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  The Syndicate was falling apart, historian Peter A. Davis writes in Inventing Times Square, because it was organized as an “informal pool” that allowed its original members to go their own way whenever they wished. As a result, in the face of competition from the Shuberts and the burgeoning movie business, the Syndicate eroded as its associates scrambled to save their own businesses.

  The Shuberts were a highly centralized company. Though they frequently raised money from outside investors, Lee and J. J. made all the decisions.

  The stock market crash of 1929 ruined Erlanger. He died, broke, on March 7, 1930. The Shuberts had won the battle, and in a final gesture of contempt they bought Erlanger’s Theatre on West Forty-Fourth Street and renamed it the St. James.

  • • •

  Lee and J. J. were now the most powerful theater owners and producers in America. On the eve of the Great Depression they owned thirty theaters in New York and another thirty around the country. Having become something of a Syndicate themselves, they also controlled the booking of productions at seven hundred and fifty other theaters. Historian Ken Bloom notes that at the time they were pulling in $1 million a week at the box office ($14 million today). They wielded enormous power but, having watched the imperious Syndicate rack up so many enemies, they did so quietly. The Shuberts, it was said, were tough—but they wouldn’t kill you. Lee could be downright generous to producers he liked. Toward the end of his life, Lee took a liking to a young ticket agent turned producer named Michael Abbott. Abbott produced his first Broadway play, Late Love with Arlene Francis, at the Booth Theatre. Reviews were lukewarm and the show struggled. Lee waived the rent and the show ran for six months.

  Lee and J. J. conducted business from opposite sides of West Forty-Fourth Street. J. J. was ensconced in the Sardi Building, while Lee operated out of a small, circular office above the Sam S. Shubert Theatre. The office was right next to a walk-in safe. “Lee liked to be right near the money,” an old Shubert employee once said. Lee’s office was part of a spacious penthouse above the theater. He lived “above the store.” His living room, painted burgundy, overlooked West Forty-Fourth Street. Its outstanding feature was a massive, hand-crafted grandfather clock from London. His bedroom looked down on the Broadhurst Theatre. He also had a library, stocked with leather-bound first editions of the classics. They remain unread today, some of the pages still uncut. Lee read contracts and scripts, not books.

  Lee worked through the night and never got up before noon. At four o’clock every afternoon, his barber came up to the apartment to give him a shave. When the barber was finished, Lee often entertained one of the chorus girls in his shows. “He didn’t only get a shave in that chair,” a longtime Shubert employee said, “he also got blowjobs from the ‘Five O’Clock Girls,’ as they were called.”

  Lee and J. J. were notorious around Broadway for their sexual prowess. Chorus girls regularly paraded up to their offices. And sometimes they didn’t even get that far. J. J. often enjoyed his girls in the stairwell of the Shubert Theatre.

  Lee fathered at least one child out of wedlock—Barry Bond—whose mother, Frederica, had been a showgirl. A few years after Lee’s death, John Shubert, J. J.’s son who was being groomed to take over, called Phil Smith, an assistant box office treasurer, into his office. “You’ll understand, Phil, that we’ll have to look out for Barry,” he said. Smith replied, “I understand, Mr. John.” Nothing more was said. “He didn’t have to draw a picture for me,” Smith recalled.I

  Lee acquired the nickname the “Wooden Indian” because he was always tan. A. J. Liebling, who profiled the brothers for the New Yorker in 1939, reported that on summer mornings, Lee could be found in Central Park asleep in the open tonneau of his Isotta Fraschini “with his face turned towards the sun.”2 Richard Seff, a young agent in the 1950s, would sometimes see Lee in Shubert Alley. “He seemed like a mummy,” Seff said. “He was very prune-faced.”

  Lee and J. J.—or Mr. Lee and Mr. J. J. as employees called them—divided up the running of their empire. Lee favored nonmusical plays, booking them into the smaller Shubert theaters. J. J. preferred musical revues and operettas, especially by his favorite composer, Sigmund Romberg. The Shuberts produced countless revivals of Romberg’s treacly The Student Prince, and had a warehouse in Fort Lee, New Jersey, where they kept the sets. Some of the furniture from The Student Prince wound up in offices in the Sardi Building and above the Shubert Theatre.

