The Little World of David Merrick

broadway's brilliant, asp-tongued grand panjandrun -- and how he got that way

With the drapes drawn, David Merrick's office looks like the inside of a wound. Walls, hangings, sofa and carpet are all the color of hot, uncoagulated blood, and there are those who insist the blood is real -- squeezed from the army of actors, directors, stagehands, chorus girls and composers he employs, or drawn from the lacerations of the critics with whom he has dueled. This impression is heightened by the stage prop, a blood-stained headsman's as, that stands in a corner of his assistant's office, as if ready for instant use. For David Merrick, the most powerful individual in the American theater today, producer of such hit shows as Fanny, Irma la Douce, Becket, A Taste of Honey and Oliver!, is a brass-knuckled businessman and, by reputation, the biggest bastard on Broadway.

He has been called "The Abominable Showman," "Typhoid David," "Broadway's Bad Boy," Merrick the Terrible Tempered," an Iago, a monster, a mortician, a "Schubert Alley Catiline," and, in David Susskind's memorably grotesque phrase,"a twisted id on a sea of crocodile tears."So entrenched is the image of Merrick as a sort of modern-day Mephistopheles that one enemy, who believes Merrick has manufactured this image to suit his own purposes, says: "I dont't want to say anything bad about him. I want to find something good I can say about him, so I can ruin him."

It would, as a matter of fact, take more than a kind comment to destroy the empire that Merrick has built for himself on Broadway. Merrick is not quite a one-man cartel, but he is the greatest single economic force in the theater today. Since 1954, when he produced Fanny, theatergoers have laid out an impressive $75,000,000 for tickets to see his plays. Last year alone his productions grossed $12,500,000. He employs 500 to 600 theater people at any given time -- about one out of every ten who, in achronically depressed industry, are lucky enough to have jobs at all. Other producers struggle along with one show at a time, or two. Last year Merrick had four running simultaneously, and he has, at times, juggled as many as six or seven productions on Broadway, plus another one or two on road tour. Moreover, in a business that is, according to Fortune, riskier than a race track when it comes to making a buck, Merrick has returned something like $9,000,000 to his investors and himself in the past nine years. Says one competitor: "There isn't another producer who doesn't honestly admire David's kingdom."

The emperor of this kingdom looks the part. Nearly six-feet tall and scrupulously well-tailored, he wears custommade shoes and Savile Row suits, usually with a handkerchief darting from the breast pocket. He has been named one of the nation's 10 best-dressed men. But it is his countenance, rather than his clothes, that commands attention. It is a brooding, majestic deadpan. Thinning black hair, worn long, strays romantically over an ear. A pair of penetrating brown-black eyes punctuate the face. An aquiline nose strikes downward toward a thick black mustache. Under this a pair of lips are almost hidden. When a smile fleets across them, as it only rarely does, the incipient jowls on either side take no part in the pleasure. Characteristically, Merrick will slouch in a chair, knees crossed, listening rather than talking, playing with the horn-rimmed glasses he carries, but only seldom wears. His voice is (continued on page 150)David Merrick(continued from page 135) soft and lethargic. As Peter Ustinov puts it, "He is almost caressing when he talks, carefully modulated, redolent of warmth and comfort -- not brusque at all. He seems almost half-asleep at times." The over-all impression is one of imperturbable majesty. As in so much else about David Merrick, however, there is a jarring note. Imperturbable monarchs don't bite their nails. Merrick does.

This is only the most superficial of the many contradictions in Merrick and in his image. The image tends to be simpler than the man. For not even Merrick can be as Mephistophelian as his reputation suggests. Jule Styne, composer of innumerable hit songs and now a Broadway producer, testifies: "There is no such person as David Merrick" -- meaning the Merrick of bogieman legend. "I don't find David an s.o.b.," he says."The image is painted all wrong." Michael Stewart, author of the libretto of Bye Bye Birdie and Carnival!, goes even further. "He has created an image of himself as the Nero of our business,"Stewart says. "It's become a kind of party game to see who can say the nastiest things about him. I'm sorry, but I find Merrick warm and easy. I find him loyal and completely honest. He has the courage of a lion. And no man is more generous to his creative people."

Merrick's reputation for being a rough, tough character grows in part out of his public troubles with actors and actresses. These began as early as 1954 when he staged Fanny. Merrick telephoned Walter Slezak and induced him to accept a role in the musical. Slezak came to New York from Hollywood. Hostilities broke out almost immediately. Slezak charged furiously that Merrick had backtracked on contract terms, and refused to talk to Merrick for months at a stretch. Recently, almost a decade after the event, Slezak was still nursing his anger. When I called him and told him Merrick's office had suggested I interview him in connection with this story, he shouted, "Whatsamatter, the sonofabitch is trying to become a humanitarian?" He refused to discuss Merrick.

