One of his first assignments was to review Peter Shaffer’s new play Amadeus, about the rivalry between Mozart and Salieri. The Shuberts were producing it at the Broadhurst. Having seen how Merrick had manipulated the critics into covering 42nd Street on opening night rather than a preview performance, they decided they wanted the critics at their opening as well. The theater would be packed with cheerleaders for the show, ginning up the excitement, which would spill over into the reviews, they thought. Schoenfeld called Gelb and badgered him about returning to the old days, when critics dashed up the aisles on opening night and knocked out copy in the heat of the moment. But Rich wanted more than just forty-five minutes to make sense of Amadeus. He could handle 42nd Street. It was an old-fashioned musical, and he’d been a musical theater buff since childhood. But Amadeus was serious stuff. It was about classical music and kapellmeisters and the Viennese court of the eighteenth century, not exactly territory that a young critic who could act out every scene from Mame knew well. Gelb told Schoenfeld, “I promise you that Frank Rich will be at Amadeus on opening night.” What he didn’t say was that Rich was going to buy a ticket, in the mezzanine, to the final preview.
Rich attended, unnoticed by anyone involved in the production, including Schoenfeld, who was greeting people in the lobby. Rich filed his review and then, as Gelb had promised, attended opening night. Schoenfeld and Jacobs were pleased with themselves. At the party after the show, Schoenfeld told friends that there would be no review in the Times until the next morning. “Frank Rich was at the opening,” he said. “We have stopped the reviewing of previews. We told the New York Times what to do and from now on they will be coming to opening nights. No more previews.”
Jon Wilner, the ad executive on the show, went back to his office after the performance and picked up the early edition of the New York Times. And there it was—Frank Rich’s review of Amadeus, in the early edition. Wilner ran over to the party with the paper. When Schoenfeld and Jacobs saw it, they exploded.
“How dare he do this?” Jacobs yelled.
Wilner interrupted. “It’s an out-and-out rave,” he said. “This is the best review you’ve ever had for a straight play, ever!”
“That cocksucker!” Schoenfeld screamed.
“I never saw them that angry again,” Wilner said. “It was just mind-boggling. They had a huge hit and all they cared about was their power. They were so hungry for this power, but the New York Times had said to them, ‘We’re more powerful than you are.’ ”
The one man to whom the review meant the most, Peter Shaffer, noticed the commotion. He saw Jacobs clutching the Times. “What is the review like?” he asked.
“Oh, it’s fine, but that’s not what we’re talking about!” Jacobs snapped.
“Well, that’s what I’m talking about!” Shaffer said.
Years later, Shaffer, laughing at the memory, added, “Yes, Frank Rich liked your play very much. Now let’s talk about real things. The New York Times is defying the Shubert Organization. Oh, the conceit of it!”
• • •
Someone else the Shuberts couldn’t dominate was their rival, Jimmy Nederlander. They battled Nederlander in the spring of 1980 over control of the National Theatre in Washington, D.C. The Shuberts made a bid to manage the not-for-profit theater, but Nederlander took them to court, arguing that their control of the theater would “unduly restrain competition.”3 Nederlander invoked the consent decree from 1956, which enjoined the Shuberts from acquiring more theaters. Schoenfeld and Jacobs were furious that Nederlander would drudge up a twenty-four-year-old document. They retaliated by canceling Nederlander’s house seats to Shubert theaters. “I don’t want any courtesies from him, and I don’t care to extend any to him,” Schoenfeld told the Times.
A court dismissed Nederlander’s case, and the Shuberts eventually got control of the National Theatre. But that only inflamed the feud. Nederlander struck back in his own mischievous way. He hired Irving Goldman, Schoenfeld and Jacobs’s ex-partner, as a business consultant.II
Both companies also got into a bidding war for the Broadway rights to Ronald Harwood’s hit London play The Dresser. The Shuberts usually refrained from bidding wars, but they were so angry with Nederlander, they wanted to snatch the play away from him. Nederlander outbid them, paying $75,000 in advance plus 50 percent of the net profits. Producers watched from the sidelines, aghast. They could not afford such a price for a play, and they feared they’d be muscled out of the market by future bidding wars between the two theatrical empires.4
Schoenfeld and Jacobs positioned themselves as stewards of the American theater, pointing out that they produced shows with artistic merit. Nederlander, Jacobs sniffed, “worries about theaters—whether he can fill them up or not.”
