“Why should I give interviews? The facts speak for themselves.… Let people guess,” said producer David Merrick (1911–2000), also known as the Abominable Showman. “Anyway, the facts are in my career,” stated the man born David Margulois, who had renamed himself Merrick after the great British actor David Garrick. Although Merrick projected himself as a ruthless attorney turned producer who was “more interested in theatre in the black than theatre in the round,” the son of a salesman loved Broadway more than he let on, and once declared that David Margulois had died and David Merrick had been born on November 4, 1954, the opening night of his breakthrough musical hit Fanny.
Stage manager Robert Schear, who began as a production assistant in Merrick’s office and worked for him for many years, stated in late 2003, “I get so many interview requests about David Merrick and especially Barbra Streisand,” whom the producer kept insisting should be fired because of her looks. “But I’m not interested. It gets twisted and misquoted, and in Mister Merrick’s case people want to gossip or condemn and speculate.
“However, as Mr. Merrick said, it’s in the facts.” So here are several of them, regarding the man whose Broadway producing career will never be equaled:
• David Merrick’s theatrical career spanned 1942 to 1996. During the 1963–1964 season alone, he produced eight plays and musicals. Time magazine estimated in 1966 that he employed twenty percent of Broadway’s work force.
• Celebrated British playwright John Osborne told Women’s Wear Daily that he’d actually enjoyed working with Merrick because unlike other producers, “He didn’t have any creative ideas.”
• Merrick sometimes denied being Jewish and so hated his hometown of St. Louis that he refused to fly TWA because their flights passed over or through St. Louis. His parents had fought long and loud—“It was like living on the set of Virginia Woolf”—and divorced when he was seven.
• Merrick didn’t attend his own mother’s funeral. He did ask a friend to attend it, in St. Louis. Biographer Howard Kissel theorized that the eventual giving way of Merrick’s mind was perhaps the legacy “of his poor, crazy mother. There had always been a screw loose. Now it got looser.”
• Merrick first married in 1938. The bride’s family refused to attend the wedding. Leonore’s inheritance allowed the couple to move to New York in 1939 and David to invest $5,000 in 1940 in an upcoming play that became a hit.
• As a young man, Merrick had such bad ulcers that certain insiders didn’t give him long to live. The ulcers excused him from service in World War II.
• “Merrick is profoundly a lawyer,” said Reid Shelton, who costarred in the producer’s Oh What a Lovely War! in 1964. “He loves litigation and uses it, frequently, to manipulate associates and the media. And his other specialty is publicity. He’s as much a publicist as a producer.”
• Critic Frank Rich noted that Merrick was “chastised not only for his misanthropy and financial ruthlessness, but for being an importer and packager rather than a truly creative producer.”
• The producer was famous for affecting a mortician’s look of severe black clothes.
“He looked like Mephistopheles when he glared or sneered at you,” said Hello, Dolly! leading man David Burns. “Or like a Disney villain.… The glasses he wore magnified his enormous pupils. He loved to intimidate and frighten as many people as he can.” Merrick’s office was done all in red—walls and carpeting—reinforcing the impression of a devil in his lair.
Though he dressed conservatively, Merrick tried to present a with-it attitude if not a with-it look. When future film and TV producer Joel Thurm, who worked for several years in Merrick’s office, came to work one day in platform shoes, bell-bottom blue jeans, and a marine dress uniform jacket, Merrick stared, then stated, “No matter what anybody says, you wear that.”
• Merrick’s legendary tantrums affected some people more than others. Hello, Dolly! composer-lyricist Jerry Herman explained that the producer’s out-of-town pre-Broadway rantings “almost did major damage to our costume designer Freddie Wittop, who went through the tortures of the damned.” One day, Herman found him at the back of the local theater in tears during a show. Wittop revealed that Merrick had informed him “that the costumes were ugly and he was ashamed to have such wretched rags in his beautiful show.” As Wittop explained, Herman’s “Put on Your Sunday Clothes” number began with actors strutting about in costume. The combination of clothes and music typically elicited strong applause from audiences. Herman thus pointed out that they were clapping before the music even started.
“They are applauding your gorgeous costumes.” Freddie hugged Jerry and felt better.
• From Kaye Ballard to Streisand, Merrick disliked non-beauties and whenever possible avoided casting them. Talent was a secondary consideration. Unlike the mostly gay men he worked with on I Can Get It for You Wholesale (1962)—Barbra’s Broadway bow—Merrick didn’t believe she had a big future, and failed to put her under contract, to his later fiscal regret when she starred in Funny Girl.
• When a reporter asked Merrick what he thought of the women’s rights movement, he snapped, “A woman’s place is in the oven!”—quite a Freudian slip from the secretly Jewish misogynist. When a notably fat Jewish Canadian critic who had panned several Merrick shows died and was cremated, the producer publicly commented, “The fat’s in the fire.”
• Unlike his first wife, Leonore, Merrick never wanted children. Five days shy of their 25th anniversary, the marriage terminated because he’d fathered a child via another woman. Eventually he was survived by two official daughters.
• Gypsy set designer Jo Mielziner observed, “Merrick has little if any respect for women. He has contempt for unattractive ones and considers all the attractive ones interchangeable.” Merrick routinely treated leading ladies badly, excepting a rare Ethel Merman who wouldn’t tolerate such treatment. When Anna Maria Alberghetti missed performances in his hit Carnival (1961), Merrick publicly stated he didn’t believe her claims of poor health and would administer a lie-detector test to her in hospital. Actors in general Merrick considered “unruly children.”
• Early on, Merrick displayed a flair for publicity, no matter how outlandish. His 1949 play Clutterbuck was boosted by his practice of having bellboys and telephone operators page “Mr. Clutterbuck” during cocktail hour in midtown-Manhattan restaurants and bars. More effective were two-for-one tickets that kept the fiscal failure running for six months.
