Razzle Dazzle

by Michael Riedel

  The theater industry was shocked to learn of his death, the New York Post reported. The Shuberts without Schoenfeld—indeed an opening night without Schoenfeld—“hardly seemed possible.”3

  “People didn’t actually call him Mr. Broadway. But they could have,” the Times noted, describing him as a “Runyonesque figure” who left an indelible stamp on America by bringing dozens of hit shows to Broadway.4

  His memorial service at the Majestic was packed with celebrities—Liam Neeson, Vanessa Redgrave, Andrew Lloyd Webber, Hugh Jackman, Barbara Walters, Henry Kissinger, Whoopi Goldberg, Helen Mirren, Jeremy Irons.

  Mayor Bloomberg spoke, recalling how Schoenfeld loved to harangue him about traffic in Times Square.

  “Jerry’s already arguing with God about air rights,” Bloomberg said. “And God knows he will never hear the end of it.”

  • • •

  “I’m the last of the Mohicans,” Jimmy Nederlander declared a few weeks after Schoenfeld’s death. He was sitting in his office in Times Square talking to a reporter from the New York Post about his sixty-plus years in show business.5 At eighty-six, he was, indeed, the last of the theater owners who had transformed Broadway from a “crumbling cottage industry into a multibillion-dollar global empire.”II

  Nederlander considered Schoenfeld a “good friend.” Their fierce rivalry in the seventies and eighties had long abated and, throughout the 2000s, they spoke on the phone almost every day. Nederlander was the first to extend a hand. Over lunch at Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Sydmonton Festival in 1992, where the composer unveiled his new show, Sunset Boulevard, Nederlander said to Jacobs, “Bernie, when are we going to stop all this? We’re getting too old to keep doing this.” Jacobs replied, “Why don’t we get together for lunch when we’re back in New York?”

  The following week, Nederlander’s assistant, Nick Scandalios, received a call from Schoenfeld. If Jimmy was serious about ending the feud, he and Jacobs would be happy to join him for lunch, Schoenfeld said. The peace talks took place in the garden of Barbetta, the restaurant on West Forty-Sixth Street. Schoenfeld, Jacobs, and Phil Smith were on one side of the table, Nederlander, his son, Jimmy, and Scandalios on the other. The lunch lasted three hours. Schoenfeld, Jacobs, and Nederlander regaled one another with war stories.

  “They each told the story of an incident from their perspective,” Scandalios recalled. “It was cathartic. I don’t think they changed their opinion of anything, but there was a lot of laughter.”

  During the lunch, a few theater producers walked into the garden, but as soon as they saw the Shuberts and the Nederlanders breaking bread they “immediately turned on their heels and left,” said Scandalios. “They were stunned.”

  Nederlander weathered his rough patch in the late eighties and nineties, emerging in the 2000s with his theaters home to such shows as Beauty and the Beast, Wicked, Hairspray, and The Lion King (which moved from Disney’s New Amsterdam to Nederlander’s Minskoff Theatre in 2006). Touring productions of those and other megahits filled his theaters in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Chicago. Real estate bets he made long ago paid off. He bought the four corners of Hollywood and Vine in the early eighties, when that part of Los Angeles was seedy and crime ridden. Every time a small business went belly up, he’d buy the building and tear it down to make more parking space for his Pantages Theatre. He still owns most of Hollywood and Vine, a parcel of land worth tens of millions of dollars today.

  Over the last ten years, companies from Clear Channel to Disney have tried to buy Nederlander’s empire. Nobody knows how much it’s worth, but it’s likely billions. Nederlander, ninety-three as of this writing, isn’t selling. He runs the empire today with his son, Jimmy, and his former assistant, Scandalios, now vice president of the company. It was and will always be, Nederlander says, a family business.

  In his office next to his big desk are a small plastic table and two little chairs. On the back of the chairs are the names of his grandchildren, James and Kathleen.

  “They’re my board of directors,” he says.

  • • •

  Andrew Lloyd Webber and Cameron Mackintosh continue to be active in the theater.

