“I don't like New York anymore. Here in Boca Raton I've gotten used to a nice quiet life. I play golf, I swim, I read, I have friends, I go to local theaters. All the Shuberts are gone now, except for me and my progeny–five children... I once called up Bernie Jacobs to taunt him, “Are you a Shubert? Are you a relative of mine?” I asked, but he wouldn't talk to me. None of my kids went into the theater, and thank God for that. It was a blessing they didn't.”

Lawrence (Larry) Shubert Lawrence Jr.’s statement made in 1990 from his Boca Raton house was perhaps more relief and resignation than fact. The truth is that he made frantic attempts to hold onto his Broadway birthright, to which one insider mocked, “This was bowling and Lawrence would have been knocked down anyway.” Further comments by Lawrence reveal his pain: "It was my Inheritance, everybody knows that. I call what the lawyers did the hundred million dollar train robbery ... I felt I let my ancestors down.”

From the start the Shuberts believed that being tough and making people fear them was a success formula. They trusted no one. ''You always have to remember that about the Shuberts, insiders say, they trusted no one.'' Larry Lawrence broke that formula. Lied to, tricked, betrayed and setup, Lawrence lost the theaters to the lawyers who were at one time loyal employees of the founding Shuberts.

That was the first time since 1900, that "the largest, most powerful and durable theatrical empire in the history of American theater was managed by people who were not members of the Shubert family."

The Beginning

It began with the sons of a religious fanatic who emigrated from Europe to Syracuse in the early 1880’s. There were three brothers and four sisters in all. Their father David, was a failure as a father and as a business man. He regularly beat his sons and forced Lee at ten, and Sam at eight to quit school so they could work to support him. For the rest of their lives the sons would deny their fathers example and lack of motivation and remained almost defiantly inattentive to their Jewish heritage. They did not drink and were stunningly hard working. The opposite of their father.

That the Shubert brothers, Sam, Lee (Levi) and J.J., (Jacob) nearly illiterate and from humble beginnings could become the most ruthless titans in the history of the American theater speaks volumes about their defiant amoral grit. At first they were thought of almost comically but hat was to change as people quickly learned not to underestimated their fierce will and determination.

"From the beginning they were “wheeler-dealers,” who fought viscously, even among themselves. They instinctively understood star power and were excellent businessmen rarely financing their own enterprises with their own money."

The Shuberts family life was from the beginning a series of battles and betrayals. They had mistresses, violent tempers, second wives, secret marriages and divorces, and children that were both abused and denied. Ego battles, power struggles and greed consumed them. They put all their energy and ability into their ambitions and mocked any family members who came after them. Lee, foreshadowing the family fate was heard to say of the next generation,

“God help our firm if both of us (Sam and Lee) ever die.”

Sam Shubert was the real force behind the Shuberts, he was determined to escape his fathers legacy. John, J.J.’s son, once related a story that would show the pain their father wrought.

“'My grandfather was a religious man who believed the lord would provide if he kept the faith, John said scornfully. No one in the family liked to talk about it, but one of the younger daughters, Lisa, died of malnutrition that first winter. The other brothers and other sisters rarely mentioned it, and when they did the women would get tears in their eyes and father and Lee would always look away”

From that beginning, with little education and a father who offered neither financial nor moral guidance the three Shubert boys became responsible for their own survival and for that of their family from a startling early age. They quickly demonstrated a shrewdness that was to earn them more money from theater than anyone else in the history of American show business.

Empire builders

Sam and Lee were frail and small, J.J. was much stockier. He was a bully who found out that if you're really tough, people leave you alone. Sam, the dreamy eyed, painfully thin, pale favorite of their mother started by shinning shoes outside the Grand Opera House in Syracuse. He was invited in from the cold by a Mr. Plumber who felt sorry for him and liked him enough to hire him as a program boy for $1.50 a week.

Soon he was selling candy and fruit with an enterprising friend Willie Provol. As Provol put it, “We became the boy candy kings of Syracuse." Within eighteen months the enterprising Sam was promoted to the box office. Sam, like Lee was a wizard with numbers, able to add amounts in his head and to quote daily grosses to the penny. By the end of 1888, he was promoted to assistant treasurer at the Grand Opera House. The following year the foremost theater in town, the Wieting, offered him a position as treasurer

Mrs. John Weiting, who had inherited the theater from her late husband, was so impressed by Sam she made him the house manager. Sam's first move was to hire Lee. Sam's ambitions were always foremost and it wasn't long before he decided to produce his own shows. With his charm and gentle ways, Sam succeeded in raising five thousand dollars from friends and local businessmen. He went to New York and bought the rights to Charles Hoyt’s, A Texas Steer. Sam still needed a theater to house his show. At that time all the theaters were controlled by a Theater Syndicate headed by a man named Erlanger. Impressed by Sam’s ability to buy the rights from a well known playwright he booked Sam’s show into his first-class theaters.