• It was said that David Merrick liked to be the first to do something, or if need be, the tenth or twentieth. But never the second.
• When a Merrick show took a critical drubbing, he would often sigh and tell an associate, “Time to tack up posters in the men’s room again.” He meant primarily in the subways, where he pioneered Broadway advertising. After the method and venue proved successful, fellow producers stopped scoffing and followed suit.
• “His ideas are usually cornball and his taste’s mostly in his mouth,” felt record and revue producer Ben Bagley, “yet his gimmicks have worked surprisingly often.” Merrick’s idea of wit was embodied by his ad line for his 1980 production 42nd Street—“The All-Singing All-Dancing Extravaganza with a Cast of 54 (Some Younger).”
• Merrick began publicizing his breakthrough production Fanny (1954, co-produced with Joshua Logan) by plastering men’s-room mirrors with suggestive stickers asking, “Have you seen Fanny?” He then commissioned a life-sized nude statue of the show’s belly dancer and had it erected atop an empty pedestal in Central Park one night—illegally, of course. And of course with enough clues so members of the press and police force could find it the next morning.
• One reason Merrick promoted the hell out of Fanny was to make it a hit despite Richard Rodgers having declined to do the music, a fact Merrick never forgave. Rodgers was consistently at or near the top of the producer’s enemies list. According to critic Frank Rich, “Such was his detestation of Rodgers that even after the composer’s death he took revenge on his elderly widow by seating her in the upper balcony at 42nd Street.”
• When asked by a reporter why he had the reputation of being a mean man, David Merrick logically replied, “Because I am mean—what else?”
• When he disliked someone, that person stayed disliked. Merrick taunted New York Times critic Howard Taubman more often than most critics, and relished needling him publicly, for instance on Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show. The insults finally descended to the level of Nazi analogies, at which point Taubman threatened to sue, and Merrick issued a rare apology.
• Taubman’s successor at the Times, Stanley Kauffmann, was also detested by Merrick, who didn’t want him to review a preview of Philadelphia, Here I Come in 1966 and prevented him from doing so by canceling that performance after announcing that “a rat” was loose in the theater’s generator. The cancellation and its cause made page one of the paper, garnering the show more in publicity than the amount that had to be refunded for tickets.
• Broadway producers often asked a show’s creators to give up part of their weekly royalties when business wasn’t enough to meet the weekly nut (the amount required before profits commenced). But on Do Re Mi (1960), for example, Merrick insisted on such a cut from the creative team and star Phil Silvers during good weeks as well as bad. When Merrick’s demands weren’t met, he’d cut back on advertising and publicity.
• Merrick didn’t like his performers earning outside money. Kaye Ballard was already a Broadway name when she signed to do Carnival at $650 a week. Friday afternoons she did a regular appearance on Perry Como’s TV show. Merrick had it written into Ballard’s contract that should she arrive at the Imperial Theatre one minute late on Friday, she’d have to pay David $750.
• Merrick wasn’t intimidated by any actress. He admitted to Carol Channing that initially he didn’t want her for Hello, Dolly! “I [didn’t] want that silly grin with all those teeth that go back to your ears.” When Phyllis Newman was Tony nominated for his Subways Are for Sleeping, Merrick, seated near her, lied when the list of nominees was read: “Streisand’s going to win. I voted for her.” Seconds later, Newman won, and the producer “sincerely” congratulated her.
• “Merrick was a sadistic hypocrite,” offered lyricist Adolph Green. “He himself went for young girls and was not known for lengthy relationships. But he liked to try and provoke me over the years about my younger wife”—Phyllis Newman, to whom Green was married from 1960 until his death in 2002.
• Merrick often spoke for shock effect, especially to the press. “Homosexuals are taking over the theater” was the theme of one interview he did, after which gay writer-director Arthur Laurents warned that more such verbal bigotry “and we won’t work for you.” Merrick’s “faux-macho general manager—with a penchant for Puerto Rican boys—signaled frantically behind Merrick’s back for me to lay off. Merrick wasn’t fazed.
“ ‘It’s only for publicity,’ ” Laurents quoted Merrick as saying. “ ‘I wouldn’t have anyone on my staff who wasn’t homosexual. They have no one to go home to so they work late and don’t complain.’ ” For the record, Laurents has been wedded to his life partner far longer than Merrick was to any of his contractual wives.
• Jerry Herman, who eventually came out as a gay man, confessed that it took him years to get over the trauma of Merrick’s informing him in front of the whole company that his songs for Hello, Dolly! were “an embarrassment.” Merrick probably really liked them but felt he was encouraging Herman to create better ones. “He really believed he could get better work out of everybody if he frightened them half to death and made them feel two inches tall.” Herman rued, “It could have been such a happy time, my first big hit. But I still look back on it with discomfort and trepidation.”
Hello, Dolly! leading man David Burns agreed. “Mr. Merrick is a screamer. Literally. When all else fails and he wants to improve a show, he’ll try and scream it into shape.” Burns added, “Woe to anyone Mr. Merrick believes to be homosexual.… In Dolly! he had some unforgettably choice words for Charles Nelson Reilly [a supporting actor], both in front of and behind his very flamboyant back.”
• Hello, Dolly! was Merrick’s most famous and ongoing hit. It cost $440,000 and grossed over $60 million in its original run of 2,844 performances.
• Merrick’s ideas didn’t evolve with the times. When Dolly!’s business fell off after almost four years, he decided to mount an all-black version starring Pearl Bailey in 1967. In 1989, after 42nd Street finally closed, he announced he would bring it back with an all-black cast. He wasn’t able to.
