Broadway Babylon (41 page)

• When Ethel Merman’s leading man Jack Klugman sought to invest in
Gypsy
, Merrick replied, “You don’t want to invest in this. It’s going to be a bomb. If you want to invest in a musical, invest in
Destry
,” an ill-fated show starring a pre-TV Andy Griffith and Dolores Gray. Co-producer Leland Hayward and
Gypsy
composer Jule Styne overheard Merrick’s typically unflattering remarks about their musical and reportedly got out their checkbooks and asked Merrick, “How much would you take to get out of this show?”

• David Merrick was amazed and intrigued by Woody Allen’s open Jewishness. He gave the comic, born Allen Konigsberg, his Broadway debut as a playwright (
Don’t Drink the Water
) and as an actor (
Play It Again, Sam
), while predicting, “He’s too plain and specialized for television,” not to mention the movies.

• “This story may be apocryphal,” advised stage and screen costume designer Irene Sharaff, “but it fits David Merrick to a ‘T’.… Naturally he hated to wait in line, and he had his minions who did everything for him. But sometimes, in later years, he would get out and about, and when he came to a line, he’d march up to the front and tell the first person, ‘If you knew what I’ve got, you’d let me go ahead of you.’ He did this many times, and finally one brave person dared to say, ‘Excuse me for asking, but what have you got?’
  “Merrick cackled and answered back, ‘Chutzpah!’ ”

• When the great caricaturist Al Hirschfeld did a drawing of Merrick as a Grinch-like Santa Claus who steals Christmas, several people thought he would sue. Instead, Merrick turned around and used Hirschfeld’s drawing—without permission, of course—on his Christmas cards.

• The most memorable thing about Merrick’s 1961 musical
Subways Are for Sleeping
was The Ad, a stunt he’d been planning for years. It had been preceded by thousands of pre-opening posters affixed to subway trains and platforms that bore only the show’s title.
Transit Authority officials ordered Merrick to remove the posters, which they believed encouraged homeless people to spend the night underground.
  The posters piqued New Yorkers’ curiosity, but it was The Ad that extended the disappointing show’s run. The stunt was possible because
New York Times
critic Brooks Atkinson, who had a one-of-a-kind name, had retired. His replacement, Howard Taubman, was one of seven critics whose namesakes Merrick found in the telephone book. He invited the seven non-critics to wine and dine at his expense and to agree to the critical praise that would accompany their names and photos in the advertisement, which ran only in the
Herald Tribune
’s early edition before editors killed it.
  The Ad headlined, “7 Out of 7 Are Ecstatically Unanimous About ‘Subways Are for Sleeping.’ ” For instance, the mock John Chapman called it “the best musical of the century.” The mostly rejected ad itself became news and was reproduced nationwide for free. The chutzpah of Merrick’s stunt, a cross between exhibitionistic contempt and performance art, was written and talked about and debated, and The Ad quickly took its place as perhaps the greatest publicity stunt in 20th-century theater history. Ironically, it was remembered long after the show that it so lavishly extolled was forgotten.

• “Classy” was, for David Merrick, the ultimate seal of approval. In his mind, it often went together with “English,” and the former producer died in his sleep at eighty-eight in a pricey rest home in London. At the same time that he had snobbish tastes and goals, Merrick relished his reputation as “the meanest man on Broadway.” “He was conflicted,” said Ben Bagley. “His parents were Russian immigrants, it was an arranged marriage, the family was poor and melodramatically unhappy … and he bought the dominant culture’s stereotypes and propaganda about being Jewish.”
  Merrick’s childhood was described as “Dickensian” by some insiders, and he almost never discussed it. His relief when his battling parents divorced was short-lived, since they briefly remarried before Sam abandoned Celia and David, who then ran away from his mother but had to return for lack of funds. Late in life, Merrick admitted that two of his least favorite adjectives, which in his mind went together, were “poor” and “Jew” (the latter, of course, a noun).

•
Besides strongly objecting to Barbra Streisand’s looks, Merrick was aghast at her undisguised Brooklyn accent and “blatant Jewishness.” He also resented how well liked the nineteen-year-old initially was by his associates. When
I Can Get It for You Wholesale
casting director Michael Shurtleff stood up for her, Merrick retorted, “I want you to take her out and kill her.”
  When
Wholesale
composer-lyricist Harold Rome pointed out that the Broadway newcomer could be hired “for scale,” Merrick exploded, “You’re the most anti-Semitic guy I know. You’ve hired every ugly Jew in town for this show, and now you want me to hire this
meeskite
.”—Yiddish for an unattractive person; Merrick normally avoided Yiddishisms, except in the heat of the moment.
  Rome later disclosed, “Merrick had it very tough coming up, as a Jewish youth and a future producer. It galled him that Barbra, whom he genuinely cannot stand, rose to major stardom by her second Broadway show,
Funny Girl
.” When she departed for Hollywood and the movie version of
Funny Girl
—never to return to the stage—Merrick was both relieved and dumbfounded by film producers clamoring for her services.

