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  In London, Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber wrote Jesus Christ Superstar, which was originally conceived as a rock album. It opened on Broadway in 1971, and though neither Lloyd Webber nor Rice cared for the production, it managed to run over a year. “Andrew and I thought we opened up the way for rock music in the theater,” Rice said. “But nobody followed us.” It’s telling that almost none of the great songwriters of the sixties—Paul Simon, Bob Dylan, Carole King, Brian Wilson, John Lennon—attempted a Broadway show at the height of their careers (though Lennon did contribute a song to the revue Oh, Calcutta! and Simon would write The Capeman, a notorious flop, in 1998). An art form that once produced the greatest of American songwriters no longer attracted them.I

  Rock music would never really take hold on Broadway until Rent opened in 1996.

  One popular songwriting team of the 1960s—Burt Bacharach and Hal David—did write a show, the snappy Promises, Promises, produced by David Merrick in 1968. The score is still as bracing as a martini in August, but Bacharach hated that, theater being live, his music sounded different every night. He preferred the recording studio, where he could control the sound. He never returned to Broadway.

  After their groundbreaking 1966 musical Cabaret, John Kander and Fred Ebb wrote two conventional shows, The Happy Time, starring Robert Goulet as a French-Canadian photographer with an accent thicker than Inspector Clouseau’s, and Zorba, which has its earthy charms but can only be revived today with a big star in the lead (Anthony Quinn made a fortune touring it in the 1980s).

  Jerry Herman wrote two major hits of the 1960s—Hello, Dolly! and Mame. But he stumbled with his next show, Dear World. Though the score is a delight, the book, based on the play The Madwoman of Chaillot, is, theater historian Ken Mandelbaum notes, “virtually plotless.”1 Herman would write two more flops—Mack & Mabel and The Grand Tour—before roaring back in 1983 with La Cage aux Folles.

  Jerry Bock and Sheldon Harnick’s Fiddler on the Roof ran 3,242 performances from 1964 to 1972. But their partnership ended in 1970 with a flop called The Rothschilds, starring Hal Linden. They split up over the director, the overrated Derek Godby. Harnick wanted him fired; Bock backed him. (He was eventually replaced by Michael Kidd.) Bock and Harnick split but agreed never to speak publicly about the feud.

  By 1970, as attendance began to slide, Broadway offered little excitement. The hit musical was the Lauren Bacall vehicle Applause, adapted from the movie All About Eve. Right at the end of the turbulent sixties—Woodstock, Kent State, Vietnam, the deaths of Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr.—Broadway’s big offering was a musical whose show-stopping number included the lyrics: “What is it that we’re living for? Applause, applause!”—sung by Bonnie Franklin and a bunch of chorus boys.

  Is it any wonder no one raised a hand in Goldman’s class?

  • • •

  Another strike against Broadway was the unraveling of New York City itself. The seeds of New York’s troubles were planted during the New Deal. No city embraced the cornerstones of the New Deal—government expansion, redistribution of wealth through welfare programs, unionization, municipal works projects—as fervently as New York. Mayor Fiorello La Guardia paid for the ever-expanding city government in the 1930s through tax hike after tax hike, a cycle that would be repeated by his successors until so many businesses and middle-class residents had fled that New York had to be rescued from bankruptcy in the 1970s. As urban historian Fred Siegel wrote of La Guardia’s legacy, “except for boom times, New York would never again be able to afford its government.”2

  There were warning signs of the city’s impending disaster in the 1950s under Mayor Robert F. Wagner Jr. Three recessions hammered New York’s manufacturing base, a key economic engine of the city during and after World War II. By the late fifties, manufacturing was also under assault by automation, high taxes, and traffic congestion that made it difficult to move goods out of the city. “From 1958 to 1964, metropolitan factory employment fell by eighty-seven thousand jobs,” writes George J. Lankevich in New York City: A Short History. A prescient series in the Herald Tribune in 1965 chronicled the city’s growing economic problems. One article headlined BUSINESSES COME—BUT MOSTLY GO noted that between 1958 and 1964, thirty thousand manufacturing jobs evaporated from the garment industry alone.3

  The steady, unstoppable decline of the garment industry was a serious setback for Broadway. Garment executives were among the city’s most devoted playgoers ever since their business district migrated, in the 1920s, from the south end of Manhattan to the West Side between Thirty-Fourth and Fortieth Streets. The garment district was at the doorstep of Times Square and the Broadway theater. It was also an industry run mainly by Jews, a significant portion of the Broadway audience. (A 1980 study by the Broadway League—then known as the League of New York Theatres and Producers—showed that 40 percent of the Broadway audience was Jewish.)

