Razzle Dazzle

by Michael Riedel

  Along Forty-Second Street between Ninth and Tenth Avenues is Theatre Row, a collection of Off-Broadway theaters including Playwrights Horizons, put together by real estate developer Fred Papert and Bob Moss, a director and producer. They spent more than a decade getting the project off the ground, but by the 1990s the theaters were full of productions and the block was “hurtling toward respectability.”5

  But Times Square was hardly free of crime. And the crack cocaine epidemic of the 1980s and early nineties only made matters worse. One morning, over breakfast at the Pierre Hotel on Fifth Avenue, Schoenfeld, Herb Sturz, and Carl Weisbrod, then running the New York City Economic Development Corporation for Mayor David Dinkins, discussed the issue. Schoenfeld complained that Broadway theatergoers were under assault from petty thieves, prostitutes, drug dealers, and hustlers. But these low-level, so-called quality of life crimes were of little interest to law enforcement, which channeled its resources toward violent felonies. Prostitutes and other petty criminals, if and when they were arrested, were sent downtown to the criminal court at 100 Centre Street, where they were fined and released, only to ply their trades again in Times Square.

  In 1982, social scientists James Q. Wilson and George L. Kelling argued in an essay in The Atlantic that petty crime and low-level antisocial behavior created an atmosphere in which more serious crimes thrived. They urged law enforcement to crack down on small crimes as an important step in deterring major crimes. Their argument became known as the “broken windows” theory, after their contention that if broken windows were not repaired, vandals would return to break more windows, eventually destroying the entire building. Wilson and Kelling believed broken windows—and petty crimes—should be addressed before they mushroomed into something more serious.

  William J. Bratton, then the head of the New York City Transit Police, was an early proponent of the broken windows theory. He implemented it by cracking down on fare beaters in the subway system. It turned out that people who jump turnstiles often commit more serious crimes. Sturz and Weisbrod thought the theory could be applied to the hundreds of petty crimes in Times Square. Their idea was to create a community court in Midtown where people who pleaded guilty to minor offenses would be sentenced quickly, fined, sent to rehabilitation facilities, or ordered to perform community service.

  Schoenfeld offered the city rent-free use of the Longacre Theatre, which had been dark for more than a year. The Shuberts would refurbish the theater and set up an actual court on stage. Coincidently, the first show to play the Longacre in 1913 was Are You a Crook?6 The Shubert Foundation provided early funding for the court, and Schoenfeld raised money from other charitable organizations committed to improving quality of life in the city, including, crucially, the New York Times Foundation.

  The court was not without detractors, especially civil rights advocates who feared a rush to judgment that might violate the rights of the accused. Proponents countered that there would be a battery of public defenders on hand to represent those who came before the court. Another skeptic was District Attorney Robert M. Morgenthau, who questioned, rather oddly given the amount of crime in Times Square, whether there were enough cases to justify the court. Morgenthau, in the view of Herb Sturz, also thought it would cut into his control over a centralized legal system.

  Without Morgenthau’s support, the Midtown Community Court, as it was to be called, was unlikely to get off the ground. Schoenfeld stepped in and arranged a lunch with Morgenthau, Sturz, and Arthur Sulzberger, the publisher of the New York Times and an advocate of the court.

  “That lunch was pivotal,” said Sturz. “It was all about getting the Times to swing the district attorney, and it did.”

  In the end, the court was not housed at the Longacre. Owners of office and residential buildings near the theater fretted the court would bring more criminals to the area. Theater groups and preservationists objected to taking another legitimate theater off the market. But Mayor Dinkins was behind the idea. The court was moved to a city-owned building on West Fifty-Fourth Street next to a police station where it continues to operate today.

  The court became “the best show in town,” said Phil Smith, who, when he had some free time before or after lunch, would wander into the court to watch the parade of Times Square eccentrics.