  Mackintosh owns and operates eight West End theaters, including the Victoria Palace, the Prince of Wales, the Novello, and the Prince Edward. He turned to the movies in 2012, producing Les Misérables, starring Hugh Jackman and Anne Hathaway (who won an Oscar). In 2014, he produced successful revivals of Les Misérables (in New York) and Miss Saigon (in London). That same year, the Sunday Times of London anointed him the most successful producer in theater history, with a net worth of $1.6 billion.

  Lloyd Webber’s Really Useful Group owns and operates six West End theaters, including the Drury Lane and the Palladium. The Phantom of the Opera is in its twenty-seventh year in London and its twenty-sixth in New York. On any given day, productions of Evita, Cats, Jesus Christ Superstar, and Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat are running somewhere in the world. Queen Elizabeth II made Lloyd Webber a life peer in 1997. He sits on the Conservative side of the House of Lords. In 2006, he became a reality TV star as the producer and lead judge of How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria?—a BBC series about the search for an actress to play Maria in a West End revival of The Sound of Music. He continues to write new musicals, but without the success he once had. Two recent shows, Love Never Dies, the sequel to Phantom, and Stephen Ward, about the Profumo affair, were flops. In 2015 he was working on a musical version of School of Rock for Broadway.

  • • •

  After Beauty and the Beast, Disney produced The Lion King, which is still running on Broadway today and has grossed, worldwide, $6.2 billion, making it the most successful theatrical production of all time. (The Phantom of the Opera is number two.) Not every Disney show has been a success, however. Tarzan and The Little Mermaid flopped on Broadway, though they’ve proved popular in Europe and Asia. But Mary Poppins, Newsies, and Aladdin were hits, and the Disney Store is among the most popular tourist destinations in Times Square.

  Disney’s success lured other entertainment companies to Broadway. Warner Bros., Clear Channel, 20th Century Fox, and Dreamworks have all produced shows on Broadway, though with mixed results. Nearly every movie studio today has a theater division seeking to turn back catalogues of popular movies into stage shows.

  After Disney, Universal Studios has had the most success on Broadway. The company owns a large stake in Mamma Mia! whose producer, Judy Craymer, had been Tim Rice’s assistant on Chess. Craymer worked for several years as a freelance television producer after Chess closed. But she wanted to put together a stage show using the songs of ABBA. Scarred by their experience on Chess, Benny Andersson and Björn Ulvaeus vowed never to do another musical. But liking and trusting Craymer, they agreed to let her give it a try. She fashioned a show around their catalogue of hit songs. She was forty thousand pounds in debt and renting a friend’s apartment when she finally got Mamma Mia! on stage in the West End in 1999. As of 2014, it was still running in London and New York, and has been performed all over the world, with grosses totalling nearly $3 billion. The 2008 movie remains the most successful movie musical of all time. Craymer owns 18.5 percent of Mamma Mia!. She is thought to be the third richest woman in England, after the queen and J. K. Rowling.

  Universal also owns more than 50 percent of Wicked, which opened on Broadway at a cost of $14 million in 2003. It has become a global hit, breaking box office records from London to Auckland, and posting grosses of more than $3 billion. In 2014, the Broadway production alone was grossing $1.6 million a week.

  • • •

  Throughout the 1990s, Broadway attendance increased dramatically. Seven million people saw a Broadway show in the 1990–91 season. Ten years later, the figure had risen to nearly 12 million. In the 2000–01 theater season, Broadway grossed an all-time high of $666 million.

  By the fall of 2001, Broadway had become such a crucial part of the cultural and economic fabric of the city that the d
ay after the attack on the World Trade Center, Mayor Giuliani called the League of New York Theatres and Producers and requested that Broadway shows resume performances on September 13. The marquee lights were dimmed that night in memory of the victims of the attacks and their families. But when the lights went back on, the symbolism was unmistakable—New York was open for business. No act of terrorism, however horrific, could still this great city for long. At the hottest show in town—The Producers—Mel Brooks, Matthew Broderick, and Nathan Lane led the audience, standing and weeping, in singing “God Bless America” during the curtain call.

