At an early production meeting for a Beauty and the Beast stage musical, Katzenberg asked his team what they thought it should cost. Nobody knew. “We said $12 million,” said Schneider. “And Jeffrey said fine. Little did he know he had just made it the most expensive show in Broadway history. And it turned out to be even more than advertised!” (Disney never discussed costs but the unofficial figure put on Beauty was $18 to $20 million.)
Beauty and the Beast opened at the Palace Theatre on April 18, 1994, and the critics, for the most part, were unimpressed. The new critic at the Times, David Richards, compared it to FAO Schwarz and the Circle Line boat tour of Manhattan—a middlebrow tourist attraction. Culture critics fretted about the Disneyfication of Broadway. And the theater community snickered at “Team Disney.” The musical was nominated for nine Tony Awards that year, but won only one, for costumes. Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine’s Passion, produced by the Shuberts, beat it out for Best Musical, Best Score, Best Book, and Best Actress (Donna Murphy).
But Beauty and the Beast was unstoppable. It broke box office records at the Palace, reviving the fortunes of Jimmy Nederlander, who owned the theater. It would go on to run 5,461 performances and gross nearly $2 billion worldwide.
Passion, meanwhile, ran less than a year, and lost most of its $3.5 million production cost.
• • •
Even before he put Beauty and the Beast in the Palace, Eisner had explored the possibility of acquiring a theater for Disney. Cora Cahan, of the 42nd Street Development Project, took him on a tour of the decrepit New Amsterdam Theatre in the spring of 1993. Eisner saw the holes in the ceiling, water dripping into the auditorium, birds flying above the stage, rubble strewn about the lobby. But he also noticed the art nouveau details, the friezes depicting scenes from Shakespeare and Faust, the remains of the Irish marble fireplace in the lounge, what was left of the porcelain vines and flowers snaking up the walls of the auditorium. He looked passed the decay and saw the former grandeur. He left the New Amsterdam knowing that this was where Disney would plant its flag in Times Square.11
It took nearly two years to work out the arrangements, but on July 20, 1995, at a press conference in front of the theater, Mayor Rudolph Giuliani and New York governor George Pataki announced that Disney would take a forty-nine-year lease from the city on the New Amsterdam. It was a good deal for Disney. New York State kicked in $26 million, in the form of a loan to Disney, to renovate the theater. Disney put up $8 million. But as Anthony Bianco points out in Ghosts of 42nd Street, the company also received a 20 percent federal tax credit, which reduced its exposure in the New Amsterdam to just $3 million.12
With Disney on board, two other entertainment companies—AMC, the movie chain, and Madame Tussauds—struck deals with the 42nd Street Development Project to plant their flags on the Deuce as well.
The rehabilitation of Forty-Second Street was underway.
After years of battling to save Times Square, the Shuberts, one might think, would have welcomed Disney. But Schoenfeld and Jacobs were not pleased. They’d never received the tax breaks and loans the city and state showered on Disney. And now there would be another theater in the neighborhood they did not control. Jujamcyn and the Nederlanders objected to the Disney deal as well.I The three theater owners wanted the Broadway unions to stand with them against the deal.
Alan Eisenberg, the head of Actors’ Equity, had a “polite” conversation with the disgruntled theater owners, but made it clear that his union applauded the arrival of Disney on Broadway. The theater owners didn’t make any headway with the other unions, either. From the unions’ perspective, Disney meant employment, for actors, stagehands, musicians, ushers, and box office treasurers.
The theater owners’ rebellion never got off the ground. Schoenfeld grumbled to the New York Times about Disney’s “unfair advantage,” but nobody paid much attention, especially since the complaints were coming from a man who sat atop a multimillion-dollar empire himself.13
Disney opened the refurbished New Amsterdam on May 18, 1997, with a concert version of King David, a musical by Alan Menken and Tim Rice. It had some pleasant songs, but it was dull. Wags called it a “boratoria.” The eighteen hundred guests, however, weren’t paying much attention to the show. They were dazzled by the return to glory of an architectural treasure. Before the curtain went up, they wandered through the theater, marveling at the restored murals and friezes, porcelain statues and ivy-covered boxes, terra-cotta staircases and lower-level grand bar. After the show, they gathered behind the New Amsterdam on West Forty-First Street, once one of the scariest streets in all New York. Disney put a tent over the entire block and threw a lavish black-tie gala.
