Gower’s ex-wife. The two had danced together for years. She knew every step he ever choreographed. Smith suggested her to Merrick.

  “I couldn’t do that,” Merrick said.

  “Why not?”

  “Gower wouldn’t like it.”

  “Don’t tell him!”

  “But if he calls, Phil, I’ll have to tell him,” Merrick said.

  Champion had been dead for six months. Smith thought, I’d better call an end to this meeting. This man is nuts.

  Not long after, Smith and Jacobs got further confirmation of the rumors they’d been hearing about Merrick. The treasurer of the Majestic called them. “Jesus, Merrick’s off to the races,” he said. “I just went down to the men’s room and he’s on the stairs sniffing coke off the steps!”

  In 1983, Merrick went down to Rio de Janeiro, a city he knew well. He went down with one of his few friends in life, a doctor from New York. When they returned, the doctor died, suddenly, of a heart attack. Not long after that, Merrick suffered a stroke. He later admitted to Bramble that it was a cocaine stroke. He and the doctor had picked up some “bad stuff” in Rio. Merrick lost his most potent weapon—his dagger-like tongue. He could no longer express his quick, vicious wit. One of his ex-wives, Etan, took over his care. She took him to the south of France to recuperate. Bramble went to visit him at a villa overlooking the sea, but the staff told him Merrick was too sick to see anybody. Bramble demanded to be taken to his room. He found Merrick wrapped up in a heavy blanket even though it was the middle of August. He was moaning. But as soon as they were alone in the room, Merrick threw off the blanket. He was wearing a three-piece suit. “Can I please come back to New York with you?” he struggled to say.

  And he did. He had no place to live, since his various houses were being renovated or were tied up in litigation with yet another ex-wife, Karen Prunczik, who played Anytime Annie in 42nd Street. They were married ten months. Merrick moved in with Bramble at his 321 West Fifty-Fifth Street apartment. They went around town collecting cash Merrick had stashed in safe deposit boxes. Merrick was hiding money from his ex-wives and the IRS. At one point, he stashed $250,000 in an antique Victrola in Bramble’s cupboard.

  With Bramble’s help, he kicked his cocaine addiction. They flushed bags of cocaine down the toilet.

  Merrick saw almost no one while he lived with Bramble. But almost every day at lunchtime, Bernie Jacobs came to the apartment. The two warriors gossiped about box office grosses, rival producers, or the reviews for the latest show. And they talked about the old days, when the phrase “David Merrick presents . . .” caused a stir on Broadway.

  * * *

  I. In 2013, producer Scott Rudin, who studied Merrick’s career in detail, pulled off his version of the stunt. This time the Times didn’t catch it. Furious about theater reporter Patrick Healy’s piece on the closing of his show The Testament of Mary, Rudin slipped the following note into an ad for the play: “Let’s give a big cuddly shout-out to Pat Healy—infant provocateur and amateur journalist at the New York Times. Keep it up, Pat—one day perhaps you’ll learn something about how Broadway works and maybe even understand it.” Broadway insiders loved it. Executives at the newspaper of record were mortified.

  II. Despite the diabolical bravado, he remained friendly with his first wife Leonore and paid her alimony, without contest, until the end of her life.

  III. Wagner, who was at the hospital when Champion died, believes Merrick was up to something, however. “His room was right next to Gower’s at the Watergate, and I think he may have tapped the phone. I’m sure he knew how sick Gower was. He was getting blood transfusions almost every day in Washington. I think David was waiting for him to die before he would open the show.”

  IV. Merrick eventually raised the price of house seats to fifty dollars. House seat orders dried up, and Merrick took a beating in the press. Albert Poland felt “that was a turning point and a part of the regular theater-going audience was lost.”

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  The Bernie and Jerry Show

  With 42nd Street selling out at the Winter Garden and A Chorus Line still selling out at the Shubert, hundreds of thousands of dollars a week were now flowing into the Shubert Organization. And 42nd Street and A Chorus Line weren’t the only hits in the Shubert stable. In 1978, Richard Maltby Jr., a lyricist and director, began auditions for a revue of Fats Waller songs in the cabaret space of the Manhattan Theatre Club (MTC), an Off-Broadway theater. He asked the performers to audition with a 1930s-style song. Since the performers were black, most came in with songs from the heyday of the Cotton Club. But not Nell Carter. The ample singer auditioned with Noel Coward’s “If Love Were All.” She knocked Maltby out with her heartbreaking rendition and got the job. Filling out the cast were Ken Page, André De Shields, Armelia McQueen, and Irene Cara (who would be replaced by Charlayne Woodard). Called Ain’t Misbehavin’, the revue opened to raves in February at MTC. In April, it transferred to Broadway’s Longacre Theatre. Its producers were Emanuel Azenberg, Dasha Epstein, and the Shubert Organization.

