Razzle Dazzle

by Michael Riedel

  Smith replied, “Bernie, that is the act of a crazy man. You are not crazy.”

  “No,” Jacobs said, “but I gave it a thought.”

  “Well, thank heavens your sanity has returned to you,” Smith said.

  • • •

  Back in New York, Schoenfeld and Jacobs informed Lefkowitz they had no intention of stepping down from the board of the Shubert Foundation. “You propose that seven new directors be appointed by your office as the sole disinterested party,” Milton Gould, another lawyer who was defending them, wrote, “I respectfully suggest that your office is not the ‘sole disinterested party.’ ”6

  A different lawyer represented each board member. Weissberg had been given the choice of representing either Rocky Wall or Irving Goldman. “I made a couple of phone calls about Irving Goldman,” Weissberg said. “And I said, ‘No way.’ So I represented Rocky. And he became a close friend.”

  Rocky Wall, who had been bayoneted in the neck on the battlefields of Italy, “was not a man to be trifled with,” Weissberg said. “He was not afraid of anyone.”

  Lefkowitz’s point man for the Shubert battle was a ferocious, Javert-like prosecutor named Maurice H. Nadjari. He had thin, tight lips and coal-black eyes that blazed with contempt for his targets. A man was guilty until proven innocent, he believed. Nadjari was sworn in as special prosecutor in 1972. Four years later, he had spent $14 million of taxpayer money to bring indictments against eleven judges. Not one was convicted. He obtained the indictments through “inaccurate testimony” and “illegal wiretaps,” reported Village Voice columnist Jack Newfield. “He ruined careers with baseless charges,” Newfield wrote, adding, “He sees the world in black and white, without doubts, without ambiguities. He is obsessive and without a sense of proportion.”

  In an infamous speech to a group of lawyers, Nadjari compared the thrill of hearing a jury foreman say “guilty” to having sex. One prominent criminal attorney told Newfield, “In my opinion, Nadjari is mentally disturbed.”7

  During the Shubert battle, Nadjari summoned Rocky Wall and Frank Weissberg to his office.

  “You guys are all in a lot of trouble,” he told Wall. “Unless we get this resolved, we’re going to bring you all down.”

  Wall looked him in the eye and said, “You can do anything you want to me, but you’re not going to get me off that board because I’ve done nothing wrong, and I am not afraid of you. And if I’m the last person left on that board, I’ll reconstitute it and you can go fuck yourself.”

  • • •

  With the battle against the attorney general in full tilt, the Broadway community rallied around Schoenfeld and Jacobs. Eugene Wolsk, a low-key producer and general manager, called Phil Smith. He had an idea. What if, he asked, we bring together a group of prominent Broadway people, go down to Lefkowitz’s office, and make our case for Bernie and Jerry? “I think that would help,” Smith said.

  Wolsk pulled together an impressive slate, including producers David Merrick, Hal Prince, Elizabeth I. McCann, and Robert Whitehead; union leaders Solly Pernick (stagehands), Max Arons (musicians), and Lloyd Richards (directors and choreographers); and the theatrical lawyer John Wharton.

  Alex Cohen was at his house in the south of France when Wolsk called. Not one to miss an opportunity to make a splash in the press, Cohen told the Times, “I had a distress call when I was in France”—and then took credit for organizing the flotilla of theater people.8 Cohen always claimed that he hired a fleet of limousines to ferry everyone to the attorney general’s office from Shubert Alley, and that he spoke for the group, convincing Lefkowitz to lay off.

  “I saved them,” he once told a reporter.

  In fact, the group traveled downtown in a bus. And the person who spoke for the group was John Wharton, founder of Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison. On the bus before the meeting, Wharton told the group, “When we go in there, nobody speaks but me.” It must have been difficult for such a colorful cast of characters to hold their tongues, but, according to Liz McCann, they did.

  Lefkowitz received the delegation in his baronial office. After brief introductions, Wharton spoke. “Gerald Schoenfeld and Bernard Jacobs deserve to be praised, not hunted,” he said. “They are trying to do a good job. They are trying to take this business and save it. They are trying, Louis, to pull it out of the garbage. They shouldn’t be punished for that. They should be supported, and as you can see from all of us here today, they have the full support of the theater community.”