That fall Disney opened The Lion King, directed by Julie Taymor, at the New Amsterdam. It was a smash. A theater that Hal Prince, inspecting it for The Phantom of the Opera in 1987, said he “would not go near” was now being mobbed nightly by parents and their children.
The new 42nd Street had arrived.
• • •
With the arrival of Disney and Livent and a raft of young, hungry producers, the Shuberts’ grip on the theater industry was being challenged. In the fall of 1995, the newcomers staged a coup of their own against the Shuberts.
As long as anyone could remember, Schoenfeld and Jacobs negotiated every theater contract. Jacobs handled the stagehands and the actors; Schoenfeld dealt with the musicians, the ushers, the press agents, and the company managers. Their reign was remarkably free of labor strife, and they were liked and respected by their adversaries across the table. When Jacobs suffered his bout of transient global amnesia, Phil Smith took Alan Eisenberg aside and told him, “Bernie is still Bernie, but he’s going to need a little help” in the upcoming negotiations. Eisenberg understood. He met privately with Jacobs to coach him through the talks so he wouldn’t embarrass himself in front of the other producers.
“Phil and I walked him through that negotiation, practically holding his hand,” Eisenberg recalled.
Producers had grumbled for years, mostly off the record for fear of retribution, that Schoenfeld and Jacobs were “giving away the store” to avoid work stoppages. Generous contracts with the unions, the producers complained, were driving up production costs. Schoenfeld and Jacobs negotiated the deals—but the producers shouldered the costs. And they had little to say at the table.
There was some truth to the charge.
“Bernie didn’t have much use for a lot of the producers,” said Eisenberg. “He didn’t give a shit what they wanted from him or what they wanted from us. He knew where the deal was going to be from his perspective and that was it.”
Schoenfeld and Jacobs always countered that they were producers as well as theater owners, so they paid their share of the production costs. But they also believed, having suffered under J. J. Shubert, that theater people deserved a living wage. And they valued labor peace. Strikes meant dark theaters and, with Broadway now earning hundreds of millions of dollars every year, an enormous loss of revenue.
But the new group of producers—the “Young Turks” as the Shuberts called them—were tired of those arguments. They wanted a say in the negotiations, and they were not afraid of a showdown with the unions. Taking advantage of Jacobs’s diminished capacity, they banded together and at a contentious meeting of the League of New York Theatres and Producers sidelined Schoenfeld and Jacobs from upcoming union negotiations.
Schoenfeld was furious. Smith was stunned. “I couldn’t believe what they were doing to Bernie.”
But Jacobs was resigned. He was tired and not up for another battle. It hurt his pride, Smith said, but he let the Young Turks have their way.
As negotiations with the stagehands approached in the fall of 1995, the Young Turks asserted themselves. We are “absolutely prepared to put up the barriers,” Barry Weissler, the producer of a revival of Grease, told the Daily News. “It will certainly be injurious to my business, and believe me no one wants it, but we must not be afraid of it.�
�� Another producer, Stewart Lane, added, “We will hang together if there’s a showdown.”
Schoenfeld watched the posturing with contempt. “The only producers eager to close shows are those who do not have shows to close,” he told the News.14
The negotiations that year with both stagehands and actors were torturous. Labor leaders were amused at how baffled some of the producers were by their own contracts. “They had no idea what was going on,” said a source at the stagehands union. As he monitored the negotiations, Phil Smith often had to hide his frustration. Points that Jacobs could have hashed out in minutes took hours, sometimes days. And in the end, the Young Turks did not, as some would later concede, get much more than producers had gotten in the past. But they made their point. They had a seat at the table. The Shuberts would never again be allowed to negotiate for them—and then stick them with the bill.
Schoenfeld and Jacobs were still powerful—they controlled seventeen Broadway theaters—but their domination was on the wane.
• • •
In June of 1996, Bernie and Betty Jacobs celebrated their fiftieth wedding anniversary by taking their two children, Sally and Steven, and their three grandchildren on a two-week cruise to Alaska. It was a happy trip, with Bernie enjoying the role of family patriarch. Later that summer, he began complaining of fatigue. His doctor diagnosed heart trouble. On August 23, he underwent bypass surgery at St. Francis Hospital in Roslyn, Long Island.
