Word: merricks
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...Merrick works harder than anybody. He starts at 8 a.m. and goes full throttle until after midnight. All day long, he phones, phones, phones. No notes, no memos, no conferences. "He's got a memory like a Pentagon computer," says Schlissel. "Carries it all in his head. Twenty, 30 projects at once. Never forgets a fact, never misses a trick." With his office in his head, Merrick is totally mobile. On an after-dinner impulse, he may dart into the street, grab a cab, race to Kennedy Airport, jump on a jet to London, snap up a property in Manchester...
...reconnaissance missions" have been swackingly successful. In an era when imported plays have dominated Broadway, Merrick has skimmed most of the cream off the import market. He frequently gets there first, offers top bid, makes selections both shrewd and estimable. He can watch a London play and calculate to the dollar the cost of producing it on Broadway. And what...
...Merrick buys, Merrick produces with crafty mastery of his craft. He has a strong sense of the large theatrical effect, yet no detail is too small to obsess his attention. He checks every footlight mike to make sure it is cased in rubbe-otherwise, the mikes pick up the actor's footfalls. He prowls about the sets in narrow-eyed search of peeling paint. He even makes elaborate taxi tours of the entire New York area to inspect all the billboards he has paid for. Once he climbed to a high perch in Yankee Stadium to see if a panning...
Making Waves. When it comes to nursing nickels, Merrick can scrounge with any Scrooge on the street. In one of his plays a character was supposed to eat strawberries, and strawberries the actor got on opening night; but when the reviews turned up terrible, Merrick instantly reduced him to radishes. Barbra Streisand, who appeared in Merrick's / Can Get It for You Wholesale in 1962, is still squawking because David bought her shoes by A. S. Beck instead of Capezio. Carol Channing reports that one night when she was slipping out of the Hello, Dolly! stage door in a full...
...Merrick is cunning when it comes to handling talent. "Artists are supersensitive children," he says. "They have to be whipped sometimes, but they have to be whipped with lettuce leaves." Directors, playwrights, designers, songwriters, choreographers-they all say that Merrick is patience on a monument when they come to him with their problems. "The man is a born midwife," says a playwright. "He knows just when to gentle, just when to press." The thing he does best is stay away: he never goes to rehearsals unless he is asked to, shows confidence even if he doesn't feel...