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  He would be sent to the Pacific, but not before meeting Betty Shulman. Her sorority sister was Bernie’s cousin. “She gave him my number and he called. That’s how everybody got dates in those days. He called and we talked on the phone for about six weeks before he asked me for a date,” Betty said.

  When he showed up at Betty Shulman’s apartment, he brought with him his best friend, Irving Schoenfeld. “I didn’t know which one was my date and which one wasn’t,” Betty recalled. “And what happened was we went for a ride. We went up to Westchester to an inn that had a parking lot, and Irving gave Bernie a driving lesson. That was our first date. Not a big romantic afternoon!”

  They dated for a few months, and then Bernie went into the army and was sent to the Pacific. While there, he met up for a drink one day with Betty’s brother, who was a navigator in the navy. Several weeks later, Betty got a letter from her brother. “I caught up with Bernie,” he wrote. “Marry him. He’s the only man in the South Pacific who can get fresh eggs.”

  After the war, Bernie returned to New York and asked Betty on a date. He took her to a Broadway show—which one she’s not sure of anymore. But the tickets were three dollars each, and they sat in the balcony—“I could hear in those days,” she said, “and see!”

  Bernie Jacobs married Betty Shulman on June 13, 1946, and then went to work with his brother, who was also a lawyer, representing clients in the jewelry business. It was not, he would tell his young wife, interesting work.

  • • •

  Jerry Schoenfeld met Pat Miller in the winter of 1947, while he was in law school. A pretty NYU undergraduate who wanted to be a teacher, Pat looked like the actress Poupée Bocar, who in the sixties and seventies would become a familiar face from guest appearances on TV shows such as Get Smart, Ironside, and Columbo. Jerry had a date with Pat’s older sister, and Pat tagged along with a boy she was seeing at the time. Pat lived around the corner from Jerry on the Upper West Side. They often ran into each other on the subway on their way to NYU. A friendship sprang up, and they began to date casually. Pat saw other boys as well, but she often went to Jerry for advice. And she appreciated his sense of humor. But, working hard at law school and then landing his first job in 1949 for a mere forty dollars a week, he was in no rush to get married. And then in 1950, Pat told him another boy she was seeing, a boy from a rich family, was getting serious about her. Jerry made his decision. They became engaged, officially, on her birthday—April 4. They were married in October, lived with her parents for six months, and then, when they’d saved enough money, rented a one-bedroom apartment in Peter Cooper Village, a partially subsidized apartment complex on the East River in lower Manhattan.

  As Pat was finishing her degree at NYU, Jerry worked as a clerk at a law firm called Klein & Weir. The “Klein” was William Klein, who had been the Shubert brothers’ lawyer for years, and who had been with Sam in that fatal train crash. By 1949, he was old and ailing. His partner, Milton Weir, and their junior associate, Adolph Lund, handled most of the firm’s work. They had two clients, the Shuberts and a coat hanger manufacturer. Every afternoon Weir would visit Lee in his office above the Shubert Theatre and J. J. at his in the Sardi Building. By this point, the brothers were estranged. Their personalities never did mesh—J. J. volcanic, Lee inscrutable. In addition, J. J. wanted his son, John, to take over the business; Lee, who didn’t think John had the brains or strength to run the empire, was grooming a nephew, Milton. The legend is that Lee and J. J. no longer even spoke to each other, communicating through memos dictated to their secretaries. Yet it’s hard to believe those two brothers, who plotted and clawed their way to the top, who defeated powerful enemies, who buried their beloved brother Sam, had little interaction at the end of their lives. When they were under attack, Lee and J. J. put aside whatever differences they had and joined forces, an old Shubert employee said. In the end, they trusted no one but each other, and though face-to-face meetings were infrequent, they could sometimes be seen late at night huddled at a corner table in the Astor Hotel.

  In 1950, as Schoenfeld was beginning his career, they huddled together to discuss the antitrust suit brought against them by the United States government. The Justice Department demanded that the Shuberts divest themselves of some of their theaters in New York and other cities, and close down their booking office, which gave them the power to place shows around the country in any theater they wanted. Milton Weir studied the government’s antitrust action and then handed it to his forty-dollar-a-week clerk, Jerry Schoenfeld, to prepare a response.