Merrick's noisiest brawl with an actor, however, came in 1959 shortly after the opening of Take Me Along, in which Jackie Gleason played the lead. Gleason, apparently happy during the rehearsal and tryout period, soon after the opening tried to pry himself loose from the contract that bound him to the show. Merrick refused to let him go. Before long columnists were quoting Gleason as saying things like: "Dealing with him is like playing handball against a putty wall...I'm going to put Merrick's picture on my golf balls -- I would be able to get anywhere up to 800 yards with thatkind of inspiration."

Merrick, in turn, on being told that Gleason had a stomach-ache, announced that he was deeply sympathetic because, "When Gleason has a stomach-ache it's like a giraffe having a sore throat." Gleason, he said, wanted nothing but the acclaim of an opening night. He was not interested in the hard, unromantic work that goes with performance after performance in a Broadway hit. "This was really unbelievable," Merrick said at the time. "Jackie actually requested one week's vacation after every three weeks that he is in the play."

Today Gleason will no longer comment on the feud, beyond snapping that "I've done enough for him already." Merrick is less reticent. "His press agents and mine found easy access to getting plugs in the columns," he says quietly. "But personally, I objected to the feud. I consider Gleason about 12,000,000 light-years beneath me. He's just a great big fat comic."

Another battle between Merrick and one of his stars broke out during the run of the musical, Carnival! The lead was played by Anna Maria Alberghetti, a slim, dark soprano who a friend describes by saying, "For a frail little girl, she's a helluva street fighter." Street fighter or no, the frail Miss Alberghetti fell ill and was hospitalized. Her press agent promptly publicized the news. Usually, when the star of a Broadway show is ill, pains are taken to keep it quiet, on the theory that ticket sales will fall off once the public knows the star is not appearing. Merrick, irked, replaced Miss Alberghetti with her understudy, announcing, "I wish I had been clairvoyant enough to know at the beginning that she was that much better than Miss Alberghetti." He rubbed in his revenge by sending the sick singer a bouquet of wax roses, duly publicizing that, too.

Such conflicts, of course, are superheated by the press agents who proliferate in the Broadway underbrush. They are primarily for public consumption. Not for public consumption, however, are the private, often far more bitter, battles that occur in the course of Merrick's negotiations with actors, directors, composers, writers and their legions of agents and lawyers. For Merrick is the toughest negotiator in town.

Just how tough he can be is suggested in this comment by the upset wife of a composer who has dealt with Merrick a number of times. "Negotiations with David?" she says. "It's nervous-breakdownsville!"

Merrick has been charged with calculated campaigns to weaken the opposition when he is negotiating. Conductor Lehman Engel recalls: "The first time I worked with him was in Fanny. We had breakfast one morning at the Plaza. I told him how much I get. He agreed to pay it. But when my agent called to confirm the deal he was unable to get through to Merrick. He tried for a week. Finally, I got through to him myself and he said, 'Forget it,' and hung up. I called Harold Rome and Josh Logan, who were working on the show. They called David. Twenty minutes later he called my agent and the deal was confirmed. I think he just does this to make you nervous."

One of Merrick's best-known tactics in negotiation is the temper tantrum. He has on occasion stormed out of meetings. He has screamed with rage, pounded the table, called people names. Sometimes the tantrum is genuine. More often it is a tactical maneuver. Says one friend, "I've seen him all heated up, and as soon as he hangs up the phone he smiles and says,'Wasn't that a wonderful act?'" Eruptions of Mount Merrick, however, can be corked. Says Jule Styne, "If you're weak, you're no match for David Merrick. He'll devour you. But he knows I'll fight back and hit him with a chair -- I really would -- and he knows it. I don't use agents and lawyers between us. I tell him myself. If you are strong, you can argue with Merrick."

Despite all this sound and fury, says one leading agent who has haggled and fought with Merrick repeatedly, "He's not unfair. He's tough. He's called my bluff several times. Many other producers are easier to deal with. They will pay all kinds of salaries that are unwarranted. Merrick won't. So he seems unfair by comparison."

Actor Sydney Chaplin puts it this way: "He wants to get everyone cheap. But all the other producers do too. Some do it with a smile at a cocktail party or an arm around your shoulder. David is direct. He lives up to the contract. I didn't have one day's trouble with him. After all, when you put $400,000 into a show, it's no longer crapping around artsy-craftsy. It's a business."

