But it was not a performance for the ages. Burton raced through his first big speech “as if it were Noel Coward,” he later said. He was shaky on his lines and unsure of where he was supposed to be on stage during his scenes. After the performance, Dexter marched backstage and said to him, “Well, dear, you’ve had your chance in front of an audience. What are you going to do now?” Shaffer went back to see him as well. When he knocked on the dressing room door, Burton opened it and said, “You will never see that performance again.” And then he shut the door.
That weekend, Dexter, Shaffer, and Burton’s agent, Robert Lantz, moved into Burton’s hotel suite, rearranged the furniture so that it resembled the set, and drilled him on the play. Burton had memorized the speeches, which he called “arias,” but “not the other bits.” By “the other bits,” Shaffer wanted to know, “do you mean my play?”
Fueled by endless cups of coffee, they ran the play again and again (Shaffer played the boy) until Burton knew his lines. Comfortable in the role, he made his debut on February 26, 1976, to mixed reviews. Clive Barnes wrote, “This is unabashedly a star performance. He is not one’s idea of a man who would be a moderately failed psychiatrist . . . yet somehow his larger-than-life approach works.” Martin Gottfried, in the New York Post, was not impressed. He called the performance “self-centered,” “mannered,” and “superficial.” Gottfried concluded, “Inactivity has caused his formidable talents to go to flab.” But Walter Kerr, in the Sunday Times, delivered a money review: “The actor’s performance in Equus seems to me to be the best work of his life.”
Despite the mixed notices, audiences flocked to the play. Weekly grosses had been slipping under Perkins. They now soared above $50,000. Jacobs, knowing Burton would be a draw, pressed the producers to raise ticket prices. Jacobs thought ticket prices, which had not risen much in several years, were artificially low. Orchestra seats for a musical at the time were about fifteen dollars; for a straight play, nine fifty. Jacobs pushed for a fifteen-dollar ticket for Burton, the highest ever for a play. The public snapped them up. When Burton left, and Perkins returned to the role, the producers wanted to lower the price for fear he wouldn’t sell at fifteen dollars a head. But Jacobs held the line. The top price to Equus was now fifteen dollars. And it wasn’t coming down. “If the public wants the show, they’ll pay for it,” he said. “And now they’re used to a fifteen-dollar ticket.” From that point on, ticket prices began to rise on Broadway. But Jacobs was right; the public would pay just about any price to see a hit show. (They’d been paying huge markups to scalpers for years.) Anything less than a hit probably wouldn’t be around long, even with lower prices, Jacobs thought. And the higher the ticket, the more money there would be for everybody, especially theater owners.
Equus ran three years on Broadway and sent out two national touring companies. Produced all over the world, it set box office records everywhere it opened. Running two years at the Plymouth Theatre, it provided the Shuberts much-needed cash. Many years later, at an event honoring Vanessa Redgrave, Gerald Schoenfeld introduced a group of young reporters to Peter Shaffer. “I want you to meet,” he said to them, “the man who saved Shubert.”
* * *
I. Rehearsals for Five Finger Exercise were chaotic, with the actors stumbling all over the stage. Gielgud, aghast, said, “What are you all doing banging into each other?” Juliet Mills, one of the performers, replied, “We are doing, or rather trying to do, John, what you have given us to do!” Gielgud said, “What on earth for? Everyone knows I can’t direct!”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
The Paintman Cometh
In the spring of 1974, as the Shubert Organization and the producers of Equus began planning the Broadway production, State Attorney General Louis Lefkowitz attacked Schoenfeld and Jacobs. Prompted by Larry Shubert’s complaint, the attorney general’s office had spent a year investigating the Shubert Foundation and its board. On March 28, Lefkowitz filed suit in Surrogate Court against Schoenfeld and Jacobs, charging them with “conflicts of interest” and “self-dealing,” as well as siphoning off hundreds of thousands of dollars from the Shubert Foundation in legal fees that were “grossly excessive, unjustified and unreasonable.” The foundation’s money, Lefkowitz charged, should have gone to charities rather than the lawyers’ pockets. He accused them of taking nearly $550,000 in legal fees from various Shubert entities in the years after J. J. Shubert’s death—but without submitting proper bills. He noted that, in addition to those fees, both men received salaries of $173,000. He objected to their photocopying bill—$17,534 over ten years—and the $15,092 they spent renovating their offices above the Shubert Theatre. He also noted they didn’t pay rent for those offices. “Such use of rent-free space constitutes self-dealing and a conflict of interest in that [Schoenfeld and Jacobs] were at all . . . times . . . attorneys for and executors of [J. J. Shubert’s] estate.”