  “John was wonderful,” Liz McCann recalled years later. “He knew how to talk to Lefkowitz. I’m not sure Louis would have listened to a bunch of Broadway producers, but he could not ignore John Wharton.”

  Lefkowitz refused to comment publicly on the meeting, but the producers, now off Wharton’s leash, talked to reporters.

  “This is the first time in my whole nineteen-year career that I’ve seen all of these people in one room with such a display of unanimity,” David Merrick pronounced. “I went on behalf of Mr. Schoenfeld and Mr. Jacobs. Their conduct has always been absolutely impeccable and honest.”

  “This is the best management of the Shuberts and we have no complaint with the board or with the people in the organization with whom we do business,” Alex Cohen said.9

  Max Arons, head of the musicians union, declared, “In comparison with years ago, this is the best management of all. There is no question of dipsy-doodle as twenty-five years ago, when musicians felt they had to give back something of what they made to theater managements. Mr. Schoenfeld and Mr. Jacobs negotiate contracts with us. Everything is put on the table, there are no deals. It’s healthy, a million percent improvement.”

  Nobody, though, said anything in support of Irving Goldman. The Times reported: “Broadway’s major concern was with the retention of Mr. Jacobs and Mr. Schoenfeld, with whom Broadway theater people work on a day-to-day basis. Most said they had had little contact with Mr. Goldman.”10

  “Irving Goldman? The paint man?” Liz McCann said years later. “Who would speak up for him? Certainly not John Wharton.”

  The meeting had an impact. Lefkowitz cooled his investigatory zeal. “After that meeting, the sting sort of went out of the whole thing,” Smith said.

  Lefkowitz never attempted to remove the board. Schoenfeld and Jacobs outmaneuvered him by expanding the board themselves. They appointed three new members—John Kluge, founder of Metromedia and destined to become, in the 1980s, the richest man in America; Helen Hollerith, a member of the Pew family, which owned Sun Oil Company; and Lee Seidler, a professor of economics and accounting at New York University.

  “That was a very smart move,” said Foley Vaughan, whose father represented Schoenfeld and Jacobs. “These were three people with impeccable credentials. Why would they agree to accept an appointment like that if they were going into a snake’s nest? And, now, if Louis wanted to remove the board, he would have to remove three people about which there was no controversy. He would have looked stupid.”

  Kluge, Hollerith, and Seidler would remain on the Shubert board until their deaths.

  Lefkowitz’s battle with Schoenfeld and Jacobs ground on for another three years, but slowly and with little publicity. In the end, on April 13, 1977, there was a settlement. Schoenfeld, Jacobs, and other lawyers and executors of J. J. Shubert’s estate, including Morgan Guaranty, agreed to reduce outstanding claims of $7 million in fees and commissions—claims that reached as far back as J. J.’s death in 1963—to $5 million. The $2 million difference was funneled into the Shubert Foundation, then doled out in grants to theatrical causes. Lefkowitz dropped all charges against the lawyers and the executors. He called the decision “fair.”11 Others said it was just a way of saving face.

  Schoenfeld and Jacobs had battled with one of the most powerful men in New York State—and won. They were now “the Shuberts.”

  Irving Goldman remained a target, a nice, fat, juicy one. Lefkowitz unleashed Nadjari on him. Nadjari indicted him on char
ges of defrauding the Transit Authority by inflating invoices from his candy company. Nadjari also indicted him on a kickback scheme involving $1 million worth of contracts to the Campbell Paint Company. Goldman, Nadjari claimed, received a 50 percent kickback. Nadjari then indicted Goldman on a bribery scheme, accusing him of giving $4,350 to a witness to flee to Mexico to avoid a subpoena. (The witness, Anne Levinson, ran off to Mexico City but was brought back to New York by federal agents.) Goldman tried to hang on to his perch at the Shubert Foundation, but by now he had become an embarrassment to the company.

  The board forced Goldman out on March 19, 1975. He also stepped down as cultural affairs commissioner. He exited the stage with a ringing protestation of innocence: “The charges against me are false. And I will fight them. And I am sure that I will be exonerated.”12 As usual, Nadjari overreached. Some of the indictments were overturned. At one point, a judge declared a mistrial. Irving Goldman was never found guilty of any crimes. By 1980, his health began to fail. Nadjari, his pursuer, had been fired by Lefkowitz in 1976 after a series of controversial prosecutions. Lefkowitz himself left office in 1979. His successor, Robert Abrams, had little interest in hounding an ailing old man. Irving Goldman died, at seventy-three, in 1983. The New York Times didn’t even run an obituary.

