Show Business: THE BE(A)ST OF BROADWAY

David Merrick recently took his annual physical examination at Boston’s Lahey Clinic, and his friends may be relieved to learn that he does not have a long red pointy tail. In other respects, however, David is a devil of a fellow.

Not since Belasco and Ziegfeld has the theater produced such a successful and spectacular producer-star. To the millions who follow his exclamatory career on the front pages and the late shows, he gleefully presents himself as the meanest man in town-as “the Abominable Showman,” a bold, bad Broadway producer with a rubber leer, a big black Groucho Marx mustache and a tongue that can tirelessly slice baloney and burble ballyhoo about such Merrick productions as Look Back in Anger, La Plume de Ma Tante, Gypsy and Luther. To publicize his shows, Merrick with truly hippopotamic cheek has sent sandwich-board men into the streets of Manhattan encased in portable placarded pissoirs; persuaded President Johnson to accept the title tune of Hello, Dolly! (a Merrick show) as his campaign song; and conducted a hilarious war of words with the theater crit ics that recently came to a headline-grabbing climax when he canceled an entire preview performance and bought back or exchanged about 1,100 tickets -just to keep New York Times Reviewer Stanley Kauffmann from seeing the show.

Crocodiles & Bluebirds. To the trade, on the other hand, David Merrick is no mere figure of fun. He is a monster of rapacity, a genius of publicity, a wizard of organization who over the last decade has personified U.S. theater as no other man, not even Charles Frohman or Jake Shubert, has ever done before. In the 1965-66 season, his supremacy has been absolute. Out of 44 new shows presented on Broadway, Merrick produced only five. But of the season’s dozen hits he came up with four: Marat/Sade, Inadmissible Evidence, Cactus Flower, Philadelphia, Here 1 Come! And he also has Dolly!, now in its third winter and still running strong. Without Merrick’s contributions the dying season, in which plays by Edward Albee (Malcolm), Tennessee Williams (Slapstick Tragedy), and William Inge (Where’s Daddy?) succumbed in swift succession, could fairly be declared a calamity and Broadway a disaster area. With Merrick’s offerings, 1965-66 will be recorded as a minor sinking spell in the long decline of legit.

The decline began in the ’20s. Forty years ago there were more than 70 theaters on Broadway and about 250 plays were presented every season. Now there are only 30 theaters and in an average season fewer than 60 openings. Over the same period, costs have bloated until a hit ticket is worth up to $50 in the scalping shops, and Broadway has become an economic jungle where the crocodiles eat the bluebirds. On the other hand, a good play can still keep the seats warm for a couple of years-but where are the good plays? Good musicals come along once in a while, and sprightly comedies intermittently pop up, but the right plays-and the playwrights-are vanishing American commodities. Many writers have been devoured in the threshers of television, while many others have run off to greener pastures outside literature.

Healing & Dealing. Yet somehow, beset with profit fever, talent anemia, labor pains, galloping costitis and an acute customer deficiency, the Fabulous Invalid staggers into her spurious finery every fall. And somehow she manages to last the winter. If a cure is possible, Merrick has not found it. Yet in a spectacular series of operations that involve both healing and dealing, cutting throats and cauterizing abuses, he has contrived to keep the patient above-ground and to generate a genuine hope that U.S. theater can eventually get back on its-well, anyway, on its two left feet. That hope, David Merrick believes, lies in David Merrick.

With demonic determination, Merrick has established himself as the great master of theatrical mass production. Since 1954, he has presented 37 commercial shows on Broadway. Other producers have been more prolific; Roger Stevens and his associates turned out about 100 shows in 14 years. But to the horror of his rivals-who keep insisting that theater is an art because they don’t know how to run it as a business-Merrick has produced 22 moneymakers and eleven smash hits. On an investment of $7,000,000, Merrick has grossed $115 million and shown a net projected profit of $14 million. In recent years he has regularly employed more than 600 people-about 20% of the theater’s total employed labor force. Operating on such a scale, he has cut production costs and in general checked the flight of angels, actors, authors and audiences to the mass media. “Let’s face it,” he smerricks. “I am the greatest theatrical producer who ever lived!”