In all, Lefkowitz lodged sixty-six objections to the way Schoenfeld and Jacobs handled Shubert business. He attacked Schoenfeld for putting his mother-in-law, Mabel Miller, on the payroll from 1965 to 1972 (she received $31,083). Her compensation was “unwarranted and unjustified,” the attorney general wrote. He also criticized the lawyers for representing theater producers who worked with the Shubert Organization—an obvious “conflict of interest,” the attorney general noted.
Ironically, given the fact that his complaint set off the attorney general’s investigation, Lawrence Shubert Lawrence Jr. came in for some stinging criticism as well. Lefkowitz excoriated him for taking $1 million in salaries from 1965 to 1972 and for using foundation money for a chauffeur-driven Cadillac limousine, trips to London, flowers for “Shubert women,” and regular meals at Sardi’s (nothing was said about his bar bill, which must have been considerably larger than Schoenfeld and Jacobs’s photocopying bill). The attorney general noted Larry Shubert was once reimbursed $252.38 for a hotel bill, though the purpose of this business expense was never declared. And he complained that Stuttering M-M-Murray Helwitz remained on the Shubert payroll despite his conviction in 1965 for taking $70,000 in ice. Helwitz, Lefkowitz said, had earned $132,000 at Shubert since he’d gotten out of jail.
Irving Goldman’s name did not appear in the suit. But Lefkowitz objected to a bill for $1,030,583 paid to the Campbell Paint Company in Flushing for painting Shubert theaters. As New York Post reporter Joseph Berger pointed out, the Campbell Paint Company obtained its paint from a company called Gothic Color, which was owned by . . . Irving Goldman.
The paintman cometh.
In the weeks ahead, Berger, a tough and tenacious investigative reporter, scrutinized Goldman. Berger found out the Campbell Paint Company was hired to paint at least three Shubert theaters in cities other than New York, even though it would have been cheaper to hire local painters. Berger also discovered that Goldman’s paint company had been listed in Playbills in the 1960s, but according to a Shubert employee, the listing was changed to the Campbell Paint Company because the name “Gothic” would have made Goldman’s self-dealing “too obvious.” George Campbell Jr., the owner of the company, refused to comment. But Berger noted Campbell had pled guilty in 1967 in a conspiracy-bribery case involving “rigged bids” on $42 million worth of painting contracts from the city Housing Authority. Berger also reported that Goldman family members received commissions from Campbell totaling thousands of dollars.
But the most explosive charge against Goldman and the Shuberts was made by Robert Brustein, the head of the Yale School of Drama. Brustein told the New York Times that Schoenfeld approached him in 1972 with an offer to supply paint to the school at a lower price through Goldman’s company. Yale bought Goldman’s paint, but only for a short period of time. The Shubert’s annual grant to Yale of $30,000 was slashed to $10,000 because Goldman complained the school wasn’t buying his paint anymore, Brustein said. Schoenfeld denied he had anything to do with Goldman’s paint dealings. Goldman didn’t speak to the reporter. But a woman who answered the phone in his Shu
bert Alley office barked, “He’s not here and doesn’t want to talk to you,” and then slammed down the receiver.
