That summer, while vacationing in Monaco, Nederlander had a stroke. His empire was adrift, its founder in a rehabilitation center, its finances shaky. “It was a difficult time,” said Kathleen Raitt, who was in charge of investor relations for the Nederlander Organization. “We were loyal to Jimmy, but it was understood that if we found another job, we should take it.”
The Hellinger Theatre never came back on the market. In 1991, after backing yet another flop, Nick & Nora, Nederlander sold the theater to the Times Square Church for $17 million.
The sale shored up his company, but outraged Broadway. How could Nederlander take the Hellinger—once home to My Fair Lady, Jesus Christ Superstar, On a Clear Day You Can See Forever, and Sugar Babies—off the market? And it wasn’t as though he couldn’t sell it to other theater people. Though Jacobs thwarted Michael Bennett’s attempt to become part owner of the Hellinger, the Shuberts would have snapped up such a prime musical house. Cameron Mackintosh and Andrew Lloyd Webber might have bought it.
Years later, asked why he didn’t make a deal with a theater person to keep the Hellinger as a legitimate theater, Nederlander said, “Why sell to a competitor?”
• • •
As Jimmy Nederlander struggled to recover from his stroke, Bernie Jacobs was battling his own health problems. He never fully recovered from the transient global amnesia he’d suffered in 1986. And though no one close to him would ever confirm it—and to this day deny it—many in the theater world suspected that the global amnesia was cover for a stroke.
“Bernie was never the same after his ‘incident,’ which is how everyone referred to it,” said a veteran producer. “They [the Shuberts] tried to cover it up—they never discussed it—but it was obvious if you spent any time with him. He would repeat the same story three times. He could tell you all about J. J. Shubert and David Merrick, but he couldn’t tell you what he had for lunch that day. He was a great man. He was just not the same.”
Which is not to say he didn’t have flashes of his old, cunning self. Nancy Coyne, the ad executive, had grown close to Jacobs over the years, seeing him as a father figure in a business dominated by tough men. (She keeps a picture of Jacobs on her desk.) In 1987, Dewynters, the London-based ad agency that had designed the marketing campaigns for Cats, Les Misérables, and The Phantom of the Opera, opened an office in New York. Coyne handled Cameron Mackintosh and Andrew Lloyd Webber shows in New York, but the founder of Dewynters, Anthony Pye-Jeary, was one of their closest friends. He could easily steal their shows away.
Jacobs called Coyne. “Do you know about this?” he asked.
Coyne was in the dark. “What should I do, Bernie? Anthony, Cameron, and Andrew are best friends. This is really bad for my agency.”
“You’re doing good work on Les Miz,” Jacobs said. “Just keep giving Cameron ideas he can’t live without because I’ll tell you one thing about Cameron—he loves his shows more than he loves any person.”
Coyne held off Dewynters for six months before they pulled up stakes and left New York.
Jacobs took a liking to another one of the few women in this male-dominated business. Bright, young, energetic, and pretty, Susan Lee landed a job at the League of New York Theatres and Producers looking after producers and presenters around the country, who collectively were known as “the road.” The road had been in the doldrums throughout the seventies and early eighties but was starting to pick up again with demand for hits such as Cats, Les Misérables, and The Phantom of the Opera. Lee’s title was Director of Road Resources, “which sounded like I was in construction,” she said. She thought the term “road,” used by New York producers, was patronizing. She believed her constituents should take a more active part in the League, which until then had been dominated by New York producers, mainly the Shuberts. She developed a list of proposals to build up the road, including changing “Road Resources” to “National Touring Council.”
Whenever Jacobs was at the League, he dropped by to see Lee. One day, she outlined the proposals she planned to present at the next board meeting. “That’s the dumbest idea I’ve ever heard,” Jacobs said. Lee defended her case against Jacobs’s lawyer-like interrogation. Phil Smith was in the room, laughing. She spent the next several days strengthening her arguments against Jacobs’s objections. When she made her proposal to the League, nobody in the room responded. Then Jacobs spoke up and said, “I think we should agree to this.” Everybody agreed. After the meeting, he took Lee aside and said, “I knew what you were going to say. Remember, always know where everybody stands when you walk into a room.”