Not everybody agrees. “Merrick is not the right doctor for this Invalid,” says a producer. “He’s a quack who’s got the patient hooked on drugs.” Merrick’s critics-a cast of thousands-ad mit that what can be done by industrial methods, he does well: the package is attractive, the contents safe-but unoriginal. “The man’s not creative,” a director says. “He’s a packager and an importer.” .All but four (The Matchmaker, Maria Golovin, Milk Train, I Was Dancing) of the 19 Merrick shows that originated in America were musicals or comedies with more Merrick than merit in them; the others were imported from England or France.

Destination Sickness. Merrick’s supporters reply that his energy and enterprise have transported to the U.S. many of the most important dramas of England’s new Elizabethans. Furthermore, they contend that Merrick’s angles and bangles and broad Broadway way have revived the allure of live theater for thousands who had come to think that actors are just people who live in a tube. And finally, they add defiantly, Merrick is far more than a show-off showman. If his vaulting ambitions do not o’erleap, he may even be remembered as a considerable theatrical re former, a man who with one sudden brainstorm built up a new creative tide in the U.S. theater.

The brainstorm is the David Merrick Foundation, which was set up in 1962. “I had an attack of destination sick ness,” Merrick remembers. “I had achieved everything I had ever wanted to achieve, and there I was drowning in two feet of water.” He was also sick of paying to the Government tax money that might usefully have been kept in the theater, so he decided to divert personal income from his hit shows to a nonprofit foundation. From this “captive angel” he can now draw cash whenever he finds a play he wants to produce. If the play loses money, no harm done; if it makes a profit, the profit can go back into the foundation and produce more plays, or it can be assigned to another beneficiary-such as Brandeis University, where Merrick’s money has helped to build an experimental theater where he expects to present professional productions of new American plays.

Spilled Guts. “Suddenly,” says Merrick, “I’ve got what amounts to a Government subsidy without Government control. Suddenly I’m free!”-free of the need to please both backers and critics, free to please himself. And to please himself he has started a greenroom revolution. “All over the world,” he says, “a new kind of theater is happening. We’re running like a dry creek around here. I want to blow up the dam and have a flood.”

Merrick’s flood began as a trickle. John Osborne’s Luther, the first foundation play, was a hit but hardly an innovation; and Arturo Ui, a grotesque political farrago by Bertolt Brecht, was merely a memorable dropout. This season, however, the dam burst. In Osborne’s Inadmissible Evidence, Merrick presents a risky experiment in the drama of diatribe, a 130-minute tantrum that turns a soliloquy into a show and, in the performance of Nicol Williamson, offers the Broadway audience a grand and ghastly display of spilled guts. And in Peter Weiss’s Marat/Sade, a monstrous charade in which the in mates of an asylum perform a play within a play directed by the Marquis de Sade, all bedlam breaks loose on the stage and swarms over the audience like a great hairy psychosis that the spectator experiences as his own. It is a painting by George Grosz brought to life, a hideous Hellzapoppin. As a consequence of these successes, the Abominable Showman, to the exquisite revulsion of his colleagues, has been cast in the role of a culture hero.

Cock on a Dunghill. As S. N. Behrman once pointed out, Merrick looks rather more like a riverboat gambler. His London-tailored suits are a shade too natty, his nails a touch too neat. His mustache has a villainous smeariness, his skin a trace of prison pallor, his voice a con-mannerly suavity, his big soft eyes the expression of a slightly sneaky sheep. But inside the gambler there is a gamin, a child of almost traumatic charm. His ideas bubble, his wit darts about like a gay little gecko. “I love every minute of my life,” he bursts out, “and I’m absolutely crazy about the theater!” He stands on what’s left of it like a cock on a dunghill, crowing in ecstasy because he has found a place in the sun.