  “Bernie and Jerry took me to practically every theater in New York,” Maltby recalled. “In those days you had your pick of straight play theaters. They were empty. I picked the Longacre because it had a low stage and I wanted the connection with the audience. They couldn’t believe I wanted the Longacre. Nobody wanted it.”

  Ain’t Misbehavin’ ran four years and became an ambassador for Broadway. Because it was a small show and could tour easily, the I Love New York campaign sent a company to South America to encourage tourism to New York City.

  The Belasco, another straight playhouse that was difficult to book, had a popular black musical called Your Arms Are Too Short to Box With God. The Imperial was home to They’re Playing Our Song, Marvin Hamlisch’s next show after A Chorus Line and a solid hit. At the Music Box, Ira Levin’s Deathtrap was thrilling packed houses. Other popular shows in Shubert houses included Evita, Morning’s at Seven, and The Elephant Man.

  And at the Broadhurst, Bob Fosse’s Dancin’ had, by 1980, been running two years. Fosse’s previous show, Chicago, opened in the same season as A Chorus Line. It was swamped by Michael Bennett’s triumph. Fosse, according to biographer Martin Gottfried, resented the accolades lavished on Bennett. Dancin’ was his response to A Chorus Line. But it was not a happy production, and he did not like his producers, the Shuberts. The feeling was mutual. Schoenfeld and Jacobs thought Fosse, who once said “I lift up a rock and choreograph what’s underneath,” pushed the sleaze factor beyond the limits of mainstream taste in two numbers, “Welcome to the City” and “The Dream Barre.” The first depicted a tourist under assault from prostitutes, peep shows, and massage parlors. The second featured dancer Ann Reinking acting out a sexual fantasy with her dance master. Jacobs referred to “The Dream Barre” as “the cunnilingus number.” When Schoenfeld expressed his concerns to Fosse right before the first preview in Boston, the director shoved him and snarled, “That’s a goddamn lousy thing to say!” Schoenfeld thought Fosse was going to hit him. He didn’t, but if he had, Schoenfeld “would have punched him right there.”1

  Their position at the top of the Shubert empire secure, Schoenfeld and Jacobs began to assert control over the theater industry. Long involved in union negotiations, they now dominated the bargaining tables. Schoenfeld handled musicians, ushers, managers, and press agents. Jacobs dealt with the actors and the stagehands, whose union was one of the most powerful in the city. With so many shows making so much money in their theaters, a strike was the last thing Schoenfeld and Jacobs wanted. But independent producers grumbled they were giving away the store for the sake of peace. Production costs were going up—and ticket prices along with them. Schoenfeld and Jacobs countered that theater employees
had a right to a decent wage and good benefits and that a strike would be a disaster for the industry. They remembered the actors’ strike of 1960, when Broadway shut down for thirteen days. Several shows could not reopen after the strike. A three-week musicians’ strike in 1975 also killed shows. Schoenfeld and Jacobs thought the theater business was too fragile to risk losing productions over labor disputes. As for ticket prices, Jacobs believed they’d been low for too long. If a show was popular, the audience would pay a higher price to see it. When Schoenfeld and Jacobs took over the Shubert Organization in 1972, the top ticket price was fifteen dollars. By 1980, it was forty dollars. Every time Jacobs wanted to raise prices to A Chorus Line, Joe Papp resisted—“but just a little,” said Bernard Gersten, Papp’s right-hand man.

  Schoenfeld and Jacobs were friendly with their labor adversaries. Jacobs and Bob McDonald, the head of the stagehands union, got along especially well. Every now and then Jacobs would call him up and say, “I hear you have an election coming up. Meet me in the alley [Shubert Alley] and we’ll yell at each other. It’ll look good for you in front of your men.”