(In the ’60s, Merrick had discussed a new Dolly! with Jack Benny in drag, opposite Benny’s pal George Burns. Benny was willing, but only for one week. Merrick also pursued Bette Davis for the musical title role. She called it “a fifteen-minute show,” referring to the famous title number.)
• Merrick married former, but still far younger, flight attendant Etan Aronson, a brunette Swede, twice. The litigation surrounding their second divorce (his fifth) lasted a decade. Their first marriage, in 1969, lasted three weeks before he obtained a Mexican divorce. During their second marriage (which began 1983), at Etan’s instigation, she and Merrick adopted two daughters. Eventually he denied in court that he’d been a willing participant in the adoptions.
• “The more his taste and antics are derided,” said David Burns, “the more he revels in his outrageousness.” For his 1955 Hello, Dolly! antecedent, The Matchmaker, Merrick hired an old-fashioned black taxicab with dual controls. While a human drove the vehicle from the backseat, a “monkey” sat up front at the dummy wheel, flabbergasting onlookers. The cab’s side read: “I am driving my master to see The Matchmaker.”
• “I think deep down Mr. Merrick is contemptuous of the media and people, even,” felt David Charlie’s Angels Doyle, who appeared in the producer’s 1964 flop I Was Dancing. “He seems to like the theatre but not theatregoers very much.… Some of his p.r. stunts almost seem intended to offend.” Such as for the French musical Irma La Douce (1960), for which Merrick paid sandwich-board men to walk the streets wearing portable pissoirs.
• On the other hand, Merrick was the first producer to buy full-page newspaper ads for a Broadway show. The practice was criticized as vulgar, trivial, wasteful, and egotistical—until it became commonplace.
• Via the tax dodge of a foundation he set up, Merrick imported a large quantity of quality British fare by avant-garde playwrights, featuring talented actors. Some, like Marat/Sade with Broadway newcomer Glenda Jackson, became actual hits.
• Merrick and John Osborne’s British drama Look Back in Anger (1957) failed to generate much American excitement until Merrick hired a woman to pose as an affronted theatergoer who got up on the stage and attacked the actor portraying an unfaithful husband. Newspapers duly reported the incident and noted the play’s powerful effect on certain viewers. The hoax extended the run by several months (and was revealed weeks after the stunt occurred).
• When Ethel Merman’s leading man Jack Klugman sought to invest in Gypsy, Merrick replied, “You don’t want to invest in this. It’s going to be a bomb. If you want to invest in a musical, invest in Destry,” an ill-fated show starring a pre-TV Andy Griffith and Dolores Gray. Co-producer Leland Hayward and Gypsy composer Jule Styne overheard Merrick’s typically unflattering remarks about their musical and reportedly got out their checkbooks and asked Merrick, “How much would you take to get out of this show?”
• David Merrick was amazed and intrigued by Woody Allen’s open Jewishness. He gave the comic, born Allen Konigsberg, his Broadway debut as a playwright (Don’t Drink the Water) and as an actor (Play It Again, Sam), while predicting, “He’s too plain and specialized for television,” not to mention the movies.
• “This story may be apocryphal,” advised stage and screen costume designer Irene Sharaff, “but it fits David Merrick to a ‘T’.… Naturally he hated to wait in line, and he had his minions who did everything for him. But sometimes, in later years, he would get out and about, and when he came to a line, he’d march up to the front and tell the first person, ‘If you knew what I’ve got, you’d let me go ahead of you.’ He did this many times, and finally one brave person dared to say, ‘Excuse me for asking, but what have you got?’
“Merrick cackled and answered back, ‘Chutzpah!’ ”
• When the great caricaturist Al Hirschfeld did a drawing of Merrick as a Grinch-like Santa Claus who steals Christmas, several people thought he would sue. Instead, Merrick turned around and used Hirschfeld’s drawing—without permission, of course—on his Christmas cards.
• The most memorable thing about Merrick’s 1961 musical Subways Are for Sleeping was The Ad, a stunt he’d been planning for years. It had been preceded by thousands of pre-opening posters affixed to subway trains and platforms that bore only the show’s title. Transit Authority officials ordered Merrick to remove the posters, which they believed encouraged homeless people to spend the night underground.
The posters piqued New Yorkers’ curiosity, but it was The Ad that extended the disappointing show’s run. The stunt was possible because New York Times critic Brooks Atkinson, who had a one-of-a-kind name, had retired. His replacement, Howard Taubman, was one of seven critics whose namesakes Merrick found in the telephone book. He invited the seven non-critics to wine and dine at his expense and to agree to the critical praise that would accompany their names and photos in the advertisement, which ran only in the Herald Tribune’s early edition before editors killed it.
The Ad headlined, “7 Out of 7 Are Ecstatically Unanimous About ‘Subways Are for Sleeping.’ ” For instance, the mock John Chapman called it “the best musical of the century.” The mostly rejected ad itself became news and was reproduced nationwide for free. The chutzpah of Merrick’s stunt, a cross between exhibitionistic contempt and performance art, was written and talked about and debated, and The Ad quickly took its place as perhaps the greatest publicity stunt in 20th-century theater history. Ironically, it was remembered long after the show that it so lavishly extolled was forgotten.
• “Classy” was, for David Merrick, the ultimate seal of approval. In his mind, it often went together with “English,” and the former producer died in his sleep at eighty-eight in a pricey rest home in London. At the same time that he had snobbish tastes and goals, Merrick relished his reputation as “the meanest man on Broadway.” “He was conflicted,” said Ben Bagley. “His parents were Russian immigrants, it was an arranged marriage, the family was poor and melodramatically unhappy … and he bought the dominant culture’s stereotypes and propaganda about being Jewish.”