Nederlander’s main gripe about the Shuberts was their foundation, which had grown in size and influence with the success of the Shubert theaters. He argued that Schoenfeld and Jacobs could afford to gamble on shows because the money wasn’t theirs. It belonged to the foundation. He had to put his own money into shows. He also claimed the foundation’s grants to non-profit theaters gave the Shuberts an advantage. He pointed out that many productions from the Public Theater and L.A.’s Mark Taper Forum, both beneficiaries of Shubert grants, played Shubert theaters. “It’s like competing against Ford Motors and the Ford Foundation all in one,” he sniped. “If somebody gives you $100,000 a year—sure, you’ll be more likely to do business with them.”
Nederlander’s charge, at least according to the judge who ruled the Shuberts could take over the National Theatre, was unfair. Shubert grants were “unconditional,” the judge said.5 But Nederlander was onto something unusual about the foundation. Had he explored it more fully, he might have been able to block his rivals’ path. J. J. Shubert left his theaters, which were owned and operated by the Shubert Organization, a for-profit company, to the non-profit Shubert Foundation. In 1969, Congress passed the Tax Reform Act, which took aim at philanthropies that owned profit-making businesses. Supporters of the law believed the profit-making businesses shielded incomes by funneling them into the philanthropies. As a result of the Tax Reform Act, more than a hundred charities had to divest themselves of for-profit companies.6 The Shubert Foundation would have to sell off the Shubert theaters. Schoenfeld and Jacobs were in no position in 1969 to buy the theaters themselves, and new owners might not have kept them in their jobs. But the foundation was never forced to sell the theaters. No one at the Shubert Organization fretted about the 1969 ruling. “We were putting our finger in the dike everywhere we turned. We were so inundated with problems of surviving,” Schoenfeld said.7
In the 1970s, Nederlander could have pressed the government to invoke the Tax Reform Act against the Shubert Foundation. He never did. And by 1980 it was too late. In 1977, the Shubert board petitioned the IRS for a private letter ruling, which would allow the foundation to hold on to the theaters. The board argued that the legitimate theater would be destroyed if the theaters were sold. New owners, the board said, would turn the theaters into porn houses or parking lots, or would sell them off, piecemeal, to the highest bidders. The theaters were vulnerable because they only returned a marginal profit. The board said the foundation’s main purpose was to perpetuate theater in America, which it could do best by maintaining control of the Shubert theaters.
In October 1979, the IRS gave the board everything it wanted. The IRS agreed that the legitimate theater would be in peril if the theaters were sold. Owning theaters, the IRS said, is not a good business, “characterized by long periods of losses and relatively short periods of profits.”8 It would appear that nobody from the IRS had seen A Chorus Line or Ain’t Misbehavin’ or Annie or Evita or They’re Playing Our Song.
The ruling received little attention at the time, but it was highly unusual. To this day, the Shubert Foundation is thought to be the only charity that controls what has now became a multibillion-dollar for-profit company, the Shubert Organization. A 1994 New York Times artic
le exploring the ruling carried expressions of disbelief from tax experts. “It is a case without parallel,” said Pamela Mann, who ran the charity division for the New York State attorney general. “Nutty,” said William Lehrfeld, a lawyer specializing in foundation law. “That’s absolutely the silliest thing I’ve ever heard.”
Whatever the experts thought about the ruling fifteen years later made no difference to Schoenfeld and Jacobs. They were presiding over a vigorous, powerful, and wealthy empire. And they pointed out that the success of the theaters meant more money for the foundation, which in 1993 doled out grants totalling $5.4 million, a far cry from the $400,000 the foundation gave out in 1970.