Lee noticed something else about the way Schoenfeld and Jacobs conducted themselves at League meetings. They always sat opposite each other at the conference table to “balance out the power,” she said. “And the nonverbal communication between the two of them was a sign language unto itself.”
Much of Jacobs’s power stemmed from his vast industry grapevine. He had informants everywhere. He knew what was going on at every show, production office, and theatrical agency. One of his best sources was Fred Nathan, the powerful press agent. Nathan was also close to Frank Rich, a power on Broadway, of course, but also a power at the Times. Nathan and Rich both grew up devouring Variety and attending Broadway shows. And they shared a love, bordering on an obsession, with the musicals of Stephen Sondheim. As Rich’s influence and celebrity increased in the eighties, he seldom socialized with theater people to avoid conflicts of interest. He acknowledged his friendship with Wendy Wasserstein but never reviewed her plays. His friendship with Nathan, not unusual since Nathan’s job was to look after the press, was much discussed on Broadway.
“Fred bragged about it at the office,” said one of Nathan’s former employees.
“Fred fed on the fact that he was close to Frank,” said Josh Ellis, one of Nathan’s best friends.
“The first time I ever met Frank Rich was at Fred’s apartment,” said Rick Elice. “Fred called me up and said, ‘I’m having a party!’ And I went over to Fred’s and I thought, Oh, my God, Frank Rich is at Fred Nathan’s party! Oh my God! They were very close. Very.”
Rich and Nathan often spoke at night on the phone, discussing shows and trading gossip. In the morning, at 8:30, Nathan would call Bernie Jacobs with the “morning report”—some of it from Rich. First, though, he’d call Josh Ellis at 7:30 and rehearse the items, selecting the best bits for Jacobs. Nathan and Ellis called their conversations “Mary in the Morning.” The name derived from a story they’d both heard about Mary Martin. The Broadway star once had a woman fired from a show, though she left no fingerprints. The woman went to Martin and said, “I can’t believe they’re going to fire me.” Martin said she would have a word with the producers, which of course she never did. She then told the woman, “They won’t move, but I’m going to throw you a party!”
Every gossipy story in which someone got it in the neck usually ended with Ellis and Nathan saying, “We’re just going to throw you a party!”
They developed a set of criteria for gossip. “First, it had to be the juiciest piece of gossip,” Ellis said. “Second, it had to come from the best source. If it came from the horse’s mouth—the person who was in the room—that was good. Third, it had to be up-to-date. God forbid that you told someone at 8:03 what had happened at 8:00 and there was a new wrinkle. Wrong! And how dare you spread old gossip? You had to be the first recipient of it. This was a big Shubert thing. They had to be first. And, finally, exclusivity. ‘I’m glad you’re telling me, but don’t tell anyone else.’ Now that’s a really heavy burden for a piece of gossip.”
Nathan, who had more than a touch of Sweet Smell of Success’s Sidney Falco about him, skillfully deployed the information he gleaned from his sources to become close to Jacobs and the Shuberts. Frank Rich may not have known it at the time, but whatever he told Fred Nathan went straight to Bernie Jacobs.III
As Jacobs once said of Nathan, “A terrific piece of manpower.”
Until it all came cras
hing down.
• • •
There was, in 1990, plenty of theater gossip, and much of it was about Frank Rich. A New York celebrity, he appeared regularly on Don Imus’s popular radio show. He even merited a 60 Minutes profile. Theater people respected his talent but they came to resent his power. Few would speak openly against him, but they whispered about him behind his back. Much of the gossip was petty and wrong—and Rich was quick to demand retractions.
But every now and then it hit the mark. When Rich collaborated on a screenplay about Broadway with his friend Rafael Yglesias, the novelist and screenwriter, copies of it circulated around Shubert Alley. Now the reviewer was being reviewed. And the notices were not good. The screenplay, Opening Night, was a feeble attempt to be a contemporary All About Eve.
But instead of such sparkling lines as “Fasten your seatbelts, it’s going to be a bumpy night,” the best Rich and Yglesias could do was:
“I don’t love you. It’s just a sexual thing—”
“What a pity . . . and I only wanted to talk about Bernard Shaw.”
