Razzle Dazzle Read online

  Ernst told Clurman he knew some people who were interested in his investigation. He invited Clurman to his apartment at Two Fifth Avenue that night for an informal meeting. Nothing official, he stressed. He just wanted to introduce Clurman to some theater people who, he thought, might be able to help him. “They think your investigation needs to be amplified,” Ernst said.

  When Clurman arrived at Two Fifth Avenue, just north of Washington Square Park, he was introduced to an impressive array of theater people. Leland Hayward, tall, patrician, elegant, the son of a United States senator, seemed to be the leader. His productions included South Pacific, Mister Roberts, and Gypsy.

  Gilbert Miller, son of the legendary producer Henry Miller, was there, too. Gilbert specialized in high-class plays—Shaw’s Candida, Anouilh’s Ring Around the Moon, Eliot’s The Cocktail Party.

  Another impressive figure was Roger Stevens, one of the founders of the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts and the National Endowment for the Arts. Dickie Moore, one-time child actor who starred in the Our Gang series, was there representing the Actors’ Equity Association, for which he was the public relations director. Representing the Dramatists Guild was Russel Crouse, coauthor of the book to The Sound of Music.

  “This was not a bunch of little guys who invest in the theater,” Clurman recalled. “These were some very notable people.”

  Hayward took the floor. Clurman’s investigation into the financial practices on Broadway was essential, he said. Clurman remembered thinking how unusual it was “for the people I was talking to want to be investigated.” But Hayward said too many of his colleagues were “kidnapping” investors’ money, and the investors were getting fed up. Money was becoming harder and harder to raise, and Broadway itself was in a precarious position. Its so-called golden age—from 1940 to 1960—was winding down. There had only been seventeen new shows in the 1962–63 season, many of them flops.

  When Hayward finished speaking, somebody called out from the back of the room, “What about the ice?”

  “Ice.” Other than being something you put in your drink, Clurman did not know the term. The room fell silent, and then Clurman’s education began.

  Ice—ticket corruption—went as far back as Jenny Lind’s sold-out performances in 1850.1 “It has been a thriving fungus ever since,” William Goldman noted in his classic theater book, The Season.

  Other theater historians say ticket corruption goes back much further, to ancient Athens, where you had to bribe someone to get a ticket for a sold-out run of Medea at the Theater of Dionysus.

  Whatever its murky history, ice is a function of supply and demand. Broadway theaters seat, at most, eighteen hundred people. If a show’s a hit, a lot more than eighteen hundred people want to see it, and they want to see it from the best seat possible. The show is, of course, sold out, but somebody, usually a ticket broker, can help—for a price considerably higher than the face value of the ticket. To get that ticket, the broker has to bribe someone, usually someone in the box office. And that bribe—the difference between the face value of the ticket and the amount the broker paid to get his hands on it—is the ice.

  The producers explained to Clurman how this black market worked. The top ticket price for a musical at the time was about ten dollars. This was, of course, before computers, so the tickets were hard tickets, kept in racks in the box offices. The men who ran the box offices controlled the tickets. Arthur Cantor, a producer and publicist in the early sixties, was desperate to get a pair of seats for a client to Neil Simon’s hit play Barefoot in the Park at the Biltmore Theatre. He called in a lot of favors, but to no avail. And then one afternoon, walking through Shubert Alley, he ran into the box office treasurer at the Biltmore. He asked if he could help. The treasurer smiled and said, “Let me see what the Rabbi has.” He pulled out a fistful of tickets—that weekend’s best orchestra locations.

  A broker might pay a box office man five, ten, fifteen dollars above face value, depending on the popularity of the show, to get a ticket. The broker would then resell that ticket for as much as fifty dollars. The box office man pocketed the bribe, which because it was cash, was untraceable. It melted away, just like ice.

  For years, the box office treasurers never asked for a raise. They didn’t need to. They were running, as one producer said, “their very own concession stand.”