Merrick’s childhood was described as “Dickensian” by some insiders, and he almost never discussed it. His relief when his battling parents divorced was short-lived, since they briefly remarried before Sam abandoned Celia and David, who then ran away from his mother but had to return for lack of funds. Late in life, Merrick admitted that two of his least favorite adjectives, which in his mind went together, were “poor” and “Jew” (the latter, of course, a noun).
• Besides strongly objecting to Barbra Streisand’s looks, Merrick was aghast at her undisguised Brooklyn accent and “blatant Jewishness.” He also resented how well liked the nineteen-year-old initially was by his associates. When I Can Get It for You Wholesale casting director Michael Shurtleff stood up for her, Merrick retorted, “I want you to take her out and kill her.”
When Wholesale composer-lyricist Harold Rome pointed out that the Broadway newcomer could be hired “for scale,” Merrick exploded, “You’re the most anti-Semitic guy I know. You’ve hired every ugly Jew in town for this show, and now you want me to hire this meeskite.”—Yiddish for an unattractive person; Merrick normally avoided Yiddishisms, except in the heat of the moment.
Rome later disclosed, “Merrick had it very tough coming up, as a Jewish youth and a future producer. It galled him that Barbra, whom he genuinely cannot stand, rose to major stardom by her second Broadway show, Funny Girl.” When she departed for Hollywood and the movie version of Funny Girl—never to return to the stage—Merrick was both relieved and dumbfounded by film producers clamoring for her services.
• Merrick’s Midas touch did not translate to Hollywood, where he produced four pictures between 1972 and ’80, the most notable being the much-ballyhooed The Great Gatsby, toplining Robert Redford and Mia Farrow, a costly flop. While in LA, Merrick picked up a cocaine habit.
• Choreographer-turned-director Gower Champion hired one Karen Prunczik for 42nd Street (1980) because she was a talented tap dancer. The first day Merrick saw her, he informed Champion, “That girl is pockmarked and she’s ugly. I want her fired.” Champion refused. One night, when leading lady Wanda Richert was unable to go on, Prunczik had the opportunity to take her place. But Merrick took it away by canceling the evening’s performance.
Many months later, Merrick married Prunczik. A few months later, he initiated divorce proceedings. Former father-in-law Walt Prunczik later filed court papers claiming that Merrick had “been heard mumbling that he had put out a contract on him.” A psychiatrist testified that the producer did have “homicidal impulses” against his ex in-law.
• Merrick’s longest creative partnership was with Gower Champion. It started in 1961 and ended in 1980 with the producer’s infamous 42nd Street closing-curtain announcement that Champion had died that morning at 59 of a rare blood cancer. Merrick held back the news partly or primarily for the TV cameras that had been summoned to record the shock and tears, also Merrick embracing a thunderstruck Wanda Richert, Champion’s mistress, who’d also been kept in the dark.
David Merrick had met his match in Gower Champion. In the early ‘60s, via his hit musical Bye, Bye, Birdie, Champion joined the top ranks of Broadway director-choreographers—with Jerome Robbins, Bob Fosse, and Michael Kidd. All four “had fearsome reputations as tyrants,” said critic Howard Kissel. Playwright Michael Stewart called the diminutive Champion “the Presbyterian Hitler.”
Although Merrick professed genuine grief at Champion’s passing, in subsequent months he removed the man’s name from the 42nd Street marquee and tried to reduce the royalties to which Champion’s estate was entitled.
• In 1983, David Merrick suffered a stroke that left him barely able to speak—mostly grunts—and limited his mobility. Confined to a wheelchair, he stepped up his lawsuits against offenders real and imagined, and was a bizarre sight in a maladjusted wig and crudely applied rouge. He’d long since admitted to being frequently depressed. Despite his penny-pinching ways, the man lived modestly—as a sometime bachelor, even shabbily—and seldom gave or attended parties.
Adolph Green said, “He had a Rolodex full of associates and acquaintances, but no real friends, least of all his wives.”
• No surprise, but Merrick did not mellow with age and still enjoyed planning confrontational advertising. When Cats proved a “now and forever” hit, he touted 42nd Street as being for people allergic to cats. When 42nd Street had run seven years and looked ready to close soon, Merrick began advertising it as “Broadway’s Latest Hit!”—pushing back the curtain time to 8:15. His leering face on a giant poster over Times Square announced, “David Merrick is holding the curtain for you!” The musical returned to profit by picking up turn-away business from another hit import, Phantom of the Opera, across the street.
• Merrick’s last public appearance, according to associate Bob Schear, was closing night of State Fair (1996). It was an unsuccessful and downbeat ending to a career that encompassed nearly ninety productions. “However, Mr. Merrick didn’t know it was closing night, he was so out of it.” At the well-attended memorial for Merrick at the St. James Theatre, where he’d had his famous red office, former Broadway star Dolores Gray was present in a wheelchair but asked Schear, “When’s David Merrick going to show up?”
• When he died, Merrick was married to his fifth wife—a younger woman who’d been his spokesperson—but had divorced five times. Bob Schear believed Merrick probably had other wives “we didn’t know about,” as well as unofficial daughters.
• A nurse who looked after Merrick toward the end summed up his personality and his achievement: “This man has channeled his self-destructive instincts into something positive—his work in the theatre. It is rare that someone with that much destructive energy can find such a constructive outlet.”
THOSE NOT UP ON THEIR BROADWAY HISTORY might be excused for imagining that Hello, Dolly! (1964) was offered to Carol Channing on a silver platter. The role and actress have become so enmeshed, it’s hard to think of one without the other. Yet much of the success of Dolly! and its myriad revivals is based on its adaptability to most any larger-than-life female celebrity of a certain age. Only Barbra Streisand, at twenty-six, was technically too young for the widow-coming-out-of-seclusion role—though right by Hollywood box-office standards (and musically, of course).
