Razzle Dazzle

by Michael Riedel

  But all of that would become clear much later. In the summer of 1972, sitting in Schoenfeld’s office, all Poland saw was a distracted, agitated man. “I’m finding you impossible today,” he told Schoenfeld. “I’ll come back another time.” The next day Poland picked up the New York Times and read SHUBERT NO LONGER A FAMILY AFFAIR.

  • • •

  The day of the coup—Friday, July 7, 1972—Schoenfeld showed up at Phil Smith’s office on the sixth floor of the Sardi Building. “Phil, don’t go to lunch today,” he said. “Don’t leave this floor. Send out for lunch—whatever you have to do. But do not leave this building. Important things are about to happen.” Smith huddled with a couple of other employees who sided with Schoenfeld and Jacobs against Larry Shubert. “I guess they’re going to dump him,” one of them said. “So the three of us just sat there, waiting for the bomb to go off,” Smith recalled.

  At 11:00 a.m., Larry Shubert threw open the door of his sixth-floor office in the Sardi Building and staggered out, ashen faced. He’d been deposed. A few minutes later, Jacobs summoned Smith into the room. Schoenfeld looked tense, Jacobs calm and businesslike. Irving Goldman was smiling. Jacobs issued orders. The most pressing problem was the company’s new theater, the Shubert, in Century City, Los Angeles. Hal Prince’s Follies was due to open there at the end of the month, but the theater wasn’t finished. Larry Shubert had deferred decisions about the new theater for months. If it wasn’t ready by the time Follies played its first preview in a couple of weeks, the Shuberts would have to pay Prince tens of thousands of dollars in penalties.

  “From all appearances, it does not look like this theater is going to open,” Jacobs said. “So, Phil, you’re going to have to take that on as your responsibility. That theater has to be ready.” As Smith was leaving the office to pack a bag and get on a plane, he had a thought. “Bernie,” he said, “I have to take you over to the precinct and have you fingerprinted.”

  “Why?” Jacobs wondered.

  “Because we have a liquor license in Los Angeles, and they want the president of the company to be fingerprinted,” Smith replied. He made a phone call to the Forty-Seventh Street precinct and took Jacobs, the new president of the Shubert Organization, over to have him fingerprinted. “That was my first official act under the new regime,” Smith said.

  Smith flew out that night to Los Angeles and checked into the Beverly Hills Hotel. The next morning he had a two-hour phone conversation with Jacobs. The new president told his right-hand man to call him, day or night, at the office or at home, if he needed to run something by him. But, he added, “If you don’t think it’s necessary to check with me, don’t call. Just get it done.”

  Meanwhile, Schoenfeld took charge of announcing the change at the Shubert Organization. He called an old friend, Harvey Sabinson, who had been David Merrick’s publicist, for advice. Schoenfeld handed him a piece of paper on which he’d written eight lines stating that Lawrence Shubert Lawrence Jr. had been made chairman of the board but that Schoenfeld and Jacobs were now the chief executive officers of the Shubert Organization. Irving Goldman had been handed more power as well. It was a bland announcement that would probably merit scant attention even in Variety. But Sabinson knew a good story when he saw one and told Schoenfeld, “This is history in the making. Not since 1900, when this company was founded, has a Shubert not been in charge of it. I think this is a front page story for the New York Times.” Sabinson went round the corner to the Times building on West Forty-Third Street and explained the situation to his old friend, Arthur Gelb, a rising editor at the Times who had once been the paper’s theater reporter. “You’re right. It’s a front page story,” said Gelb.

  Memories can be hazy forty years after the fact. The Times story ran on page twenty-four, not page one. But it conveyed the significance of the coup. “For the first time since its founding 72 years ago,” it read, “the Shubert organization, the largest theatrical empire in the world, will be operated by men not in the Shubert family. In a drastic reorganization, this cluster of 23 corporations was put in charge of a troika . . . . The shift in control of 17 of the city’s 30 Broadway theaters touched off intensive speculation in show business about what this might mean in booking shows and how it might affect the artistic standards the new executives might impose . . . . Those in show business did not know the answer. But all agreed this was one of the major developments in the legitimate theater in recent years.”

  Schoenfeld and Jacobs gave the Times a brief interview, denying reports that they planned to sell any theaters. Schoenfeld said the company would increase pressure on the city to rid Times Square of prostitutes, drug dealers, and pornographers.