But inside the gamin there is another gambler, and this one is for real. The name of the game he plays is losers-weepers, and he plays with a murderous will to win. “I know what’s going on in the garbage can,” he says flatly, and he fiercely enjoys rubbing other people’s noses in it. “It is not enough for me to succeed,” he once remarked. “It is also necessary for others to fail.” He despises weakness, and when he sees it he instinctively lashes out with his terrible swift tongue. “Congratulations,” he once announced to a conceited actor after his opening-night performance. “You will be tomorrow what you think you are today.”

Dead in the Cage. Why is he so nasty? “He’s so scared of rejection, he can’t risk a real relationship,” says a friend. “So then you get the success syndrome. His whole career is a colossal plot to prove he doesn’t need anybody.” In fact, his private life is a wasteland. He is living apart from his second wife, Jeanne, and their two-year-old daughter. He has had casual relationships with “a hundred women,” but he always feels that they are trying to “entrap” him. “Women either leave the door open,” he says coldly, “or they find me dead on the bottom of the cage.” Men friends are few, and none are really close. Scarcely anybody knows where he lives; he changes apartments like shirts. After a big Broadway opening, while the rest of the company is celebrating together, Merrick often eats alone in an all-night deli off Times

Square. “I’m a loner,” he says. “I have the soul of an alley cat.”

Will to Power. Merrick has been lonely from the day he was born-in St. Louis on Nov. 27, 1911. His name was David Margulois in those days, and he was the youngest of seven children. “We were very poor,” he says. His father owned a series of small grocery stores; his mother lived in fantasies -“a Blanche DuBois.” The marriage, which had been arranged in Poland by a matchmaker, was bitterly unhappy, and when David was seven his parents were divorced. The children were all brought into court, and one of them recalls that when the judge asked David to speak he could only stand there miserably and bite his nails.

After the divorce, David went to live with his mother, then with a married sister, then with his mother again. At one point his father remarried his mother, but David ran away from home because, he says now, “it was like living on the set of Virginia Woolf.” His parents got divorced again, and David lived with one or another of his sisters, bouncing from home to home, school to school. “In one house,” says a member of the family, “he played second fiddle to the dog.”

To escape the wretchedness of his childhood, David developed a will to power that was directed by three dominant ideas: money, status, theater. He kept himself in funds by running a paper route and doing odd jobs. He bought neat dark suits, “the sort of clothes I imagined a gentleman would wear.” And in high school, where he was cast as “a poet and a dreamer” in a play about a multimillionaire, David fell under the spell of the stage and one day remarked to a friend that he had decided to make a career in the theater.

Mental Discipline. He was shy, and sometimes spoke so softly that he could scarcely be heard, but when he had made a decision his will never wavered.

He decided to win a scholarship to St. Louis’ Washington University, and then to go on to law school “for mental discipline.” In college he grew a mustache “to make me look older,” and just before graduating from law school he informed some other young lawyers that he had decided to marry a wealthy woman.

He didn’t quite do that, but at least she had a little money. Her name was Lenore Beck, and her mother had died six months before, leaving an estate of $116,319.66. Soon after the wedding, the young couple took off for New York, where David changed his name to Merrick: a cross between Margulois and Garrick, the name of the most famous 18th century English actor. He never looked back. At 54, Merrick still hates his home town so violently that when he flies west he refuses to fly TWA because he thinks TWA planes pass over St. Louis.

Fanny-or Bust. The David Merrick who arrived in New York in 1939 looked like the last man in the world who would ever conquer Broadway. Shy and alarmingly thin, he had a bleeding ulcer and shed “a faint greenish glow.” But he was shrewd, and he decided to case the joint before he tried to take it over. One day he called on Producer-Director Herman Shumlin and invested $5,000 in The Male Animal. Merrick made $18,000 on the deal, and by watching rehearsals and eavesdropping on conferences he also accumulated valuable experience. Six years later, after co-producing two turkeys (The Willow and I, Bright Boy), he signed on as Shumlin’s general manager; by 1951 he was ready to break the bank or bust.