Sam was a quick study, soon he would find some better attractions and reroute A Texas Steer into one night stands and old run down theaters before eventually dropping it. He acquired another show and this time knowing the game, he bribed one of the Theater Syndicates bookers to get a theater. Later Sam would outfox Erlanger again by enlisting one of the Syndicate partners, Samuel Nixon as a secret ally.

Together, behind Erlanger’s back, Nixon would help finance the Shuberts shows for a percentage. Sam learned to deal with the Syndicate by using Erlanger’s own strategies against him.

Bribery, double cross, evasion, and lying became the Shubert way of doing business

Sam would lease the Grand and the Bastabe in Syracuse, but the Syndicate still owned most of the theaters, so he decided to go other cities and sign leases in less know theaters throughout upstate New York. To avoid Erlanger fighting him he put the leases in other peoples names. Sam ended up in Rochester where the only available theaters were bypassed by the Syndicate because they were shabby and jinxed by repetitive failures. He leased two theaters, Abe Wolf, the owner of an opposition theater told Sam he didn’t have a chance in hell and wouldn't last more than two weeks.

Undeterred Sam and J.J. went to place an order for posters for their show. They were told by Mr. Stalbrodt, ‘an insulting bully’ that he wouldn't do it. Eventually after many pleas by the brothers he agreed to print the posters, but only for the week, and only if J.J. paid in advance and allowed Stalbrodt to decide where the posters would be put.

He then made J.J. pay in advance for covering them up with blank paper after the week. He told the Shuberts they would fail. Stalbrodt was even more pessimistic than Wolf, he didn’t think the Shuberts would last out the week.

The Shuberts made them both look bad. They lowered prices, and both theaters filled up for six months. Then just for spite, a trait the Shuberts were to embrace warmly, J.J. opened a bill posting business himself. He charged a quarter of what Stalbrodt did and succeeded in attracting local and national advertisers. J.J. himself would work at nights with stagehands tearing down Stalbrodt’s posters, throwing them into the river and replacing them with his posters. J.J. got the best locations by giving the landlords free tickets to all his shows. By the time Stalbrodt realized what was going on it was too late.

As J.J. gleefully recalled to John, “We Shuberts meant business.”

Sam decided it was time to move up and go to go New York, the heart of the commercial theater. On March 31st, 1900 after three months in New York he found a theater and signed a three year lease. Lee and J.J. remained in upstate New York tending to the other Shubert theaters. When Lee found out that Sam’s name alone was on the marquee as lessee, and on the program covers as manager and he was left out, he became enraged.

One Saturday night he went to New York and put up a new sign with both their names. When Sam found out on Monday morning, he called his attorney to protest that Lee had acted without authority, but Lee was tired of being Sam’s underling. He was the oldest son and resented taking orders from his younger brother. Lee’s shame can be seen in the fact that all his life he maintained that Sam was the first born

Resentment and competition would follow them throughout their life. Bitter feelings between them would become Broadway folklore. John described their relationship this way,

“ .... Their was jealousy and rivalry between them at a very early age, but heaven help you if you attacked one to the other, they would rise up and defend each other. Among themselves there was a rivalry. Sam at first did not want Lee or J.J. in New York because he wanted all the glory for himself. But as young people just getting started in a rough, cut throat business they were deeply dependent on each other. They never made many friends because they basically didn’t trust people. And so they stuck to themselves.”

By 1905 Sam had accumulated six theaters in New York City, a group of theaters in upstate New York and theaters all along the major railway routes in Boston, Buffalo, Cleveland, Chicago and St. Louis. When Sam tried to lease a famed Pittsburgh theater, Erlanger threatened to block the lease by blacklisting the theater owners if they signed. Sam responded by doing what the Shuberts always did. He filled a lawsuit, claiming restraint of trade. Sam decided to take the train to Pittsburgh himself to make sure the deal was done. It was an important battle for him. It would be one he would not live to fight. On May 11, 1905, Sam’s train would crash. Two days later he died.