  Most nights after the curtains came down at their theaters, Lee and J. J. held court at separate tables in the bar of the Astor Hotel. They were accessible—managers, agents, directors, anyone with a question or a problem could approach them. They would listen and then confer privately. That night or, at the latest, the next morning, they had the answer. Lee and J. J. did not agonize over decisions.

  They weathered the Great Depression, though their empire went into receivership in 1931 after losing $3 million. The Irving Trust Company held the theaters for two years—in close consultation with Lee. On April 7, 1933, the bank put them up for auction. Broadway was nearly bust then, so nobody was rushing to buy theaters. There was only one bidder—Lee Shubert. He paid $400,000 to regain his empire. And then it was back to business. Lee and J. J. aided producers during the Depression by not charging rent, a significant savings that helped boost the number of productions on Broadway. Instead of rent, the Shuberts took a cut of the box office. As the Depression wore on, they acquired more theaters at rock-bottom prices.

  There is no question that Lee and J. J. saved Broadway during the Great Depression. Had they lost their theaters, many would have been torn down to make way for more lucrative real estate. The Shubert, the St. James, the Broadhurst, the Booth, the Royale, the Plymouth—to say nothing of Shubert houses around the country—could have met the wrecking ball. Broadway’s geography could have been wiped out. “If Lee Shubert had walked away from his business, the basic hardware of the American theater might well have been demolished,” concludes biographer Foster Hirsch.3

  Their empire intact, Lee and J. J. were poised to make more money than ever as Broadway entered its golden age after World War II. Oklahoma! opened at the St. James in 1943, and for the next twenty years, Shubert theaters would house such celebrated productions as Annie Get Your Gun, The King and I, Gypsy, The Skin of Our Teeth, A Streetcar Named Desire, The Cradle Will Rock, Fiorello!, and Kiss Me, Kate.

  As the New York economy boomed after the war, producers were awash in investment money. The Shuberts no longer had to supply their own product. They withdrew from producing and became landlords, though they often made investments in shows that played their theaters. Lee, always aloof, grew more and more remote. He rarely attended first nights, preferring to stay up in his aerie above the Shubert Theatre playing pinochle with old cronies. J. J. could still be volatile—he once punched out his chauffeur—but even he wasn’t the force he’d been while overseeing the productions of The Passing Show at his Winter Garden Theatre twenty years earlier.

  But Lee and J. J. had one more fight on their hands. And this time the enemy was the United States government.

  • • •

  The Shuberts dominated Broadway in the 1940s. And they were not averse to using their power. They could move shows in and out of their theaters at will. Legally, a show had to fall below a certain weekly box office gross, called the “stop clause,” before they could kick it out. But if they wanted something else in the theater, they ordered the box office treasurer to tell customers the show was sold out. If they wanted to prop a show up, they bought their own tickets. They had their own booking arm, United Booking Office (UBO), which demanded a percentage of every show booked into a Shubert house. Lee and J. J. were getting money two ways—as theater owners and bookers. And they could invest in whatever they liked—on their terms, since producers needed, if not their money, their theaters.

  Producers began to resent the Shuberts’ grip on the theater business. One producer complained to Variety in 1941: “Ninety
percent of all scripts are said to go through the Brothers Shubert for appraisal. If a play doesn’t appeal to the company, out it goes. If it clicks, the Shuberts take either a piece of the investment or a house percentage—whichever looks more profitable.”

  The Shuberts also controlled the best seats in their theaters. House seats had always been part of the theater business. But they were kept at a minimum, a pair for the creator, a pair for the producer, a pair for the house. The Shuberts jacked up their allotment. By the time South Pacific opened in 1949 at the Majestic Theatre, they had their hands on fifty prime orchestra seats at every performance.4

  The ice was flowing. The Annie Get Your Gun ticket scandal in Philadelphia drew unwelcome attention to Shubert practices, and Richard Rodgers, that implacable foe of ice, heard tales of shenanigans at his hit show, South Pacific, at the Majestic Theatre.

