Broadway Babylon (40 page)

• David Merrick’s theatrical career spanned 1942 to 1996. During the 1963–1964 season alone, he produced eight plays and musicals.
Time
magazine estimated in 1966 that he employed twenty percent of Broadway’s work force.

• Celebrated British playwright John Osborne told
Women’s Wear Daily
that he’d actually enjoyed working with Merrick because unlike other producers, “He didn’t have any creative ideas.”

• Merrick sometimes denied being Jewish and so hated his hometown of St. Louis that he refused to fly TWA because their flights passed over or through St. Louis. His parents had fought long and loud—“It was like living on the set of
Virginia Woolf
”—and divorced when he was seven.

• Merrick didn’t attend his own mother’s funeral. He did ask a friend to attend it, in St. Louis. Biographer Howard Kissel theorized that the eventual giving way of Merrick’s mind was perhaps the legacy “of his poor, crazy mother. There had always been a screw loose. Now it got looser.”

• Merrick first married in 1938. The bride’s family refused to attend the wedding. Leonore’s inheritance allowed the couple to move to New York in 1939 and David to invest $5,000 in 1940 in an upcoming play that became a hit.

• As a young man, Merrick had such bad ulcers that certain insiders didn’t give him long to live. The ulcers excused him from service in World War II.

• “Merrick is profoundly a lawyer,” said Reid Shelton, who costarred in the producer’s
Oh What a Lovely War!
in 1964. “He loves litigation and uses it, frequently, to manipulate associates and the media. And his other specialty is publicity. He’s as much a publicist as a producer.”

• Critic Frank Rich noted that Merrick was “chastised not only for his misanthropy and financial ruthlessness, but for being an importer and packager rather than a truly creative producer.”

• The producer was famous for affecting a mortician’s look of severe black clothes.
  “He looked like Mephistopheles when he glared or sneered at you,” said
Hello, Dolly!
leading man David Burns. “Or like a Disney villain.… The glasses he wore magnified his enormous pupils. He loved to intimidate and frighten as many people as he can.” Merrick’s office was done all in red—walls and carpeting—reinforcing the impression of a devil in his lair.
  Though he dressed conservatively, Merrick tried to present a
with-it attitude if not a with-it look. When future film and TV producer Joel Thurm, who worked for several years in Merrick’s office, came to work one day in platform shoes, bell-bottom blue jeans, and a marine dress uniform jacket, Merrick stared, then stated, “No matter what anybody says, you wear that.”

• Merrick’s legendary tantrums affected some people more than others.
Hello, Dolly!
composer-lyricist Jerry Herman explained that the producer’s out-of-town pre-Broadway rantings “almost did major damage to our costume designer Freddie Wittop, who went through the tortures of the damned.” One day, Herman found him at the back of the local theater in tears during a show. Wittop revealed that Merrick had informed him “that the costumes were ugly and he was ashamed to have such wretched rags in his beautiful show.” As Wittop explained, Herman’s “Put on Your Sunday Clothes” number began with actors strutting about in costume. The combination of clothes and music typically elicited strong applause from audiences. Herman thus pointed out that they were clapping before the music even started.
  “They are applauding your gorgeous costumes.” Freddie hugged Jerry and felt better.

• From Kaye Ballard to Streisand, Merrick disliked non-beauties and whenever possible avoided casting them. Talent was a secondary consideration. Unlike the mostly gay men he worked with on
I Can Get It for You Wholesale
(1962)—Barbra’s Broadway bow—Merrick didn’t believe she had a big future, and failed to put her under contract, to his later fiscal regret when she starred in
Funny Girl
.

• When a reporter asked Merrick what he thought of the women’s rights movement, he snapped, “A woman’s place is in the oven!”—quite a Freudian slip from the secretly Jewish misogynist. When a notably fat Jewish Canadian critic who had panned several Merrick shows died and was cremated, the producer publicly commented, “The fat’s in the fire.”

• Unlike his first wife, Leonore, Merrick never wanted children. Five days shy of their 25th anniversary, the marriage terminated because he’d fathered a child via another woman. Eventually he was survived by two official daughters.

