(9 of 10)
Clobbering the Critics. More than anything else, it's the critics who bring out the beast (and the best) in Merrick. To a considerable degree, the reviewers who write for the New York Times and the New York Herald Tribune can make or break any show that comes to Broadway. Producers have always complained about the critics' power, but nobody did anything until, from motives no doubt crass as well as cultural, David loaded his sling.
His attack has been conducted at ev ery turn with a grand sense of theater. Sometimes he has needled: he querulously complained that Playwright Jean Kerr, wife of the Trib's Walter Kerr, kept nudging her husband while the performance was going on-the implication being that Walter's reviews reflected Jean's opinions. Sometimes, without bothering to explain the joke, he has secretly decorated his enemies with insulting little signs. Only last week, after years of resenting The New Yorker magazine's theater reviews, he inserted an advertisement in which the first let ters of each line form an acrostic that sort of makes a monkey out of the magazine that printed it. The ad:
CACTUS FLOWER HELLO, DOLLY! INADMISSIBLE EVIDENCE MARAT/DE SADE PHILADELPHIA, HERE I COME!
In another ad, he gave the whole scrivening lot a glorious razzberry: even before Subways Are for Sleeping received its predictable panning, Merrick collected seven men with the same names as the New York daily reviewers and sent them to previews of Subways. A week after the show opened, Merrick stuck tongue firmly in cheek and printed their names, their pictures and their reviews of the show (all raves) in a great big blat of a full-page ad. And in the course of a long guerrilla war against Howard Taubman of the Times, he pointedly reprinted one of Taubman's reviews in Greek and suggested sympathetically that the poor chap required "vocational guidance."
Savage Joke. Last week Merrick's Marauders struck again at Taubman's successor, Stanley Kauffmann. On a recent trip to London, Merrick found 100 copies of The Philanderer, a 1952 novel by Critic Kauffmann that falls pat to Merrick's purpose-the book was the occasion of an unsuccessful prosecution for obscenity in England. (" 'Darling,' she whispered. How lazy, a woman's first words after lovemaking; how husky and bare"). Cackling wickedly, Merrick bought up the lot and shipped it home. Then he mailed 89 copies to editors and columnists all over the U.S. -and ten copies to key editors of the New York Times. Said Merrick: "If I'm lucky, I'll get arrested for sending unseemly matter through the mails."
It is a savage joke, but then Merrick savagely resents the power of the critics, and he will stop at nothing legal in his drive to whittle it away. "Sure, I'm playing this thing for publicity," he says, "but I'm also playing a deeper game. I want people to stop swallowing the pap these mediocrities are churning out and start thinking for themselves about the theater."