Page Six and other gossip columns got hold of the screenplay and poked fun at Rich’s attempt to be Joseph L. Mankiewicz.IV
The gossip items about Opening Night were fun, but they weren’t nearly as much fun as the talk swirling around Rich’s love life. In 1990 he had taken up with a young, aggressive magazine columnist named Alex Witchel. A graduate of the Yale School of Drama, Witchel worked for the Shuberts when she first came to New York as the house manager of the Shubert Theatre, where A Chorus Line was playing. She also worked for Papp at the Public Theater. She then switched to journalism, landing junior editorial positions at Elle and Mirabella. In 1989, she started writing a theater column for 7 Days, a stylish, gossipy magazine that covered New York. Its editor was Adam Moss, who would go on to edit the New York Times Magazine and New York. Witchel’s column roiled Broadway. Having worked in the theater, she had excellent contacts and a killer’s taste for juicy behind-the-scenes gossip. The New York Times had a Friday theater column, but it was genteel, most of its items spoon-fed by press agents.
Witchel dished. Her biggest exclusive was about Frank Rich. After he panned the Broadway production of David Hare’s The Secret Rapture—which he’d raved about after seeing the London production—Hare requested to meet him. Rich turned him down, and Hare responded with a blistering letter. “Your moral position is, from the outside, that of Orson Welles in The Third Man,” Hare wrote. “You are happy to stay up on the Ferris wheel and stop the little dots from moving. But nothing will persuade you to come down and look the little dots in the eye.”
Whenever Rich was asked about his power, he would answer glibly, “I don’t close plays, producers close plays.” Hare found that dishonest. “No one,” he wrote, “could write drama criticism for the New York Times without being aware that every word they wrote affected the livelihood of hundreds of people, and the vitality of the form from which they make their living.” Rich’s reviews, Hare wrote, had become “gratuitously abusive . . . a disfiguring note of personal cruelty has entered your writing.” Rich’s make-or-break power was driving serious writers away from Broadway, leaving only “insipid comedies and mindless musicals.” Hare concluded, writing, “You’re Emperor of all you survey. Only thing is, there isn’t much left, except ashes.”
Joe Papp, who produced The Secret Rapture, gave Hare’s letter to Richard Hummler at Variety, which ran it under the immortal headline RUFFLED HARE AIRS RICH BITCH. (Rich never liked Hummler, sneeringly referring to him as “Charlie Brown.”) Broadway was, as the gossip columns would say, “atwitter.” Hare had taken on the most powerful drama critic in the world, and his letter spoke for many whose shows Rich had destroyed.
Some of Hare’s criticisms could be batted away. The New York Times’ drama critic, no matter who he was, would always be powerful. And a critic should never hedge his opinions because of that power. Rich was the most powerful critic in the paper’s history. But that was because he was a lively writer, had the taste of his readers, and was generally on the mark with his judgments. But Hare had hit on something. Rich’s writing had become brutal. Bad reviews gave him a chance to show off. As one of his colleagues said, “When Frank wrote a killer review, you could practically see the blood dripping from his mouth.”V
Rich responded with a pointed letter of his own—which he gave to Witchel. She ran Hare’s and Rich’s letters side by side in 7 Days. Broadway was gripped by the Rich-Hare feud. Not long after, Witchel began attending shows with Rich. When 7 Days folded in the spring of 1990, she was hired by the Times as a theater reporter. That’s when rumors of a relationship began to swirl. By fall, Witchel had taken over the Friday theater column, muscling aside veteran Times writer Enid Nemy. Al Hirschfeld, who for years had illustrated the column with his drawings, was pushed out as well. Photographs replaced his caricatures, much to the dismay of readers who enjoyed hunting for the Ninas (the name of his daughter) he hid in his drawings.
The changes made clear to Broadway that there was now only one star of the Friday theater column—Alex Witchel. She clawed her mark quickly. There were no more nice little items about casting. No more sweet interviews with up-and-coming performers. Witchel offered delicious—and vicious—backstage gossip, written with a sting. If Amanda Plummer threw a fit about her wig, it became the lead item in Witchel’s column. Broadway was riveted, and appalled. Witchel had basketfuls of its dirty laundry, and she was airing it in the most powerful newspaper in the world.
