Ellis pushed the mock ad around the table and everyone laughed. It was a good joke.
Merrick didn’t laugh. He looked at Ellis and said, “Run it.”
His voice was clear as a bell.
Everyone laughed again.
“Run it,” he said again. Everyone fell silent. Then, at the bottom of the heart, Ellis wrote, “To Frank and Alex, All My Love.” He handed the pen to Merrick who signed his name.
“You won’t get that through the Times, Mr. Merrick,” Cohen said.
Merrick looked at Wilner.
“I have been waiting twenty years to do this,” Wilner said. “Every time I take an ad to the New York Times late, the people in advertising just want to go home. I’ve always said you could write ‘fuck you’ and get it in the paper if you turn it in late, because nobody looks at it. If you want to run that ad, Mr. Merrick, I’ll get it in.”
Merrick chuckled.
Wilner created the ad, and, fifteen minutes before midnight on Friday, November 9, 1990, dropped it off at the Times for publication the following Monday. “I’m sorry, it’s late,” he told the staffers in the advertising department. “They’re keeping me so late at the office, it’s horrible. Here’s the ad.”
On Sunday night, Wilner hung around his local newsstand waiting for the early edition of Monday’s paper to hit the streets. As soon as the first stack of papers came off the truck, he grabbed a copy and ripped it open. The ad was there, in the Metro section. He raced back to his apartment and called Merrick. “It’s in!” he exclaimed. “It’s in!”
Rich picked up an early edition of the paper as well and saw the ad. Years later, he would pass it off as a fun Merrick stunt. “And by Merrick standards, the treatment I got was mild,” he wrote.3 But at the time he was furious. He called Paul Goldberger, the paper’s culture editor, and demanded the ad be pulled from the next edition. Witchel, meanwhile, berated Goldberger for letting the ad slip through.4
The heart-shaped ad was effaced from the Times, but for the next week papers and magazines from the New York Post to Time reprinted it. The publicity couldn’t save Oh, Kay!, which soon closed, ensnaring Merrick in financial battles with his associates. But it told the world—well, that part of the world that cared—that Frank Rich and Alex Witchel were a couple.
Some of those involved in the stunt felt Rich and Witchel’s fury. A top producer friendly with Rich said to Ellis, “Get out. You’ll never get another job in the theater again.”
“I felt repercussions all the time,” said Ellis. “My relationship with Frank was strained to begin with, so this made it more strained. Shortly after Oh, Kay! I did leave the business and New York. And not just because of Frank. It wasn’t fun anymore. The party was over in a lot of ways, and I’m not big on staying at a party longer than the party’s fun.”VII
Wilner was also in the line of fire. He was up for the ad job on a revival of Guys and Dolls, to be produced by Jujamcyn Theaters and Dodger Theatricals. An executive with the Dodgers called him to his office and said, “I have very bad news for you. You’re not gonna get it. We can’t hire you. It’s horrible, but that’s the way it is.”
“I had done Into the Woods and Prelude to a Kiss for them,” said Wilner. “They loved us. But now they couldn’t hire us.”
Dan Jinks was Wilner’s assistant at the time (he would go on to be a Hollywood producer whose credits include American Beauty). Rich was friendly with Jinks, but after the Merrick stunt, he called him and said, “You cannot be my friend anymore. You work for Jon Wilner.”5
Wilner, fearing that his livelihood was being cut off, asked his friend press agent Shirley Herz to intercede. Rich liked and admired Herz. She went over to his office and told the critic, “It’s David Merrick. What do you want Jon to do? He was just doing his job.” She reported back to Wilner, “Frank threw me out of his office.”
Why did Rich and Witchel seem so infuriated by what was, as Rich would later call it, a mild stunt? For one thing, there was no shortage of self-importance at the Times, and David Merrick had made it—and Rich and Witchel—a laughingstock. But there may have been another reason. At the time, theater people whispered Rich was so angry because Alex was a man’s name and the public might conclude Rich was gay.
Asked if that angle occurred to Merrick and his team, Ellis chuckled and said, “We might have been aware it would leave that impression.”
The same week the stunt captured headlines, two go-go boys were appearing at the Gaiety Burlesque, a male strip club on West Forty-Sixth Street, sandwiched between the Lunt-Fontanne Theatre and a Howard Johnson’s. The couple were billed as Frank and Alex. All that week, Jacques le Sourd, the critic for Gannett Newspapers and a Gaiety regular, would announce to his table at Joe Allen, “Hey, everybody! Frank and Alex are at the Gaiety!”