If Merrick looms as an ogre to many outsiders, he presents a totally different picture to his own tightly knit permanent staff. He is the only producer in America to have built a 52-week-a-year organization. Others hire and fire people as needed. Merrick retains a cadre of trained people. He is thoughtful of them. He gives them great leeway for individual initiative. He is paternal. The same is true of Merrick's relationships with offstage creative personnel. Typically, when he hires a director, he leaves the director alone. "I don't constantly hover over them taking notes, sitting alongside them at rehearsal," Merrick says. "The producer with a pad and pencil will drive the (continued on page 228)David Merrick(continued from page 150) director and everyone mad."

Still, Merrick is not just a money raiser who leaves creativity to his hired hands. Once the director has had an opportunity to shape the show, when it is nearly ready for tryout, Merrick will move in and begin making suggestions. In doing this, he reveals a keen knowledge of the details of the theater world. He knows which painter in which design shop is best at painting certain kinds of sets. He knows the physical specifications of dozens of theater buildings in Europe and the United States. He is insistent that his shows look attractive, that the stage is, as he puts it, "dressed." Merrick had the back wall of the set for Oliver! painted five times until he had exactly the color he thought proper to the mood of the show.

Such dedicated attention to detail is one of the reasons that Merrick's operation is as cleanly efficient as it is. Carnival! once closed in Boston on a Saturday night and opened again in San Francisco on Monday night. Any other producer would have allowed a week or more to be lost in transporting his show across the continent. Merrick shaved days and dollars off the operation. Harold Rome, the composer, sums it up by saying, "He organizes the whole thing. He gets the most out of it. He's got the best backstage men in the business and he keeps them."

To keep the best men in the business, Merrick leans over backward. He shifts his people from one show to another to make sure that they are employed all the time. On opening nights many of his employees receive personal telegrams or notes from him, thanking them for their contributions to the new show. Often there are gifts -- silver cigarette cases or radios or gift certificates to some of New York's better stores. Veteran employees are invited to invest in Merrick's shows, an opportunity that few producers extend to their staffs. In Merrick's case, this is an opportunity.

But there is another quality about Merrick that keeps his team tied to him. There is charisma. Leo Herbert, Merrick's chief prop man, says, "The schedule he gives us is rough. But you don't feel like you're wasting your life. If I'm going to do this as a job, I'd rather have spent the prime of my life with a man like Merrick who is the prime man in the theater today." This kind of esprit de corps explains much about Merrick's success.

Backing up Merrick's indisputably good business sense is his flair for offbeat advertising and publicity. He is the theater's most freewheeling flack, alert to any opportunity for kicking up comment or controversy. Merrick says, "At times my tactics are cheap, even. They lack dignity. But they work." These tactics are best illustrated by what Merrick did to promote Fanny.

Merrick began by looking up a burly, bearded ballyhoo artist named James Sterling Moran (profiled in Playboy, September 1961). Moran's oddball specialty was -- and still is -- the engineering of hoopla. His talent for extravagant nonsense appealed to Merrick's own peculiar taste for theatrical gimmickery, and together the two men mapped out a campaign that has since become legendary. One night after the play had opened, Moran and a motley collection of his friends stole into Central Park lugging a large, heavy object. The next morning someone "discovered" that a larger-than-life nude statue of Nejla Ates, the Turkish belly dancer in Fanny, had been placed atop a vacant pedestal in the park. The statue lured droves of newspapermen, photographers, and TV reporters to the park, few of whom failed to mention Fanny in their stories.

Stunt followed stunt, and the fanfaronade for Fanny helped turn this show into a stunning success, setting a pattern for the future. Now Merrick began mounting one show after another, each one accompanied by the wildest and noisiest ballyhoo campaign Broadway had experienced in a generation. For his next production, The Matchmaker, Merrick and Moran imported an English taxicab and rented an orangutan. They put the orangutan in the front seat, inconspicuously chained in place so it appeared to be driving the vehicle. Moran himself clambered behind the real steering wheel in the back seat and proceeded to drive it round Manhattan. Startled New Yorkers did double takes at the sight of the simian chauffeur. As they rubbed their eyes in astonishment, they saw a sign on the cab that proclaimed: "I am taking my master to see The Matchmaker."

No stunt was too hackneyed or too kookie for Merrick. For Romanoff and Juliet he fell back on a hoary Hollywood standard, a phony talent hunt for an ingenue. For The World of Suzie Wong he threw a huge party in Chinatown, distributing stage money with the name of the show printed on it -- having previously arranged with local merchants to accept the scrip as legal tender. For Look Back in Anger Merrick and Moran arranged for a woman to leap up out of the audience and slap an actor in the face. The woman claimed noisily that she had been infuriated by what the actor was saying. Later she admitted she'd been paid $250 by Merrick to do the job.

When Destry Rides Again, a musical Western, opened, Merrick filled the street outside the theater with cowboys, compounding the confusion by dumping sawdust and horse manure in the gutter. For Irma la Douce, Merrick attracted attention by having a squad of men appear on the street lugging an Irma-postered pissoir around with them.

