The Outrageous David Merrick - 5 May 2000

An extraordinary man has just died at the age of 88, once a great force in the American theatre, though all that force and energy were extinguished by a stroke 15 years ago and now, even to theatregoers here, his name is an echo from the heyday of such as, say, Carol Channing, Glenda Jackson.

He was not a great man and, as a professional curmudgeon and meany, he would have been the first to repudiate the attribute of goodness.

But his particular talent sends us back in recollection to people like Chicago's 19th century master criminal, dubbed the Napoleon of crime, who lived most of his high life in London as a very respectable host and patron of the arts.

And in this country I think with relish of the late Harry Gerguson of Brooklyn who, assuming the title of Prince Michael Alexandrovich Dmitry Obelensky, a young refugee from the Bolshevik Revolution, applied to enter Harvard and was rapturously received by the president of Harvard no less as if he were conferring an honour on the most ancient of American universities.

However, rubber cheques, it turned out, were not acceptable currency at Harvard and when his bank account turned out to be as fictitious as his title a greatly embarrassed president saw him on his way.

He was deported to France, whence, having served a month or two in a Paris jail, he somehow re-entered the United States, reinvented himself as the last of the Romanovs, sold himself first to Broadway and then to some writer friends in Hollywood who admired the gall of a cheerful fraud who in one and the same breath could proclaim himself to be the last of the Romanov princes and at the same time the first Jewish boy from Brooklyn to claim the title.

They set him up in a restaurant, indeed it was the best in Hollywood, and he lived out his days and nights there in opulent grandeur disposing the favoured seating arrangements of the stars, according to his own personal liking for them, despatching the disliked to the corners of a back room which he would occasionally deign to visit to refold an untidy napkin and see that its crest, of the double-headed eagle, appeared on top.

Well the 88-year-old we're celebrating now is nothing like so colourful or conspicuously fraudulent as Harry Gerguson. But like him David Merrick, that's the name, David Merrick succeeded not in spite of his gall but because of it.

David Merrick then was born in 1912 in St Louis, Missouri - birthplace of among others the late T S Eliot and Ginger Rogers. But David Merrick was not meant, by nature, to stay long in his native state.

He was stage struck and moved, as if by a magnet, in his youth to Broadway. Theatre was the young Merrick's passion.

And early on he adopted a well-defined, if not theatrical image, his flashing brown black eyes were underpinned by an appropriately waxed black moustache.

In the early days a high stiff collar, grey silk tie, wide cuffs, distinct cufflinks - all in all he brought to life the typical early motion picture villain, the one you'll remember who led astray innocent lasses with his villainous demitasses.

I don't know if Merrick ever had an itch to be in a play - that's to say, to be an actor - but I believe from the start he spurned such an ambition. In fact in life he strongly disliked actors but, discovering that they were essential to any play he wished to produce, he had to put up with them.

Running things, alone, was his forte and he made it clear from the start that democracy had played no part in running his affairs.

There was a kind of wild courage in this. Very few plays - musicals certainly - dared take the risk of being launched on one man's money.

Today a New York journalist wrote: "To finance a Broadway show you need either some huge multimedia conglomerate or a list of backers as long as a football team."

David Merrick at first borrowed but pretty soon put up his own money and in time was responsible for smashes like Hello Dolly, 42nd Street, Gypsy.

He did not restrict himself, as most producers do, to one style of play or musical, he leapt at anything he happened to like which included, one memorable time, Peter Brook's Marat/Sade.

And Merrick had a peculiar virtue, I suppose you'd call it, he had a sort of fore knowledge, a pricking of the thumbs, that something he very much wanted to put on would be wounded by the critics and killed at the box office.

But, unlike the rest of us, Merrick would not say: "Well, win some, lose some" - he regarded hostile critics and an indifferent public as a challenge. He would promote a flop in a peculiar way.

He despised advertising and public relations men, not for the thing they did but because of the poor, amateur way they did it. He shared H L Mencken's sour belief that nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the public.