Nobody enjoyed Merrick’s stunt more than his old adversary—and friend—Bernie Jacobs. “He’s still got it,” Jacobs said.
• • •
Eventually, Rich and Witchel decided to marry. They kept the news under wraps at first, telling only a few close friends. One Saturday morning in the spring of 1991, Rich called Fred Nathan and said, “I’m calling to let you know that I’m going to marry Alex.” Nathan’s next call was to Bernie Jacobs, who then called Schoenfeld with the news. Schoenfeld was not pleased. He called Arthur Sulzberger and said, “Don’t you have a policy that your people can’t be married to each other and cover the same beat?”
Sulzberger was surprised. Apparently, he hadn’t heard the news.
Rich phoned Nathan. “Don’t ever call me again,” he said.
“So that was the end of that,” said Albert Poland, one of Nathan’s closest friends.VIII
Nathan was showing poor judgment on other fronts. He regularly came home to his San Remo apartment with hustlers, some of them rough looking. There were times when the doormen would not let him bring his “friends” into the building. He was also drinking heavily and doing enormous amounts of cocaine. And he’d been diagnosed with HIV.
Sometimes late at night he’d call friends he knew were in Alcoholics Anonymous and say, in slurred speech, “I just got back from an AA meeting. AA is fantastic. I love AA.”
“It was a real mind fuck,” said Poland, who was in AA. “It really made me angry. And then he called one night and he said, ‘I need you to come over now.’ And I said, ‘Look, I will do this once. If this is the time you want it, I will come, but I am doing it once.’ He said, ‘I want it now.’ ”
Poland went over and found Nathan “falling all over the fucking apartment.”
“See these draperies? Seventy thousand dollars!” he said, stumbling. “See this lamp? Forty thousand!”
“He was like Dorothy Malone in Written on the Wind,” Poland said years later.
Colleagues in Cameron Mackintosh’s office noticed how much money Nathan was spending on his lamps—and his cocaine. They also knew what he was making. It was a nice paycheck, but it wasn’t enough to support his spending habits. Mackintosh himself went over to Nathan’s apartment one day, looked at the furnishings and later said to friends, “I know what I pay him. There’s something wrong.” He asked his business managers to look into Nathan’s financial affairs.
Once again, Nathan called his friend Albert Poland. “I stole one million dollars,” he admitted.
He’d been stealing it from Mackintosh. He submitted fake invoices for expenses on touring productions of Les Misérables and The Phantom of the Opera. He didn’t just claim the odd expense. He sought reimbursement for two or three thousand dollars’ worth of phony expenses at a time.
Mackintosh threw him out of the kingdom. Jacobs and Phil Smith examined the books on Cats to see if Nathan had been stealing from them. They concluded he had not.
Nathan got himself sober, but he was now without an income—and he was dying of AIDS. But because he’d been a valuable ally, Jacobs decided to keep him on Cats. The union job came with health benefits.
“Bernie and Phil
were loyal to him to the end, which just touches my heart because Fred had no friends left in the world,” said Poland.
Nathan died on June 28, 1994, at thirty-eight. For more than a decade he had been the most powerful press agent on Broadway. His obituary in the Times ran a scant 168 words.
* * *
I. Air rights in Times Square are even more valuable today. Between 2008 and 2014, the Shuberts made $50 million in air rights transfers, according to public records.
II. Allen’s reputation as a performer and songwriter was resurrected in 2003 in the Broadway musical The Boy from Oz, starring Hugh Jackman. The show opened to tepid reviews, but Jackman turned it into the Hugh Jackman show, making it the hottest ticket in town and launching his reputation as Broadway’s most sought-after leading man.
III. The flow of gossip went both ways. Sometimes, when Nathan was on the phone with Jacobs, he would conference in Rich without telling Jacobs. “He’d tell Frank not to make a sound,” said one of Nathan’s associates. “Bernie had no idea Frank was on the line.”
IV. Opening Night went into turnaround, which is Hollywood slang for limbo. It has never been seen again. I still have my copy, however—which I will put on eBay when I’m broke.
V. Hare thinks his letter had an effect on Rich’s writing. He says, “Producers used to ring me up and say, ‘You’ve made Frank sentimental. All he talks about now is his love of the theater. I think we preferred him mean.’ ”
VI. The Public’s board of directors fired Akalaitis in 1993. Her replacement, George C. Wofle, was a Rich-Witchel favorite.
