Razzle Dazzle Page 3

  Merrick’s other schemes—of which his investors and Clurman were unaware—included a little side business with the souvenir program. Merrick and Schlissel had a deal with a small-time printer named Abe Zamachansky. He printed the souvenir programs for Merrick’s shows. They were sold in the lobby for a dollar. It doesn’t sound like much, but on a hit show, playing a fifteen-hundred-seat theater eight times a week, packed with theatergoers who might want to take something home to remember their night on Broadway, those dollars added up. At the end of the week, Zamachansky would split the profits with Merrick and Schlissel. “No one got a piece of that but the three of them,” said an old associate of Merrick’s. “No one. No investors. No creative people. Nobody. It was a very profitable business. And when the creative people started demanding their share, Merrick stopped doing the book!”

  As Clurman had discovered, financial documentation for Broadway shows was sketchy, at best. If Merrick’s investors had any idea how to read their contracts, they might—might—have discovered that a certain company was entitled to buy, at minimal cost, all the lighting and electrical equipment from Merrick’s shows when they closed. Merrick owned the company. He shipped the equipment to a warehouse in upstate New York and then rented it out to other shows in New York and around the country. The original investors in the show that had closed paid for lighting equipment. But only Merrick pocketed the money from its subsequent rental. Another small fortune was being made off Broadway’s oblivious angels.

  Clurman called others to the stand. Every box office treasurer, he recalled, took the Fifth Amendment. But the CBS secretary, Marion Branch, testified, and so, too, did Melvin D. Hecht, the runner. He told about the payoffs he made every Monday morning to box office treasurers. He also said he carried two envelopes. One contained checks for the regular box office price of the tickets. The other contained cash. He distributed the checks to the box office.

  “What did you do with the cash?” Clurman asked.

  “I delivered it in person to an individual in an office building.”

  Clurman had instructed Hecht not to name the person or the building, but everybody in the room knew he was talking about Murray Helwitz, the Shubert iceman, who worked out of room 504 in the Sardi Building.

  After Hecht was done, Alvin Cooperman, a Shubert executive, took the stand and announced that the Shubert Organization “deplores any unethical practices in ticket selling and production investing.” Any Shubert employee who accepted ice “would be summarily dismissed.”5

  Again, much of the room had to stifle a laugh.

  At the end of the day, Merrick asked if he could return to the stand. He said he was “appalled” at what he’d learned that day, and he was “happy and delighted” that the attorney general was exposing such practices and “cleaning out the vermin.” He congratulated Lefkowitz and called the hearing “the best show of the season.”6

  • • •

  On December 26, 1963—just two weeks after the hearings that engulfed the Shubert Organization in scandal—J. J. Shubert, the last of the three brothers who built the empire, died of a cerebral hemorrhage in his penthouse apartment on the eleventh floor of the Sardi Building. He was eighty-six. On Broadway they called him the “Phantom,” as no one had seen him in years. It was an ironic nickname, though no one knew it at the time. Twenty-five years later, another phantom, the one with the mask, would make more money for the Shubert Organization than any other show in its one-hundred-year history.

  J. J.’s dementia had set in around 1958, and by 1960 his mind was gone. He was bedridden in his apartment, surrounded by Louis XIV furniture he’d collected on long-ago trips to Europe. He was attended to by nurses and by his second wife, who let few people into the apartment. Those old confidants who were allowed to see this belligerent, brutal old despot said his face seemed fixed in a scowl.

  Above a massive fireplace in his living room hung a painting of his only son, John, at the age of eight dressed like Little Lord Fauntleroy. J. J. had trained John to take over the Shubert empire. But in November 1962, John had died from a heart attack on a train to Clearwater, Florida. He was fifty-three.

  The Shubert lawyers, Gerald Schoenfeld and Bernard B. Jacobs, fearing the news would kill the old man—or perhaps that he would not have grasped it at all—never told J. J. that his only direct heir, the only direct heir to his empire, was dead.

  * * *

  I. Bernie Hart was thought to be one of the funniest men on Broadway, much funnier than Moss, who with George S. Kaufman wrote the classic comedies You Can’t Take It with You and The Man Who Came to Dinner. After Moss’s play The Climate of Eden got slaughtered by the critics in Philadephia, Moss and Bernie took the train back to New York. As soon as they arrived, they headed to the Little Bar at Sardi’s. “Did you see those reviews, Bernie?” Moss said. “How are we ever going to get out of Philadelphia with those reviews? There is no way we can get out of Philadelphia with those reviews.” Bernie replied, “Moss, relax. We got out of Egypt. We’ll get out of Philadelphia.”