  The garment industry also provided lucrative jobs for Broadway writers, directors, and performers in the form of industrial shows—musical revues tailored to a textile company’s clients. The most lavish of all was the Milliken Breakfast Show, sponsored by Milliken & Company, which made fabrics. It ran annually—for twelve consecutive performances—at the Waldorf Astoria beginning in 1956. Some two thousand textiles executives attended each performance. The company hired such stars as Angela Lansbury, Ann Miller, Robert Morse, and Carol Channing to perform material written by Charles Strouse or Jerry Herman or Sheldon Harnick. Michael Bennett, an up-and-coming choreographer in the sixties, staged several Milliken shows, hiring friends such as Donna McKechnie and Tommy Tune.

  The Milliken shows became less and less lavish in the late seventies when investors in the company complained how much money they cost. The last splashy Milliken show was in 1980. After that, fashion buyers weren’t interested in “Millikiddies,” or Broadway for that matter. As Howard Kissel, then the drama critic for Women’s Wear Daily, noted, “They wanted to know where they could get the best cocaine.”

  • • •

  The Broadway audience has always been white, middle-aged, and upper-middle class. New Yorkers, in the fifties and sixties, made up the majority of that audience. The great white flight from cities in the mid-twentieth century took a huge toll on the theater. During Mayor Wagner’s tenure, eight hundred thousand white people left the city for the suburbs.4 As crime rates soared in the 1960s, schools decayed and city services such as garbage collection and policing frayed, white flight in New York became an exodus. At the same time, the city’s ranks swelled with Puerto Ricans, who were fleeing economic collapse on their island, and blacks, who could not find work in the rural South. White residents “were replaced in the city by various minorities with lesser skills who did not qualify for jobs but required a greater amount of public service than did the exiting whites.”5 Even if Puerto Ricans coming to the city had money to spend on a Broadway show—which they certainly did not—it’s hard to imagine they would have flocked to see a Russian-Jewish milkman fretting about one of his daughters marrying a goy.

  • • •

  Though the clouds of economic collapse were gathering, New Yorkers had reason to hope for the future with the election of John Lindsay in 1965. A liberal Republican, he had defeated the Democratic nominee, Abe Beame, an old-line machine politician. Lindsay was New York’s JFK. Handsome, rich, well educated, but not stuffy, he promised to look out for the downtrodden and mend the growing racial divide.6 It was the era of the great liberal experiment—the belief that the power of government, a good and true government, not one run by Tammany Hall, could raise the fortunes of those in need. Where would the resources come from? From the prosperous, of course. Tax, tax, tax, and then spend, spend, spend, and—voilà!—Utopia.

  Broadway has always leaned left—BROADWAY REDDER THAN FILMS! screamed a New York Post headline in 1947—but Lindsay was a Republican theater people could embrace. For starters, he looked fabulous in a tuxedo. And he loved the theater. He was a regular at op
ening nights, and a fixture at Sardi’s (his caricature still hangs in the main dining room). He went to the opening of On a Clear Day You Can See Forever with his friend Alan Jay Lerner. He was as Broadway saw itself—rich, sophisticated, elegant, white, but compassionate. He was also, arguably, one of the worst mayors in the history of the city. The damage he did to New York—and Broadway—would not be repaired until the city elected Ed Koch in 1978 (he shored up the city’s finances) and Rudolph Giuliani in 1992 (he shored up its quality of life).

  Lindsay’s disastrous tenure is chronicled, definitively, in Vincent J. Cannato’s The Ungovernable City: John Lindsay and His Struggle to Save New York. Lindsay presided over strikes that paralyzed the city—a transit workers’ strike, a sanitation workers’ strike, a teachers’ strike. Race riots set Harlem and the Bronx on fire. Whites fought blacks over control of public schools. College students rioted against the Vietnam War, most famously at Columbia University, which was shut down for several days in 1968 because of a violent, student-led insurrection. Crime exploded. The murder rate alone soared 137 percent between 1966 and 1973.7 Police morale plummeted. The police were considered the enemy, and not without reason. This was, after all, an era of profound police corruption, the most famous whistle-blower being Frank Serpico. By the early 1970s, New York City, the great melting pot, had turned into a seething cauldron.