• Merrick’s Midas touch did not translate to Hollywood, where he produced four pictures between 1972 and ’80, the most notable being the much-ballyhooed
The Great Gatsby
, toplining Robert Redford and Mia Farrow, a costly flop. While in LA, Merrick picked up a cocaine habit.

• Choreographer-turned-director Gower Champion hired one Karen Prunczik for
42nd Street
(1980) because she was a talented tap dancer. The first day Merrick saw her, he informed Champion, “That girl is pockmarked and she’s ugly. I want her fired.” Champion refused. One night, when leading lady Wanda Richert was unable to go on, Prunczik had the opportunity to take her place. But Merrick took it away by canceling the evening’s performance.
  Many months later, Merrick married Prunczik. A few months later, he initiated divorce proceedings. Former father-in-law Walt Prunczik later filed court papers claiming that Merrick had “been heard mumbling that he had put out a contract on him.” A psychiatrist testified that the producer did have “homicidal impulses” against his ex in-law.

• Merrick’s longest creative partnership was with Gower Champion. It started in 1961 and ended in 1980 with the producer’s infamous
42nd Street
closing-curtain announcement that Champion had died that morning at 59 of a rare blood cancer. Merrick held back the news partly or primarily for the TV cameras that had been summoned to record the shock and tears, also Merrick embracing a thunderstruck Wanda Richert, Champion’s mistress, who’d also been kept in the dark.
  David Merrick had met his match in Gower Champion. In the early ‘60s, via his hit musical
Bye, Bye, Birdie
, Champion joined the top ranks of Broadway director-choreographers—with Jerome Robbins, Bob Fosse, and Michael Kidd. All four “had fearsome reputations as tyrants,” said critic Howard Kissel. Playwright Michael Stewart called the diminutive Champion “the Presbyterian Hitler.”
  Although Merrick professed genuine grief at Champion’s passing, in subsequent months he removed the man’s name from the
42nd Street
marquee and tried to reduce the royalties to which Champion’s estate was entitled.

• In 1983, David Merrick suffered a stroke that left him barely able to speak—mostly grunts—and limited his mobility. Confined to a wheelchair, he stepped up his lawsuits against offenders real and imagined, and was a bizarre sight in a maladjusted wig and crudely applied rouge. He’d long since admitted to being frequently depressed. Despite his penny-pinching ways, the man lived modestly—as a sometime bachelor, even shabbily—and seldom gave or attended parties.
  Adolph Green said, “He had a Rolodex full of associates and acquaintances, but no real friends, least of all his wives.”

• No surprise, but Merrick did not mellow with age and still enjoyed planning confrontational advertising. When
Cats
proved a “now and forever” hit, he touted
42nd Street
as being for people allergic to cats. When
42nd Street
had run seven years and looked ready to close soon, Merrick began advertising it as “Broadway’s
Latest
Hit!”—pushing back the curtain time to 8:15. His leering face on a giant poster over Times Square announced, “David Merrick is holding the curtain for you!” The musical returned to profit by picking up turn-away business from another hit import,
Phantom of the Opera
, across the street.

• Merrick’s last public appearance, according to associate Bob Schear, was closing night of
State Fair
(1996). It was an unsuccessful and downbeat ending to a career that encompassed nearly ninety productions.
“However, Mr. Merrick didn’t know it was closing night, he was so out of it.” At the well-attended memorial for Merrick at the St. James Theatre, where he’d had his famous red office, former Broadway star Dolores Gray was present in a wheelchair but asked Schear, “When’s David Merrick going to show up?”

• When he died, Merrick was married to his fifth wife—a younger woman who’d been his spokesperson—but had divorced five times. Bob Schear believed Merrick probably had other wives “we didn’t know about,” as well as unofficial daughters.

• A nurse who looked after Merrick toward the end summed up his personality and his achievement: “This man has channeled his self-destructive instincts into something positive—his work in the theatre. It is rare that someone with that much destructive energy can find such a constructive outlet.”