  Which is not to say all negotiations were pleasant. In the seventies and eighties, Irish Americans ran the ushers union. The head of the union was a short, fat, feisty Irish lady. She once came to a negotiation armed with a list of demands, including a day off whenever there was a death in the family. “I’ve never heard of such a thing,” Schoenfeld responded. The Irish lady jumped up and yelled, “God forbid—he won’t let us bury our dead!” Schoenfeld went white. Elizabeth McCann, the producer, recalled, “The moment she would say, ‘Holy Mother of God, Jesus, Mary and Joseph!’ Jerry thought he was being condemned to hell. He got out of there so fast. I said to him, ‘Jerry, you know a wake lasts three nights. And they drink a lot. So they won’t be in the next day, either.’ ”

  Schoenfeld and Jacobs took active roles in other Broadway institutions, including the Actors Fund and the Theater Development Fund, whose TKTS Booth in Duffy Square (the half-price ticket booth) they helped create in 1973. (Duffy Square, the northern part of Times Square, had been a magnet for vagrants, drug users, dealers, and prostitutes. The TKTS Booth was developed, in part, to clean up the area.) They also changed the way tickets were sold on Broadway. For years, box offices refused to accept credit cards or personal checks (ice melts much faster when it’s in cash). The Shuberts accepted both, and they instituted, for the first time, phone orders. Their company, Telecharge, turned into a gold mine as each transaction came with a handling fee. It was only fifty cents, but fifty cents on thousands of tickets to A Chorus Line, 42nd Street, Ain’t Misbehavin’, and Evita added up.

  Under J. J. Shubert and then under Lawrence, Schoenfeld and Jacobs toiled in obscurity. Until 1972, when they took over the company, their names rarely appeared in the papers. But by the end of the seventies, they were public figures.

  “It is unlikely that any two people dominate their part of the entertainment business as thoroughly as do Gerald Schoenfeld and Bernard B. Jacobs,” John Cory wrote in a profile that ran on the front page of the Arts & Leisure section of the New York Times on April 1, 1979. They “tower over the world of commercial theater. Collectively, they are known as the Shuberts, and individually, on every part of Broadway, as Bernie and Jerry. Either way they are flourishing, and while they do not necessarily take all the credit for the fact that Broadway flourishes with them, they do not entirely eschew it, either. Their hearts and Broadway’s, they suggest, beat as one.”

  With critic Clive Barnes, they didn’t “eschew” credit at all. Barnes, profiling them in the New York Post, asked, “This increase in the quality of the product—why has that come about?”2

  “Us,” said Schoenfeld.

  “You mean the theatrical community?” Barnes asked.

  “No, Gerald means us, Gerald and myself,” Jacobs said. “This sounds immodest, and it really is not meant to. But the two of us have swung around the Broadway product. We simply have gotten better things on Broadway than we have ever had before . . . . Everyone with any sense knew ten years ago that the old image of Broadway was totally dead.”I

  Despite the carping about Schoenfeld and Jacobs’s control over union negotiations, Broadway producers thought the Shubert Organization was in good hands. They were, as Hal Prince called them, “good guys.” They changed the theater rental agreement in their favor, but they were quick to lower or waive the rent if a show was struggling. They were loath to exercise the stop clause, which allowed them to evict a money-losing show, because they believed that a producer with a struggling show one season might come up with a smash next season.

  Theater people also liked them because they were fun. The charge made by some producers who later came to resent their power that they were just lawyers was preposterous to anyone who knew them well. They were, in their own way, Broadway characters. Jacobs had a dry, cutting wit. The day after ’night, Mother, Marsha Norman’s play about a lonely woman who kills herself, opened on Broadway, Albert Poland was in Jacobs’s office. “How was ’night, Mother?” Poland asked. “It was fine,” Jacobs replied, “but the depth of the suicide audience remains to be seen.”

  Schoenfeld could be pompous, a trait that became more pronounced as he accumulated more power. But he could poke fun at himself. Not long after Schoenfeld and Jacobs took over the Shubert Organization, Poland, who was working both as a producer and an actor, appeared in a play Off Broadway at La Mama called Elegy to a Down Queen. He played a parrot. He was on his perch as the audience filed into the theater on East Fourth Street. He spotted Jerry and Pat Schoenfeld. Jerry came up to him and said, “How are you, Albert?” Poland responded, in character. “Hello, Jerry!” he squawked. “How are you? Squawk, squawk.” The next day Schoenfeld called him. “Albert, when we are in private, you may call me Jerry,” he said. “But when we are in public, you must call me Mr. Schoenfeld.” There was a pause. “Especially, Albert, when you are a parrot.”