  Variety, whose coverage was led by its tenacious editor, Abel Green, did a racier job of capturing the intrigue. Describing the announcement of the new ruling troika as “cryptic,” Green wrote: “Whether this restructuring of duties, whereby two lawyers and a scenic paint tycoon are officially placed in charge of virtually all of the day-to-day operations, augurs a power struggle is conjectural at the moment.” But, he noted, the “omission of Lawrence’s trademark Shubert middle-name [the press release referred to him as Lawrence S. Lawrence] may be deliberate . . . .” Green also noted the announcement was not made by Howard Teichmann, the Shubert’s official spokesman, but by an outside press agent, Sabinson. Green managed to get Larry Shubert on the phone. The deposed king said he might have something to say in the future, but when Green told him that Schoenfeld and Jacobs had announced they’d been with the company eighteen years, he cracked, “So? I’ve been with the Shuberts for thirty-two years!”3

  Around the office there were no wisecracks. “Every time I walked into the office, for weeks after the announcement, Lawrence Shubert Lawrence would yell at me and say, ‘You know what those traitors did to me?’ ” recalls Sabinson, laughing.

  Schoenfeld and Jacobs solidified their power. They dispensed with the sycophants, cutting them loose or stripping them of authority. They hated Teichmann most of all because he was always “winding Larry up about them,” said Smith. Teichmann was out of a job by the end of July 1972. But, with his connections in the press, he would prove a formidable enemy. Over the next six months, he leaked stories suggesting that Schoenfeld and Jacobs had been plotting their coup for years and that they intended to sell off the Shubert theaters and focus on nontheatrical real estate. Schoenfeld and Jacobs denied the reports, which cropped up in Variety and the New York Post. Teichmann also struck back with a blistering letter to his friend, Robert M. Morgenthau, who was angling to become Manhattan District Attorney (which he did in 1975). Teichmann believed the lawyers had been planning their coup ever since John Shubert’s death in 1962. They began to wield, he wrote, power well outside the scope of their duties as in-house lawyers. (He neglected to mention that they had to do so, since the head of the company was usually drunk at the Sardi’s bar by lunchtime.) He went after Goldman, too, saying he’d been appointed to the board because he fixed the Surrogate Court case in the Shubert’s favor. Teichmann ended his jeremiad with a ringing charge of corruption. “I believe that what Schoenfeld, Jacobs, and Goldman are running is not the Shubert theaters but a partnership in which each man shares in everything from house seats to concessions to real estate ventures to maintenance contracts and who knows what else. It is my opinion they have been milking the theaters with the same brashness they have used as trustees of the Foundation.”4

  Evelyn Teichmann gave her husband’s letter to writer Foster Hirsch, who made extensive use of it in his 1998 book, The Boys from Syracuse. Teichmann died in 1987, but his widow carried on the war against Schoenfeld and Jacobs, telling Hirsch that they were out to do in her husband and get control of the company for themselves.

  Schoenfeld, who loathed Hirsch’s book, denied all the charges in his memoir—and to this writer during the course of several conversations over many years. Irving Goldman, Schoenfeld maintained, was a friend of Larry Shubert’s, not his or Jacobs’s. Jacobs never ha
d any illusions about Goldman. “He was not someone you could admire,” he said. But they needed him to oust Larry. Phil Smith, who worked alongside everyone at the time, said, “Teichmann hated Goldman. They were always fighting. He wanted Bernie and Jerry to intercede, but what could they do? Irving was on the board, appointed by Lawrence. Tyke really didn’t do anything at the company. He was just Larry’s buddy. As for house seats, nobody wanted more house seats than Tyke. He used them to ingratiate himself with his friends in the press. He loved being able to pass them out.”

  Schoenfeld and Jacobs did not, as Teichmann charged, sell off the theaters or “milk them for their own personal gain.” In 1972, the seventeen Shubert theaters were not that valuable. Jacobs discovered this shortly after the coup as he tried to stem the company’s cash flow problem. “When we were given the power to run the business the first thing we discovered was that the business was close to being bankrupt,” he said. “There were assets but they were not liquid. There was not sufficient cash around to pay our bills.” Jacobs went to Morgan Guaranty, which oversaw J. J. Shubert’s estate, and asked for a $1 million line of credit. For collateral, he put up the seventeen Broadway theaters. The bank turned him down. The theaters were, the bank said, “specialized properties” in a deteriorating neighborhood. They were not worth $1 million. Had Schoenfeld and Jacobs wanted to milk the theaters they would have sold them off (theaters were not landmarked then as they are today) to developers who would have turned them into something far more valuable than theaters—parking lots. As the impresario Dimitri Weismann says in Stephen Sondheim’s Follies, “It is 1971 . . . every year between the Great Wars, I produced the Follies in this theater. Since then this house has been home to ballet, movies, blue movies, and, now, in a final burst of glory, it’s to be a parking lot.” But the lawyers didn’t sell. Just as Lee and J. J. Shubert kept their theaters during the Great Depression, Schoenfeld and Jacobs held the chain together during the company’s—and the city’s—financial catastrophe of the 1970s.