  There was a law on the books for years governing the reselling of tickets in New York. It restricted the broker markup to just a dollar fifty plus a fifteen-cent tax. The producers said nobody ever paid any attention to the law.

  How much ice was there? Clurman wondered. No one could say for certain, but it flowed down Broadway as if a giant iceberg up in Washington Heights had melted. And, of course, no one ever paid taxes on ice.

  Hayward and the others were upset that the ice was going to box office people (and others) who had nothing to do with creating the show. Money was being made off the work of producers, writers, directors. Many weren’t seeing any of it. Investors, too, were getting screwed.

  And so was the public. Tickets were not available to hit shows because brokers had scooped them up. Brokers’ offices lined the side streets of Times Square. (Some were legitimate, but many were just hole-in-the-wall scalpers.) You had to have connections—or be willing to pay astronomical prices—to get into, say, Stop the World—I Want to Get Off! Hayward himself had once called the box office of one of his shows and been told the performance that night was sold out. But when he arrived at the theater he was dismayed to see rows of empty seats. The brokers had not been able to unload all their tickets.2

  The regular theatergoer, Hayward said, was getting fed up with being told the show was sold out when brokers had tickets.

  Clurman told the group, “If this relates to the use of funds that are coming in from investors, I suppose I could say I have jurisdiction to go into it.”

  A solemn man with dark eyes whom Clurman had not noticed jumped up from his seat in the corner of the room and said, “This man knows the jokes!” The solemn man began to smile. Clurman recognized him—Richard Rodgers, composer of Oklahoma!, Carousel, and The King and I.

  Rodgers, a producer as well as composer, hated ice. People were pocketing huge amounts of money from his hit shows, and neither he nor his investors ever saw a penny of it. He’d had fights with theater owners about ticket corruption.

  In 1946, Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein produced Irving Berlin’s Annie Get Your Gun, starring Ethel Merman. Its out-of-town tryout was in Philadelphia at a Shubert theater. A local reporter went to the box office the day tickets went on sale and was told nothing in the orchestra was available for the run of the show. She was suspicious since the musical hadn’t even been advertised in the papers yet. So she called Oscar Hammerstein. He was flabbergasted. “Richard Rodgers and I have nothing to do with the distributions of tickets,” he said.3 Rodgers and Hammerstein were furious. They called Lee Shubert, the head of the company. Lee called the box office manager in Philadelphia and bellowed, “Get those goddamned tickets back, you hear me? I don’t want to know anything except you get those tickets!”

  Orchestra seats to Annie Get Your Gun in Philadelphia became available. And Dick Rodgers became interested in what went on in the box offices of his shows.

  • • •

  Clurman left the meeting after nearly three hours determined to investigate Broadway. From what he’d heard, ticket scalping and misuse of investor money was out of control. Over the next six months, he interviewed, and in some cases subpoenaed, nearly three hundred people in the theater, from producers to theater owners, box office staffers to employees of companies that serviced Broadway productions. Some cooperated, but many took the Fifth Amendment.

  But Clurman got hold of hotel records, which revealed that hundreds and hundreds of tickets had been directed to hotel concierges. He subpoenaed records from major New York corporations—banks and several textile companies—that paid huge amounts to brokers to secure seats to hit shows fo
r their clients. He also found informants—“some pretty horrible little people,” he would say years later—who agreed to cooperate with his investigation.

  As he nosed around Broadway he began to get some strange phone calls. One person told him, “Don’t stand too close to the edge of the subway platform.” Another caller asked if “he liked chorus girls.” When he said he wasn’t interested, the caller replied, “Oh, you’re that kind. Do you want some chorus boys?”

  What Clurman uncovered during his six-month examination of Broadway stunned even so seasoned an investigator as himself. It wasn’t just that money was flying around, unaccounted for. Or that bribes were being paid under the table. He discovered a “train of aggravated corruption. Everybody,” he recalled, “was having a ball—and nobody was watching.”

  There were scams of all sorts, about which angels knew nothing. For instance, if three trucks were required to bring scenery down from the shop to the theater, the trucking company might make out a bill for four—and the producer could pocket the money for the fourth, nonexistent, truck.