David Merrick had had a success with the 1955 Thornton Wilder play The Matchmaker, starring Ruth Gordon as Dolly Levi, born Gallagher. (Only Streisand rejected the Abie’s Irish Rose heritage.) That was a revision of Wilder’s 1938 non-hit The Merchant of Yonkers—notice the titles’ difference in gender emphasis. The original source materials were the 1835 English comedy A Day Well Spent, by John Oxenford, and the 1842 Einen Jux Will Er Sich Machen, by Austrian Johann Nestroy—which had no Dolly!
By the early 1960s, Merrick wanted to musicalize The Matchmaker and title it Dolly: A Damned Exasperating Woman, which was pretty strong language on or off Broadway. Talented young composer Jerry Herman, with the semi-successful set-in-Israel musical Milk and Honey behind him, wrote some songs on spec for Merrick, who liked them and was eager to have Ethel Merman hear them. At the time, starring Merman in a musical was like minting money.
But after her triumphant and lengthy turn in Gypsy, Merman asserted that she wasn’t listening to anything from anyone; retirement looked too good. Both men were crushed. Herman had written with the Merm’s voice and style in mind, two songs so specifically that they weren’t used in the show until Merman became the final Broadway Dolly in the original run.
Another major contender was musical star Nanette Fabray, but once Carol Channing heard of the project she put herself into high gear and campaigned strenuously for the comeback role. Though she’d achieved Broadway stardom in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes in 1949, she hadn’t followed up with any other hits, spending much of the ’50s playing nightclubs. She was too tall, flamboyant, and large in every sense of the word save girth to play conventional female leads or drama, onstage or onscreen, and she was too ambitious to settle for secondary roles.
“Carol sort of pestered her way into the part,” admitted director-choreographer Gower Champion, who’d worked with her before but initially didn’t want her as Dolly. “And how right she proved to be.” Channing also won over Jerry Herman, whom Merrick hired to do the score—with reservations. Carol declared, “I hope this won’t upset you, Mr. Herman, because a composer usually hears his songs being sung in a certain way. But you know, I sing lower than the men in your show.” Jerry tailored the score to Carol’s quavering baritone, and the two, for whom Hello, Dolly! was a professional turning point, became fast friends.
However, the musical’s score didn’t come together as smoothly as intended. After Dolly! proved a dud in previews in Detroit—audiences actually booed and threw things—David Merrick surrepetitiously brought in Bob Merrill, who was working on Funny Girl. Merrill contributed the song “Elegance,” which may have been originally written for New Girl in Town, a 1957 Gwen Verdon vehicle based on Eugene O’Neill’s Anna Christie. Also the “Motherhood March.” In time, both were publicly credited to Jerry Herman.
Meanwhile, Champion brought in Charles Strouse and Lee Adams of Bye, Bye, Birdie fame. In Detroit they contributed the showstopper “Before the Parade Passes By.” Merrick let Herman “rework” the music, if not the lyrics—which encapsule Dolly’s new philosophy and the show’s theme.
As often happened during the golden age of Broadway musicals, the chief song was released to radio before the show opened, and via Louis Armstrong’s jazzy rendition the title song—after which the musical was named—became a number-one hit. Its success meant everyone heard it—including Mack David (brother of lyricist Hal David), who sued Jerry Herman for allegedly plagiarizing his 1948 song “Sunflower” (coincidentally a hit via Armstrong), to which it bore a strong resemblance. Herman had to pay a $275,000 settlement, but the negative publicity didn’t harm Dolly!, which proceeded to become Broadway’s longest-running musical until Fiddler on the Roof surpassed it as Broadway’s longest-running production, period.
DOLLY! OF COURSE RESURRECTED and expanded Carol Channing’s stardom and gave her a signature role she could and would return to again and again—ye-es! Unfortunately, she wasn’t lucky or versatile enough to follow it up with another hit, unlike Angela Lansbury after Jerry Herman’s subsequent megahit Mame. Following assorted showbiz efforts, Channing in later years did a sequel of sorts to Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, titled Lorelei, besides touring extensively as Dolly.
Once Channing made a hit as Dolly, everyone wanted to play her, it was so clearly a star vehicle and so easily adjusted to the personality of its diva-of-the-month’s run. Ginger Rogers was flashy and arrogant. Martha Raye was droll but not enough in character. Betty Grable was charming and eager to please—some said too sweet to play the conniving widow. Pearl Bailey got away with stereotyping the first black Dolly. Phyllis Diller tried to shake her standup-comedy image by playing it relatively straight.
Ethel Merman was Ethel Merman, and that was enough. She agreed to return for three months only, to close the run. It turned out to be her Broadway swansong.
“Dolly is a star herself,” David Merrick had proclaimed, “and she needs a star to play a star.” He foresaw an endless procession of Dollys after the formula proved viable.
Expectations were high when Ginger Rogers took over the role, but her swanking and attitude soon turned many in the company off, and she began missing several performances, in contrast to the very professional Channing. At that time, Actors’ Equity required posting a notice in the lobby or making a pre-performance announcement if a performer was not going on. Merrick opted for the latter, with the announcer welcoming the audience and stating that the role of Mrs. Levi—the word “Dolly” was not used—would tonight be performed by Bibi Osterwald. Just as Bibi’s last name was starting to be said, the conductor gave the downbeat and the box-office window slammed shut.
This became known as The Ginger Rogers Cue. Although patrons who’d come to see Rogers were at first disappointed, Osterwald’s performance was said by many aficionados to be the best of all stage Dollys. (She eventually got to star regularly in the show.) Alas, via a non-collision of talent and timing, the singer-actress never became a star. It was Osterwald who complained to Equity about Merrick’s ruse, and henceforth a performer’s absence had to be made clear both from the stage and in the lobby.