  • • •

  In Washington, D.C., Congressman Emanuel Celler, a Democrat who represented parts of Brooklyn and Queens, was gaining a reputation as a trust buster. He and Estes Kefauver (D-Tennessee) coauthored a law in 1950 that strengthened the federal government’s hand in busting up monopolies. Right across the river from his district was a tempting target—the Shubert Organization. He held hearings, accusing the Shuberts of having a stranglehold on the theater business in America. The U.S. attorney general was also interested in Shubert business practices and opened up his own investigation. Suddenly, the Shuberts were facing a pincer attack—Celler, denouncing them in the House of Representatives; the U.S. attorney general, interviewing witnesses about Shubert business practices.

  In 1950, the U.S. attorney general said Lee and J. J. dominated the theater business in America to such an extent that competition did not exist. The government demanded that the Shuberts get out of the booking business and divest themselves of some of their theaters.

  Lee and J. J. balked. They had built their business up from nothing, they felt they were honorable, if tough men, and they had stuck by the theater during the Great Depression, when it all could have gone under. They instructed their lawyers to fight back, and they turned to their friends at the newspapers. The powerful critic George Jean Nathan wrote, “Play shortage has been so acute that, in order to fill their theaters, the Shuberts have now and then been forced to put money into outside producers’ productions, and then demand the producers book them in their theaters. And why shouldn’t they?”

  The battle was in full tilt when, on December 21, 1953, Lee Shubert collapsed in his small circular office next to the safe. He’d had a stroke. The brain damage was irreparable. He died, still sporting a tan from a recent trip to Miami, on December 25, 1953.

  J. J. was left to battle the U.S. government—and run the Shubert empire—alone. Soon, though, he would acquire the services of two bright young lawyers. So bright, in fact, they would one day take control of his company for themselves.

  * * *

  I. Smith installed Bond into the box office of the Plymouth Theatre, one of the smaller Shubert houses. Bond earned the reputation for being “the dumbest box office treasurer on Broadway,” said producer Elizabeth I. McCann, whose many hit plays included the Tony Award–winning The Elephant Man. In 1994, Stephen Sondheim’s Passion played the Plymouth. The show was about an ugly woman with warts on her face named Fosca who becomes obsessed with a handsome soldier. Donna Murphy played Fosca, and her face, warts and all, was prominently displayed on posters in front of the theater. One day as McCann was walking past the Plymouth, Bond dashed out of the box office. “Liz!” he shouted. Pointing to the picture of the hideous Fosca, he said, “Every time I look at that I think of you.” McCann gasped. “Barry,” she said, “I know I’m no beauty, but really?” “No, no,” he said. “I don’t mean that. I mean, I think you should revive The Elephant Man. It was about an ugly person, too!”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  While There Is Death There Is Hope

  In the fall of 1996 Gerald S. Schoenfeld, the chairman of the board of the Shubert Organization, was lunching at Sardi’s with his old friend, producer Elizabeth I. (Liz) McCann. She was having her chopped salad, Schoenfeld his club sandwich. The most powerful man in the American theater, Schoenfeld was in a reflective mood that day. His longtime business partner and great friend, Bernard B. Jacobs, had died in August. They’d known each other since they’d been teenagers on the Upper West Side of Manhattan and, together, they’d taken control of the Shubert Organization and turned it into one of the most powerful and lucrative entertainment companies in the country. Promotions had just been announced at the organization. Philip J. Smith, Jacobs’s right-hand man for years, was named president. Robert Wankel, an accountant who worked directly under Schoenfeld, was made executive vice president. Both men were Catholic, in a company that had always been run by Jews.

  “Liz,” Schoenfeld said in his resonant, authoritative, and at times ridiculously pompous voice, “now that Bernie’s gone, I’m the only Jew left at Shubert.”

  McCann, an Irish Catholic, said, “You know, Jerry, there’s something you can do about that.”

  “What?” Schoenfeld asked.

  “Hire more Jews!”