  As he recounts in his memoir, Schoenfeld was “stunned.” He knew little about antitrust laws and had never prepared a response to the United States government. But he couldn’t duck the assignment, so he hit the books, studying not only antitrust cases but also the history of the American theater and of the Shubert brothers. He developed a unique argument. Schoenfeld pointed out that the Shubert Organization had gone bankrupt during the Great Depression. Its theaters were put up for auction, but there was only one bidder—Lee. “The Shuberts had not purchased the theaters to drive competitors out of business,” Schoenfeld wrote in his memoir. They had, in fact, few competitors during the Great Depression. Whatever monopoly they acquired “had been thrust upon them as a result of their original company’s bankruptcy,” Schoenfeld argued. They had not created a monopoly deliberately.

  “Some are born great, some achieve greatness and some have greatness thrust upon them,” Shakespeare wrote in Twelfth Night. Lee and J. J. Shubert had achieved greatness, but they had monopoly “thrust upon them,” Schoenfeld argued.

  It was a clever riposte, and it bought the Shubert Organization time in its fight against the government.

  • • •

  Lee’s death in 1953 thrust Schoenfeld into yet another battle—this one a bitter family feud. In his will, Lee attempted to block J. J.’s son, John, from taking over the company by naming his nephew Milton Shubert as his successor. By all accounts a mild-mannered junior executive with little flair for a fight, Milton moved into Lee’s office above the Shubert Theatre, while J. J. fumed across the street. J. J. insisted Milton had no authority in an empire that was now his, and his alone. Milton Weir, who had been close to Lee, disagreed, citing Lee’s will, which specifically delegated his duties to Milton Shubert. J. J. turned to his other lawyer, Adolph Lund, and Lund’s associate, Schoenfeld, for help. According to Schoenfeld, J. J. produced a copy of an agreement, drawn up decades earlier, that laid out the partnership between him and Lee. It was a fifty-fifty split. Neither could overrule the other; decisions were made together. Lund advised J. J. that the Shubert business was indeed his. J. J. could annihilate his nephew Milton—and he did. When Milton left his office (Lee’s old office) above the Shubert Theatre one afternoon for an appointment, J. J. dashed across Forty-Fourth Street with Lund, Schoenfeld, and a locksmith. He ordered all the locks in his brother’s former office changed. Then, according to biographer Foster Hirsch, he waited for Milton to return, seated behind his brother’s old desk. But Milton heard what had happened—the Shubert grapevine must have been buzzing that day—and stormed in, accompanied by the other Shubert lawyer, Milton Weir. J. J. ordered his nephew out on the street. When Weir protested, J. J. tried to punch him in the face. Schoenfeld reports that J. J. then asked Lund if he could call the police and have his adversaries arrested for trespassing. Lund said, “You can do whatever you want.”1

  In the end, Milton Shubert backed down. Few people could withstand J. J.’s tirades, and his agreement with his brother was ironclad. Milton left the office that day, never to return to the Shubert Organization. Then J. J. turned on Milton Weir, fired him, and demanded that Lund break up the firm of Klein & Weir. The new firm became Klein & Lund, and Schoenfeld moved up a rung on the ladder.

  • • •

  A few days after J. J. annihilated the two Miltons, United States District Court Judge John C. Knox threw out the government’s suit against the Shuberts, arguing that “thea
trical bookings, like organized baseball, are not subject to antitrust laws.”2 He cited Toolson v. New York Yankees, which had exempted Major League Baseball from the Sherman Antitrust Act. The U.S. government appealed. The case would drag on for another three years. Lund and Schoenfeld enlisted the aid of more lawyers, including Alfred McCormack, a renowned antitrust specialist. J. J. raged and raged, threatening at one point to sell all his theaters just to spite the government. The battle finally reached the Supreme Court, which overturned Knox’s decision and reinstated the antitrust suit. J. J. had a choice: cut a deal or risk a trial, which McCormack feared he would lose.

  On February 17, 1956, perhaps worn down by one too many battles, J. J. buckled. He signed a consent decree with the U.S. government, agreeing to sell off twelve theaters. J. J. lost a few prime houses—the St. James in New York, the Colonial in Boston, the Shubert in Philadelphia—but he cleverly used the consent decree to dispose of smaller, less profitable theaters (“the junk,” as producer Liz McCann would call them) such as the Ritz and the Maxine Elliott in New York. The Shuberts’ powerful booking office was disbanded, and J. J. also agreed to dissolve partnerships with theater owners across the country. The consent decree also banned the Shuberts from buying any more theaters.