•
Gypsy
set designer Jo Mielziner observed, “Merrick has little if any respect for women. He has contempt for unattractive ones and
considers all the attractive ones interchangeable.” Merrick routinely treated leading ladies badly, excepting a rare Ethel Merman who wouldn’t tolerate such treatment. When Anna Maria Alberghetti missed performances in his hit
Carnival
(1961), Merrick publicly stated he didn’t believe her claims of poor health and would administer a lie-detector test to her in hospital. Actors in general Merrick considered “unruly children.”

• Early on, Merrick displayed a flair for publicity, no matter how outlandish. His 1949 play
Clutterbuck
was boosted by his practice of having bellboys and telephone operators page “Mr. Clutterbuck” during cocktail hour in midtown-Manhattan restaurants and bars. More effective were two-for-one tickets that kept the fiscal failure running for six months.

• It was said that David Merrick liked to be the first to do something, or if need be, the tenth or twentieth. But never the second.

• When a Merrick show took a critical drubbing, he would often sigh and tell an associate, “Time to tack up posters in the men’s room again.” He meant primarily in the subways, where he pioneered Broadway advertising. After the method and venue proved successful, fellow producers stopped scoffing and followed suit.

• “His ideas are usually cornball and his taste’s mostly in his mouth,” felt record and revue producer Ben Bagley, “yet his gimmicks have worked surprisingly often.” Merrick’s idea of wit was embodied by his ad line for his 1980 production
42nd Street
—“The All-Singing All-Dancing Extravaganza with a Cast of 54 (Some Younger).”

• Merrick began publicizing his breakthrough production
Fanny
(1954, co-produced with Joshua Logan) by plastering men’s-room mirrors with suggestive stickers asking, “Have you seen Fanny?” He then commissioned a life-sized nude statue of the show’s belly dancer and had it erected atop an empty pedestal in Central Park one night—illegally, of course. And of course with enough clues so members of the press and police force could find it the next morning.

• One reason Merrick promoted the hell out of
Fanny
was to make it a hit despite Richard Rodgers having declined to do the music, a fact Merrick never forgave. Rodgers was consistently at or near the top of the producer’s enemies list. According to critic Frank Rich, “Such was his detestation of Rodgers that even after the
composer’s death he took revenge on his elderly widow by seating her in the upper balcony at
42nd Street
.”

• When asked by a reporter why he had the reputation of being a mean man, David Merrick logically replied, “Because I
am
mean—what else?”

• When he disliked someone, that person stayed disliked. Merrick taunted
New York Times
critic Howard Taubman more often than most critics, and relished needling him publicly, for instance on Johnny Carson’s
Tonight Show
. The insults finally descended to the level of Nazi analogies, at which point Taubman threatened to sue, and Merrick issued a rare apology.

• Taubman’s successor at the
Times
, Stanley Kauffmann, was also detested by Merrick, who didn’t want him to review a preview of
Philadelphia, Here I Come
in 1966 and prevented him from doing so by canceling that performance after announcing that “a rat” was loose in the theater’s generator. The cancellation and its cause made page one of the paper, garnering the show more in publicity than the amount that had to be refunded for tickets.

• Broadway producers often asked a show’s creators to give up part of their weekly royalties when business wasn’t enough to meet the weekly nut (the amount required before profits commenced). But on
Do Re Mi
(1960), for example, Merrick insisted on such a cut from the creative team and star Phil Silvers during good weeks as well as bad. When Merrick’s demands weren’t met, he’d cut back on advertising and publicity.

• Merrick didn’t like his performers earning outside money. Kaye Ballard was already a Broadway name when she signed to do
Carnival
at $650 a week. Friday afternoons she did a regular appearance on Perry Como’s TV show. Merrick had it written into Ballard’s contract that should she arrive at the Imperial Theatre one minute late on Friday, she’d have to pay David $750.

• Merrick wasn’t intimidated by any actress. He admitted to Carol Channing that initially he didn’t want her for
Hello, Dolly!
“I [didn’t] want that silly grin with all those teeth that go back to your ears.” When Phyllis Newman was Tony nominated for his
Subways Are for Sleeping
, Merrick, seated near her, lied when the list of nominees was read: “Streisand’s going to win. I voted for her.” Seconds later, Newman won, and the producer “sincerely” congratulated her.

•
“Merrick was a sadistic hypocrite,” offered lyricist Adolph Green. “He himself went for young girls and was not known for lengthy relationships. But he liked to try and provoke me over the years about my younger wife”—Phyllis Newman, to whom Green was married from 1960 until his death in 2002.