When Major Gordon Cooper, the astronaut, came to New York recently to be honored by a ticker-tape parade, Merrick reasoned that the press would be hungry for something a bit different from the routine photos and speeches that go with a hero's welcome. Picking up a phone, he inveigled Major Cooper to attend a performance of the aptly titled comedy, Stop the World -- I Want to Get Off. The space hero's attendance was duly noted in Life and hundreds of newspapers around the nation.

Space, as a matter of fact, is something Merrick knows all about. "I'm the nation's leading space thief," he proudly claims.

Anyone who has managed to manipulate the press as effectively as Merrick has is bound to develop some scorn for it. Merrick's contempt is boundless. "Ninety-eight percent of what is written about me is crap, lies," he says. "I'm against freedom of the press. It's been mightily abused. I don't give a damn if anyone writes about me. All I care about is a forum to sell my product. Given a choice, I'd repeal that part of the Constitution that deals with freedom of the press. There's invasion of privacy, deletions, misquotes. Don't talk to me about freedom of the press." Merrick's attitude is summed up by a note he once sent to an unfriendly newspaperman: "You haven't slandered me in 10 days. What's happening?"

Merrick sees the press as a gigantic power ranged against him. The press is The Establishment, in his eyes, and at its pinnacle sits the Great Gray Lady, The New York Times. "The Times," says Merrick, "is always a first-class object for my anti-establishment feelings. It's just 100 yards down the street from my office and just because it's so big and powerful, it brings out all my pyrotechnic instincts. At times I find myself in 8th Avenue hardware stores buying kerosene."

But if Merrick is merely hostile toward the press, he is positively vitriolic about critics. Theater critics, as he sees them, are a cabal of cutthroats whose sole object in life is the dismemberment of David Merrick and all he stands for. Merrick's point is that the power of the critics is overcentralized. He has explained it this way: "The morning criticisms are picked up and broadcast by radio and TV; the morning critics have some national syndication; the news services broadcast the first opinions by the time the afternoon critics are printed, and the show is either accented as a hit or a miss.... There are 21 critics in the Drama Critics Circle. I have had shows which 17 of these critics liked, but two of the all-important morning critics didn't. I was dead unless I went to work and fought to beat the handicap. Stop and figure. Two judges out of 21 can destroy you. Why, a murderer gets a better deal than that from a jury of 12."

Not being the kind of fellow to take such odds lying down, Merrick has tried to turn the tables on them by making the critics, against their will, pawns in his own publicity game. The skirmishing began long ago. In Toronto where he went to help launch the tour of his show Do Re Mi, Merrick made news by announcing boldly that "Toronto has the three worst critics in North America." In Boston, Merrick tried to ban the Globe's second-string critic, Kevin Kelly, from the opening of Subways Are for Sleeping. "I consider Mr. Kelly as incompetent to act as a critic," he announced. In New York, Merrick tangled with Walter Kerr of the Herald Tribune, launching a one-man campaign that soon became known as "High Noon at Sardi's."

When Oliver! opened, Merrick took to radio to berate Kerr, terming him "horribly dull" and suggesting that listeners read Kerr instead of swallowing sleeping pills. He later sent Kerr a photo showing lines of ticket buyers queued up in front of the Oliver! box office. Kerr replied with a telegram that said: "I Love The Picture Of Your Mother."

Another time when Merrick was displeased by Kerr's treatment of one of his plays, he had the full text of a favorable review by the New York Post's critic, Richard Watts, set in the type and format of a Tribune review. He then bought space in the Trib and watched happily as the paper's ad department, failing to note its significance, ran the ad on the drama page, a direct slap at Kerr. This was merely a windup, however, for a much more widely publicized stunt in which Merrick tackled all the critics at once.

When Subways Are for Sleeping opened in December 1961, the seven major New York critics gave it three sharply negative reviews and four ranging from mildly critical to tepidly positive. Howard Taubman of the Times said the show "stumbles as if suffering from somnambulism." Kerr said it moved as fitfully as "the holiday traffic." The play, he wrote, was "limp" and lacking in "get-up-and-go." Others called the play "disappointing...feeble...without distinction," and so forth. But on January 4, 1962, in the first edition of the Herald Tribune, a full-page ad appeared entitled "7 out of 7 are ecstatically unanimous." Beneath this breathless headline ran the names of each of the seven critics. Next to Taubman's name were the words: "One of the few great musical comedies of the last 30 years, one of the best of our time." Next to Kerr's name the words, "What a show! What a hit! What a solid hit!" rang out. Other comments ranged from "Best musical of the century...fabulous...a knockout..." to "as fine a piece of work as our stage can be asked to give us."