  Entertainment value aside, the court also proved effective. It brought a sense of law and order to a neighborhood that appeared to be sliding into chaos. By the end of the decade, there were community courts in Harlem, Red Hook, and other parts of the city. Located in low-income neighborhoods, the courts helped “restore trust” in the criminal justice system, “a bond that many legal experts feel has frayed over time.”7

  Looking back on the success of the Midtown Community Court twenty years later, Sturz said, “Without Jerry, I don’t think the court would have happened. I give him the lion’s share of the credit. The Shuberts had a huge vested interest that coincided with the public interest. Not that everything that is good for Shubert is good for the city. But in this instance, it turned out to be good policy for the Shuberts and the city.”

  • • •

  As Times Square began its resurgence in the early nineties, one block remained mired in the muck—Forty-Second Street between Broadway and Eighth Avenue. The Shubert brothers built their first Times Square theater on the street—the Lyric in 1903—but eventually moved their empire north to Forty-Fourth Street, leaving the block in control of their mortal enemy, Abe Erlanger and the Syndicate, which operated out of the New Amsterdam Theatre. The Shuberts lost the Lyric during the Depression, and it became a movie house. Schoenfeld and Jacobs never showed much interest in the block, thinking it could never be reclaimed for legitimate purposes. They concentrated their cleanup efforts between Forty-Fourth and Fifty-Second Streets.

  Attempts to salvage the Deuce went nowhere in the seventies and eighties, especially after Ed Koch nixed the City at 42nd Street project early in his first term. Developers planned massive office buildings on the block in the 1980s, but those plans became entangled in a blizzard of lawsuits with the city, preservationists, and small-business owners. For-profit development plans were scuttled when New York plunged into a recession after the stock market crash of 1987. The Deuce looked like it would forever be New York’s street of sleaze.

  But by 1990, plans were coming together that would, in the end, reverse decades of decline.

  For years, the idea of reviving Forty-Second Street hinged on constructing office buildings to attract high-end tenants. The plan that came to the fore was called the Times Square Center, which consisted of four office towers that would be built at Forty-Second Street and Broadway. Architectural plans were drawn up, models made. City officials announced that the resurgence of Times Square was underway. But the project moved slowly, and critics said there would never be enough demand to fill the office towers.

  An urban planner named Rebecca Robertson, president of the 42nd Street Development Project, had another idea. Instead of focusing on office buildings, why not refurbish what had always been the lifeblood of Forty-Second Street—its theaters, including the Lyric, the Apollo, the Selwyn, and the New Amsterdam? Robertson formed the New 42nd Street, Inc., a city and state venture dedicated to restoring the theaters.8 Robertson brought two key figures into her camp—Marian Heiskell, older sister of Arthur Sulzberger, and Cora Cahan, cofounder of the Joyce Theater, a dance company, and a capable arts administrator. Heiskell rallied the Times to the cause; Cahan, who is married to Bernard Gersten, marshalled the Broadway community.

  Once again, the theater was there for Times Square when so much else had deserted it.

  Another, and more controversial, development set things in motion—the government intervened. On April 18, 1990, the New York State Supreme Court issued a sweeping ruling. It granted the 42nd Street Development Project title to most of the block, including the theaters. Real estate moguls were furious, especially the Durst Organization, which owned several of the theaters. “They sto
le those theaters from us,” a bitter Douglas Durst complained.9 Durst had been restoring some of the theaters and renting them out to theater companies. But it was a piecemeal effort. The city argued before the court that the only way to clean up Forty-Second Street would be to give condemnation power to the 42nd Street Development Project. That power in hand, Robertson wasted no time condemning buildings along the Deuce, forcing out nearly three hundred tenants, some of whom had been in their seedy cubbyhole offices for years.

  But redevelopment stalled once again when Governor Mario Cuomo shelved the Times Square Center in 1992. The critics were right. There simply were not enough tenants to fill the towers, Cuomo conceded. With its theaters and buildings empty, Forty-Second Street looked like a ghost town. A block that once thronged with pedestrians was now “as still as a tomb.”10

  What Robertson needed was at least one major tenant for one of her empty theaters, a tenant who would put on popular shows that would attract the throngs—civilized, well-behaved, law-abiding throngs—back to the Deuce.