  Suppliers of scenery, costumes, and lights admitted to giving kickbacks to producers and general managers (the people who run the day-to-day operations of a production) in exchange for contracts. On any one show, the kickbacks could amount to several thousand dollars.

  Clurman, an expert in accounting, was shocked to discover such clauses in investment papers as this: “Our audit was conducted in accordance with generally accepted theatrical accounting principles. Such statements as to the operations and cash position of theatrical ventures do not customarily require the rendering of an opinion. No direct verification of assets or liabilities was undertaken.”

  In plain English: “We have no idea if these statements are true.”

  Clurman subpoenaed records from some productions, and discovered that on one show, which had been produced for $500,000, the books were kept in pencil. The numbers were smudged.

  But the real money was in the ice. Clurman discovered that it wasn’t limited to box office personnel. Many people—theater owners, general managers, producers—were taking their cut. Anybody with access to tickets could flip them to brokers, including writers, directors, designers, and stars, who, in their contracts, were guaranteed at least two prime orchestra seats—“house seats”—a night.

  Rudy Vallee, one of the stars of How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, openly shopped his house seats around Times Square to the highest bidder, usually the Hollywood Ticket Office.

  It was said that Frederick Loewe, the composer of Brigadoon and My Fair Lady, traded his house seats for fur coats from friends in the garment business. Many a chorus girl in a Frederick Loewe show was known to keep warm in the winter with one of Freddie’s furs. Clurman discovered that a Broadway leading lady—whose name he would not give up even fifty years after the fact—had a deal with a broker who paid her $10,000 a year for her house seats. A well-known Broadway producer had bags of cash delivered to his East Side town house every night.

  The bigger the hit, the more the ice. And at that point, the longest-running show in Broadway history was My Fair Lady, which opened March 15, 1956, at the Mark Hellinger Theatre and closed September 29, 1962, after 2,717 performances. A few months after My Fair Lady opened, a Russian submarine, the Myest, disappeared in the Baltic Sea. The day news of the sinking appeared in the papers, Bernie Hart, general manager of My Fair Lady (and the brother of the director Moss Hart) told his staff that the Russians had located the sub. “It broke through the ice,” he said, laughing, “at the Hellinger!”I

  Stanley Stahl, a Times Square real estate magnate, bought the Hellinger during the run of My Fair Lady. He did so, according to his friend Arthur Rubin, so he could get a cut of the ice from the box office.

  My Fair Lady was produced by CBS, which put up $360,000. But even executives at CBS couldn’t get tickets to the show without going through brokers. Marion Branch, a secretary at CBS, told Clurman that she bought as many as five pairs of seats a week from brokers. She paid $50 a ticket—$500 a week, she said ($3,500 today)—and gave them to CBS clients.

  During the course of his investigation, Clurman discovered that the distribution of tickets and bribes wasn’t limited to Broadway box offices. He discovered that one theater chain had centralized the black market in tickets. The Shubert Organization controlled seventeen of Broadway’s best theaters. The company also owned the Sardi Building on West Forty-Fourth Street, named after the famed Broadway restaurant housed on the ground floor. Four floors above Sardi’s was a room—504—set aside for a special purpose. Here brokers or their runners went to buy tickets for shows in Shubert theaters. Sometimes there was a line out the door. Clurman found a former runner—Melvin D. Hecht, a twenty-six-year-old “freelance writer” from Philadelphia—who told him that, every Monday, he would deliver an envelope stuffed with cash to a man in 504.4 The man was Murray Helwitz, a distant cousin of the three Shubert Brothers—Sam, Lee, and J. J.—who had founded the mighty theatrical empire.

  The money was divided up in room 504 and distributed up and down the chain of command. A company manager who worked at a Shubert show at the time said, “I was going on vacation once, and the box office treasurer came up to me, handed me an envelope and said, ‘Have fun, kid.’ There was a hundred dollars in cash in the envelope.”