“When Ginger left,” recalled a backstage insider, “she was relieved. By then, it was too much for her. And we, the crew and cast, were also relieved.… She made some of us homesick for Carol!”
Another ex-movie star, and a much more comedic one, was brought in: Martha Raye, aka The Big Mouth. “Perfect show for me,” she cracked. “Set in the 1890s—when I was an ingénue.”
Raye’s jollity was mostly for show, as Melodye—her only child (who so far hasn’t written a book)—could attest. Martha was the only Dolly with whom the affable, almost fatuous Jerry Herman did not get along. When she took over Dolly, he was in hospital with hepatitis. He’d routinely worked on the score with each new actress, rehearsing and changing keys, etc. Herman described himself as “sick as a dog;” he was unable to meet with Raye but sent a “gorgeous telegram” proffering an apology. On her opening, he sent “a magnificent bouquet of flowers” to her dressing room.
Neither the telegram nor flowers were acknowledged, and during her run Raye made no attempt to contact Herman, who when let out of hospital recuperated at his summer home on Fire Island. Still weak and confined to a wheelchair, Jerry was taken to lunch at a local restaurant where sat Martha Raye with three gay friends or associates (her final husband was openly gay and decades her junior).
In his wheelchair, Herman rolled over to Raye’s table to introduce himself. She gave him an icy stare, then pouted, “You’ve never been to see me.” He explained, “I just got out of the hospital,” where he had been for months. He wondered if Raye had received his wire and flowers, and asked, “Didn’t you know that I was very, very ill?”
She snapped, “Well, I thought you could have spared one evening.”
The amazed and deflated composer wrote, “After that, I never went to the St. James Theatre to see her.”
PEARL BAILEY DELIBERATELY TRIED TO SLOW Dolly’s pace. “She lazily led an all-black cast,” observed theater buff Ethan Mordden. She also had attitude to spare. “There’s a line in the show,” her leading man Cab Calloway later noted, “ ‘a damned exasperating woman.’ That is Pearl all over, except I might use a stronger word than ‘damned.’ ” A professional singer, Bailey took fewer liberties with the songs than, say, the offhand Rogers or the idiosyncratic Channing. But one of Pearl’s idiosyncracies was claiming that God was onstage with her during a given performance.
“She carried on as if she was preaching or giving you a revelation,” said Calloway assistant Cyril Jackson. “She’d go on at length, never coming to the point, except how she and God were close personal friends and She, He, or It was apparently an avid theatergoer who’d blessed Pearl’s interpretation [of Dolly].”
More effective than anticipated was Phyllis Diller. Herman had worried, once producer Merrick made the decision to cast most any female box-office name between forty and death, that the comedienne in the fright wig might make a “wild, crazed” caricature of Dolly. “She could have made funny faces or slipped in a few of her raunchy stories.” Rather, she enacted Dolly simply and honestly, if unspectacularly.
Dolly had long since proven less a role than a performance, less a character than a force of nature. It’s almost impossible to believe she was ever a retiring, reclusive widow, at least since The Matchmaker was musicalized. Possibly the most convincing Dolly of all was Tony- and Oscar-winning actress Shirley Booth in the 1958 Matchmaker film (costarring Shirley MacLaine and Anthony Perkins, who briefly donned drag, which he declined to do again in Some Like It Hot, thereby handing Jack Lemmon one of that actor’s biggest hits). Booth had the maturity, charm, push, and demureness to be credible as a personable (but non-diva) widow returning to life and romance. However, since the advent of Hello, Dolly! Wilder’s nonmusical play has remained dormant, unrevived due to comparison with its tuneful, exclamation-marked twin. Ironically, though, musical ability is not an absolute requirement for an actress-diva playing Dolly!
When Barbra Streisand nabbed the movie version that she’d gone after, she gave an over-the-top performance at times reminiscent of the ageless Mae West (who paranoiacally threatened to sue) that was widely criticized but now seems apt and inventive. How can you overdo Dolly? Besides, what a change to hear the beautiful music beautifully sung.
Another irony: although Carol Channing had beaten Streisand for the 1964 Best Actress (Musical) Tony, it was Barbra who got the rare chance to reprise her Broadway triumph on the screen, earning a Best Actress Academy Award (split with Katharine Hepburn) for Funny Girl. Hello, Dolly!’s record of ten Tony Award wins held until The Producers overtook it in 2001, winning 12 Tonys.
Other Dollys in varied venues and productions from London to Vietnam included Mary Martin, who proved typically uncomfortable with the character’s aggressive, self-starting qualities, and Eve Arden (Our Miss Brooks, Grease), who seemed a bit schoolmarmish and detached in the part. Additional Dollys were former B-movie stars Dorothy Lamour and Yvonne De Carlo, and Joanne Worley from TV’s Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In.
Assorted songs got dropped along the way. For the movie version, Streisand requested a new opening song, a “list song” with complicated, showy lyrics (“Just Leave Everything to Me”), to establish her hyperkinetic character. Babs also wanted a love song of sorts (“Love Is Only Love”) to sing in a romantically lit solo scene that featured her in sexy deshabille and firm young cleavage, which belied the widow’s claim that she’d been in seclusion lo these many years since the death of Ephraim Levi. But what Streisand wanted, Streisand got—directed by Gene Kelly, who added yet more dancing to the lengthy musical film. David Merrick, who had a financial interest in the movie, reportedly agreed to pay big bucks at the last minute if Jerry Herman could quickly compose what became “Love Is Only Love.”