  For Broadway, the most pressing problem was the disintegration of its neighborhood—the area around Times Square. In the late sixties, the “Crossroads of the World” became a twenty-four-hour carnival of sex, drugs, and crime. The 1969 movie Midnight Cowboy, about a male hustler (Jon Voight), captures the area and all its sleaze. A series of Supreme Court decisions in the 1950s and sixties granted First Amendment protection to pornography, which by the late 1960s was being sold openly in Times Square. Peep shows and dirty bookstores flourished. Prostitutes (along Eighth Avenue) and male hustlers (on Forty-Second Street between Seventh and Eighth Avenues) sold their wares openly as well. Drugs could be scored in broad daylight. Live sex shows, which were also protected by the First Amendment—provided there was no penetration—drew more customers than Angela Lansbury in Dear World. Dilapidated “grocery stores” along side streets sold beer, knives, condoms, and fake photo IDs. “Those ‘grocery stores’ became the support system for the criminals who would then conduct their activities throughout Times Square,” said Carl Weisbrod, who ran New York State’s 42nd Street Development Project during Ed Koch’s administration.8 Muggings and stabbings occurred daily. And there were plenty of murders, many unreported. “When people would argue that we shouldn’t be spending manpower and money on prostitution because it’s a ‘victimless crime,’ I would tell them about the prostitutes we found cut up in little pieces in plastic bags,” said Sidney J. Baumgarten, a lawyer who ran the mayor’s Midtown Enforcement Project in the mid-seventies. “And what about the johns, the out-of-towners, who get picked up and then mutilated by prostitutes? Many of them don’t even report the crimes because they’re so ashamed to go back to Podunk and tell their families.”9 The neighborhood became so dangerous by the early seventies that Vincent Sardi Jr., owner of Broadway’s most famous restaurant, hired a private security team to escort his employees to and from their cars every night.

  Times Square had always had a seedy side. Originally called Longacre Square, it was once the center of New York’s horse-trading and carriage industries. Full of smelly stables, saloons, pickpockets, and prostitutes, it was a rough part of town. It began to gussy up a bit when producer Oscar Hammerstein I (grandfather of the lyricist) built a splendid theater called the Olympia on the corner of Seventh Avenue and Forty-Second Street. Modeled on a French Renaissance palace, it had three auditoriums and an air-conditioning system, which Hammerstein patented. He also built the Theatre Republic and the Victoria. When other producers followed, New York’s theater district migrated along Broadway from Union Square to Forty-Second Street. In 1904, Adolph Ochs, the publisher of the New York Times, joined his friend Hammerstein in the neighborhood, relocating his newspaper from Park Row near City Hall to a brand-new tower, modeled on the Campanile in Florence, on a patch of land in the middle of Longacre Square. A few months later, a major subway station opened on Forty-Second Street and Seventh Avenue. Pedestrians packed the streets. Ochs lobbied to have the neighborhood renamed Times Square. Longacre Square became Times Square by proclamation of Mayor George B. McClellan in April 1904.10

  Impresarios built more splendid theaters in the neighborhood, many with roof gardens where patrons could see late-night shows featuring chorus girls wearing fewer clothes than they had during performances earlier in the evening. (The most famous roof garden was atop the original Madison Square Garden, where Harry Thaw shot the architect Stanford White in 1906.) Spectacular productions featured real chariot races and gigantic water tanks in which chorus girls decked out like mermaids frolicked. Around the theaters, lobster palaces such as Rector’s flourished. Here, the city’s newly prosperous merchant classes could gorge on oysters, steaks, and vast quantities of champagne.

  Gambling was rampant around Times Square and so, too, was prostitution. The Tenderloin district—New York’s cluster of brothels, saloons, and gambling joints—migrated up Eighth Avenue to the west side of mid-Manhattan. By 1901, Forty-Third Street between Broadway and Eighth Avenue was known as “Soubrette Row” because of all its French brothels. Once prostitution took hold on Eighth Avenue in the West Forties and Fifties, it would thrive there for another eighty years, until the area was cleaned up during the Giuliani administration.