  “Irving escaped by dying,” Phil Smith said.I

  * * *

  I. One afternoon in 1995, I got a crash course in the history of the Shubert empire from Gerald Schoenfeld. Sitting behind his grand desk in his elegant office above the Shubert Theatre, he described what it was like to work for J. J. Shubert; he talked about the coup against Larry Shubert; and he recalled, with a pained expression, his bruising battle with Louis Lefkowitz. But when I brought up Irving Goldman, Schoenfeld looked at me and said, only half-jokingly I thought, “Michael, that is not a name we mention in these hallowed precincts.”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  The Jockey

  Though engulfed in scandal at the close of 1974, Schoenfeld and Jacobs still had a job to do—find shows to fill empty theaters. The Plymouth had Equus, but several Shubert theaters were dark. And then there was a phone call for Bernie Jacobs. It was Michael Bennett, a thirty-four-year-old talented, charismatic, and ambitious choreographer. Jacobs had gotten to know him while Bennett was choreographing Coco, a musical by André Previn and Alan Jay Lerner about Coco Chanel, starring Katharine Hepburn. It wasn’t a good show but it ran from 1969 to 1970 at the Mark Hellinger Theatre on the strength of Hepburn’s name. Though Bennett was billed as the choreographer, everybody knew he had taken over the direction from Michael Benthall, who could not handle the star. Bennett could. He ran into Jacobs at Wally’s & Joseph’s one night and told him, “I’ve finally found a way of working with Kate Hepburn. If I want her to go stage left, I tell her to go stage right!”

  On the phone that day, Bennett told Jacobs he was working on a new musical called A Chorus Line. He wanted to know if he and his collaborators—composer Marvin Hamlisch and lyricist Edward Kleban—could come up to the office and play some songs from the show for him. Of course, Jacobs said. He always had time for a talented person with a new show.

  In the cab to Shubert Alley, Bennett told Hamlisch, “Just play a couple of the funny songs. Don’t do anything too esoteric.” The funniest song they had was called “Dance 10; Looks 3,” about a dancer who surgically enhances her body to kick-start her career. Bennett, Hamlisch, and Kleban squeezed into the tiny elevator at the side of the Shubert Theatre that took them up to the executive offices. In the reception room was a grand piano that “looked like it hadn’t been played in twenty-five years,” Hamlisch said. “It was covered in dust.”1

  Hamlisch lifted the lid on the keyboard and placed his fingers on the cracked yellowed keys. He hit the first note of “Tits and Ass,” and one of the legs on the piano gave way. The piano fell on its side with a crash. Jacobs, Bennett, Hamlisch, and Smith scrambled to lift it back in place.

  My God, this is how we get money for a Broadway show? Hamlisch thought. But he played the song, and this time the piano didn’t fall on its side. Jacobs wanted to hear more. “Marvin played through the whole score for us that afternoon,” Phil Smith said—“I Hope I Get It,” “I Can Do That,” “At the Ballet,” “What I Did for Love,” “One.”

  Afterward, Bennett met privately with Jacobs and explained the show to him. It was based on hours of interviews he’d done with dancers in Broadway shows. He’d been working on it for nearly a year down at the Public Theater, where Joe Papp had given him space and money. But the day before Papp had said to him, “I’m going to have to close you down after next week because we’re out of money.” Bennett looked at Jacobs and said, “You can have the show, Bernie.”

  Jacobs thought for a moment and said, “No. We could never do that to Joe. We could never do that.”

  Bennett was crushed. “But Joe isn’t going to do any more for me. It’s going to die right here.”

  “No, no,” Jacobs replied. “We’ll talk to Joe and we’ll see what we can work out. We’ll take care of things.”

  Bennett floated out of the office. Between the Public Theater and the Shubert Organization, his show would go on.

  Jacobs and Smith weren’t sure what the show was. They liked the songs, but the idea of a musical about Broadway dancers, based on what sounded like group therapy sessions, was vague, at best. But Jacobs was learning to bet on the jockeys, and Michael Bennett was one hell of a jockey.