VII. Ellis eventually moved back to New York. He occasionally finds himself in a room with Rich and Witchel. “We avoid each other,” he says.
VIII. Frank Rich married Alex Witchel on June 9, 1991. She gave up the theater column later that year; Rich left the theater beat in 1994, becoming an op-ed writer for the paper.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Nothing Matters
The debacle of Chess notwithstanding, the Shuberts plunged into another major Broadway musical in 1989—the $10 million Jerome Robbins’ Broadway, a revue of musical numbers from shows staged by the legendary director including High Button Shoes, On the Town, West Side Story, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, Gypsy, and Fiddler on the Roof among others.
Jacobs was not up to the job of overseeing the show. Schoenfeld took the lead, coproducing with Manny Azenberg. Schoenfeld loved playing Mr. Producer, but he had a weakness. He was susceptible to flattery, especially when poured on by someone of Robbins’s stature. Schoenfeld gave the difficult director everything he wanted, including an unheard of (and expensive) six-month rehearsal period.
As a director Robbins, seventy at the time, was a tyrant, notorious for his tantrums. During a rehearsal of the original West Side Story, he gathered the cast on stage and screamed at them. He slowly walked backward toward the orchestra pit pounding his fist into his palm. Nobody warned him as he approached the edge, and he tumbled into the pit. One of Azenberg’s jobs on Jerome Robbins’ Broadway was to run interference between the director and his dancers. “If you gained a pound, he’d send you to the back of the line,” said Azenberg. “He’d scream and shout and humiliate you. He was a horrible man.”
Robbins had no interest in budgets. The Shuberts spent several hundred thousand dollars on costumes, and then one day Robbins decided he wanted the actors in nothing but leotards. Azenberg was furious and nearly quit the show. Robbins eventually realized that an evening of leotards was not what a Broadway audience expected from a big-budget musical.
The only person Robbins didn’t “piss all over,” said Azenberg, was Leonard Bernstein, the composer of Fancy Free, On the Town, and West Side Story. Since Robbins’s show was running long—more than three hours at one point—he thought he would cut a number from On the Town. But he wanted Bernstein’s approval. Bernstein came to a preview at the Imperial Theatre. He was not in good shape, battling emphysema from years of smoking. He was wizened and hooked up to oxygen—but still smoking. Azenberg was leaning up against the back wall of the theater. Bernstein looked up at him and said, “You don’t look so bad.” Azenberg responded, “Lenny, I used to be six foot three.”
“Look at me,” the hunched-over Bernstein said. “I did three shows with him!”
(Bernstein didn’t think the On the Town material should be cut. Leaving the theater, he said to Azenberg, “The show’s too long. Cut Fiddler.”)
Jerome Robbins’ Broadway opened to glowing reviews on February 26, 1989. In a pathetically thin season for musicals—Starmites, Legs Diamond, Kenny Loggins on Broadway!—it swept the Tonys, winning six awards including Best Musical. It ran nearly seven hundred performances, but because it was so expensive it only returned 40 percent of its $10 million capitalization. It would be the last musical the Shuberts would take the lead in producing until 1994, when the company backed Stephen Sondheim’s Passion, about an ugly woman who falls in love with a stud.
By 1990, the Broadway landscape was beginning to change. Schoenfeld and Jacobs were being overshadowed, at least publicly, by younger producers. Rocco Landesman, the charismatic head of Jujamcyn Theaters, was, in the estimation of the New York Times and the New Yorker, the future of Broadway—a man with impeccable taste and good breeding.1 He went to Yale! And he was colorful. He wore cowboy boots and bet on the horses. Landesman teamed up with some other, younger producers—Michael David, Ed Strong, director Des McAnuff—to form Dodger Theatricals, which in the early nineties produced acclaimed revivals of Guys and Dolls, making a star of Nathan Lane, The Who’s Tommy, and How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, starring Matthew Broderick.
Landesman also coproduced Tony Kushner’s two-part Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes, which Frank Rich slobbered over—“miraculous,” “revolutionary,” “mind-exploding.” Rich’s last review as chief drama critic for the New York Times was for Perestroika, the second part of Angels in America. Rich was so enamored of the play, he celebrated its opening night over dinner at Orso with Landesman.2
Schoenfeld and Jacobs admired and respected Landesman. Schoenfeld, quoted in a glowing profile of Landesman, said, “I think he’s a very welcome addition to our business.”3 Privately, Schoenfeld would sometimes chafe at all the attention being showered on Landesman. The implication, especially from the Times, was that Landesman was young and vibrant—Broadway’s future—while the Shuberts, old and unimaginative, were its past.
