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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 and a sudsy right at Merrick's head and sent him staggering into a backstage trash barrel. It is on such occasions, of course, that Merrick's critics up periscope and fire all tubes. He has been called "Typhoid David" and "Captain Hook" and "the Krishna Menon of Broadway." Director Tony Richardson says: "He's like a woman-sweet and bitchy at the same time." Anthony Quinn, who played in Merrick's Becket and Tchin-Tchin, recalls that when his vocal cords were so sore they were bleeding, Merrick snarled: "As long as you can talk, you go on." Says Quinn: "I may not like the son-of-a-bitch, but I've got to admit that he produces plays well and makes them work." Anthony Newley, who survived two stints with Merrick in Stop the World, I Want to Get Off and The Roar of the Greasepaint! The Smell of the Crowd, mutters grimly: "Hitler didn't die at the end of World War II.
He went into show business."
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 detective to sit detectably in a tree outside Gleason's house. After a few days of that, and a few weeks of verbal ping-pong in the press, Merrick cheerfully delivered the cruncher: he announced that since Lloyds of London had agreed to pay him $3,000 for every performance his star missed, Gleason was actually doing him a favor by staying home.
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 Santa Clans; last December, with characteristic gallows humor, he sent out Christmas cards showing St. Nick hanging by the neck.