  But when they gave an order, they expected it to be followed. Ain’t Misbehavin’ was nominated for the Tony Award for Best Musical in 1978. Dasha Epstein, the Shuberts’ coproducer, was excited. “Bernie, if we get the Tony, I’m going up on stage with you,” she said. Jacobs glared at her. “No you’re not. Gerald and I are going up,” he said. “But Bernie, I was there from the beginning,” Epstein protested. “If we win, I’m going up.”

  “You’ll do what I say,” Jacobs snapped.

  Ain’t Misbehavin’ won the Tony, and Epstein, looking splendid in a Zandra Rhodes dress, walked up on stage. She looked down and saw Jacobs, in the second row, scowling at her. “He did not move,” she said. “Jerry came up on stage, but Bernie did not.” The next day Schoenfeld received several calls from people wanting to know who the pretty woman in the great dress was standing next to him at the Tonys. Epstein said to Jacobs, “You see what you missed? I would have been next to you!” Jacobs didn’t say a word. “He refused to speak to me for two weeks,” Epstein recalled.

  But he remained fond of Epstein and always looked out for her. When Epstein’s husband Henry, a multimillionaire real estate mogul, died, Jacobs and his wife, Betty, took her with them on a vacation to Fisher Island, Florida. Epstein walked by their room one evening and saw the two of them on the bed, watching TV and holding hands. “Here was this man who was so powerful just lying on the bed, holding hands with his wife. Like a little boy and girl. And he said, ‘Dasha, come on. Come sit here and watch television with us.’ He knew. He knew I was lonely because I missed Henry so much.”

  Jacobs stepped in to help Epstein settle her husband’s vast estate. When she found herself at war with one of the trustees of the estate, Jacobs told her, “You don’t just need a fancy lawyer—you need a fighter.” He found one for her, but when he thought the lawyer was overcharging her, he said, “You’re not paying that,” and fired him.

  Schoenfeld was a grudge holder, especially against anyone who, he believed, had betrayed him or “Shubert,” as he called the
company. “You are dead to me” was one of his favorite phrases. But like Jacobs, he could also be kind and wise. Albert Poland was once at Frankie & Johnnie’s, a steakhouse on West Forty-Fifth Street frequented by the Shuberts. He’d just returned from a painful Christmas visit to his family in Michigan. After an ugly fight with his father on Christmas Eve, Poland cut the visit short. He was drinking heavily at the time and on this particular evening parked himself at the bar with a grappa. Schoenfeld and Smith came into the restaurant. Oh, God, I don’t want them to see me like this, he thought. “Albert, come and join us,” Schoenfeld said. “What’s the matter with you? You look unhappy, Albert.” Poland told them about the fight with his father. Schoenfeld listened and said, “When my father died, we were estranged and I will regret it to my dying day. You can’t let that happen. Go back there, even if it’s for a day, or a few hours. Have a car and driver waiting at the curb so if you have to leave you can do so immediately. But you must do it.” A few weeks later Poland was back in Michigan, having it out with his father. It was painful, but they reconciled. As soon as Poland got back to New York, “I rushed to see Jerry. To tell him I was in his debt. His words made all the difference.”

  • • •

  If by 1980 Schoenfeld and Jacobs towered, as the Times put it, over Broadway, there was one element they could not control—the press, particularly the Times itself, which towered over Broadway in its own way. Times critics and reporters had near make-or-break power over shows. Press agents begged and wheedled to get their shows on the front page of the Arts & Leisure section the Sunday before opening night. If they didn’t, their producers would often fire them. As powerful as the paper was in 1980, it was about to become even more powerful with the arrival of Frank Rich.

  Born and raised in Washington, D.C., Rich attended Harvard and came to the attention of Stephen Sondheim and Hal Prince when he wrote a rave review in the Harvard Crimson of Follies during its Boston tryout. Rich arrived in New York in the seventies and became a movie critic for the New York Post, when it leaned left under publisher Dorothy Schiff. Rich was out of a job when Rupert Murdoch took over the paper in 1977. “Frank came over to my apartment in tears,” said Martin Gottfried, who was pushed out of the paper to make way for Clive Barnes. “He didn’t know what he was going to do.” Rich landed at Time as a movie critic but was then lured away to the New York Times by the powerful managing editor, Arthur Gelb, who, early in his career at the paper, had been a theater reporter and critic. Rich was second-string drama critic to Walter Kerr. His early reviews were not of much note, but his nimble work on the opening night of 42nd Street (Kerr was sick and could not cover it) caught executive editor Abe Rosenthal’s attention. When Kerr decided he only wanted to write on Sunday, Rosenthal made Rich, then just thirty-one, chief drama critic.