Aside from Nederlander, who told the Times, “There’s no question about it—they have an unfair advantage,” nobody in the theater in 1994 seemed bothered by the unusual arrangement between the Shubert Foundation and the Shubert Organization. Rocco Landesman, then the head of Jujamcyn Theaters, Broadway’s third landowner, said, “I haven’t bumped up against any conflict. There’s a real separation of church and state.”9
• • •
The Shubert-Nederlander feud had reached such a fever pitch by 1980 that producers had to start taking sides. A few could straddle the divide. Elizabeth I. McCann, for instance, worked both sides of the street. But for the most part, in a male-dominated business, you were either a “Shubert man” or a “Nederlander man.” At the 1980 Tony Awards, Alex Cohen, the producer of the Tony telecast, tried to bridge the divide in flamboyant fashion. Just before the start of the show, he walked Nederlander across the aisle of the Mark Hellinger Theatre and, in front of the entire Broadway community, made him shake hands with Schoenfeld and Jacobs. The audience applauded, but the three men barely smiled. Privately, they yelled at Cohen for putting them in an awkward situation.
It would take more than a handshake to end the feud. It would take a business arrangement, which in the theater meant a show. As it turned out, one was coming together in England, though the inspiration came from the Soviet Union. In 1978, Trevor Nunn, the thirty-eight-year-old director of the Royal Shakespeare Company, visited the Gorki Theater in Leningrad. The head of the theater told him that for the next six months, the company would be preparing a stage adaptation of The Pickwick Papers.
“It emerged that such large-scale adaptations of Dickens are commonplace in Soviet theater,” Nunn told Time magazine.10 The RSC was strapped for cash. It could only afford to do one new play instead of the usual five. Nunn decided the production would have to be big enough to employ all thirty-nine members of the acting company. He decided on an eight-and-a-half-hour stage version of Nicholas Nickleby, adapted by David Edgar. The company developed much of the production through improvisation. The actors studied daily life in Victorian England, each memorizing a chapter from the book and then performing it for the rest of the company. “We had a crazy theory,” Nunn said, “that if thirty-eight of the cast died, the one survivor could come in and tell the story all by himself.”
The first part of the play was in good shape, but the second half didn’t gel. Nunn began to have doubts about the production. He and his codirector, John Caird, disappeared to a hotel in the English countryside to sort out the situation. Caird persuaded Nunn not to abandon the show, shouting at him over food and wine in the hotel’s Michelin-starred restaurant. “We must have resembled nothing so much as two gays who’d gone away for the weekend to sort out their relationship,” Nunn told Time. Sort it out they did, and The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby, with a brilliant young Roger Rees in the lead, opened at the Aldwych Theatre in the West End in June 1980.
Jimmy Nederlander had brought a number of RSC productions to New York in the 1970s, and had a first-look deal with the company. He loved the show, though the prospect of doing an eight-and-a-half-hour play on Broadway was daunting. The budget was $4.4 million. And he didn’t have a theater. All of his were booked. But Elizabeth McCann and her producing partner Nelle Nugent had an idea. The two women were on good terms with both the Shuberts and Nederlander. McCann had worked for Nederlander in the 1970s, and she and Nugent had coproduced a number of shows with the Shuberts, including Amadeus. The only way to bring Nicholas Nickleby to Broadway would be as a joint venture between the Shuberts and Nederlander, they argued. Jimmy Nederlander had the rights to the show; the Shuberts had the perfect theater—the Plymouth on Forty-Fifth Street. McCann negotiated the deal, shuttling between Nederlander’s rundown office above the Palace and the Shuberts’ elegant offices above the Shubert Theatre. The crux of the deal was this: The three producers—McCann and Nugent, Nederlander, the Shuberts—would each have one vote. Decisions would be made by majority. Once the vote had been cast there would be no squabbling about the outcome. When it came time to pick a press agent, McCann and Nugent and Nederlander cast their vote for Joshua Ellis; the Shuberts voted for their longtime flack, Merle Debuskey.