Sam, in what would become a family theme did not adequately prepare Lee or J.J. for command. That Sam could not have progressed so rapidly without his brothers did not matter. It was that failure and unwillingness to plan for an orderly succession that would come to define the Shuberts. Sam’s will left Lee in charge, and in a family that had precious little family feeling, the wounds became deeper. J.J. and Lee would battle to the end.

Setting the Stage

Lee and J.J. had fought from childhood on, that rivalry only grew when Lee was named the successor to Sam. J. J. accused Lee in the papers of stealing millions from him. Lee countered that the business had lost money from J.J.’s lousy shows. Their battles would rage until a week before Christmas in 1953 when Lee collapsed with a broken artery preceded by upside-down vision. At Mount Sinai hospital Lee lay close to death.

J.J. considered going to the hospital. “My father wanted to visit Lee” John said, “but backed off when he thought about how Lee might react.” J.J. also feared that when business associates heard of the visit he would yet again be placed in a subservient role, the approval seeker going to receive absolution from the supreme power broker. J.J. did not go until Lee was in a coma and family members sat in vigil. On Christmas Day J.J. rode with John to the hospital. At 5:24 Dr. Sidney Greenberg entered the room to tell them Lee had died. While the others sat in shocked silence, J.J. began to weep uncontrollably. Several million dollars assumed to be “Ice Money” was found in Lee’s safe after his death. Ice money came from hoarding, then selling tickets to shows at higher than box office value, or scalping. The theater owners would use a scalper who would sell tickets on the street and split the extra profits.

Lee had in his will anticipated a power struggle for his position. He surely knew of J.J’s desire to rule yet left his sisters son Milton in charge. Lee knew Milton was unable to rule and would not be able to fight off J.J.’s counterattack. “Do you dare compare yourself to me?” Lee once asked Milton in verbal barrage that underscored Lee’s dominance and Milton’s weakness. Milton was just another way to humiliate J.J. It was Lee’s last turn of the screw, from his grave. A plan to prolong and complicate J.J.’s rise to the position Lee had so cherished since Sam’s death.

J.J. takes charge, the Shubert way

On January 1, 1954, while Milton was attending a meeting at one of the Shuberts attorneys at 1440 Broadway, J.J. made an unprecedented trip across west forty-fourth street to seize his kingdom. Accompanying J.J. was John, J.J.’s attorney, his longtime friend and burly ex cop Ben Mallam and a locksmith named Fisher who had a reputation for speed. J.J. then hurled Milton’s possessions out of the office and ordered them taken down to the sidewalk in front of the Shubert Theater. During J.J.’s rampage Milton’s secretary rushed to the theater only to find a cocky, bristling, buoyant J.J. seated authoritatively behind Lee’s desk.

Milton’s with his attorney ran down from his office, his attorney challenged J.J., insisting that Milton was in rightful position of the premises. J.J. attempted to punch him in the face and was restrained by Mallam. John informed Milton gently but firmly that he was locked out of his office for good. Milton fought over Lee’s estate for many years but not for his right to assume leadership. He in fact had no further role in the day to day affairs of the business. He may well have realized that the job was more than he could handle. Milton went to Florida and retired. He died at age sixty-six on March 8, 1967. J.J. would run the business until he grew old, feeble and partly senile. It was then that John took control of Broadway.

J.J.’s Heir

J. J. often bragged that he was the only one who had produced a direct heir. But John was never treated like an heir apparent by J.J., he was treated like a Shubert. J.J. was for the most part an absentee parent. John's first school was the Scudder School for girls where as a young man he was sometimes seen in drag. He was seven when his continually warring parents finally divorced in 1917. John was left with the impression that family life was treacherous. “My parents could agree on absolutely nothing,” he recalled, “and I played them against each other. I think I found out it was the only way to survive." He was to be browbeaten for years by his father with his self esteem suffering accordingly. John like all the Shuberts was never trained to succeed, indeed J.J. had almost feared the competition from his son.

John was truly the last Shubert to run the business according to the methods his father and uncles had established. After John the great treachery and fear the Shuberts instilled would be gone. The intimidation and rampant desire would fade as would the Shubert way of life. Larry Lawrence would trust. On the last day of Johns life, Friday, November 16, 1962, John arrived at his office on the sixth floor of the Sardi building just before noon and announced that he was going on a business trip to Florida. His secretaries knew what that meant. John was going to see his second wife. In the Shubert tradition his two children by his secret wife, John Jason and Sally, would be denied and cast aside. Before John left on his final journey he told his attorneys Shoenfeld and Jacobs to watch the business and take care of it like he would. The attorneys would do just that.

