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Overnight, thousands of stickers were stuck on the walls of Manhattan's men's rooms: HAVE YOU SEEN FANNY? Po lice found a statue of a nude woman-Fanny's belly dancer-set up in the Poets' Corner in Central Park. "A wealthy Turk" (who hasn't been seen since) informed the press that he wanted to buy the belly dancer from Merrick for $2,000,000 and take her back to Istanbul. TV and radio broke out with a rash of spot commercials selling Fanny, Fanny, Fanny. Logan himself directed scenes from the play that were presented on The Ed Sullivan Show. And for the first time in history, the Times and Trib carried full-page theater ads -for Fanny.
Fanny ran for 888 performances and made Merrick and his investors $847,726.74 clear profit on an investment of $275,000. Merrick was in, and he meant to stay in. With a shrewdness and energy that scared his rivals stiff, he moved to consolidate and exploit his position.
Crafty Craftsman. In a matter of months he put together the slickest production company on Broadway. On Merrick's permanent staff today there are only two executives (General Manager Jack Schlissel, Production Manager Samuel "Biff" Liff), four assistants, five theatrical technicians. But Merrick has tuned this team to an excited pitch of efficiency that no other production office can approach.
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, get back to New York in less than 48 hours.
His "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 TV camera could catch a certain outfield billboard; he concluded that the sign was out of range, so he didn't buy the space.