  Broadway—and New York—rebounded quickly from the September 11 attacks. Attendance and revenue continued to climb. By the end of the decade, average yearly attendance on Broadway was 12 million. And the annual box office gross regularly exceeded $1 billion. The Times Square of Midnight Cowboy, of drugs, crime, and prostitution, of crumbling theaters and seedy peep shows, is now one of the world’s leading tourist attractions. A 2011 economic report by the city noted that 10 percent of all the jobs in New York City were located in Times Square. The neighborhood contributed 11 percent of the entire economic output of the city.

  One of Times Square’s anchors, the Shubert Organization, founded in 1900, continues to thrive. All of its seventeen theaters were booked in the spring of 2015 with hits such as Mamma Mia!, The Phantom of the Opera, Matilda, It’s Only a Play with Nathan Lane and Matthew Broderick, The Elephant Man with Bradley Cooper, Fish in the Dark with Larry David, and The Audience with Helen Mirren. The seventeen theaters post gross receipts of more than $6 million every week.

  Back in 1972, when the Shubert Organization was on the verge of insolvency, Bernard Jacobs went to Morgan Quarterly to secure a $1 million line of credit. He used as collateral those seventeen theaters. J. P. Morgan turned him down.

  In 2015, the Shuberts were exploring the possibility of building a fifteen-hundred-seat theater on land the company owns between Forty-Fifth and Forty-Sixth Streets along Eighth Avenue.

  The estimated cost was $150 million.

  For one theater.

  * * *

  I. That was not nearly as embarrassing as an event at the Pierre Hotel a year later honoring Schoenfeld. He was called up to the stage, sat in a throne, and donned an ermine cape and a crown. A parade of leading ladies, including Marin Mazzie and Betty Buckley, serenaded him. Longtime Shubert employees winced, but King Jerry loved it.

  II. Broadway’s third landlord, James H. Binger, founder of Jujamcyn Theaters and the chairman of the Honeywell Corporation, died in 2004. Though Binger was not immersed in Broadway the way the Shuberts and the Nederlanders were, his acquisition of five Broadway theaters undoubtedly saved them from the wrecking ball.

  The boys from Syracuse, New York, who began it all: J. J., Sam, and Lee Shubert. Sam (center) went to work as a teenager at the Grand Opera House in downtown Syracuse. Within a few months, he was running the box office. Within a few years, he owned several theaters in upstate New York. Lee (right), the eldest, opened a haberdashery store, but was bored. He soon joined his younger brother Sam in the theater business. J. J. (left), the youngest, joined the business as well. Sam and Lee were cool and deliberate in business. J. J. was a hothead and a tyrant.

  Sam S. Shubert on a ship’s deck striking a characteristically contemplative pose. But his dreamy, gentle look masked an enormous ambition that propelled him to New York City and into a ferocious battle with Abe Erlanger, whose Syndicate controlled the theater business.

  A rare candid photograph of Sam looking prosperous and satisfied with the empire he was building. The people with him were probably actors in a touring Shubert show. Actors liked Sam because he paid them well and treated them fairly. Major stars of the day such as Minnie Maddern Fiske and Joseph Jefferson supported him in his fight with the ruthless Syndicate.

  J. J. Shubert inspecting the chorus girls in a traveling Shubert show. He bedded many of them, and didn’t hesitate to chew them out or hit them if they displeased him. One chorus girl he slapped sued him, complaining of a swollen eye and a bleeding lip. He accused her of sticking him with her hatpin.

  Lee Shubert greeting a soldier at the Stage Door Canteen during World War II. He loved the sun, and could often be found in Central Park in the summer tanning himself in the open tonneau of his Isotta Fraschini. “His upturned eyebrows and the deep wrinkles at the corners of his eyes make him look something like a good-natured Indian,” A. J. Liebling wrote in a New Yorker profile.

  J. J. greeting his biggest box-office star—Al Jolson. J. J. cast Jolson in one of the Shubert Passing Shows at the Winter Garden Theatre. Jolson brought down the house singing “Paris Is a Paradise for Coons” in blackface. He left the Shubert stable in 1926 to make movie history, singing “My Mammy” in The Jazz Singer.