  Manny Azenberg recalled, “Everybody knew about the ice. You couldn’t wait to become important so that you got your envelope.”II

  The ticketing scandal reached right into the heart of Broadway’s biggest landlord—the Shubert Organization. Clurman spoke to many Shubert employees, many of whom took the Fifth Amendment. But two employees, he would later say, were “very helpful to my investigation.” They were J. J. Shubert’s lawyers and advisors—Gerald Schoenfeld and Bernard B. Jacobs. Middle-aged, low-key, always in the background, they seemed, Clurman would later say, to understand that the company was in peril. Several people in the organization were collecting hundreds of thousands of dollars—perhaps millions—every year without reporting any of it to the Internal Revenue Service.

  “Along came these two guys, these two lawyers, and I got to know them,” Clurman said. “They were not stupid people. They were helpful. It was hard to figure out what their motivation was, but they were very helpful.”

  In 2005, when the Shubert Organization renamed the Plymouth Theatre after Gerald Schoenfeld, then chairman of the board, Clurman sent him a note. “I want to congratulate you,” he wrote. “And I really believe that you’re one of the people who helped save the theater in 1963.”

  • • •

  Clurman had to make a decision. He had enough evidence—kickbacks, bribes, diverted funds—to bring down Broadway, not least its most powerful entity, the Shubert Organization. He believed that the ice flowed to the top of the company, right into the executive offices of Lawrence Shubert Lawrence Jr., the president and chief operating officer. But if Clurman brought the Shuberts down he might decimate Broadway itself. Who, after all, would look after those seventeen theaters, especially as Times Square was getting seedier and seedier and the theater business itself was losing ground to television? He went to his boss to talk it over. Lefkowitz agreed. We’ll hold hearings, he said, put them on notice, pass some laws governing theater investing and ticket distribution. But Broadway was vital to New York. It could not be wiped out.

  “It would have been easy to indict a multitude of people,” Clurman said. “I knew some of these guys hated me, but I don’t think they realized that I saved their necks.”

  • • •

  Clurman opened his public hearings on Broadway’s financial practices on December 10, 1963. He began with a headline-grabbing number. Based on the evidence collected, the attorney general estimated that at least $10 million ($75 million today) in ice was collected each year on Broadway. All of it was in cash and tax-free. Most Broadway productions failed, Clurman pointed out. In the 1961–62 season, investors lost nearly $6 million, he calc
ulated. But the well connected were hauling in millions—at the expense of other people’s money.

  Broadway producers, general managers, box office personnel, and other theater people gathered at 80 Centre Street, and were called on to testify. One of the first to speak was David Merrick, then the most powerful producer on Broadway. Merrick’s string of hit shows included Fanny, Look Back in Anger, Irma La Douce, and Carnival!.

  Merrick took the stand and said he knew little about ice. What he did know, he said, was rumor and conjecture. The term itself, he believed, was a turn-of-the-century political expression meaning “incidental campaign expenses.”

  Clurman and just about everybody else in the room had to stifle laughs. David Merrick didn’t know about ice? His right-hand man was Jack Schlissel, as tough a general manager as they came on Broadway. Schlissel was Merrick’s enforcer. He did the negotiating, the hiring, and often, the firing. “He was a worm,” Richard Seff, a veteran agent, says. “Slimy.” His name, in Yiddish, meant “key” (shlisl), and the joke around Broadway was that if you wanted to get at the ice on a Merrick show, you had to have the key. Schlissel and Merrick made hundreds of thousands of dollars from ice.

  Informants told Clurman that Merrick’s offices above the St. James were almost as busy in the black market for tickets as room 504 in the Sardi Building. What Clurman didn’t know was that as soon as news of his investigation broke, Merrick contacted his longtime property man and ordered him to remove filing cabinets from his office in the middle of the night and dump them into the Hudson River. The cabinets contained Merrick’s secret accounts of the cash flowing in from the ice, the kickbacks, and the various other schemes he was running. And here was David Merrick claiming he only knew the term as incidental campaign expenses.