  “No, no,” Schoenfeld said. “J. J. always said, ‘Don’t hire any bright Jewish boys. They’ll take the business away from you someday.’ ”

  McCann smiled. “Well, Jerry—isn’t that what you and Bernie did?”

  Schoenfeld raised his eyebrows above his thick glasses and laughed.

  • • •

  On September 22, 1924, as Lee and J. J. were expanding the Shubert empire, Sam and Fanny Schoenfeld welcomed a new addition to the household, a chubby boy with dark, rather tentative eyes. They named him Gerald. The Schoenfelds were comfortably middle-class. Sam sold fur coats, enough of them to keep his wife and two sons in an elegant apartment at 400 West End Avenue. Joe DiMaggio lived in the penthouse. Gerald was a good student at P.S. 87, displaying at an early age an interest in the law—and power. In his charming but score-settling memoir Mr. Broadway, he writes about being active in student government. One student was mayor, another district attorney, a third, the cop on the beat. If a student misbehaved he was brought to trial. “I was the judge,” Schoenfeld writes, proudly.

  Schoenfeld discovered he had a gift for oratory. He could recite poetry, Shakespeare, and the Gettysburg Address. At twelve years old, he won a speaking prize from the Child Welfare League of America. The award meant a great deal to him all his life. The prize was a speaking engagement at the Waldorf Astoria hotel. It didn’t take much prodding to get him to reminisce about how he held such celebrities as comedian Joe E. Brown and Mayor Fiorello La Guardia “in the palm of my hand with my spellbinding oratorical skills!” It was a pompous claim, but he always said it with a twinkle. His love of the spotlight, though, did not lead him to the theater. He seldom attended a Broadway show and he had never heard of the Shubert brothers. An early draft of his memoir—which he loved to read aloud to visitors in his elegant office above the Shubert Theatre (the office had once been Lee’s bedroom)—contained a chapter that opened, “When I was a boy, the name Schubert meant one thing—a Trout Quintet!” (That line never made it into the published Mr. Broadway.)

  In 1941, Jerry enrolled at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He was only seventeen, but everyone who knew him as a boy said he always looked and acted older than his years. He was a serious student, though as he himself admitted he lacked direction. He studied business and engineering and became a great reader, especially of history. When World War II broke out, he joined the army air corps and was sent to MIT to learn physics, calculus, and meteorology. None appealed to him, and because he couldn’t draw maps he flunked the course. He also had trouble assembling machine guns, and the thought of flying terrified him.

  “I had visions of a plane door falling off and me tumbling out into space with nothing to save me,” he wrote in his memoir.

  Fortunately, he was never called upon to jump out of a B-17 bomber—or fire
one of those machine guns he had so much trouble assembling. He got through the war at various technical training schools in the South. After being discharged in 1946, he returned to New York with the vague idea of following his father into the garment business. But there was another option—law. His brother Irving’s best friend from the neighborhood, Bernie Jacobs, recently graduated from Columbia Law School. Jacobs encouraged Schoenfeld to try law, and in 1947 Schoenfeld entered New York University Law School. But his best teacher wasn’t on the NYU faculty. “Jerry used to call Bernie every night for advice about his classes,” Betty Jacobs, Bernie’s widow, said decades later. “That’s how they became close.”

  Bernard B. Jacobs was born in Manhattan in 1916. His father was also in the garment industry, though he was not as successful as Sam Schoenfeld. He ran a woolen waste business, reselling scraps of leftover material. Bernie grew up in an apartment building on Broadway and 102nd Street. It wasn’t the ghetto, but it was not as upscale an address as the Schoenfelds’ on West End Avenue. Bernie Jacobs was not, at first blush, gregarious, or even friendly. He had a long face, dark eyes, and a large, slightly crooked nose. His lips drooped at the edges. He always seemed to be frowning. But he had a cutting sense of humor and a quick mind. He could do complicated math in his head and, though just a teenager, seemed wiser than his years. If you had a problem, you went to Bernie for advice. After graduating from DeWitt Clinton High School, he shot through NYU and then Columbia Law School, earning his degree just before he was drafted into the army.