Razzle Dazzle: The Battle for Broadway - Softcover

Michael Riedel has been a theater columnist for the New York Post since 1998. He worked at the Daily News (New York) for five years before returning to the Post and has written for The Guardian, Harper’s Bazaar, Mirabella, Departures, and Commentary. Riedel is the cohost of Theater Talk with PBS, is a contributor to the BBC, and has appeared on Larry King Live, the Today show, Good Morning America, and many other news programs. He lives in New York City.

Razzle Dazzle CHAPTER ONE

The Ice Age

This is a very weird way to begin an investigation, David Clurman thought as he listened to the anonymous caller on the other end of the line.

A special assistant to the powerful New York State attorney general, Louis J. Lefkowitz, Clurman knew nothing about the economics of the Broadway theater. His speciality was real estate and securities. At thirty-five, he’d already made a name for himself as a tough investigator of the city’s powerful real estate magnates, authoring the first law in New York state history regulating the sales of co-ops and condominiums.

Important, to be sure; glamorous, hardly.

But here he was, sitting in his office at 80 Centre Street in the spring of 1963, listening to a fast-talking, agitated, self-described “angel,” which, as the caller explained to Clurman, was showbiz slang for backers of Broadway shows.

“I’m not going to give you my name,” the angel said. “But you should look into what goes on with the money on Broadway.”

Clurman asked why the angel was concerned.

“Well, I made an investment in a play, and the producer used the money to buy a lobster boat in Montauk.”

“A lobster boat?” Clurman said. This was indeed a strange way to begin an investigation.

But Clurman, who could smell flimflam down to the paperclips, was interested. He spent nearly an hour on the phone with the tipster, getting a crash course in the murky world of Broadway financing. Investors, it seemed, were in the dark about everything—production costs, weekly running costs, where the money they invested went, whether the shows were fully capitalized or not, how much they lost when they closed. Sometimes their money went into the productions they wanted to support; sometimes it wound up in shows they didn’t even know about. And sometimes it went to buy lobster boats in Montauk.

Producers wanted to take an angel’s money, give him a hug on opening night, give him some money if the show worked, and if it didn’t, well, that’s Broadway—it’s a crap shoot. Move on to the next show, next season. It’s going to be a surefire hit. Stick with me, the producers seemed to say, because I have a script on my desk right now that’s a winner.

“What about accountants?” Clurman asked. “Don’t you get a complete accounting of the production after it closes?”

“Accountants?” the caller responded, laughing. They just accept whatever documents the producers give them. Ledgers, balance sheets, profit and loss statements—they don’t exist on Broadway. Angels were like slot machine players. Bewitched by the twinkling lights, they put in quarter after quarter, hoping to hit the jackpot. And if they did—if they backed The Music Man, My Fair Lady, Oliver!—the quarters come so fast, who thought about where all those other quarters went?

Broadway’s a casino, New York City’s very own Las Vegas.

“Everything he told me was so antithetical to the whole idea of disclosure that it amazed me,” Clurman said, remembering the phone call nearly fifty years later.

Clurman thanked the caller and hung up. Something was going on here, he thought, something worth investigating. You can’t have a business in New York City—a business as high profile and as important to the life of the city as Broadway—that doesn’t abide by basic rules of accounting.

Financially, it sounded like the Wild, Wild West—with tap shoes.

Clurman left his office on the way to lunch, passing the room for “the boys,” as Attorney General Lefkowitz called the reporters who covered him. Lefkowitz, popular, charming, a politician who loved to be in the papers, liked the boys and had given them a room of their own near his office in the state office building. As Clurman walked by, he ran into Lawrence O’Kane, a reporter for the New York Times. Clurman liked O’Kane. He was smart, curious, fair. They’d talked about a number of cases Clurman had investigated, and he found O’Kane to be a good sounding board.

Clurman asked O’Kane if he knew anything about the theater. The Times, after all, was located on West Forty-Third Street, right in the heart of Broadway. It covered the theater aggressively and its critics and theater reporters—Brooks Atkinson, Sam Zolotow, Louis Funke—were, to Times readers, household names.

Not really, O’Kane said. Why?

Clurman recounted his conversation with the angel. He was talking to O’Kane as a friend, telling him about this odd call. There were no names mentioned, no talk of an investigation, just a general discussion about some funny business on Broadway.

O’Kane was interested. Clurman said he’d tell him if anything came of it.

  ·  ·  ·  

The next morning, on his way to the subway, Clurman bought a copy of the New York Times. Standing on the platform, he glanced at the headlines above the fold—KENNEDY MEETING WITH MACMILLAN LIKELY JUNE 29–30; RISE IN TEEN-AGE JOBLESS PUSHES U.S. RATE TO 5.9%. Then he looked at the stories below the fold. One caught his eye. FINANCING PRACTICES IN THEATER UNDER BROADWAY INQUIRY BY STATE.

“A ‘far-reaching’ investigation of theatrical practices—both on and Off-Broadway—is under way in the office of the State Attorney General,” the article began. Lefkowitz, O’Kane wrote, “decided to make the investigation after a preliminary study had given indications of ‘peculiar’ financing methods in the industry and a possible need for corrective legislation.”

Clurman was stunned. Holy God, he thought. What is going on? He’d never dreamed that a casual conversation with one of the boys would wind up as front-page news in the New York Times. His preliminary study consisted of a few notes he’d scribbled on a yellow legal pad during the phone call.

When he arrived at 80 Centre Street, Lefkowitz summoned him to his office. “How come you didn’t tell me about this?” Lefkowitz demanded.

Clurman explained that he thought his conversation with O’Kane had been casual. It was not in any way, he said, an official announcement. Still, he added, it might be worth looking into the financial practices of Broadway. And, as this morning’s Times proved, it would get headlines.

“Can I conduct an inquiry into this to see what’s going on?” he asked.

Lefkowitz, enticed by headlines, gave him the go ahead.

Underneath his quiet, scholarly demeanor, Clurman had the investigating zeal of Inspector Javert. Let the hunt begin, he thought.

  ·  ·  ·  

That morning, in Shubert Alley, the town square of Broadway, everybody was on edge. There had been investigations in the past about money flying around the theater. They always seemed to coincide with the election of the attorney general. But they never amounted to much. This one, however, made the front page of the New York Times, which meant that it was serious. Emanuel “Manny” Azenberg, then a young company manager, recalled, “Everybody that day was walking around with a little brown spot on the back of their pants.”

  ·  ·  ·  

Clurman didn’t know where to begin. He was now in charge of a “far-reaching” investigation into the financial practices of Broadway about which, aside from being a casual theatergoer who had enjoyed My Fair Lady, he knew nothing.

And then he got another call.

If you were a lawyer in 1963, Morris Ernst was a name you knew. A founder of the American Civil Liberties Union, Ernst represented Random House in its fight to get James Joyce’s Ulysses published in the United States despite state-by-state laws against obscenity. A fixture of New York society, he had been close to Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, and several Supreme Court justices. He loved the theater, and numbered among his friends Edna Ferber, Groucho Marx, E. B. White, and Charles Addams.

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...