Another new producer in town was Garth Drabinsky, an impresario from Toronto who arrived on Broadway in 1993 with the John Kander-Fred Ebb musical Kiss of the Spider Woman, starring Chita Rivera. Drabinsky was the founder of Cineplex Odeon, the movie chain. A man of unbridled ambition, he expanded the company past the breaking point by taking on a huge amount of debt. He was forced out in 1989 by his partner, MCA. As part of his golden parachute he acquired the Canadian rights to The Phantom of the Opera, which he produced in Toronto. He parlayed the success of Phantom into Livent, a publically traded company that produced Broadway shows and acquired theaters throughout North America, including, in 1998, the Ford Center for the Performing Arts on Forty-Second Street, a new theater that combined restored elements of the old Lyric and Apollo theaters.
Schoenfeld and Jacobs watched Drabinsky from the sidelines, marveling at his drive but questioning his finances. He produced shows—Kiss of the Spider Woman, Show Boat, Candide—with no thought of the bottom line. He claimed they were all hits, no matter what they cost. But the Shuberts, and a few other veteran producers, had their doubts. They knew how Broadway financing worked, and they could not figure out where Drabinsky’s profits were coming from. In the end, their hunch was correct. Drabinsky was a fraud. Like Max Bialystock in The Producers, he kept two sets of books—one for shareholders that showed enormous profits, the other for himself and his cohorts that revealed staggering losses. Livent went bankrupt, and Drabinsky went to jail in Canada on several counts of fraud and forger
y.
At the same time Rocco Landesman, the Dodgers, and Garth Drabinsky were coming up in the world, the Shuberts’ closest allies, Andrew Lloyd Webber and Cameron Mackintosh, were winding down. After Phantom, Lloyd Webber wrote Aspects of Love, which had a fine score but, in a bloated production directed by Trevor Nunn, died an expensive death at the Shuberts’ Broadhurst Theatre. One of Lloyd Webber’s best shows, Sunset Boulevard, opened on Broadway at the Minskoff (a Nederlander theater) in 1994. It received strong reviews—especially for its leading lady, Glenn Close—and ran over two years. But it was so expensive that it closed without recouping its $13 million production cost.
Mackintosh produced Miss Saigon in 1991 at the Shuberts’ Broadway Theatre, and it was a smash. But it was the last of the British pop-operas to succeed in New York. Mackintosh’s next show, Five Guys Named Moe, was a modest, forgettable revue. In London he produced flop after flop—Martin Guerre, The Witches of Eastwick, Moby Dick, The Fix.
None made it to New York.
The British invasion, which had made the Shuberts immensely rich, was over.
• • •
If the Shuberts were not as aggressive on the producing front in the early nineties, they were still, led by Schoenfeld, fighting for a better Times Square. The Marriott Marquis, though despised by many on Broadway, did prove a boon to the area. It became a draw for business conferences and tourists, who braved the still sketchy neighborhood so they could see the now world-famous musicals Cats, Les Misérables, The Phantom of the Opera, and Miss Saigon.
Other construction projects were beginning to lift the fortunes of Times Square as well. To its west, in the block between Forty-Second and Forty-Third Streets and Ninth and Tenth Avenues, sits Manhattan Plaza, with 1,689 apartments in two towers and town houses, a playground, fitness center, basketball and tennis courts.4 Apartments were originally conceived to be offered at market rate, but through a confluence of events—the oil crisis, the city approaching default—and the realities of the neighborhood, the developers went bankrupt, and the buildings sat vacant. An idea developed to make the complex available to people in the performing arts, low-income people, and the elderly living in the area displaced by the construction. A number of the apartments would be covered by federal US Housing and Urban Development Section 8 subsidies, while others would fall under New York State’s Mitchell-Lama program. The Shuberts backed this idea. Schoenfeld and producer Alex Cohen promoted it in the press and with city officials. Opening in 1977, Manhattan Plaza became a vast colony of artists in what had been one of the most dangerous blocks in New York. Herb Sturz, deputy mayor for criminal justice under Ed Koch, said Manhattan Plaza was “part and parcel of stabilizing a part of the city that was no man’s land.”
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