The ad did not lie. It did not say that the Howard Taubman, or the Walter Kerr or Richard Watts quoted in it were drama critics. It merely made it appear that the comments came from the gentlemen of the press. Merrick's press agents, on orders from him, had scoured metropolitan-area telephone books for people bearing the same names as the critics. The Walter Kerr quoted in the ad was a man in the housewares business, for example. The Howard Taubman was an audio-equipment salesman. The Richard Watts was a printing supervisor. Merrick had rounded up his squad of pseudo critics, wined them, dined them, and sat them down to watch the show. Later his press agents had "helped them" with their statements.

Merrick had submitted the ad to the five New York newspapers, and had been turned down everywhere but at the Trib, where the same sleepy advertising department that had allowed his earlier trick ad to get through now goofed again. When Merrick turned up backstage that night with a copy of the Tribune's first edition, Sydney Chaplin recalls. "His eyes were dancing. He was delighted." The trick drummed up more publicity for the play than almost any other in his career. The Trib itself was reduced to running a red-faced story about it. Time magazine devoted three quarters of a page to chuckling over it.

"I thought the ad would stir things up," Merrick chortled.

Among the things it stirred up was the ire of the Better Business Bureau which denounced the ad as "deceptive, confusing to the public and blatantly misleading." To which Merrick replied, "I never heard of the Better Business Bureau. Is that anything like the Diners' Club?"

This stunt, however, was merely a comic prelude to a more serious episode in Merrick's conflict with the critics. For a long time his most caustic comments had been reserved for Taubman of the Times. He once publicly urged Taubman to get "vocational guidance." Another time he tried to place an ad in the Times pleading "Bring Back Brooks Atkinson." When Taubman panned Subways, Merrick fired off a telegram to him saying "Congratulations on finally expressing an opinion." Irked by another Taubman review, Merrick had it translated into Greek and published it in his ads.

The humor drained out of this campaign, however, last April, when Merrick turned up on the NBC Tonight show. What followed was a tirade during which Merrick mixed hard-sell plugs for his shows with suggestions that Taubman feeds poisoned nuts to squirrels, takes "Wet Paint" signs off park benches, and abandons old ladies in the middle of the street -- among other misdemeanors. He read a prayer asking for Taubman's removal, and displayed a photo of a diapered baby with the caption, "Time for a Change." This tasteless performance, delivered deadpan, went on for 30 minutes. At one point Johnny Carson, host of the show, asked Merrick: "Do you and Mr. Taubman ever speak at all?" Merrick replied: "No,I'am afraid not. He was invited to come over here tonight but refused." What made all this even more graceless was the fact that Taubman had, in fact, not been invited to appear.

It was such a poor, unsportsmanlike performance that Merrick himself realized he had left his tongue run wild. In an unusual retreat he wrote a brief apology to Taubman and admitted publicly: "I got carried away. The situation on the Tonight show got out of hand and ugly. I subsequently decided it had been undignified and that I'd done Taubman an injustice, so I wrote him an apology." He went on to make a rare and perceptive comment about himself, the kind of statement few public figures would dare to make: "I think perhaps I've become a captive of my own stormy-petrel image," Merrick said, "and that here after I should stick to producing shows and let other people do the public performing."

Antics like these suggest that Merrick is a noisy, Barnumesque extrovert. Ironically, nothing could be further from the truth. Says one young actress who dated him briefly, "He's one of the shyest, most repressed and inhibited people I ever met." Says another friend: "In social situations Merrick is often overtly ill at ease. He's grateful when you call someone over to speak to him. Otherwise he stands by himself."

A poignant scene is conjured up by the friend who recalls one particularly wild party attended by Merrick. The affair took place in the baronial apartment maintained by Jim Moran in a big old-fashioned house on New York's West Side. In this 10-room pad, Moran keeps, along with an astonishing collection of other oddments like African drums, ancient zithers and a mantrap, a huge wardrobe of theatrical costumes from Merrick productions. At this party each guest was asked to don the costume of his or her choice. The result might be discreetly described as a general relaxation of restraint. Merrick loosened his enough to don the three-cornered hat and silk britches of an 18th Century outfit. But even in masquerade, even amidst the revelry and racket of a pulsating party, Merrick is remembered as standing, remote and silent, disconnected from the surrounding abandon.

Similarly, until a few years ago Merrick had the habit, when talking, of masking the lower part of his face with his hand, as if hiding. It was called to his attention and he has stopped doing it, but the gesture was symbolic of his shyness. This reserve is still reflected in the long silences with which Merrick interrupts what might be termed his intermittent nonconversation.