For reporters, a “no comment” often means a “license to kill.” The Times began its own investigation of Irving Goldman. Reporter Ralph Blumenthal wrote that, in addition to Yale, several other university drama departments saw their Shubert Foundation grants canceled or slashed when they didn’t buy enough paint from Goldman. Catholic University received $2,500 annually from the foundation. But at a grant meeting in 1971, Goldman said that Father Gilbert Hartke, head of the drama department, “never bought a quart of paint from me—he doesn’t get a dime.” The grant was canceled. Officials at three other schools—the University of Indiana, the University of Texas at Austin, and the University of Kansas—told the Times that, upon receiving grants from the Shubert Foundation, Goldman told them of his connection to the Gothic paint company. “He identified himself first as the president of Gothic Color, then brought up the Shubert money,” one university official told the Times. After receiving their grants, all three university drama departments began buying paint from Gothic. Goldman, another official said, was pleased with the arrangement. As for the situation at Yale, a professor from the university ran into Goldman at a theater party in New York. Goldman brought up Yale’s application for a grant and said, “If they can’t buy paint from us, why should I bother with them?”1
The Times also reported that Nicholas Scoppetta, New York’s commissioner of investigation, warned Abe Beame against making Goldman cultural affairs commissioner because of rumors of Goldman’s unsavory business connections. Scoppetta was concerned about Goldman’s connection to a company called New York Sportservice, Inc., a sports concession conglomerate run out of Buffalo, New York, by Louis Jacobs. Goldman represented the company’s interests in New York City during the 1960s. In 1972, a congressional investigation into Mafia involvement in professional sports turned up a thicket of underworld connections to Louis Jacobs and his empire, including secret ownership of the Frontier Casino in Las Vegas. Jacobs’s partners in the casino included two high-ranking members of a Detroit Mafia family. Jacobs died in 1968, but after the congressional investigation, Sports Illustrated put him on its cover, posthumously, under the headline THE GODFATHER OF SPORTS.
Scoppetta, the Times reported, presented his concerns about Goldman to Beame. But the mayor dismissed them. Goldman, he said, was his close friend and a loyal supporter. So long as he’d done nothing illegal, he would be the city’s cultural affairs commissioner.
With the Times now on the trail, the Post’s Berger stepped up his investigations. In a series of articles, he rehashed Goldman’s friendship with Surrogate Court Judge DiFalco and the alleged fixing of John Shubert’s estate back in 1963. Berger also explored Goldman’s involvement with the Jola Candy Company, which supplied candy to subway vending machines. Jola, which was named after Goldman’s daughters, Joy and Laurie, also collected 17 percent of the gross receipts from photo booths throughout the subway system. Berger reported that Goldman did not reveal his business connections to the Transit Authority when city officials vetted him for the job of cultural affairs commissioner. “Failure to answer such questions could be grounds for dismissal,” Berger wrote. The reporter also uncovered more ties to the mobbed-up Sportservice, Inc. Goldman’s candy company was a subsidiary of a company called Interborough News Company, Inc., which owned vending machines throughout the subway system. And Interborough, Berger reported, was controlled by Sportservice, whose business associates included such pillars of the community as Gerardo Catena, head of the New Jersey Mafia; Raymond Patriarca, head of the New England Mafia; Moe Dalitz, a Cleveland mobster; and Jimmy Plumeri, a New York loan shark and a capo of the Lucchese crime family, murdered in 1971.
Berger’s articles on Goldman’s murky business dealings appeared in the Post almost daily. The reporter discovered that trucks with the name Gothic Color emblazoned on their sides made stops at subway stations to pick up “canvas bags bulging with coins.” The coins were then taken to Interborough’s offices, located at the Fourteenth Street and Eighth Avenue subway station in a “closed-off passageway.” Pressed to explain why his paint trucks were collecting bags of coins for Interborough, Goldman said he was doing it “as a favor, an accommodation.”2 Goldman railed against Berger in private. Every time one of the reporter’s stories appeared in the paper, Goldman yelled, “I’ll fuck him! I’ll fuck him where he breathes!”
Berger also investigated Goldman’s pet charities, which received tens of thousands of dollars in grants from the Shubert Foundation. The City of Hope hospital in Los Angeles, for instance, received nearly $110,000 in 1972 from the foundation. Goldman was national vice president of City of Hope and hosted lavish fund-raising dinners in New York attended by city and state officials, including Mayor Beame and Goldman’s old crony, Judge Samuel DiFalco. A source told Berger, “The Shubert Foundation had no favorites to any marked degree. Irving Goldman came in with the favorites. The dam was broken.”3
Meanwhile, Schoenfeld and Jacobs, new to the spotlight, were rattled by Lefkowitz’s charges. They hired their old friend James Vaughan, the lawyer who advised them for years, to defend them in the press. The two men, Vaughan told reporters, “were the most qualified theatrical men in town.” Their “excessive legal fees,” he said, were justified by the work they did for J. J. Shubert’s estate and the Shubert Foundation. “Lawyers have a claim for compensation,” Vaughan said. “The question is whether they were reasonably compensated. I believe they were.”4 As for the rent-free office space, Vaughan said J. J. Shubert had given them the offices above the Shubert Theatre years ago. As Phil Smith would say decades later, J. J. gave them free offices “precisely because he never paid them very much.” As for the various fees and bills they submitted over the years, Vaughan noted, pointedly, that the IRS had scrutinized Shubert operations over the years (including that $17,534 photocopying bill) and had not raised a red flag. “They are in a goldfish bowl as far as the IRS is concerned,” Vaughan told the New York Post.