  Lee looking very much like a cigar-store Indian with his wife, Marcella, a former show girl, and producer John Golden. Lee was not a model of fidelity. After his daily shave in a barber chair in his office, some girl or other from one of his shows would swing by for a little afternoon delight. They were called the “Five O’Clock Girls” because that was the appointed time. Lee had at least one bastard son, whom he installed in the box office of the Plymouth Theatre.

  A grumpy-looking J. J. with his stylish second wife, Muriel, who had been a chorus girl at the Winter Garden Theatre. They met in 1921 but didn’t marry until 1951. Muriel was on the Shubert payroll. Every week she received a check for $546.38, which she cashed at a Shubert box office. Pablo, her chauffeur, would then drive her to the Empire Bank, where she’d put the money in a safety deposit box. “Nobody knew what Muriel did with all her cash,” said a Shubert employee. “Maybe she was planning on making a fast getaway.”

  An aging J. J. with David Merrick, one of Broadway’s most prolific producers of the 1960s. Born David Margulois in St. Louis, he came to New York in 1939 and changed his name to Merrick, inspired by the eighteenth-century English actor David Garrick. He promoted the first play he produced, Clutterbuck, by calling bars and restaurants during the cocktail hour to page a “Mr. Clutterbuck.” It was the beginning of many legendary—and increasingly diabolical—David Merrick stunts.

  J. J. confers with his only son and heir, John Shubert, whose mother was J. J.’s first wife, Catherine Mary. J. J. groomed John to take over the business, but could be as nasty to him as he was to his other employees. “My son has no more authority here than the porters in my theaters,” he said. John Shubert predeceased his father. He had a massive heart attack on a train to St. Petersburg, Florida, where he kept a second wife and two secret children.

  James M. Nederlander (center) learning the business from his father, David Tobias (D. T.) Nederlander (left), and the head box-office treasurer of D. T.’s theaters in Detroit. D. T. gave his son plenty of advice, including “Stay away from the backstage area or they’ll want you to paint their dressing rooms.” Jimmy Nederlander would eventually bring the family business to New York, challenging the Shuberts’ hold on Broadway.

  A wheelchair-bound Eckie Shubert, John Shubert’s legal widow, celebrates a Surrogate Court ruling that kept the Shubert empire intact after a scandal tarnished the family name. Congratulating her are (left to right) Betty Jacobs and Pat Schoenfeld, whose husbands, Bernard Jacobs and Gerald Schoenfeld, were J. J. Shubert’s lawyers; and Shannon Dean, one of Eckie’s close friends.

  Irving Goldman ( far left) “had the charm of a guy who sells you used Chevrolet upholstery,” said producer Albert Poland. Goldman is celebrating his rise to the top of the Shubert Organization with (left to right) Bernard Jacobs, Eckie Shubert, and Gerald Schoenfeld. Schoenfeld and Jacobs needed the corrupt Goldman’s support to take over the company. “We didn’t know how high the price would be,” Jacobs would say.

  Anthony Hopkins as psychiatrist Martin Dysart and Peter Firth as the boy who blinds horses in the Broadway production of Peter Shaffer’s Equus. John Dexter, who directed the play, initially had doubts about Hopkins. “Shift
y, spineless Welsh cunt,” he called the actor in his diary. But shortly before the play opened at the Plymouth Theatre, he wrote: “Tony Hopkins is on the way to being superb in Equus. He is calm, disciplined, and every word is crystal clear.”

  Composer Marvin Hamlisch (left) with lyricist Ed Kleban at the original cast recording of A Chorus Line. At the time, Hamlisch, an Oscar-winning film composer, was the only person working on the show who had any money. Kleban was scratching by teaching musical theater workshops and writing for a children’s theater. In an updated yearbook being put together for his high school reunion, he contemplated writing, “Occupation: Failure.”

  Dorothy Loudon at Sardi’s with her longtime agent and friend, Lionel Larner. Mike Nichols suggested Loudon for the part of the evil Miss Hannigan, who runs the orphanage in Annie. Her performance was perfect “because she hated kids,” said writer Tom Meehan. At an early reading of the show, Loudon told Andrea McArdle, who was playing Annie, “If you make one move on any of my laugh lines, you will not live to see the curtain call.”