Word: merricks
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...Captain Hook." Merrick's waves come in all sizes. The tsunami is terrifying. Says a man who survived it: "He is convulsed. He goes purple. The vein in his forehead stands up three-eighths of an inch. And the hatred in his eyes!" He cuts up his victim "with a tongue you could shave with." He fires people left and right. Sometimes he even throws things. Sometimes people throw things back. Last December, when Merrick flew off the handle and fired Director Tony Page for not making cuts in Inadmissible Evidence, Actor Nicol Williamson threw a glass of beer...
Detective in a Tree. Merrick gives as good as he gets, and he never stops fighting for a Merrick production. But since he flacked for Fanny he has refined his methods. By cultivating a public character, he has set up a walking advertisement for his shows; by involving that character in a sensational series of front-page fratches, he has kept those shows in the public eye. His first big feud was with Jackie Gleason, who started missing performances of Take Me Along when it was coolly received by the critics. David decided that Gleason was malingering, ordered a private...
Next victim: Anna Maria Alberghet-ti, who said she was too sick to appear in Carnival and dragged herself off to the hospital. Merrick sent the lady a bouquet of plastic roses and demanded a lie-detector test. At various times since then, he has flown into snits over Richard Rodgers, Arthur Miller, Barry Goldwater, Mayor Lindsay, the New York Telephone Co., the New York City Transit Authority, and the Republican Party (when accused of calling Henry Cabot Lodge "a broken-down Republican," he denied indignantly that he had used "a phrase so redundant"). He has even taken out after...
Clobbering the Critics. More than anything else, it's the critics who bring out the beast (and the best) in Merrick. To a considerable degree, the reviewers who write for the New York Times and the New York Herald Tribune can make or break any show that comes to Broadway. Producers have always complained about the critics' power, but nobody did anything until, from motives no doubt crass as well as cultural, David loaded his sling...
...another ad, he gave the whole scrivening lot a glorious razzberry: even before Subways Are for Sleeping received its predictable panning, Merrick collected seven men with the same names as the New York daily reviewers and sent them to previews of Subways. A week after the show opened, Merrick stuck tongue firmly in cheek and printed their names, their pictures and their reviews of the show (all raves) in a great big blat of a full-page ad. And in the course of a long guerrilla war against Howard Taubman of the Times, he pointedly reprinted one of Taubman...