  As it so happened, Mickey Mouse was eyeing Times Square.

  • • •

  Riding high from the success of Little Shop of Horrors, Howard Ashman, who wrote and directed the Shuberts’ little “slot machine,” decided to try his hand at a Broadway show. He teamed up with Marvin Hamlisch to a write a musical based on Smile, the 1975 movie satirizing beauty pageants. The Shuberts and David Geffen funded a $250,000 workshop in 1985. But they didn’t care for the show, which was sharp and cynical, so they withdrew. But they never bothered to tell Ashman, who heard about it from gossip. Not long after, Ashman was at a party with Schoenfeld at Little Shop general manager Albert Poland’s apartment.

  Schoenfeld went over to say hello.

  “Don’t come near me!” Ashman snarled. “I don’t want to hear anything you have to say!”

  Schoenfeld was furious. He pulled Poland aside and said, “Does Howard want a career in the theater?”

  “Listen,” Poland replied. “You did a workshop of his show and then you did not have the decency to tell him that you were not continuing.”

  “Should I apologize?” Schoenfeld asked.

  “Well, that would be a start.”

  Another set of producers eventually picked up Smile, which opened November 24, 1986, at the Lunt-Fontanne Theatre. But the Shuberts were right. The show was too cynical and cold to have much appeal for Broadway audiences. The reviews were tepid, and Smile closed after just forty-eight performances.

  Hamlisch and Ashman, who also directed the show, were devastated. Hamlisch, who helped save the theater industry with A Chorus Line, turned his back on Broadway and resumed his Hollywood career. Ashman, in demand after Little Shop, now experienced firsthand how fickle the theater world could be. As writer and director of the season’s biggest flop, nobody would hire him.

  And then he got a phone call from Peter Schneider, who’d been a company manager on Little Shop. Schneider had moved to Los Angeles, where he’d been hired by Disney to help salvage its moribund animation department. Long gone were the days of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Bambi, and Dumbo. The animation department was producing such second- and third-tier titles as The Great Mouse Detective, The Black Cauldron, and Oliver & Company.

  The score to Oliver & Company was a grab bag of songs by Barry Manilow, Dean Pitchford, and Charlie Midnight. Ashman and Barry Mann had a song in it as well—“Once Upon a Time in New York City.” Schneider, who joined the animation department just as Oliver & Company was about to be released, felt the score lacked a consistent tone.

  He was not afraid to express his displeasure to the staff.

  “You guys don’t know jack shit,” he said. “You can’t have a musical written by five people!”

  But Schneider liked Ashman’s song. For Disney’s next movie, The Little Mermaid, he wanted Ashman to write all the songs. Eager to get out of New York after the failure of Smile, Ashman said yes, provided he could work with his Little Shop collaborator Alan Menken.

  An initial draft of The Little Mermaid was, according to Schneider, “very white, very nonurban, and, dare I say it, very non-homosexual.” Ashman brought a New Yorker’s showbiz savvy to the material. For the voice of Ursula, the villainess octopus, Ashman wanted the gravelly-voiced transvestite Divine, who had a cult following from John Waters movies such as Pink Flamingos and Hairspray. The crab that looked out for Ariel became Jamaican, and was played by Samuel E. Wright, who auditioned for the part as if he were up for a stage musical.

  Ashman and Menken tackled The Little Mermaid as if they were writing a Broadway show, which suited Schneider and his second-in-command, Thomas Schumacher, as both had theater backgrounds. (Schumacher spent several years at the Mark Taper Forum and the Los Angeles Festival of Arts. While working in the nonprofit theater, he became friendly with a young, ambitious director named Julie Taymor.)

  Disney executives Michael Eisner, Jeffrey Katzenberg, and Roy Disney gathered in a small studio on the Disney lot to hear the score to The Little Mermaid. Menken played the songs on a synthesizer, and he and Ashman played all the characters. But for the Hollywood setting, the whole afternoon could have been a backers’ audition in New York for a new Broadway musical.