So, for example, he produced a play called Subways Are For Sleeping - a title practically invented for disparaging critics. They all slated it.

So Mr Merrick riffled through the Manhattan telephone book, picked out, say, half a dozen men with exactly the same names as the most prominent critics, paid them a handsome fee, then took a big ad in the New York Times signing these famous names under reviews he'd composed which varied between the enthusiastic and the stunning.

His most audacious attempt at the reincarnation of a failing play was to put in the papers an advertisement announcing that his theatre had seen a rat or two let loose in the auditorium. A threat to the public health and safety he wasn't going to countenance.

So he announced he would close the play until the theatre could be cleansed of the foul invaders and re-open with his splendid play as the most hygienic theatre in New York.

He returned all the booked seats, the tickets, to the tune of $1m which he got back in the early revival and subsequent success of the show he'd closed. The public flocked to see a play with such a bizarre and amusing history.

He assured the success of another play, which New York's most influential critic had damned, by printing the critic's name joined to the name of his secret girlfriend, framing the couple's names inside a big pink heart and publishing this as a newspaper ad on Valentine's Day with the caption: "People are holding hands in the theatre again."

I bring up David Merrick here not for the tricks he played on theatre but for the strong, unmentioned effect he had on those advertising men who, in the past quarter century or so, have run the election campaigns of the mightiest in the land, in your land no doubt as much as in this land.

I remember, must be 40 years ago, being introduced to a fellow reporter - a first rate magazine Washington bureau chief - and he mentioned to me, very much as a state secret, that Senator Nixon's campaign was being handled, as we were learning to say, by H & E. I'd never heard of them, apparently two whizz-kids from an up-and-coming advertising firm.

In ways I could only guess at they created a new, acceptable image of Nixon and a brutal line of talk. I remember one phrase about the Democrats having presided over "20 years of treason". Anyway Mr Nixon got in by a landslide.

I learned that H & E stood for Haldeman and Ehrlichman.

Now of course, the best politicians - I should amend that to say the most effective or shameless campaigners - have known forever that well-informed readers and studious editorials don't win elections: short snappy slogans do.

Assertions, preferably alarming - they don't need to be true.

I recall with matching shame Lloyd George's great chant that won the so-called Khaki Election of 1919: "Hang the Kaiser" and "Homes fit for heroes to live in".

Lloyd George went roaring in, though the Kaiser lived out another 22 years on a country estate in Holland and the prime minister, alas, was unable to provide homes for heroes or non-heroes.

I myself have known two or three advertising copywriters who moved on to politics and would be the first to admit their debt to the outrageous David Merrick.

And with the advent of television it's got to the point that the winning trick can require nothing more than a ringing phrase and one memorable picture - film shot.

Do you remember "Did you ever have it so good?" and the reverse "Are you better off today than you were four years ago?"

Ronald Reagan's frequent, rueful aside at practically anything dogmatic Jimmy Carter said?

"There he goes again," Mr Reagan would say with a shaking head. Mr Carter looked foolish and the audience roared.

President Ford is remembered for one phrase which he spoke the day after he took over from the abdicating and disgraced Richard Nixon.

"At long last," he said, "our national nightmare is over."

Mr Ford hated the phrase but the speechwriter who composed it begged him to say it. He did and it's the only memorable sentence he ever spoke.

Many people that President Bush's election was assured by one brief, sinister television advertisement in the election of 1988.

The Democrat was the governor of Massachusetts, one Michael Dukakis, and the Bush people heard that his state - like many others, incidentally - allowed jailed rapists to go on weekend parole after years of rehabilitation.

The Bush people showed a revolving door and a shadowy black man coming out of it on to the street. It terrified legions of voters.

The best the Democrats could do was a pathetic film shot, to show they were strong on defence, showing a tiny Mickey Mouse figure - a helmeted Dukakis just visible peeping out of a huge tank. It convulsed legions of voters.

If David Merrick had been running the Bush campaign he probably would have sold the Bush people on the outrageous black man and contrived to get the Democrats to film the ludicrous Mickey Mouse tank shot.

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