Fanny was the big gamble of Merrick’s career, and he stood to his bets with tremendous nerve and style. He made three trips to Europe before Marcel Pagnol agreed to sell the rights to his famous cinema trilogy-Marius, Fanny, Cesar. And then Merrick spent three months nailing down the subsidiary rights and three months persuading Josh Logan to go see Pagnol’s pictures and three months marking time until he was ready to direct the show and six months working with the librettist and the songwriter and three months signing up Ezio Pinza and Walter Slezak and two months building the supporting cast and two months wrangling with the Shuberts about a theater and three months working up an advertising campaign and two months in rehearsal and two months on the road and-and then at last the great day came. After three years of brain-bruising, tongue-twisting, leg-laming, wallet-wrecking labor, Fanny opened on Broadway with an unprecedented advance sale of $1,000,000 And then ran into trouble. Most of the critics liked the show, but they said so in such dull reviews that the public stopped buying tickets.

$847,726. Merrick foresaw the worst: if he did not do something drastic, and do it fast, the advance sale would vanish and Fanny would fold. He did something so drastic that dear old Broadway hasn’t been quite the same since. He promptly signed on a raft of new pressagents and launched a promotion campaign three times as vast and ten times as vulgar as anything the theater had ever seen.

Overnight, thousands of stickers were stuck on the walls of Manhattan’s men’s rooms: HAVE YOU SEEN FANNY? Po lice found a statue of a nude woman-Fanny’s belly dancer-set up in the Poets’ Corner in Central Park. “A wealthy Turk” (who hasn’t been seen since) informed the press that he wanted to buy the belly dancer from Merrick for $2,000,000 and take her back to Istanbul. TV and radio broke out with a rash of spot commercials selling Fanny, Fanny, Fanny. Logan himself directed scenes from the play that were presented on The Ed Sullivan Show. And for the first time in history, the Times and Trib carried full-page theater ads -for Fanny.

Fanny ran for 888 performances and made Merrick and his investors $847,726.74 clear profit on an investment of $275,000. Merrick was in, and he meant to stay in. With a shrewdness and energy that scared his rivals stiff, he moved to consolidate and exploit his position.

Crafty Craftsman. In a matter of months he put together the slickest production company on Broadway. On Merrick’s permanent staff today there are only two executives (General Manager Jack Schlissel, Production Manager Samuel “Biff” Liff), four assistants, five theatrical technicians. But Merrick has tuned this team to an excited pitch of efficiency that no other production office can approach.

Merrick works harder than anybody. He starts at 8 a.m. and goes full throttle until after midnight. All day long, he phones, phones, phones. No notes, no memos, no conferences. “He’s got a memory like a Pentagon computer,” says Schlissel. “Carries it all in his head. Twenty, 30 projects at once. Never forgets a fact, never misses a trick.” With his office in his head, Merrick is totally mobile. On an after-dinner impulse, he may dart into the street, grab a cab, race to Kennedy Airport, jump on a jet to London, snap up a property in Manchester, get back to New York in less than 48 hours.

His “reconnaissance missions” have been swackingly successful. In an era when imported plays have dominated Broadway, Merrick has skimmed most of the cream off the import market. He frequently gets there first, offers top bid, makes selections both shrewd and estimable. He can watch a London play and calculate to the dollar the cost of producing it on Broadway. And what

Merrick buys, Merrick produces with crafty mastery of his craft. He has a strong sense of the large theatrical effect, yet no detail is too small to obsess his attention. He checks every footlight mike to make sure it is cased in rubbe-otherwise, the mikes pick up the actor’s footfalls. He prowls about the sets in narrow-eyed search of peeling paint. He even makes elaborate taxi tours of the entire New York area to inspect all the billboards he has paid for. Once he climbed to a high perch in Yankee Stadium to see if a panning TV camera could catch a certain outfield billboard; he concluded that the sign was out of range, so he didn’t buy the space.