She wielded her power with Walter Winchell–like tactics. Press agents who fed her juicy items were awarded plugs for their shows. Those who didn’t were frozen out of the column. The veteran producer Arthur Cantor once called her up with news of a new show he was producing Off Broadway. The item didn’t interest her. “Take out an ad!” she snapped. A press agent phoned to tell her that Sid Caesar and Imogene Coca were going to re-create their old Your Show of Shows routines at Michael’s Pub. “Well, I’m glad they’re still walking, but it isn’t news,” she responded.
Above all, she demanded exclusives. When José Ferrer had to pull out of the play Conversations with My Father because he had been diagnosed with cancer, he gave the news to his old friend Army Archerd at Variety. The day the story appeared, Witchel called the show’s press agent, Jeffrey Richards, and left a message on his answering machine. “If you ever do that again, Jeffrey, you are dead fucking meat,” she said.2
Witchel’s budding relationship with Rich began to seep into her column. If Rich liked a show, Witchel wrote glowing items about how well the box office was doing. If he panned it, she wrote about its problems backstage. Rich favorites—George C. Wolfe, William Finn, and, above all, Stephen Sondheim—were heralded as theater gods in her column. Those he didn’t like got it in the neck. When Joe Papp was diagnosed with cancer in 1991, he handed over the reins of the Public Theater to avant-garde director JoAnne Akalaitis. Rich panned most of Akalaitis’s productions, and she became Witchel’s favorite target. The columnist hounded the director for her lack of administrative skills, her brusqueness with the Public’s staff, and her selection of plays. Akalaitis had other detractors—and her tenure at the Public was rocky—but even theater people who didn’t like her work were taken aback by the one-two punch she was getting from Rich and Witchel.VI
The theater world whispered incessantly about the Times’ new power couple, dubbing them the “Ceausşescus of Broadway.” But nobody dared speak openly about the relationship and its effect on Broadway. If you crossed them, they’d hand you your head.
And then, in a final burst of diabolical genius, came David Merrick.
In November 1990, Merrick attempted a Broadway comeback with a revival, imported from the Goodspeed Opera House in Connecticut, of George and Ira Gershwin’s Oh, Kay! Rich panned it, gleefully, as “a chintzy, innocuous slab of stock that is likely to leave more than a few theatergoers shrugging their shoulders and asking, ‘Didn’t I doze through that a c
ouple of summers ago in a barn?’ ”
Witchel took a shot at the show in her column the same day. “Things are not as O.K. at Oh, Kay! as at least one cast member would like,” she began an item about an actor who’d filed a complaint with Equity because Merrick refused to let him take his curtain call. (The actor was playing the villain, and Merrick didn’t want the villain onstage at the end of the show.)
It was another Rich-Witchel attack. But this time, the target struck back.
Merrick sent a letter to Arthur Sulzberger, publisher of the Times. Merrick wrote that he had sat near Rich and Witchel at the performance they’d attended and noticed that Witchel whispered to Rich throughout the performance. “At one point the whispering must have gotten loud because the woman sitting in front of them had to turn around to hush them,” he wrote. Merrick “violently” objected to Witchel’s “unsuitable behavior,” adding that he “will always wonder how her shockingly unprofessional behavior in the theatre influenced Frank Rich’s judgment of my show.”
He dispatched the letter, by hand, to Sulzberger’s office at the Times on West Forty-Third Street. Copies of it also landed on gossip columnists’ desks all over the city.
Merrick then met with his press agent, Josh Ellis; his ad man, Jon Wilner; and his general manager, Leo Cohen. “What are we going to do about Frank Rich’s review?” Wilner asked. Merrick, whose speech was impaired by his stroke, made the sign of a gun with his fingers. Ellis began scribbling on a yellow legal pad. He wrote down two quotes, one from Rich’s pan, the other from Witchel’s gossip column. Then he drew a cupid’s heart around them. Cohen picked up a pen and above the heart wrote, “At last, people are holding hands in the theater again!”
Razzle Dazzle Page 43