Merrick himself declares: "I'm quiet and reserved. All this flamboyance is a calculated image. It's part of being a producer. Having recognized that there must be showmanship off the stage as well as on it, I work at it. So now I'm colorful," he adds wryly. "It's a role I play. For some people being flamboyant comes naturally. Not for me."

Thus, while Merrick is, with one hand, inviting all the publicity he can get, he is, that the same time, fighting almost obsessively to maintain a wall of secrecy about his private life. Among the dozens of friends, associates, and co-workers with whom I spoke, only one had ever seen the inside of his apartment. Merrick, himself, refuses even to tell anyone where he lives. (It is in a luxury apartment house on West 55th street in Manhattan)The only exception to the rule of exclusion is Byron Goldman, a bald, thin-lipped whip of a man, one of Merrick's oldest financial backers, who happens to live in the same building. Merrick refuses to talk to anyone about his early days in St. Louis, about his family, or his marriage. He was furious when The New York Times ran an article describing his wrong-side-of-the-tracks boyhood. Recently, when a columnist reported that Merrick had secretly married Jeanne Gilbert, the attractive blonde ex-wife of the New York Daily Mirror's movie critic, Merrick was besieged by reporters asking for confirmation or denial. His cryptic reply: "I couldn't be married. I'm only 10 years old."

• • •

Surprising though it may be to some people, the fact is that once even David Merrick was 10 years old. Merrick was born in 1911, in St. Louis, the son of Celia and Samuel Margulois, and the youngest of five children. His father was a modest shopkeeper. The home was not a happy one, and when David was still a boy his parents were divorced. He was raised by a sister, attended Central High School and ran for the presidency of his senior class. Already imbued with anti-establishmentariauism, he campaigned on an antifraternity program. Later he went to Washington University for a few years where he studied dramatics, wrote a play or two, and worked at odd jobs to help support himself. He transferred to St. Louis University, a Catholic school, in 1935, and, at the urging of his family, studied law, a profession for which he has about as much respect as he has for the press. All this time he floated quietly around the periphery of the little-theater movement of the city, feeling somewhat excluded and self-conscious about being both Jewish and poor.

In 1937, Merrick received his law degree. Soon afterward, he married Lenore Beck, a girl he had met as a student, who shortly thereafter inherited an estate worth about $200,000. The young lawyer practiced more or less lackadaisically -- his principal interest continued to be the theater -- and he would sally forth to New York at every opportunity to see the shows on Broadway and try to find a stage door in which to insert his foot. The truth is that Merrick hated St. Louis, and still does. In 1940, he made a crucial decision. He changed his name from Margulois to Merrick and migrated to New York.

Merrick and his young wife then settled into a small hotel in midtown Manhattan and for the next decade or more David Merrick, somewhat thinner than now, but already nattily dressed and mustachioed, haunted the fringes of show business, watching, learning, looking for a lever with which to pry open the door to theatrical success. During those years he invested modestly in a few shows, took a job as theater manager at a Maine resort one summer, returned, drifted to Los Angeles to case the little theaters there, and came back to New York. In 1945, Merrick finally landed a job -- without pay -- as general manager for Herman Shumlin, who already had made a reputation as the producer of The Male Animal, The Corn is Green and other Broadway hits.

At this time, Merrick was also beginning to make important contacts, among them Max Brown and Byron Goldman, both of them successful Broadway investors. One day Brown and Goldman came to Merrick with a comedy called Clutterbuck. Merrick decided now was the time to try his own wings. The property was about ready for tryout in Denver. Merrick flew west to take a look at it, liked what he saw, and came in as co-producer. When they brought it to Broadway, however, it faltered. Merrick, beginning to show some of the publicity sense that would characterize him later on, dug in his heels. He ran a contest for sexy limericks to advertise the play. He had the fictional "Mr. Clutterbuck" paged in Manhattan hotel lobbies. He pumped advertising money into the press. By such measures he managed to keep the play running long enough to recoup most of the investment. His angels didn't forget.

Now Merrick entered a five-year period that was, for him, one of the most important and trying in his life. In 1950, shortly after the demise of Clutterbuck, Merrick, Brown, Goldman and a woman named Julia Clayburg formed a syndicate to finance a new show. Merrick had the idea that Marcel Pagnol's famous trilogy, Marius-Fanny-César, would make a first-rate musical, so he flew to France to buy the theatrical rights to the property from Pagnol. But Merrick was a nobody then, and Pagnol was rich and famous. Pagnol eluded him. Merrick pursued, nagged, cajoled. For three years, on and off, he kept after Pagnol, until at last the Frenchman relented. During the interim Merrick invested in a few productions himself, waited, schemed and dreamed. Now, at last, with the rights in his pocket, he began to assemble a company. He talked Josh Logan into directing, Harold Rome into writing the score. He got Albert and Frances Hackett, and later S. N. Behrman, to do the book. He snagged Ezio Pinza and Walter Slezak to appear in it.