His old friend Albert Poland had a bad feeling. That Monday, Poland went to see Phil Smith and started crying. “I just know this is the end,” he said. The next morning, August 27, at 11:30 a.m., he received a call from Schoenfeld. He was sobbing.
“Albert,” he said, “Bernie died.”
Jacobs, eighty years old, died of complications from heart surgery.
Schoenfeld and Jacobs had fought their way to the top of the American theater. They survived J. J. Shubert and his drunken successor, Lawrence. They endured attacks on their character and integrity by powerful public officials. They stood by their neighborhood, Times Square, when it was a symbol of America’s urban crisis. They bet on creative people who had strange ideas for shows—a boy who blinds horses, a bunch of chorus kids, a man-eating plant, a show about cats.
Their partnership, forged in friendship and business, never broke up. They had an agreement, never written down, that they would stand by each other no matter what came their way. If one felt strongly about something, the other would yield. Whatever disagreements they had never became public. The Shubert empire endured in part because nothing ever came between its two leaders.
Lee and J. J. Shubert, even when they weren’t speaking to each other, always presented a united front.
So, too, did Lee and J. J.’s real heirs—Gerald Schoenfeld and Bernard B. Jacobs.
• • •
As soon as he learned Jacobs had died, Poland rushed over to the Shubert offices to be with Schoenfeld. He was in his office with two longtime Shubert employees. Everyone was crying. Poland and Schoenfeld embraced. Schoenfeld turned toward his large, impressive desk from which he ran his part of the Shubert empire. He gestured at the contracts, the photographs of theater stars, the awards and citations for his work in helping to revive Broadway and Times Square.
And then, echoing the last words of another entertainment mogul, Louis B. Mayer, he told Poland, “None of this really matters. None of this matters at all.”
* * *
I. The Nederlanders were making money from Beauty and the Beast at the Palace, but they wanted Disney to be a tenant, not a rival landlord.
EPILOGUE
Exit Music
Not long after Jacobs died, the Shubert Foundation’s board of directors raised a touchy subject with Schoenfeld—succession. Schoenfeld and Jacobs never gave much thought to the matter, at least publicly. When asked who would run Shubert when he was gone, Jacobs would say, “Dead is dead. I won’t care.”
Their partnership worked so well, the board never pressed them on the issue. “There was never a sense of urgency,” said Michael Sovern, a board member and the former president of Columbia University. But now one of the partners was dead, and the other, at seventy-one, was “no spring chicken,” said Sovern.
The board appointed Phil Smith president of the company. He moved into Jacobs’s old office above the Shubert Theatre. “I know of no one who has more knowledge of the theater business than Phil,” Schoenfeld said. But Schoenfeld resisted any discussion of long-term plans for succession. Finally, Sovern said, “Look, Jerry, if you don’t want to have a conversation with the board about what you think should happen if something happens to you, write it down and put it in your safe so we can find it.”
Schoenfeld began discussing with the board potential candidates who could run the company when he was gone. A few names from outside Shubert were mentioned—Rocco Landesman, of Jujamcyn Theaters, as well as Peter Schneider and Tom Schumacher, who ran Disney Theatrical Productions. But in the end, the board decided to promote from within. Schoenfeld believed his successor as chairman of the Shubert empire should be Jacobs’s loyal lieutenant, Phil Smith. The board agreed. It also elevated Robert Wankel, another longtime Shubert employee who was close to Schoenfeld. In the event of Schoenfeld’s death, Wankel would become cochairman of the company with Smith.
Schoenfeld still did not like to speak publicly about what would happen when he was gone. And he hated talking about his age—or death. Over an off-the-record lunch at Frankie & Johnnie’s Steakhouse, a reporter dared to bring up the sensitive topic. “What do you mean, ‘When I die?’ ” Schoenfeld replied. “If I die,” he amended. “And if I die, I will die behind my desk!”