After Herman presented the song, everyone was happy. It was beautiful and it didn’t even sound rushed. Unbeknownst to Merrick and company, Herman had composed it but never used it for a prior musical. By the time of the 1969 Streisand movie Angela Lansbury was a close friend of Jerry’s via Mame, and was familiar with the song. She happened to sit next to David Merrick on a cross-country flight when he shared the “new” song and she innocently admitted having heard it some time before, much to Merrick’s fury.
IN 1970, SEVEN YEARS into Hello, Dolly!’s run, Ethel Merman took over the part that had been created with her in mind. Her three-month engagement stretched to nine, but she was delighted, even relieved, to be back where she belonged—starring on Broadway. When she’d declined Dolly, she’d apprised Merrick, “I have spent my entire life in a dressing room, and I have had it with that life.” She wanted freedom, for example, “to be able to go to dinner parties at eight o’clock at night, like everybody else does, instead of always eating in the middle of the night.” Eventually the inactivity had palled.
The two songs Herman had specifically tailored to Merman were finally publicly performed: “Love, Look in My Window” and “World, Take Me Back.” According to Jerry, Merman played Dolly as “tough and funny, but lovable underneath.” Her leading man, Jack Goode, felt, “Miss Merman is the perfect Dolly—a career girl who comes out of retirement and shakes up everybody around her.… She’s the most exciting thing to ever happen to this wonderful show.” Some less-partial observers believed that Merman, like Channing, more than made the role her own, trampling it with the force of her unrestrained persona. Either way, audiences came, eager to see and hear. Carol Channing later wrote of “Ethel’s greatness in my part.”
Merman revealed that the other reason she’d originally rejected Dolly was that she’d always created the roles she played and feared that if she did Hello, Dolly! she’d be viewed as following in Ruth Gordon’s Matchmaker footsteps. Ethel was well known for her competitiveness with other females. The night of Merman’s final performance, Carol Channing and accompanying photographers showed up at the theater for pictures of the first and last Dollys, together, as the record-breaking show came to a close.
“I knew you’d make certain to be here tonight, Carol,” glared Ethel before refusing to pose with her and shutting the door on her. (Carol later crowed that the New York Times instead ran a photo of her alone, the original Dolly.)
Even though Ethel had said no to Dolly, she resented Carol’s success in the part. Channing recalled that once she became Dolly, whenever she’d encounter Merman socially, “I would say, ‘Hello, Ethel.’ And she would look right and left of me, wondering where my voice came from.”
Of course, Carol had the last Dolly laugh, outliving Merman and repeating the role on and on. But at a price. Whereas the ghost of Ethel Merman has lingered over every Gypsy revival including that of 2003 with Bernadette Peters, Channing lingered in Hello, Dolly!—the only musical most people can associate with her. The inevitable comparisons with newer Roses invariably favor Merman, while each new Channing Hello, Dolly! has diminished in everything—including supporting casts (the original featured Eileen Brennan and Charles Nelson Reilly)—everything but chutzpah. Theatre historian Ethan Mordden has termed it “build[ing] an evening around the glamour of guts.” It became less about viewing a scintillating star in a dazzling musical than going to see—so you could say you had—Carol Channing in her signature role. Or Hello, Dolly! with its signature star.
Mordden, to name one, considered the re-stagings “good show biz, but bad musical comedy.” He decried the lack of a curtain fall after the show’s end. Rather, the musical reprises, the cast’s strutting and posing, and the calculated buildup to Carol’s/Dolly’s appearance in Her Song insures that the “audience rises in salute as if they, too, have been directed by Gower Champion.”
It remains to be seen if Hello, Dolly! will survive time and Carol Channing, whose final Broadway run in the part (see accompanying sidebar) didn’t last as long as expected. Gypsy survived Merman partly due to substance, partly because it challenges actresses and often elevates them to new thespic heights. Dolly! doesn’t so much challenge as accommodate, and though it’s a nostalgic, gaudy musical that serves as a holiday for the senses in an increasingly colorless and cookie-cutter time, much of its substance turns out to be image and public relations. As with the story behind Carol Channing’s plate, recounted by veteran columnist James Bacon:
“Do you know about Carol Channing’s famous silver plate? She once asked me if I had seen her ‘plate,’ and I stared at her teeth, then said no. She said, ‘My silver plate, diddums, from David Merrick.’ So she dragged out this famous plate that everyone had seen but me, and it was impressive, and engraved—‘Congratulations, Carol, on the $8 million gross for Hello, Dolly! David Merrick.’
“Years later, I’m talking with the producer himself, and I mention his gift to Carol, and he snorted, ‘Gift, my eye! I sent her the message, but it was Charles Lowe—her P.R. man and husband—who got the silver plate and had my message engraved onto it.’ Whatever that plate cost Lowe, he’s gotten over a million dollars in publicity out of it. Maybe $8 million.”