For Merrick, Fanny was a desperate make-or-break proposition. If it failed, he was convinced, he would have to return to St. Louis in defeat to practice law. Fortunately, all of Merrick's hard work, his perseverance, and the money he poured into advertising and promotion, paid off. Fanny was a smash hit. It ran for two years, and Merrick was on his way. He hasn't stopped since.

There followed The Matchmaker, Look Back in Anger, Romanoff and Juliet, an ill-fated musical named Jamaica, an English play, The Entertainer, with Laurence Olivier. Then came The World of Suzie Wong. He tried doing Maria Golovin, a musical by Menotti. Later he did La Plume de MaTante, Destry Rides Again, and Gypsy, a big, highly successful musical. Along with the brassy, flossy shows, he imported from England serious dramas like Epitaph for George Dillon, A Taste of Honey and Becket. In all there have been 29 Merrick productions, and, says Merrick, 21 of these have made back their money or piled up profits. This score, by comparison with the records of other producers, is astonishing.

For Merrick the theater became an all-absorbing concern, so absorbing that he has had almost no home life. His marriage seemed to dissolve gradually, and a few years ago he quietly divorced Lenore Beck. Sandwiched in somewhere between his jaunts to London, Paris, Los Angeles or Miami, between his breakfasts at the Plaza, and midnight snacks at the Ritz in Boston, between the transcontinental telephone calls, his arguments with agents, his publicity making and critic baiting, he has found time for only a paper-thin sliver of social life. "If you have too many friends," he says, "it's a commitment to socialize. I don't have time for that. You're lucky if in a lifetime you can find two or three real friends. I confine myself to a very few." One of these, it may be presumed, is Jeanne Gilbert, who goes around telling newspaper people that she is married to Merrick, a status Merrick refuses to either confirm or deny publicly. Merrick says, "Don't get any notion that my life is only theater. There's time for a private life. But nobody sees this other area of my life." Perhaps so. If it exists, he keeps it so well-hidden that not only journalists but even many of his closest working associates and friends -- if this term is truly applicable -- know nothing of it. A more likely guess is that at the center of all this activity lies a phantom. In the words of one acquaintance: "David never reveals himself. Maybe he's got nothing to reveal."

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It may be precisely this concentration of energy and attention that has made Merrick the influence he has been on the legitimate theater in America. His impact has been profound. He has brought with him innovations and he has reintroduced old but forgotten techniques into the business of the theater. He has, for example, revolutionized advertising. "trend in the theater all over again," says Harold Rome. He has brought back ballyhoo. He has experimented. When Oliver! opened, Merrick took it first to Los Angeles, rather than to New Haven or Boston or Philadelphia, the traditional tryout towns. Recently he discussed the possibility of having his shows broadcast coast to coast by television on opening nights. His impact on the business is most evident in the employment that he provides. Jim Moran's comment that," may be a bit extravagant. But there is no question that Merrick,s efforts to make the business more efficient, his development of what is, in effect, mass production" for the theater, has meant work for hundreds. Broadway without Merrick shows would begin to approximate a ghost town. Moreover, Merrick has not been afraid to open the doors to newcomers. Not only has he used young people in important roles, he has opened another door, too. Merrick fought the stagehands union to break down its anti-Negro barriers. Now the union has Negro members. Merrick is credited with being the first producer to hire a Negro stage manager. He is not a crusader. He merely hires the best people he can find.

Much criticism has been leveled at Merrick for his failure to favor original American plays. He is accused of being a "supermarket" because of his high productivity and a mere "importer" because he has brought over so many shows from England. One yound playwright voices the bitterness of many when she says, "The irony is that he could do so much better. This is a fellow who could sell manure with lantern slides if he tried. He could put on quality plays and sell them to the public."

The fact is that Merrick is first of all an entrepreneur. He is not an admirer of off-Broadway or the avant-grade. But within the limits of commercialism he has done well by quality. For every Suzie Wong, which one of his staff refers to as "a piece of crap," he has produced a Becket or an Epitaph for George Dillon. He has, in fact, virtually compelled his investors to pick up the tab for quality productions that seemed likely to lose money, by warning them that if they failed to support these shows he might cut them out of the big moneymakers. This is a brand of guts that is refreshing on Broadway.