In 2005, when a reporter for the Times wanted to do an article on Schoenfeld and who would succeed him at Shubert, Schoenfeld resisted. “All they’re going to do is say how old I am,” he grumbled. But he relented and the story ran under the headline THE MAN BEHIND THE CURTAIN.1
“I want you to describe me as an aspiring forty-seven-year-old with a bit in his teeth and ready to jump from the starting gate,” he told the reporter. “That’s me.”
And the truth was, Schoenfeld’s energy never flagged. He was at the office every day, attended nearly every Broadway opening and remained a powerful advocate for the theater industry in its relations with city and state governments. He led the charge in 2004 to thwart Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s plan to build a $1.4 billion football stadium for the New York Jets on the West Side rail yards, arguing it would cause traffic jams that would hurt the theater business.
He kept an eye on labor negotiations, though he was no longer a force at the table. When the musicians went on strike in 2003, he watched, with a mixture of amusement and disdain, from the sidelines. He had far more contempt for the producers and their tactics than he did for the musicians. He spoke frequently with Bill Moriarty, the head of the musicians union, during the strike. “Jerry and I could have ended the strike in a minute, if I’d been negotiating with him,” Moriarty said.
Though he no longer wielded the kind of power he and Jacobs enjoyed in the 1980s, Schoenfeld could be, when provoked, a dangerous enemy. The Shuberts produced Arthur Miller’s The Ride Down Mt. Morgan in 2000 on Broadway. It starred one of Schoenfeld’s close friends, Patrick Stewart. But Stewart and Miller thought the Shuberts weren’t doing enough to promote the play. After a Saturday matinee performance, Stewart gave a curtain speech, denouncing the Shuberts for their lack of attention to the production. Furious, Schoenfeld hauled him up on charges of unprofessional conduct before Actors’ Equity. With the flourish of Henry Drummond in Inherit the Wind, Schoenfeld obliterated Stewart’s defense during a hearing. Stewart’s own union forced him to apologize to Schoenfeld and the Shuberts. But Schoenfeld, always one to hold a grudge, never forgave the actor. Years later, both were lunching at Michael’s restaurant on West Fifty-Fifth Street. As Stewart passed Schoenfeld on the way to the door, he extended his hand. Schoenfeld refused to take it.
&n
bsp; Schoenfeld wanted to be seen as a producer in his own right, but that was never his strength. He took the lead in producing Amour, a musical by Michel Legrand, in 2002, but it closed after just two weeks. He loved Passing Strange, a rock musical by the musician Stew that the Shuberts moved to Broadway from the Public Theater. It received rave reviews but lost the 2008 Tony for Best Musical to In the Heights, and Schoenfeld had to close it.
In 2005, the Shubert board voted to change the name of the Royale Theatre to the Bernard B. Jacobs. Behind the scenes, Schoenfeld’s wife, Pat, lobbied the board to name a theater after her husband as well. “Instead of doing something to honor Jerry after he dies, do something now,” she insisted.2 The board agreed, renaming the Plymouth the Gerald Schoenfeld. Many on Broadway grumbled, albeit off the record, about the unseemliness of naming theaters after “lawyers,” especially when there were no theaters named Arthur Miller or Tennessee Williams or Irving Berlin. But others, like Rocco Landesman, knew what Schoenfeld and Jacobs had done for their industry, and spoke out in favor of the honor. Privately, Schoenfeld had a name for those who snickered at the renaming of the theaters. “Schmucks!” he called them. But at the ceremony hosted by Hugh Jackman to light the new marquees, Schoenfeld drew laughs when, visibly moved, he said, “Thank you all for coming and being part of this unforgivable—er, unforgettable—moment.”I
On November 24, 2008, Schoenfeld and his wife attended the premiere of Australia, starring Hugh Jackman and Nicole Kidman. He was his usual, ebullient self, shaking hands and hugging old friends. He was trying to convince Jackman to play Little Chap in a Shubert-produced revival of Stop the World—I Want to Get Off!. As he walked up the aisle after the movie was over, he ran into Jackman. “You,” he shouted at the star (“He always left the H off my name,” Jackman recalled), “enough of this Hollywood shit. It’s time to come back home to Broadway!” In his Madison Avenue apartment after the screening, he was feeling peckish. He went into the kitchen for a slice of herring. His wife heard him gasp. She rushed into the kitchen and found him on the floor. He died, in his apartment, of a heart attack. He was eighty-four.
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