  II. Five years later, Azenberg was offered his envelope. He was the general manager of Two Gentlemen of Verona, and it came by way of the box office. He met with his business partner, Eugene Wolsk, and they decided not to take it. “After the ’63 investigation, it was a felony,” Azenberg said.

  CHAPTER TWO

  The Phantom

  By 1958 Henry Speckman had worked as a maintenance man for the Shubert Organization for forty-one years. Short and stocky, he was suffering from severe emphysema. He didn’t talk—he wheezed. His doctor told him he didn’t have much time left, even less if he kept working. He requested a meeting with Mr. J. J., as everyone called J. J. Shubert.

  J. J. rarely met with anyone unless his two lawyers, Gerald Schoenfeld and Bernard Jacobs, were present. J. J. received people from behind a large desk in his sixth-floor office in the Sardi Building. The lawyers sat on either side of the desk, close to J. J. The “victim,” as the visitor was called, sat opposite J. J. The lawyers had their backs to the “victim” so he could not make out what they were whispering. Speckman was the victim that day. He came in, wheezing as usual.

  “Mr. J. J.,” he began, “I’ve been with Shubert for forty-one years, but I can no longer work. I’ve got emphysema, and I’ve checked on my insurance and it’s not enough. I can’t live on it. Even with the social security, it’s just not enough. I was wondering, Would you give me something to help supplement it? Something more in my pension, maybe . . . .”

  J. J. glared at him. “How long did you say you were here?”

  “Forty-one years.”

  “I’ve taken care of you for forty-one years,” J. J. replied. “Now go and find someone else to take care of you.”

  “That’s the way he was,” Jacobs would recall nearly forty years later. “He was not conscious of the fact he was cruel or mean. After all, he grew up in a world in which he and his brothers came out of nothing. And they clawed their way to become the dominant force in the American theater.”

  Short, thick, rumpled, and prone to titanic rages, J. J. ran his empire, which at one point included twenty theaters in New York and another fifty or so around the country, with an imperious hand. Since 1953, when his only partner, his brother Lee, died, he answered to no one. He was surrounded by courtiers who every day at six vied to take up the box of papers for Mr. J. J. to sign in his penthouse. He who had the box had the king’s ear, at least for the night.

  J. J. was grooming his son, John, to take over one day. But he was not ready to relinquish control yet, and John often feared his father would never do so. In fact, there were times when John feared his father might throw him out of the company. If he made a bad decision, J. J. would explode and scream, “You’re fired.”1

  J. J. told his underlings, “My son has no more authority here than the porters in my theaters.”2

  Once, when John refused to ride in a car with one of J. J.’s mistresses, his father punched him in the face. Whe
n, in a divorce case in 1916, his first wife, Catherine Mary, accused him of having caught syphilis from hookers, he struck back by denying John was even his son. John’s real father, J. J. swore under oath, was one of Catherine Mary’s many lovers.

  J. J.’s brutal treatment of actors, directors, chorus girls, even his own family, was legendary. He screamed, he bullied, and sometimes he lashed out physically at those who displeased him. A notorious incident occurred in 1911 involving a showgirl named Peggy Forbes. A grandniece of President Zachary Taylor, Forbes was confident, even a bit arrogant. J. J. didn’t like her attitude. He preferred chorus girls who were subservient in every way. One day after a matinee at the Winter Garden Theatre, he fired her. As she later recounted in court, she marched up to him and said, “Mr. Shubert, are you a man or are you a monkey?” and then turned to walk away. Enraged, J. J. spun her around and smacked her twice in the face. She sued him, claiming the assault left her with a swollen eye and a bleeding lip. The suit made the papers, and everybody had a good laugh at J. J.’s expense. He hit Miss Forbes, he said, only after she’d stuck him with a hatpin. J. J. produced several witnesses, all Shubert employees, who backed up the hatpin story and added another detail—Miss Forbes brought whiskey backstage! Willie Klein, the longtime Shubert lawyer who cleaned up many a mess after a J. J. temper tantrum, settled the case out of court.