Making Waves. When it comes to nursing nickels, Merrick can scrounge with any Scrooge on the street. In one of his plays a character was supposed to eat strawberries, and strawberries the actor got on opening night; but when the reviews turned up terrible, Merrick instantly reduced him to radishes. Barbra Streisand, who appeared in Merrick’s / Can Get It for You Wholesale in 1962, is still squawking because David bought her shoes by A. S. Beck instead of Capezio. Carol Channing reports that one night when she was slipping out of the Hello, Dolly! stage door in a full show costume that included an expensive pair of dancing shoes that Merrick had bought for her, he demanded indignantly where she was going. “To do a benefit,” she explained. “Not in my shoes!” he bellowed. With a sneer, she took them off and started out in her stocking feet. Then, with a smirk, he picked her up and carried her to a taxi. (“Not a word of truth in that story,” says Merrick, “but print it anyway. I want people to think I’m strong enough to carry a woman twice my size.”)

Merrick is cunning when it comes to handling talent. “Artists are supersensitive children,” he says. “They have to be whipped sometimes, but they have to be whipped with lettuce leaves.” Directors, playwrights, designers, songwriters, choreographers-they all say that Merrick is patience on a monument when they come to him with their problems. “The man is a born midwife,” says a playwright. “He knows just when to gentle, just when to press.” The thing he does best is stay away: he never goes to rehearsals unless he is asked to, shows confidence even if he doesn’t feel it. “But after the out-of-town opening!” he says. “After those first stinking, rotten reviews! Boy, am I ever a bastard! Boy, do I make waves!”

“Captain Hook.” Merrick’s waves come in all sizes. The tsunami is terrifying. Says a man who survived it: “He is convulsed. He goes purple. The vein in his forehead stands up three-eighths of an inch. And the hatred in his eyes!” He cuts up his victim “with a tongue you could shave with.” He fires people left and right. Sometimes he even throws things. Sometimes people throw things back. Last December, when Merrick flew off the handle and fired Director Tony Page for not making cuts in Inadmissible Evidence, Actor Nicol Williamson threw a glass of beer and a sudsy right at Merrick’s head and sent him staggering into a backstage trash barrel. It is on such occasions, of course, that Merrick’s critics up periscope and fire all tubes. He has been called “Typhoid David” and “Captain Hook” and “the Krishna Menon of Broadway.” Director Tony Richardson says: “He’s like a woman-sweet and bitchy at the same time.” Anthony Quinn, who played in Merrick’s Becket and Tchin-Tchin, recalls that when his vocal cords were so sore they were bleeding, Merrick snarled: “As long as you can talk, you go on.” Says Quinn: “I may not like the son-of-a-bitch, but I’ve got to admit that he produces plays well and makes them work.” Anthony Newley, who survived two stints with Merrick in Stop the World, I Want to Get Off and The Roar of the Greasepaint! The Smell of the Crowd, mutters grimly: “Hitler didn’t die at the end of World War II.

He went into show business.”

Detective in a Tree. Merrick gives as good as he gets, and he never stops fighting for a Merrick production. But since he flacked for Fanny he has refined his methods. By cultivating a public character, he has set up a walking advertisement for his shows; by involving that character in a sensational series of front-page fratches, he has kept those shows in the public eye. His first big feud was with Jackie Gleason, who started missing performances of Take Me Along when it was coolly received by the critics. David decided that Gleason was malingering, ordered a private detective to sit detectably in a tree outside Gleason’s house. After a few days of that, and a few weeks of verbal ping-pong in the press, Merrick cheerfully delivered the cruncher: he announced that since Lloyds of London had agreed to pay him $3,000 for every performance his star missed, Gleason was actually doing him a favor by staying home.

Next victim: Anna Maria Alberghet-ti, who said she was too sick to appear in Carnival and dragged herself off to the hospital. Merrick sent the lady a bouquet of plastic roses and demanded a lie-detector test. At various times since then, he has flown into snits over Richard Rodgers, Arthur Miller, Barry Goldwater, Mayor Lindsay, the New York Telephone Co., the New York City Transit Authority, and the Republican Party (when accused of calling Henry Cabot Lodge “a broken-down Republican,” he denied indignantly that he had used “a phrase so redundant”). He has even taken out after Santa Clans; last December, with characteristic gallows humor, he sent out Christmas cards showing St. Nick hanging by the neck.