  Phil Smith had no doubt his new bosses would keep the theaters. “They had worked at Shubert most of their adult lives,” said Smith. “It’s what they knew. Many of us had been there a long time. If the company had been broken up—if the theaters were sold—all those years would have been for nothing. We had to try to save it. And don’t forget—Bernie and Jerry loved the business. They were not theater people in the beginning but they took to it right away.”

  Jerry Leichtling, Schoenfeld’s office assistant, also believed the lawyers would keep the Shubert empire intact. “Jerry lived by something called the ‘Prudent Man Rule’—he talked about it all the time,” Leichtling said. A legal term that goes back to 1830, the Prudent Man Rule applies to trustees of estates, who are urged to look after the estate as if it were their own—“with prudence, intelligence, and discretion.” One of its key tenets is to preserve the estate. J. J. Shubert’s estate was made up in large part of his theaters—and his will stipulated that they remain theaters. As J. J.’s former lawyer, and an executor of his estate, Schoenfeld felt duty-bound to keep Shubert going as a theatrical force. The Prudent Man would act on J. J.’s wishes and keep the theaters as theaters. They were, in many ways, J. J.’s children. And in 1972 they needed looking after.

  But Schoenfeld and Jacobs were also ambitious men. They saw an opportunity to depose a weak king, and they took it. They would go on to reap the rewards of running the Shubert empire—power, perks, money, and stature. But since the Shubert Foundation controlled the Shubert Organization, they knew they would never own the company. They would never make the kind of money theater owners and producers who owned their properties and shows would. As powerful as Schoenfeld and Jacobs became, they remained, as they often said, employees of the Shubert Foundation.

  • • •

  If Howard Teichmann misjudged Schoenfeld and Jacobs’s intentions, he was right about Irving Goldman’s. Phil Smith had been in Los Angeles for a week trying to get the new Shubert Theatre ready for the opening of Follies when Goldman arrived. Over lunch at a Chinese restaurant in Century City, Goldman began quizzing Smith on preparations for opening night. You have a red carpet, he wanted to know. Yes, said Smith. Who’d you get it from? Goldman asked. Smith gave the name of a company that had done the red carpet for years for the Oscars. Goldman was silent for a moment and then asked, “You have klieg lights?” Yes, Smith said, adding that he’d also lined up Army Archerd, the top columnist at Variety, to cover the opening on the red carpet under the klieg lights. Goldman seemed pleased.

  But the next day he rang up Smith and said, “Cancel the red carpet.” Smith was taken aback. “I’ve got a better place,” Goldman said. Smith had put down a substantial deposit which would have to be forfeited. “Well, whatever it is, pay it,” Goldman said. He then gave Smith the name of another lighting company he wanted to use for the opening night. Then he wanted the list of VIPs who were going to attend the opening. He asked Smith if such and such a person had picked up his tickets. “I foolishly said, ‘No,’ ” Smith recalled.

  “Good. Give them to me. I’ll make sure he gets them,” Goldman would respond.

  “And then I recognized what was going on,” said Smith. “It took me three or four names, but then I started saying, ‘Yes! He picked up his tickets.’ I gave Irving a lot of yeses. I exhausted his list.”

  That afternoon, Smith called Bernie Jacobs in New York and told him about Irving’s interest in red carpets, klieg lights, and VIP tickets.

  “Phil, we’ll be out there in two days,” Jacobs said. “Jerry and I are coming out. Just hold on until we get there.”

  • • •

  A few weeks later, back in New York after the opening of Follies (which flopped in Los Angeles as it had on Broadway), Phil Smith had lunch with Abe Margulies, an old friend who’d become a successful businessman. Abe had read about the takeover of the Shubert empire in the Times.

  “Philly,” he said. “Have Bernie and Jerry gone crazy?”