  An antitrust battle, a family feud, a consent decree, dismantling an empire—Jerry Schoenfeld was thrust into the theater business. All along his guide was Adolph Lund, “my friend and mentor,” he wrote. Lund taught him the ins and outs of the Shubert Organization and shielded him from J. J.’s rages. In the spring of 1956, Lund, complaining of an ulcer, had surgery, rendering him absent for a month. Schoenfeld had to handle J. J.’s business. Lund warned him, “You’re entering a lion’s den. Be prepared for the worst.” But as Schoenfeld writes in his memoir, “To my surprise . . . J. J. and I got along fairly well.” Lund laughed. “You’ll learn,” he told his protégé, “that with the Shuberts, familiarity breeds contempt.”3

  Lund returned to work, but was not the same. He was tired all the time, and his stomach continued to bother him. On December 31, 1956, he checked into Mount Sinai Hospital. He was dead the next day, from colon cancer. Schoenfeld, thirty-two, was devastated. Klein had retired; Lund was dead. Klein & Lund—Schoenfeld’s employer—existed in name only.

  Harold Laski, the English Marxist and Labour Party politician, liked to say that in British politics “while there is death there is hope.”4 Such was the case in Shubert Alley. A few days after Lund died, J. J. asked another lawyer, James Vaughan, to replace Lund. Vaughan, a respected estates litigation lawyer well connected at the New York State Surrogate Court, had drawn up J. J.’s will. But Vaughan turned down the job of Shubert in-house counsel. “My father did not want to be beholden to one person,” Edward Foley Vaughan recalled. James Vaughan told J. J. he should consider hiring young Schoenfeld. Jerry was bright, energetic, and he was getting to know the Shubert business first-hand. “My father loved Jerry,” Foley Vaughan said. “And Jerry looked up to him as a kind of father figure.” J. J. took Vaughan’s advice and offered Schoenfeld the job. “You’ll need some help,” he said. “Go out and find someone.”5

  Schoenfeld called his friend and informal law school tutor, Bernie Jacobs. Over lunch, Schoenfeld asked Jacobs if he’d like to be his partner. Jacobs went home that night to discuss the offer with his wife. He decided to take the job. “I don’t know much about theater law,” he told Betty, “but anything I need to know I can probably learn in two weeks.”

  • • •

  Jacobs joined the Shubert Organization in 1957, working alongside Schoenfeld. The pay wasn’t much—about $150 week, Betty Jacobs remembers. (Schoenfeld, in his memoir, claims it was $300.) The first time she ever attended a Broadway opening, she had to borrow her mother’s fur coat. But J. J. gave his lawyers free office space above the Shubert Theatre. Jacobs moved into what had once been Lee Shubert’s living room, Schoenfeld into Lee’s bedroom. J. J. also let them do legal work for other clients. But, J. J. warned, “If you’re working for me, it’s a twenty-four-hour job.” Which meant if he was up and about in the middle of the night—as he often was—they could expect a call. And it wasn’t just a call. It was a summons. “Be at my office in half an hour,” J. J. would say. Since Jerry and Pat lived in Manhattan and Bernie and Betty lived in Roslyn, Long Island, it usually fell to Jerry to answer the summons. “That’s why Bernie never wanted to move into the city,” Betty Jacobs recalled.

  Now in his seventies, J. J. was beginning to fade. But his hold on his empire could be extended through his son, John. “John Shubert,” Bernie Jacobs once said, “was one of the kindest, most decent men I ever met. But he was dominated, completely, by his father.” The son of warring parents—J. J. despised John’s mother, Catherine Mary, and she returned the animosity—he hated confrontation. He didn’t have much of a passion for the theater, producing only a handful of plays, all flops. He liked carpentry. He was tall and gentle looking, with his father’s plump face and his uncle Sammy’s soft, sad eyes. He drank a great deal, usually at seedy bars in Times Square. But he was not a belligerent drunk. Just a sad one. He seemed content, Schoenfeld and Jacobs thought, to preside over a business that was, in many ways, winding down.

