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But inside the gamin there is another gambler, and this one is for real. The name of the game he plays is losers-weepers, and he plays with a murderous will to win. "I know what's going on in the garbage can," he says flatly, and he fiercely enjoys rubbing other people's noses in it. "It is not enough for me to succeed," he once remarked. "It is also necessary for others to fail." He despises weakness, and when he sees it he instinctively lashes out with his terrible swift tongue. "Congratulations," he once announced to a conceited actor after his opening-night performance. "You will be tomorrow what you think you are today."
Dead in the Cage. Why is he so nasty? "He's so scared of rejection, he can't risk a real relationship," says a friend. "So then you get the success syndrome. His whole career is a colossal plot to prove he doesn't need anybody." In fact, his private life is a wasteland. He is living apart from his second wife, Jeanne, and their two-year-old daughter. He has had casual relationships with "a hundred women," but he always feels that they are trying to "entrap" him. "Women either leave the door open," he says coldly, "or they find me dead on the bottom of the cage." Men friends are few, and none are really close. Scarcely anybody knows where he lives; he changes apartments like shirts. After a big Broadway opening, while the rest of the company is celebrating together, Merrick often eats alone in an all-night deli off Times
Square. "I'm a loner," he says. "I have the soul of an alley cat."
Will to Power. Merrick has been lonely from the day he was born-in St. Louis on Nov. 27, 1911. His name was David Margulois in those days, and he was the youngest of seven children. "We were very poor," he says. His father owned a series of small grocery stores; his mother lived in fantasies -"a Blanche DuBois." The marriage, which had been arranged in Poland by a matchmaker, was bitterly unhappy, and when David was seven his parents were divorced. The children were all brought into court, and one of them recalls that when the judge asked David to speak he could only stand there miserably and bite his nails.
After the divorce, David went to live with his mother, then with a married sister, then with his mother again. At one point his father remarried his mother, but David ran away from home because, he says now, "it was like living on the set of Virginia Woolf." His parents got divorced again, and David lived with one or another of his sisters, bouncing from home to home, school to school. "In one house," says a member of the family, "he played second fiddle to the dog."
To escape the wretchedness of his childhood, David developed a will to power that was directed by three dominant ideas: money, status, theater. He kept himself in funds by running a paper route and doing odd jobs. He bought neat dark suits, "the sort of clothes I imagined a gentleman would wear." And in high school, where he was cast as "a poet and a dreamer" in a play about a multimillionaire, David fell under the spell of the stage and one day remarked to a friend that he had decided to make a career in the theater.