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Mental Discipline. He was shy, and sometimes spoke so softly that he could scarcely be heard, but when he had made a decision his will never wavered.
He decided to win a scholarship to St. Louis' Washington University, and then to go on to law school "for mental discipline." In college he grew a mustache "to make me look older," and just before graduating from law school he informed some other young lawyers that he had decided to marry a wealthy woman.
He didn't quite do that, but at least she had a little money. Her name was Lenore Beck, and her mother had died six months before, leaving an estate of $116,319.66. Soon after the wedding, the young couple took off for New York, where David changed his name to Merrick: a cross between Margulois and Garrick, the name of the most famous 18th century English actor. He never looked back. At 54, Merrick still hates his home town so violently that when he flies west he refuses to fly TWA because he thinks TWA planes pass over St. Louis.
Fanny-or Bust. The David Merrick who arrived in New York in 1939 looked like the last man in the world who would ever conquer Broadway. Shy and alarmingly thin, he had a bleeding ulcer and shed "a faint greenish glow." But he was shrewd, and he decided to case the joint before he tried to take it over. One day he called on Producer-Director Herman Shumlin and invested $5,000 in The Male Animal. Merrick made $18,000 on the deal, and by watching rehearsals and eavesdropping on conferences he also accumulated valuable experience. Six years later, after co-producing two turkeys (The Willow and I, Bright Boy), he signed on as Shumlin's general manager; by 1951 he was ready to break the bank or bust.
Fanny was the big gamble of Merrick's career, and he stood to his bets with tremendous nerve and style. He made three trips to Europe before Marcel Pagnol agreed to sell the rights to his famous cinema trilogy-Marius, Fanny, Cesar. And then Merrick spent three months nailing down the subsidiary rights and three months persuading Josh Logan to go see Pagnol's pictures and three months marking time until he was ready to direct the show and six months working with the librettist and the songwriter and three months signing up Ezio Pinza and Walter Slezak and two months building the supporting cast and two months wrangling with the Shuberts about a theater and three months working up an advertising campaign and two months in rehearsal and two months on the road and-and then at last the great day came. After three years of brain-bruising, tongue-twisting, leg-laming, wallet-wrecking labor, Fanny opened on Broadway with an unprecedented advance sale of $1,000,000 And then ran into trouble. Most of the critics liked the show, but they said so in such dull reviews that the public stopped buying tickets.
$847,726. Merrick foresaw the worst: if he did not do something drastic, and do it fast, the advance sale would vanish and Fanny would fold. He did something so drastic that dear old Broadway hasn't been quite the same since. He promptly signed on a raft of new pressagents and launched a promotion campaign three times as vast and ten times as vulgar as anything the theater had ever seen.