  The Shuberts, by the late 1950s and early sixties, had all but ceased to produce. Why bother? There were plenty of producers around to take the risk for them. David Merrick was at his height, cranking out show after show every season. Cy Feuer and Ernie Martin were producing such shows as How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, Silk Stockings, Little Me, and The Boy Friend. Kermit Bloomgarden, a tough former accountant with taste (he backed Death of a Salesman after other producers turned it down because they thought it too depressing), offered up The Most Happy Fella, A View from the Bridge, and The Diary of Anne Frank. Alexander H. Cohen, a splashy, free-spending promoter-turned-impresario, produced a show every season. Most were flops, but it didn’t deter him. “Kid,” he once said, “I’ve had a million and I’ve owed a million—and my lifestyle has never changed.” Among his flops, though, were gems—An Evening with Mike Nichols and Elaine May, Beyond the Fringe, and The School for Scandal, starring John Gielgud and Ralph Richardson. Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein were still at it, and in 1959 would come up with one of their biggest hits ever, The Sound of Music. Robert Whitehead and Roger Stevens—rich, gentleman producers—presented plays by Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams, Terence Rattigan, Eugene O’Neill, Shaw, and Shakespeare. Harold (Hal) Prince, who had begun his career as a stage manager for director George Abbott, was now emerging as a musical theater producer of the first order with The Pajama Game, Damn Yankees, West Side Story, and Fiorello!

  “We did a show a year,” said Hal Prince. “We were as important as the theater owners. Do you know we negotiated our terms for every theater? We had power.”

  If John Shubert wasn’t interested in developing plays or musicals himself, there was one aspect of the theater business about which he wanted some measure of control—ice. John must have heard his father rail against box office personnel—“thieves,” he called them. J. J. often told the story of the time he was sailing back from Europe and, in first class, ran into one of his box office treasurers. “They should be paying me for their jobs,” he would say. “I’ve given them the concession stands!”

  John Shubert, with the help of two distant cousins, Lawrence Shubert Lawrence Jr. and Murray Helwitz, centralized the flow of ice from room 504 of the Sardi Building. Before 504, ice was collected and distributed by box office treasurers on an informal basis. But by 1960, John had set up the ice “bank,” as producer Alexander H. Cohen called room 504. “John made the absurd mistake of formalizing the arrangements for ice.”6

  As Assistant Attorney General David Clurman discovered in 1963, ice flowed to employees throughout the Shubert chain. Did J. J.’s lawyers, Jerry Schoenfeld and Bernie Jacobs, get their cut? In his memoir, Schoenfeld writes that when he and Jacobs learned about ice, they told John Shubert to end it. �
��It is fraught with peril,” Schoenfeld wrote. “It would be hard to deny illegal activities one floor below your own office.”7 Jacobs rarely spoke about the ice scandal. But in a 1979 interview with John Corry of the New York Times—a reporter he liked and trusted—he said, “Jerry and I have been on the street a long time. We know you’ll hear people saying things we wouldn’t like, but you’ll never hear anyone say we touched anything dishonest.”

  As J. J.’s lawyers, Schoenfeld and Jacobs each had a pair of house seats (row G, 2–8) for every performance of a show in a Shubert theater. Jack Small, who booked shows for Shubert, told them he could sell their house seats to a broker. “Give me your seats and I’ll give you five dollars for each one,” he said. Jacobs replied, “Thanks very much, but I have use for those seats. I have friends and family to take care of.” Schoenfeld turned him down as well.

  People who were—or became—close to Schoenfeld and Jacobs do not believe they were on the take. “They were lawyers, and they were very proud of being lawyers, especially Jerry,” said producer Elizabeth I. McCann. “They would not have done anything that might have gotten them disbarred.” James Vaughan, the respected estate lawyer who handled J. J.’s will, “believed in their rectitude,” his son Foley Vaughan said. “I worked alongside my father in the sixties and I never had any sense that they participated in the ice scandal.”

  Another prominent New York attorney, John Wharton, cofounder of the powerful law firm Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, also thought Schoenfeld and Jacobs were free of ice. “John Wharton believed the two of them would never do anything to threaten their standing in the legal community,” McCann said. “He had faith in them, and that carried a lot of weight because John Wharton was like the pope in legal circles.” Wharton, who represented such prominent theater people as Cole Porter, Maxwell Anderson, S. N. Berhman, and Robert E. Sherwood, deplored ice. “The people who create the entertainment and the people who supply the capital for production are all excluded,” he wrote in his book, Life Among the Playwrights. “That is the tragic part.”