“It was two-to-one, so I got the job,” said Ellis. His big coup was landing Nicholas Nickleby on the cover of Time magazine on October 5, 1981. To accompany the article, the editors wanted a group picture of the producers. “The photograph had to be negotiated like the Treaty of Ghent,” Ellis recalled. “We couldn’t take the picture in the Plymouth, since the set was being built. So Jimmy offered the Nederlander Theatre. But Bernie and Jerry wanted it to be in one of their theaters, so they offered the Shubert. And then there was the question of left to right because the person on the left is the first one named in the caption. Everybody was vying to be on the left.”
In the end, Jimmy Nederlander was on the left, but a cherubic-looking Schoenfeld was in the center, standing a bit higher than everybody else.
That fall, the talk on Broadway was the ticket price to the show—one hundred dollars, the highest in Broadway history. But when the rave reviews came out—“The RSC has fashioned an epic of feeling and intelligence, a vertiginous celebration of life upon the splendid stage” (Time)—the show was a sellout. Time also ran a story about Broadway’s resurgence, “And Another Boffo Season.” Attendance for the 1980–81 theater season was 11 million, up 15 percent from the previous year, the magazine reported. Box office receipts hit $196.9 million, quadruple those of the 1969–70 season. “As theater folk welcome Nicholas Nickleby to help launch the new season, they . . . can pat their pocketbooks with pride,” Time noted.
Nothing brings people together like success, and the success of Nicholas Nickleby took some of the sting out of the Shubert-Nederlander feud. When the show won the Tony for Best Play in 1982, Schoenfeld and Jacobs shook hands with Nederlander without any prompting from Alex Cohen.
But every now and then the rivalry flared up. In 1986, producer Manny Azenberg was preparing to put Neil Simon’s new play, Broadway Bound, into Nederlander’s 46th Street Theatre. David Mitchell, who was designing the sets, went over to inspect the theater. It had not been cleaned in a while, and when he leaned up against a wall his white shirt turned black. He also saw rats. Mitchell wrote to Azenberg and Simon, “People should not be allowed in this theater. It is an embarrassment.” Azenberg gave the letter to Nederlander and his second-in-command at the time, Arthur Rubin. “Read this,” he said. Rubin read it aloud and then said, “The Shuberts are redoing the Imperial next door. That’s where the rats are coming from. They’re not Nederlander rats. They’re Shubert rats.”
* * *
I. Barnes was one of the few critics friendly with Schoenfeld and Jacobs. He got to know them when he arrived at the Times in 1966. He enjoyed the occasional lunch with them at Sardi’s. “They were smart men,” he said. Barnes was both the theater and dance critic at the Times when, in 1977, Rupert Murdoch tried to lure him to the New York Post, which he had just bought. Murdoch offered Barnes $100,000 a year—an enormous amount of money for a journalist back then. Barnes was flattered, but turned him down. Few people left the Times, the most powerful paper in the world, in those days. A few months later, Abe Rosenthal, the paper’s managing editor, took the theater beat away from
Barnes. The critic called Murdoch and told him he was available. “I know,” said Murdoch. “I’ll take you. But you’re not worth $100,000 anymore.”
II. Many years later, asked why he would hire someone with such a black reputation, Nederlander said, “Well, he had experience in the theater.” When it was pointed out that Goldman had been accused of using his position as head of the Shubert Foundation to secure paint contracts for his company, Nederlander laughed and said, “What’s wrong with that?”
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
The Jockey and the Godfather
The success of A Chorus Line cemented a father-and-son relationship between Bernie Jacobs and Michael Bennett. Jacobs watched the show from the back of the Shubert Theatre almost every night, marveling at Bennett’s stagecraft. Over long dinners at Wally’s and Joseph’s, Bennett taught Jacobs how to examine a show, from its book to its choreography to its music, right down to its scene changes. Jacobs, in turn, taught Bennett all about the business. “Michael was not a businessman,” said John Breglio. “He’d never be able to understand the complications of a royalty pool, but he wanted to know. He wanted to know all about the business. And Bernie was the ultimate businessman. It got to the point where Michael was completely dependent on Bernie. Before he made a decision, he’d say, ‘I have to talk to Bernie about it. I’m going to go see Bernie and see what he thinks.’ ”
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