  The movie was to be released on November 15, 1989. That summer, Ashman went to New York but told Schneider he’d be back in California for the final polish.

  “Howard was all over Little Mermaid,” said Schneider. “It was his show. But Howard doesn’t show up for the scoring sessions. And Howard doesn’t show up for the final editing. I get on the phone with Howard and I say, ‘What the fuck is going on? Get your ass out here!’ ”

  “I can’t come,” said Ashman. But he refused to say why.

  “For days it puzzled me,” said Schneider. I couldn’t figure out what the fuck was going on. And then I got a call from Jeffrey Katzenberg and he said, ‘I have some disturbing news. Howard has AIDS. The Walt Disney Company will do anything to support Howard. You’re in charge.’ ”

  Ashman, Schneider learned, was “scared to death” that Disney would cut him loose because he had AIDS. “He thought you can’t have someone who is homosexual, who has AIDS, and has the word ‘Disney’ next to his name,” Schneider said. “But we would have done anything for him. I look back on it, and I wish Howard had told us earlier because I would have moved the whole fucking production to New York—the scoring, the editing. I think the movie cost us $18 million. For $50,000, we could all have gotten to New York and finished it there with Howard.”

  The Little Mermaid was an immediate hit with critics and audiences, becoming the first animated movie to gross more than $100 million. It won two Oscars, for Best Score and Song (“Under the Sea”). Though Ashman was reluctant to travel—with no immune system, an airplane ride could bring on a life-threatening illness—he wasn’t going to miss out on the Academy Awards. Before the ceremony, he told Menken, “I’m really happy, but when we get back to New York, we have to have a serious talk.”

  “What? What? Tell me now!” Menken said.

  “No, not tonight.”

  Menken suspected Ashman was sick, but, when he’d confronted him a few months earlier, Ashman denied he had AIDS.

  Back in New York, Ashman told him the truth. They had already started writing Beauty and the Beast, and all Ashman wanted to do “was bury himself in his work,” said Menken. Disney held the recording sessions in New York, so Ashman could attend. “He looked painfully thin at those sessions,” said Schneider.

  In March 1991, Disney unveiled sketches, songs, and bits of the unfinished film for a select group of influential members of the New York media. Menken was there, but Ashman, now gravely ill, was at St. Vincent’s Hospital in Greenwich Village. After the presentation, Schneider, Jeffrey Katzenberg, Don Hahn (a Disney producer), and David Geffen rushed down to St. Vincent’s to tell Ashman how well it had gone. His mother and his sister were by his bedside. He was wearing a Beauty and the Beast T-shirt.

>   “We were all sitting around saying platitudes because what do you say to someone who’s dying?” Schneider recalled. “And then David Geffen—and I will never forget this—kneels at Howard’s bedside and, as if there’s no one else in the room, takes Howard’s hand and says, ‘You are important. And we will find a cure for this disease.’ I thought, This is how you deal with death. You give up any fear you have of being embarrassed around someone who is dying. David knelt there a good ten minutes talking to Howard, and only to Howard.”

  Four days later, on March 14, 1991, Howard Ashman died of complications from AIDS. He was forty.

  Beauty and the Beast was released that November, and went on to shatter all box office records set by The Little Mermaid. The critics were ecstatic. In a year-end wrap up, Frank Rich, in the New York Times, wrote, “The best Broadway musical score of 1991 was that written by Alan Menken and Howard Ashman for the Disney animated movie Beauty and the Beast.”

  Michael Eisner read the story and thought, Why not? Born and raised in New York, Eisner loved Broadway. If the most influential drama critic in the world thought so highly of the score to Beauty and the Beast, why shouldn’t it be a Broadway show? Eisner and others at Disney were also aware of the multimillion-dollar grosses being posted by Cats, Les Misérables, and The Phantom of the Opera. Not bad returns for shows that cost less than $10 million to produce on Broadway, an insignificant amount of money for a company the size of Disney.