  “What do you mean, Abe?” Smith asked.

  “Irving Goldman! He’s a thief!”

  “Where?”

  “Anywhere, Philly. Everywhere.”

  Smith looked at his friend and said, “Thanks, Abe. I’ll pass on the word.”

  CHAPTER NINE

  Rotten to the Core

  A few months after the coup, the New York Times ran a lengthy  profile of the new triumvirate under the headline SHUBERT EMPIRE FIGHTING A FINANCIAL CRISIS. The article was accompanied by a photograph of Schoenfeld, Jacobs, and Goldman standing under the Shubert Theatre, whose marquee read, ARTHUR MILLER’S THE CREATION OF THE WORLD AND OTHER BUSINESS—a flop that would close five days after the article appeared. Goldman, grinning, stood in the center, flanked by a pudgy Schoenfeld in a fedora and a smiling (for once) Jacobs in a raincoat. Jacobs summed up their situation, saying, “We are fighting for more than just the survival of the Shubert theaters. We are fighting for the survival of the American legitimate theater. If the Shubert business does not survive, there won’t be any American theater.”

  There were just fifty-six productions in the 1971–72 Broadway season. With few exceptions—Neil Simon’s The Prisoner of Second Avenue, Van Peebles’s Ain’t Supposed to Die a Natural Death—most were duds. The Shuberts seemed to have a knack for picking the worst of the lot. In addition to Creation of the World, they had booked such gems as The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window (five performances), The Incomparable Max (ten performances), There’s One in Every Marriage (sixteen performances), and Solitaire/Double Solitaire (a hit at thirty-six performances!).

  “There was a point where we only had five theaters open,” Phil Smith recalled. “The Broadhurst was dark for almost a year. The Broadhurst! One of our best theaters. It was pretty sad.”

  As the Times reported, this was the worst Shubert season since the Depression. The paper noted that during the post–World War II boom on Broadway, the Shubert empire was valued at more than $400 million. By 1972
, its value had fallen to between $60 million and $100 million.

  The most pressing problem was cash flow. Stymied by Morgan Guaranty’s refusal of a $1 million line of credit, Schoenfeld and Jacobs had to do something the Shubert brothers never did—sell some real estate. But contrary to their enemies’ whispers, they did not sell theaters. Instead they sold off a parcel of land on Broadway between Sixty-Second and Sixty-Third Streets for $3.5 million.

  But for the Shubert empire to thrive, it needed shows. So Schoenfeld and Jacobs made what would turn out to be one of the most important decisions of their reign. They would begin investing Shubert money in new productions. They would also start meeting with writers, directors, and performers to discuss new projects. After more than a decade of acting solely as a landlord, the Shubert Organization would start producing again. Jacobs took over the company’s booking department. He began reading scripts instead of just contracts. Here he had another ally, his wife, Betty, who, it turned out, was a good script reader herself. On Friday nights, he’d take a pile of scripts out to his house in Roslyn, Long Island, where he and Betty read them over the weekend. Their kitchen table became the Shubert booking office.

  The first show the new management invested in was Pippin, which they booked into the Imperial Theatre. Stephen Schwartz, a young songwriter fresh out of Carnegie Mellon University, had fashioned a freewheeling musical loosely based on the life of Charlemagne’s eldest son. The show was of its time—more a “happening” than a traditional musical. But the score was tuneful and contemporary. In his memoir, Present at the Creation, Leaping in the Dark, and Going Against the Grain, producer Stuart Ostrow wrote, “From the moment he played ‘Corner of the Sky,’ I knew Stephen was the new voice I was looking for.” Ostrow worked with Schwartz on the script for over a year. In the meantime, Schwartz had an unexpected Off-Broadway smash called Godspell, which produced the hit tune “Day by Day.” Ostrow asked Bob Fosse, with whom he played poker, to direct Pippin. Fosse transformed Schwartz’s “sincere, naive morality play,” as Ostrow called it, into a cynical burlesque narrated by a character called the Leading Player.1 For that role, Fosse cast his friend Ben Vereen. Schwartz was aghast at what Fosse was doing to his show, but Fosse ignored him. He told a reporter that Schwartz was “talented but not as talented as he thinks he is.” There were flare-ups during rehearsals on a daily basis. At one point Schwartz said, “I’m getting out of here.” Fosse replied icily, “You can get out, and you can stay out”—and banned him from rehearsals.2