• Merrick often spoke for shock effect, especially to the press. “Homosexuals are taking over the theater” was the theme of one interview he did, after which gay writer-director Arthur Laurents warned that more such verbal bigotry “and we won’t work for you.” Merrick’s “faux-macho general manager—with a penchant for Puerto Rican boys—signaled frantically behind Merrick’s back for me to lay off. Merrick wasn’t fazed.
  “ ‘It’s only for publicity,’ ” Laurents quoted Merrick as saying. “ ‘I wouldn’t have anyone on my staff who wasn’t homosexual. They have no one to go home to so they work late and don’t complain.’ ” For the record, Laurents has been wedded to his life partner far longer than Merrick was to any of his contractual wives.

• Jerry Herman, who eventually came out as a gay man, confessed that it took him years to get over the trauma of Merrick’s informing him in front of the whole company that his songs for
Hello, Dolly!
were “an embarrassment.” Merrick probably really liked them but felt he was encouraging Herman to create better ones. “He really believed he could get better work out of everybody if he frightened them half to death and made them feel two inches tall.” Herman rued, “It could have been such a happy time, my first big hit. But I still look back on it with discomfort and trepidation.”
  
Hello, Dolly!
leading man David Burns agreed. “Mr. Merrick is a screamer. Literally. When all else fails and he wants to improve a show, he’ll try and scream it into shape.” Burns added, “Woe to anyone Mr. Merrick believes to be homosexual.… In
Dolly!
he had some unforgettably choice words for Charles Nelson Reilly [a supporting actor], both in front of and behind his very flamboyant back.”

•
Hello, Dolly!
was Merrick’s most famous and ongoing hit. It cost $440,000 and grossed over $60 million in its original run of 2,844 performances.

• Merrick’s ideas didn’t evolve with the times. When
Dolly!
’s business fell off after almost four years, he decided to mount an all-black version starring Pearl Bailey in 1967. In 1989, after
42nd Street
finally closed, he announced he would bring it back with an all-black cast. He wasn’t able to.
  (In the ’60s, Merrick had discussed a new
Dolly!
with Jack Benny in drag, opposite Benny’s pal George Burns. Benny was willing, but only for one week. Merrick also pursued Bette Davis for the musical title role. She called it “a fifteen-minute show,” referring to the famous title number.)

• Merrick married former, but still far younger, flight attendant Etan Aronson, a brunette Swede, twice. The litigation surrounding their second divorce (his fifth) lasted a decade. Their first marriage, in 1969, lasted three weeks before he obtained a Mexican divorce. During their second marriage (which began 1983), at Etan’s instigation, she and Merrick adopted two daughters. Eventually he denied in court that he’d been a willing participant in the adoptions.

• “The more his taste and antics are derided,” said David Burns, “the more he revels in his outrageousness.” For his 1955
Hello, Dolly!
antecedent,
The Matchmaker
, Merrick hired an old-fashioned black taxicab with dual controls. While a human drove the vehicle from the backseat, a “monkey” sat up front at the dummy wheel, flabbergasting onlookers. The cab’s side read: “I am driving my master to see
The Matchmaker
.”

• “I think deep down Mr. Merrick is contemptuous of the media and people, even,” felt David
Charlie’s Angels
Doyle, who appeared in the producer’s 1964 flop
I Was Dancing
. “He seems to like the theatre but not theatregoers very much.… Some of his p.r. stunts almost seem intended to offend.” Such as for the French musical
Irma La Douce
(1960), for which Merrick paid sandwich-board men to walk the streets wearing portable pissoirs.

• On the other hand, Merrick was the first producer to buy full-page newspaper ads for a Broadway show. The practice was criticized as vulgar, trivial, wasteful, and egotistical—until it became commonplace.

• Via the tax dodge of a foundation he set up, Merrick imported a large quantity of quality British fare by avant-garde playwrights, featuring talented actors. Some, like
Marat/Sade
with Broadway newcomer Glenda Jackson, became actual hits.

• Merrick and John Osborne’s British drama
Look Back in Anger
(1957) failed to generate much American excitement until
Merrick hired a woman to pose as an affronted theatergoer who got up on the stage and attacked the actor portraying an unfaithful husband. Newspapers duly reported the incident and noted the play’s powerful effect on certain viewers. The hoax extended the run by several months (and was revealed weeks after the stunt occurred).