  J. J. had no sense of humor, but his outbursts could be funny, even if he wasn’t in on the joke. “There is only one captain of this ship,” he once bellowed. “The director and me!”

  One day, while inspecting the Majestic Theatre, one of his finest musical houses, he was told that the seats at the rear of the orchestra were fraying and needed to be re-covered.

  “The only thing I want covering my seats are asses!” he responded.

  J. J.’s employees—there were over twelve hundred at one point—were always falling in and out of favor with the boss. J. J. kept a mental list of where they stood when it came time to pass out Christmas bonuses. He sat at his desk with stacks of one-, five-, ten-, and twenty-dollar bills in front of him. His secretary would hand him an envelope with an employee’s name on it, and J. J. would select bills from the various piles. If he liked the person, he’d take, perhaps, two from the five-dollar pile and one from the twenty-dollar pile. But then he might remember that the employee had not been deferential enough to him at the last opening night. So he’d retrieve the envelope and take out one of the fives. Or perhaps the employee had said a cheery good afternoon to him last summer in Shubert Alley, and he’d add another five. Bernie Jacobs once joked that passing out Christmas bonuses at the Shubert Organization took until February.

  J. J.’s kingdom extended from West Forty-Fourth Street, where he owned the Shubert, the Broadhurst, and the Majestic Theatres as well as the Sardi Building, to West Fifty-Fourth Street, where he controlled the George Abbott Theatre (torn down in 1970—a Hilton Hotel occupies the site today). He prowled his ten-block domain at all hours of the day, often popping into a theater unannounced to observe his employees. The only person who ever seemed to know where he was at all times was Kitty Hall, the gravelly-voiced chief telephone operator who worked at a switchboard above the Shubert Theatre. If she thought a conversation was going to be interesting, she’d plug in. If it was boring, she’d click off. Kitty had her favorites among the army of Shubert employees. Whenever she got wind that J. J. was coming around for a surprise inspection, she’d ring them up with the alert, recalled Philip J. Smith, who today is chairman of the Shubert Organization. (Smith joined the Shuberts in 1957.)

  “He’s coming, kid,” she said. “He’s on his way over.”

  “If she didn’t like you, she’d let you suffer the results when J. J. showed up,” Smith said. “And then J. J. would wander in and scowl at everybody.”

  J. J. ruled his empire from his sumptuous penthouse on the eleventh floor of the Sardi Building. The lighting fixtures in the vast living room had been obtained from the old Knickerbocker Hotel in Times Square, and there was a glass ceiling, fashioned by Tiffany’s, above the dining room table. The most prominent feature of the apartment was a three-ton, intricately carved wrought-iron door J. J. picked up from a palazzo in Venice. In the center of the door was a bas-relief of a woman with six breasts. J. J. acquired two such doors, but installing the first one was such trouble—it took ten men to haul it up to his apartment—he consigned the other to the basement of the Cort Theatre, where it languished in a crate for decades. (That second door seems to have vanished; nobody at the Shubert Organization today has any idea where it is.)

  J. J. lived in his penthouse with his second wife, Muriel. They met in 1921. She was a chorus girl in one of his shows at the Winter Garden. They’d been companions for years, marrying in 1951. Muriel was on the Shubert payroll. Every week, she was issued a check for $546.38. As soon as she got her hands on the check, she’d call one of the Shubert box office treasurers to see if he could cash it for her. Once she had the money in hand, her chauffeur, Pablo, would drive her to the Empire Bank where she’d put the cash in a safety deposit box. “No one ever knew what Muriel did with her money,” said an old Shubert employee. “Maybe she was planning on making a fast getaway.”

  • • •

  J. J. was the youngest of the three Shubert brothers. They were born in Eastern Europe, though no one knows where exactly. Foster Hirsch, in The Boys from Syracuse, writes that they probably came from a small town on the border of Poland and Germany. Their father, David, was a peddler and a smuggler—he smuggled tea across the border into Germany, which had levied a steep tax on tea. He married their mother, Katrina Helwitz, in 1870. In 1881, like millions of other Jews fleeing pogroms and starvation, David and Katrina packed up their family—their three sons, Levi (the oldest), Sam, Jacob, and their three daughters, Fanny, Sarah, and Lisa—and emigrated to America.