Even victims of Merrick's formidable temper often admit that he has been, on the whole, a good influence on Broadway. Joshua Logan, the director, had so much trouble with Merrick during the production of Fanny that he refused to speak to him. According to a possibly apocryphal story, they were once trapped together in a stalled elevator for a quarter of an hour, but neither spoke a word, not even to yell for help. Yet Logan subsequently worked with Merrick again, and has said that Merrick gave him "a whole new incentive to work in the theater." Herman Shumlin, the producer in whose office Merrick served his apprenticeship, refused to talk to me about Merrick when I called him. "I'm sick of Merrick," he stormed over the phone. When I reminded him that he had helped launch Merrick, he shot back: "We all have our sins!" Yet this same Shumlin has said Merrick is "a milestone in our modern theater...I don't know of anybody in my time in the theater who's done a job of producing so well or on such a scale."

To the charge that he is an "importer" and not a producer of native American works, Merrick replies, "I see no difference if I import a play from Philadelphia, or Bucks County or from Manchester, England, or Oxford or Paris. Forget about me. What has been the record of the other producers? There was only one American play of consequence on Broadway last season -- Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? I read it and liked it and tried to get it. I rang Albee's agent but never heard from him. But other than the Albee play, what do we have on Broadway that's worth a damn other than the imports?"

Recently Merrick announced still another Broadway innovation. For years he has supported the David Merrick Foundation. Through it, he has awarded scholarships in the creative arts to Brandeis and Catholic University. Now he has pumped fresh money into the Foundation and announced his intention to produce, under its nonprofit auspices, a series of essentially noncommercial plays. "There is a certain kind of play which is an indulgence," he says. "There is no possibility of its yielding a bonanza. From an investor's point of view, it's risk without any great hope of reward. The Foundation will put on plays like that. I'm the sole contributor to the Foundation. I don't intend to take in other money. I've made a lot of money in the theater and I want to put it back. After a few years, if the Foundation has a good record I might go to the Rockefellers or the Fords for additional help."

Merrick insists that such noncommercial plays should not be brought to the marketplace handicapped by poor lighting equipment, a drafty, badly maintained theater, poor costumes or props and second-rate talent. "I'll produce these plays with Broadway standards and promote them just like any Broadway play."

The first two productions set by the Foundation are Luther, a drama by John Osborne, in which Albert Finney will play the lead, and Arturo Ui, a play by Bertolt Brecht, adapted by George Tabori and set in Chicago. Says Merrick about his Foundation, "This is a poor man's Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts."

But while Merrick conspires to build his Foundation into something resembling a respectable cultural force, he is busy, too, with plans for additional, more conventional, Broadway shows. He has, in the past year or two, talked of tapering off his high-pressure activity. He has considered, and rejected, the idea of taking a year off for a leisurely tour of the world, returning, perhaps, with a new view of his life and his work. He has also turned down offers to go into movie production, or, for that matter, into publicity. "I'm not disenchanted with the theater now," says Merrick. "But I have a low boring point. If I get bored with it, I'll go on to something else."

In the meantime, he continues with a heavy schedule of work in progress. This season, in addition to Arturo Ui and Luther, he will produce a play called The Rehearsal, by Anouilh, Dolly, a musical based on The Matchmaker, and another based on the play, The Rainmaker. He rattles off a list of a dozen other projects for the future -- a revue by Stan Freberg; a musical based on The Pickwick Papers; Casablanca; Teenager Love, a Danish musical; A Candle for St. Jude, a play about a ballet school.

That Merrick's "stormy petrel" days are over seems unlikely. There are few signs that he is mellowing, or that the chip he has borne on his shoulder since boyhood is about to be retired. But it is clear that he is doing some thinking about his career and his life. The anti-establishment Merrick says, "I find suddenly I'm some kind of tycoon. I call it a toycoon: A poor man's tycoon. By nature, I'm against The Establishment. I attack anything big. I'm like a Yorkshire terrier. Suddenly I find I'm regarded that way myself; I'm The Establishment. I don't like that much."

It will no doubt surprise Merrick, and those who conceive of him as "the biggest bastard on Broadway," that some who know him see him in a totally different light. Says Lehman Engel, "Admiring him as I do, and liking him as I basically do, I also feel for him pity -- something I've never heard anyone else express."

Jule Styne says: "David has driven a lot of people away from him. The real David Merrick -- if he turned over a new leaf tomorrow -- might lose publicity. He might not seem like such an s.o.b. to so many people. But he would grow tremendously. We desperately need David Merricks in the theater, but not the David Merrick in the false picture. We need the untiring David Merrick who has given more of himself for the success of the theater than any man I know. If he did mellow, or turn over a new leaf tomorrow, he'd be home free. He hasn't even scratched the surface of being a producer yet, or doing what he could."

And Merrick, himself? "I have a reputation for being a rough, tough son of a bitch," he says. "Sure I am -- part of the time. I have my own ideas. But that's just part of being a producer." His voice is soft and persuasive as he speaks, without defiance, without self-pity, but also without a trace of apology.