  • • •

  He was born Michael “Mickey” Bennett DiFiglia on April 8, 1943, in Buffalo, New York. His mother, Helen, was a secretary for Sears, his father, Salvatore, a machinist at a Chevrolet plant. Salvatore was also an inveterate gambler who was usually in hock to low-level members of the Magaddino crime family, known as “The Arm,” that controlled upstate New York. The Bennett household was an unhappy one, strapped for cash due to Salvatore’s gambling debts. Helen was bitter and depressed by the shabbiness of her life. At the age of two, Bennett found his escape. He began “to dance around the living room,” as a line from A Chorus Line goes, to the music on the radio.

  By the time he was ten, Bennett was so good he began earning money dancing freestyle at bar mitzvahs, weddings, even on street corners. When he wasn’t dancing, he was choreographing, using his brother Frank’s marbles as dancers and creating patterns for imaginary dance routines. He devoured Dance magazine, especially articles about Jerome Robbins, who became his idol. Robbins’s West Side Story, which opened on Broadway in 1957 and which Bennett saw on tour in Buffalo, was his favorite show. There is a home movie of him doing the “Dance at the Gym” number from the show in the driveway of the family’s tiny one-story house at 181 Florida Street. A snippet of it can be seen in the excellent documentary Every Little Step, about the 2006 revival of A Chorus Line. Bennett, eight years old, performs the number flawlessly and with such intensity it’s clear that every part of his lean body bends toward Broadway.

  Though Salvatore derided his son’s sissy pirouetting, he liked the extra income it brought in. He began pocketing most of it, saying it would help with household expenses. He lost it at the track and the card tables. The searing event of Bennett’s childhood—one that would haunt him throughout his life and, when he began to use cocaine heavily, cause him extreme paranoia—took place one day in the kitchen of the house on Florida Street. Salvatore was heavily in debt to a local mobster. But he had a plan: He would sell his son’s talent to the Mafia. He invited two local mobsters to the house and ordered Bennett to dance for them. “The kid whirled, spun, kicked, slid, turned, a midget dancer,” Kevin Kelly writes in One Singular Sensation, his gossipy biography of Bennett. Salvatore offered a deal. His kid was going to make some serious money as a dancer one day, and he offered a percentage of Bennett’s future income to the mob. The mob passed. It dealt in gambling, prostitution, racketeering, and extortion, not in sissy boys who knew every step to Agnes de Mille’s dream ballet from Oklahoma!

  In 1960, at Mel
ody Fair, an amphitheater in North Tonawanda, New York, that presented musicals starring veterans like Van Johnson, Ruby Keeler, and John Raitt, Bennett met Jack Lenny, a onetime performer who had become a manager. Lenny saw Bennett, then sixteen, perform. They met after the show. Lenny said Bennett should consider trying his luck in New York. Early in his junior year of high school, Bennett received a telegram from Lenny informing him that Jerome Robbins was auditioning dancers for a European company of West Side Story.

  “I went to my locker and I took everything out of it and I left,” Bennett recalled. “And I got on a bus to New York and I said, ‘I am not coming back. I am getting this job, and I am not coming back.’ ”2

  He got the job, playing Baby John, and went off to Europe. Bob Avian was also in the show. He and Bennett became good friends. Bennett began to think of Avian as his older brother, the first member of a surrogate family he would assemble around himself. Bennett could not function without a family, and since his real one was a source of pain and unhappiness, he had to create a new one. The family would expand as he became more and more successful, and there would be bitter fallings out. But Avian would always be there.

  After the West Side Story tour, Bennett returned to New York and began making the rounds as a Broadway “gypsy,” the name for chorus kids who float from show to show. His talent was obvious, and he never lacked for work, appearing in the choruses of Subways Are for Sleeping, Here’s Love, and Bajour.

  Along the way Bennett was picking up dancers he would use in shows he would choreograph one day—Baayork Lee, Leland Palmer, Sandy Roveta. After Bajour (a musical, ironically, about real gypsies) flopped, Bennett took a job dancing on the TV show Hullabaloo, where he met Donna McKechnie, who would become his muse, lover, and, briefly, wife.