Clobbering the Critics. More than anything else, it’s the critics who bring out the beast (and the best) in Merrick. To a considerable degree, the reviewers who write for the New York Times and the New York Herald Tribune can make or break any show that comes to Broadway. Producers have always complained about the critics’ power, but nobody did anything until, from motives no doubt crass as well as cultural, David loaded his sling.

His attack has been conducted at ev ery turn with a grand sense of theater. Sometimes he has needled: he querulously complained that Playwright Jean Kerr, wife of the Trib’s Walter Kerr, kept nudging her husband while the performance was going on-the implication being that Walter’s reviews reflected Jean’s opinions. Sometimes, without bothering to explain the joke, he has secretly decorated his enemies with insulting little signs. Only last week, after years of resenting The New Yorker magazine’s theater reviews, he inserted an advertisement in which the first let ters of each line form an acrostic that sort of makes a monkey out of the magazine that printed it. The ad:

CACTUS FLOWER HELLO, DOLLY! INADMISSIBLE EVIDENCE MARAT/DE SADE PHILADELPHIA, HERE I COME!

In another ad, he gave the whole scrivening lot a glorious razzberry: even before Subways Are for Sleeping received its predictable panning, Merrick collected seven men with the same names as the New York daily reviewers and sent them to previews of Subways. A week after the show opened, Merrick stuck tongue firmly in cheek and printed their names, their pictures and their reviews of the show (all raves) in a great big blat of a full-page ad. And in the course of a long guerrilla war against Howard Taubman of the Times, he pointedly reprinted one of Taubman’s reviews in Greek and suggested sympathetically that the poor chap required “vocational guidance.”

Savage Joke. Last week Merrick’s Marauders struck again at Taubman’s successor, Stanley Kauffmann. On a recent trip to London, Merrick found 100 copies of The Philanderer, a 1952 novel by Critic Kauffmann that falls pat to Merrick’s purpose-the book was the occasion of an unsuccessful prosecution for obscenity in England. (” ‘Darling,’ she whispered. How lazy, a woman’s first words after lovemaking; how husky and bare”). Cackling wickedly, Merrick bought up the lot and shipped it home. Then he mailed 89 copies to editors and columnists all over the U.S. -and ten copies to key editors of the New York Times. Said Merrick: “If I’m lucky, I’ll get arrested for sending unseemly matter through the mails.”

It is a savage joke, but then Merrick savagely resents the power of the critics, and he will stop at nothing legal in his drive to whittle it away. “Sure, I’m playing this thing for publicity,” he says, “but I’m also playing a deeper game. I want people to stop swallowing the pap these mediocrities are churning out and start thinking for themselves about the theater.”

Next season Merrick intends to give theatergoers plenty to think about: 1) a new play by Peter Weiss (Marat/Sade); 2) a musical based on Truman Capote’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s, written and directed by Abe Burrows; 3) a musical based on The Fourposter starring Mary Martin and directed by Gower Champion; 4) a new comedy by Bill Manhoff (The Owl and the Pussycat): 5) a new play by Brian Friel (Philadelphia, Here I Come!); 6) Hugh Wheeler’s dramatization of the Shirley Jackson novel, We Have Always Lived in the Castle; 7) a play by Cartoonist Mell Lazarus: 8) an Italian musical starring Marcello Mastroianni. For the season after that, he has already signed up several properties, including a repertory program by Britain’s superlative Royal Shakespeare Company and, if negotiations work out, another by London’s National Theater.

“It’s going to go on, you know,” he says in a cold, clear voice. “I’ve got it made. The plays I want, the people I want, are easier to get now. Every year I mean-to do more and better things. I keep having this fantasy. I’m walking through the theater district, and in every house I pass there is a David Merrick production. Whenever I doodle, I doodle only one word: SOON. I’ll never stop working. It’s the only thing I know. It’s going to go on and on and on.” And on, until the Dead-End Kid from St. Louis has kicked over the sign that says Broadway is a dead-end street.