  David was a difficult man. He showed no interest in working, preferring instead to spend his days praying. He was also a secret drinker. He would eventually become a full-blown alcoholic, and it may well have been his failure as a provider—and his unquenchable thirst for a drop—that turned his sons into workaholics and fueled their enormous ambition. Though alcohol has always been the social lubricant of choice in the theater, Sam, Lee, and J. J. were noted for their abstinence.

  David, Katrina, and their children lived for a time in Queens with Katrina’s relatives, the Helwitzes. But the Helwitzes soon became fed up with David’s freeloading, so they kicked the family out. The Shuberts headed to Syracuse, New York, where one of David’s sisters had emigrated a few years before. They moved into a dilapidated house next to the railroad tracks in the Seventh Ward, the Jewish ghetto. That first winter, they had almost nothing to eat, and Lisa, the youngest and frailest child, died of starvation. David had no choice but to work. He managed to get hold of some dry goods, strapped a sack on his back, and sold his wares throughout upstate New York. But, as always, he was a failure, blaming his misfortune not on the real culprit—whiskey—but what he said were debilitating bouts of rheumatism.

  It fell to Levi, the oldest child, to help the old man earn a living. He became a peddler, too, at the age of ten. But Levi, who could barely read, had a knack for business, and soon was outstripping his father in earnings. Levi, whose jet-black hair and eyebrows, unsmiling lips, and slightly slanted eyes gave him the whiff of the “inscrutable Oriental,” as a phrase of the time had it, also ran bets for a bookie on baseball games and prize fights. After a stint in a cigar store, and with the backing of a rich Jewish merchant, he went into business for himself. He opened a haberdashery shop in downtown Syracuse. But as Shubert biographer Hirsch writes, “he found the work tedious” and spent most of his time staring “at the bustling main street of downtown Syracuse.”3

  While Levi stared out his shop window, dreaming perhaps of bigger, more exciting things to do, J. J. started hawking newspapers. Sam went to work as a shoeshine boy. Delicate, thin, and often ill, Sam was a pretty boy with
a sensuous mouth and a faraway look in his black eyes. Katrina fretted over him all the time, but he was not a mama’s boy. He turned out to be tougher and even more ambitious than Levi. Sam envisioned the empire he and his brothers would create.

  It all began one frigid winter afternoon outside the Grand Opera House in downtown Syracuse. Sam was there with his shoeshine kit, bereft of customers and shivering in the cold. The manager of the opera house, Charles Plummer, noticed the frail boy standing out in the snow and invited him in to see the show—The Black Crook, generally thought to be the first American musical. Sam was entranced. The world of songs, sets, actors, and makeup—the world of make-believe—must have been a tremendous escape from the harsh world of poverty and hunger in that dilapidated house by the railroad tracks.

  Plummer, a well-known figure about town, took an instant liking to Sam, and offered him a job at a dollar fifty a week selling programs, according to Foster Hirsch in The Boys from Syracuse. Sam learned everything he could about the theater business. Within a few months, Plummer put him in the box office, the “sanctum sanctorum in the Shubert saga,” Hirsch writes. Sam had a talent for figures and could tally up the day’s receipts in his head. He was the first Shubert—and there would be a long line of them—to obsess over weekly grosses.

  Sam proved so adept a ticket seller at the Grand that he came to the attention of the manager of Syracuse’s leading theater, the Wieting. The manager offered him a job as box office treasurer and within a few months—the year was 1891—he was promoted to house manager. His first hire was his brother Levi, whom he put in charge of the ushers.

  While working at the Wieting, Sam met the man who would instill in him the dream of one day becoming a theatrical impresario himself. The theater attracts some odd characters, but few as odd as David Belasco. Born in San Francisco in 1853, he wrote his first successful play when he was nineteen and moved to New York. He churned out a play a season, mostly melodramatic twaddle with titles such as Polly with a Past and The Harem. Of the seven hundred plays he wrote or directed, only two have endured—Madame Butterfly and The Girl of the Golden West—and that’s only because Puccini turned them into operas. The critic George Jean Nathan called Belasco the “Rasputin of Broadway” because his plays were such hokum. He retaliated by having a mural painted in his theater—the Belasco on West Forty-Fourth Street—depicting the beheading of a knight. The knight resembled Nathan, the executioner Belasco.