“There has never been anything like this before in human society.”—BROOKS ATKINSON in 1949 on Carol Channing in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (though “mincing coyly in high-heel shoes,” she was also “husky enough to kick in the teeth of any gentleman on the stage”)
“Gentlemen Must Prefer Amazons”—a COLUMNIST for the Hearst Syndicate
“Carol Channing is rather disconcerting. You’ll notice her looking at you with those big baby-stare eyes. Then eventually it dawns on you that the person behind those eyes is, in show business terms, about 200 years old.”—DANNY LOCKIN, who played Barnaby Tucker in Hello, Dolly! on stage and screen
“I knew Carol before, during and after Blondes. Everyone assumed she would become, and remain, a big star. Well, she didn’t remain one … it so disappointed and so hardened her, inside. Until Hello, Dolly! finally came along, Carol was a bundle of restless, ruthless nerves. The woman, appearances to the contrary, is no dummy.”—director-choreographer GOWER CHAMPION
“Perhaps once in a decade a nova explodes above the Great White Way with enough brilliance to reillumine the whole gaudy legend of show business.”—TIME magazine in 1949 on the new star
“Carol Channing is a closet intellectual.”—columnist LIZ SMITH
“Carol is a theatre actress. I used to stand in the wings every night and watch her. She was like clockwork. Her closing nights were like her opening nights. I loved going to the theatre knowing that you were going to get the same performance every night.”—LEE ROY REAMS
“Carol Channing never really crossed over to doing straight plays. Her whole focus is much bigger. The fact that you have to fill a theatre creates a certain style that does become larger than life.”—actor JOE BOVA
“Carol is nobody else, and she craves celebrity like chocoholics crave chocolate.”—ROSS HUNTER, who produced Thoroughly Modern Millie, for which Channing received a supporting-actress Oscar nomination
“Carol Channing has played Dolly over 5,000 times. She’s either done it to perfection by now, or it’s done in her ability to do any other, more down-to-earth roles.”—EILEEN HECKART
“Carol was crushed when the movie of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes went to Marilyn. Carol had so built up the character of Lorelei Lee in her mind and the interviews, as if it was one of the all-time roles, an American Anna Karenina or something. In the movie, Lorelei’s just a gold-digger. Well, in the play she’s also just a gold-digger. Carol’s one consolation was that Marilyn was second-billed to Jane Russell.”—JULE STYNE, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes composer
“Gower Champion wanted to star Nanette Fabray as Dolly, and she would have been marvelous. But not being outlandish or freakish, she’d have made Dolly normal, as Shirley Booth did in the Matchmaker movie—for my money, the best and most lovable interpretation. Maybe Channing helped make the show bigger, more of a stage spectacle, by taking Dolly outside the realm of normalcy and reality.”—pop-culture historian MARTIN GREIF
“.… a part nobody wanted and everybody eventually played.”—David Merrick assistant-turned-company-business manager STEVEN SUSKIN on Dolly Gallagher Levi
“It’s funny. People think Ethel Merman has this deep, masculine voice. But she can sing two octaves higher than Carol Channing.”—critic WYATT COOPER
“Carol once said she knocked the Beatles off of the charts. I thought, with that voice? And actors do exaggerate so. But she did. The original cast album of Hello, Dolly! did knock the Beatles off the charts when it came out in 1964.”—record producer BEN BAGLEY
“I once made the mistake of asking Carol to sing Hello, Dolly! That is, the title song. She took about ten minutes to explain that she doesn’t sing it in the show. The waiters sing it to her, and she does an answering verse. Then I made the further mistake of saying that in the film version, Barbra Streisand does sing it—the entire song. I got what seemed like a ten-second glare.”—critic REX REED
“Is this dud still running? Why?”—a DETROIT CRITIC to Carol Channing in her New York dressing room during Dolly!’s second year
“When she comes out during the title number in the red dress and feathers, it is a breathtaking number and a real theatre moment. But over the years Carol has embellished it to the point where I think she almost believes her stories about people dying happy during the big ‘Dolly!’ number. She also says Lyndon Johnson requested that her recording of ‘Hello, Lyndon!’ for the Democratic presidential convention be played in perpetuity—like an eternal flame—at his presidential library in Texas.”—GWEN VERDON
“One of Carol’s proudest memories is when Jackie Kennedy and her two children made their first public appearance after JFK’s assassination and funeral by going to see Hello, Dolly! and then visiting Carol backstage. Because that’s what Carol and that show represent: a coming to life again, a rejoining of the human race.”—Hello, Dolly! producer DAVID MERRICK
“She wants to be the only one in the show. She and Gower Champion, they were not nice people. You know the famous red dress? The dancers in the dressing room in the cellar had a doll with a black dress like the red dress, with the feathers and beads in black. Hanging by a noose.”—Hello, Dolly! costar CHARLES NELSON REILLY
“Carol’s old-fashioned. She likes to give the impression she defers to her husband, that he’s in charge, whether it’s Charles Lowe or the new Armenian-American one that got her on the Larry King show [in 2003].”—an anonymous FORMER FRIEND of Carol and Charles
“She always has a lot to say and definite things she won’t do—like she won’t wear earrings because she thinks her face is busy enough.”—designer BOB MACKIE
“Carol Channing is now [the late ’90s] the last pure theatre star. This is the medium that made her, and she’s remained loyal to it.”—playwright JEAN KERR
“Believe it or not, the musicals with Mary Martin, Eddie Cantor, Ethel Merman, and Bert Lahr never got standing ovations. American show biz was then in its glory, and even the biggest talents were taken for granted.… It was the 1960s and shows such as Hello, Dolly! and Mame that created the audience-participation finale [epitomized by] Dolly!’s applause-athon.”—theater historian ETHAN MORDDEN
“Watch Miss Channing as she descends that famous staircase in the title number: we applaud with relief, as we do when an old nag successfully negotiates a tricky course at a point-to-point.… Still, this [1996] production got great notices in New York, for drama critics are a sentimental crowd.”—theater columnist MARK STEYN
“Last year [1998] Carol Channing told the press that the public’s been clamoring for yet another return as Dolly. You’d have to be very old and very nostalgic or very gay and very fond of musicals to still be clamoring. I think where Carol’s concerned, they should rename it ‘Hello, Delusion!’—like, Dolly Levi meets Norma Desmond.”—HERB RITTS
“Despite the fact that Carol’s theme song is ‘Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend,’ she lost all of hers three years ago in her divorce.”—“Beverly Hills (213)” columnist CATHY GRIFFIN in January 2002
“She’s Miss Channing to me and the world.”—manager and penultimate husband CHARLES LOWE in 1966
“Carol Channing certainly is.”—WOODY ALLEN