Mabel Miller, Schoenfeld’s mother-in-law, was indeed on the payroll—but she worked, Vaughan said.
“I got her the job!” Phil Smith said. “She processed mail orders at the Majestic Theatre. Jerry called me up and asked if I could find a job for his mother-in-law—she needed something to do. We had the job at the Majestic, so I gave it to her. She wasn’t making much money—maybe ninety dollars a week. Not a huge sum. And she was very good.”
Vaughan glossed over the awkward fact that convicted iceman Murray Helwitz still had a job, saying that the Shuberts “don’t regard a man who has committed a crime and has been punished for it as an outcast.”5
Lefkowitz returned fire. He demanded that all six board members of the Shubert Foundation—Schoenfeld, Jacobs, Goldman, Eckie Shubert, Irving Wall, and Lawrence Shubert Lawrence Jr. (on the board in name only now)—step down until the charges of misconduct were investigated. In the meantime, he would appoint a seven-member board to oversee Shubert business. If they did not resign, Lefkowitz threatened legal action to remove them.
• • •
Franklin Weissberg was a young lawyer whose show business clients included director Hal Prince. He was also well connected in Republican political circles, having worked as Mayor Lindsay’s consultant on the performing arts. Schoenfeld and Jacobs invited him to their offices. “We are in a terrible pissing match with Louis Lefkowitz,” Jacobs told him. “We all need lawyers and we thought it would be a good idea to have a Republican in the mix.” Lefkowitz, a Republican, was friendly with Weissberg.
“I liked Louis, he was a very good politician,” Weissberg said. “He was an indefatigable campaigner and the first attorney general who styled himself the people’s lawyer. But he had an unsavory past. He was a liquor lawyer, and he remained a liquor lawyer at heart.”
Schoenfeld and Jacobs also knew of the attorney general’s “unsavory past.” They’d been told that, as head of the Alcohol Bev
erage Control Board, Lefkowitz was notorious for demanding bribes to grant liquor licenses. If a bar or restaurant owner needed a license, he would meet Lefkowitz at his office. Lefkowitz would open the bottom drawer of his desk and point at it. The applicant was expected to drop an envelope of cash into the drawer. No words were exchanged.
Schoenfeld and Jacobs mapped out their strategy against the attorney general over dinners at Wally’s & Joseph’s steakhouse on Forty-Ninth Street. They learned there, through a lawyer tapped into Lefkowitz’s office, why the attorney general was going after them. A classic machine politician, Lefkowitz loved to dispense patronage. Seats on the board of the Shubert Foundation were plum patronage, with such perks as tickets to Broadway shows, opening night invitations, and control of a large pot of grant money. Lefkowitz, Schoenfeld and Jacobs were told, wanted to stack the board with his friends and supporters. “This is what Louis wants,” their source told them, “and what Louis wants, Louis gets.” The tip emboldened them.
They toughed it out in public, but the attacks took a toll in private.
“Jerry was falling apart,” Weissberg recalled. “The investigation was horrible. Louis went after them with guns blazing.”
Phil Smith said, “It was a tough time, no question about it. But the good part was that, for whatever reason, the days or weeks that Bernie got weak and upset and started to bury his neck in his chest, Jerry would get strong. Then there would be a period where Jerry got very weak, and wanted to back down, and Bernie would get strong. It was like a switch. When one went out, the other went on.”
Jacobs’s only daughter, Sally, having heard her friends at school talking about the mud being flung at her father in the papers, asked him, “Daddy, are you a crook?” Not long after, Jacobs traveled to London to see some plays. He checked into a room at the Berkeley Hotel with a balcony overlooking Hyde Park. Phil Smith was in the room next door. At dinner one night, Jacobs confessed, “Phil, this is terrible. My children think I’m a criminal. You know, I looked out from the terrace and I thought about jumping.”
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