  The Times Square of lobster palaces and Ziegfeld’s Follies was wiped out by Prohibition. That great, disastrous experiment brought a new criminal element to Times Square—mobsters, who controlled most of the speakeasies that sprang up throughout the neighborhood. Meanwhile, the great theaters of yesterday’s showmen—Hammerstein’s Victoria, Belasco’s Republic, Klaw and Erlanger’s New Amsterdam—were in trouble, ironically as a result of increasing land values in the Times Square they helped create. Being single-use properties, open only eight or nine times a week, legitimate theaters “found it difficult to generate sufficient revenues to retain command over the street,” writes Lynne B. Sagalyn in Times Square Roulette. Most would be converted into movie houses. In the 1930s, they faced crushing competition from the great movie palaces the studios built along Broadway. By 1940, most of the theaters on Forty-Second Street had been converted into burlesque houses or “grinders,” which showed reruns of old movies. Grinders were not places to take the family, and Forty-Second Street quickly became a male bastion of sleaze. “The grinders brought a new kind of commercial promotion to the street: garish marquees, sexually suggestive posters, bizarre devices to lure crowds,” Sagalyn writes.11 The grinders would become the porn houses of the sixties and seventies.

  When Times Square became the theatrical capital of the world, gay men, who had clustered around the waterfronts of lower Manhattan (“Hello, sailor!”), began moving uptown as well. The theater would be nothing without gay men. They are its creators, and much of its audience. Gay culture flourished in New York during World War I. As George Chauncey notes in Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World 1890–1940, the war disgorged hordes of single young men from all over the country into the city, which was a clearinghouse for soldiers on their way to Europe. In the 1920s, as Prohibition loosened Victorian-era morals, there was even a “pansy craze” in Times Square. So-called queer balls were staged at Madison Square Garden and the Astor Hotel. Nightclubs featuring gay emcees became fashionable.

  The repeal of Prohibition drove Times Square’s thriving gay culture into the shadows. The sale of alcohol was regulated by the powerful New York State Liquor Authority, which, at the urging of La Guardia, cracked down on bars that served “lewd and dissolute people” such as homosexuals.12 The Mafia could offer protection from the State Liquor Authority to gay bars, and by the end of the thirties, mobsters owned many of tho
se bars. The Great Depression ushered in what, in the 1970s, would become an emblem of Forty-Second Street: the male hustler. With the unemployment rate at nearly 30 percent in the city, many young men were forced to sell their bodies in and around the grinders. By the 1970s, Forty-Second Street between Seventh and Eighth Avenues was almost exclusively a male domain. “A major indicator of the perception of the safety of an area is the percentage of women to men,” said Carl Weisbrod. “One study done in the late 1970s revealed that for every one woman who spent time on Forty-Second Street, there were nine men.” On average, five felonies a day occurred along the “Deuce,” as the street is sometimes called. Skyscrapers were rising on the east side of Midtown Manhattan in the 1960s as global conglomerates planted their flags in New York City. But along West Forty-Second Street not a single new building had been constructed since 1939. “For a Midtown block, that is unbelievable,” said Weisbrod.

  Adding to Times Square’s slide into sleaze was the neighborhood in the West Forties and Fifties. Hell’s Kitchen was its name. It had always been a tough place, dominated by the Westies, the Irish mob. The side streets were lined with single-room occupancy buildings (SROs), which could be rented by the hour. They became de facto whorehouses. Many of these SROs stood right alongside Broadway theaters. In the summer of 1972, Gail Sheehy, writing in New York magazine, profiled Jimmy Della Bella, the manager of Hotel Raymona, an SRO brothel on the corner of Eighth Avenue and West Forty-Ninth Street. As she was interviewing Della Bella, his brother Phil was keeping an eye out for cops. Suddenly, Phil yelled to the women in the lobby, “Get baaaack!” He’d spotted a squad car coming down the street. Sheehy reported that she couldn’t see anything but an empty street. “Spotted him way up at the corner,” Phil said. “See, I got very special eyes. I can see reflections in the Eugene O’Neill Theater.”