John boarded the train at Penn Station at 4:35 for Clearwater Florida. John aged 52 would be found dead by trips end.
“'I was John’s assistant and next in line” Larry Lawrence Jr., would say “nobody questioned that. I had worked for the Shuberts for thirty-six years, integrated into the business since the time I was a youngster. Employees like Shoenfeld and Jacobs sat outside John’s office and mine and waited their turn. I sat in with John on all meetings behind closed doors and the lawyers came in only when John asked them to.”

Setting up Larry

In November 1962 the Forty-seven year old Larry Shubert Lawrence, Jr., took his place at the head of the Shubert Organization. In fact though, it was the long time Shubert attorneys Gerald Shoenfeld and Bernard Jacobs who made the decisions immediately after John’s death. Shoenfeld who went to work for the Shuberts in 1949 and helped them with an antitrust suit brought by the Government, was very well schooled in the Shubert ways.

They advised Lawrence to hire Howard Teichmann, a playwright and teacher of a famous creative writing course at Barnard College. Teichman had worked with Orson Wells and John Houseman and was widely respected. Teichman’s wife Evelyn explained that, “Right after John died, the lawyers called every day with a new crisis and because my husband loved the theater, he took the ten-thousand-dollar a year job that Shoenfeld offered him. It was really the lawyers who hired Tyke, but they allowed Lawrence to think he did.” Teichman wrote Lawrence’s speeches, Shubert press releases, and the articles that appeared under Lawrence's byline in Variety. Teichman’s secretary said that “he was the cultural attache for Mr. Lawrence, who was not a man of wide knowledge or a cultivated man.” Teichman was also hired to be Lawrence’s companion.

To give Lawrence an illusion of stature, the lawyers arranged for him to receive awards. “When I won a gold medal for encouraging young writers, my associates, including Shoenfeld and Jacobs, gave me a luncheon at Sardi’s ... Both Shonefeld and Jacobs signed the city of hope plaque presented to me,” Lawrence recalled bitterly in 1990.

“People laughed behind Lawrence’s back and even though he only spoke Mr. Teichman’s words, Mr. Lawrence had some real power too,” Teichman’s secretary, Valerie Mitchell said. Lawrence himself seemed to lack the relish for power, he was though very concerned with the box office receipts, because Broadway was slowly declining. Lawrence once said in a revealing quote, “I always regarded the business as purely buying and selling.”

He did not have John’s desire to prove a demanding, demeaning, disapproving father wrong or even John’s sense of family tradition. He would be told many times by Teichman to remember that “he was a Shubert and he mustn’t forget that.” He inherited his fathers lack of drive and fatally like his father, he drank.

Lawrence was born in Philadelphia on February 18, 1916, the Shuberts, he would say , “were a strange family, not at all like normal people. Their life was their business. My father wouldn’t make that commitment, and Lee and J.J. treated him like an outsider.” A Shubert in-law and a good friend of Lawrence’s, Marjorie Light, spoke of how Lawrence’s father was “a practical joker, a fun loving kind of guy on the surface but a loner underneath” and noted that, “Lawrence’s father hated him.” Lawrence's family was, in the Shubert mold divided. “My father and Milton couldn't stand each other, just like Lee and J.J.” Lawrence Jr. would say, and before his death he would repeat sadly to his son Lee how his father always hated him

“I wasn’t trained in business, but you learn by osmosis anyway, on the job, as both John and I did. But I wish now I had been a lawyer, so I could have protected myself against Shoenfeld and Jacobs." Lawrence worked his way up in the theater business and became the manager of the Majestic, a key Shubert theater that put on hits like South Pacific and the Music Man. He worked there up to John’s death.

Tall and well built he looked quite the part, but Eileen Kelly who became his secretary recalled that Lawrence, “never wanted the job until it was taken from him. He really didn’t want to make huge decisions. He never was a catalyst the way John was and he was never as involved or concerned as John. He never wanted to be more than the manager of the Majestic. John trained him and Larry certainly needed help, but John thought Larry had absolutely no brains at all.”

Teichman’s secretary, Valerie Mitchell talked of how the Shuberts and Lawrence were “stingy beyond belief,” She also endured Lawrence’s flare-ups. “He had a fierce temper, and usually he would scream behind closed doors. His secretary Eileen Kelly, would often emerge from his office in tears. At one Christmas party Mr. Lawrence got drunk and insulted (Mayor) John Lindsay, who turned heel and left.”

Eventually Lawrence's chauvinism became unbearable and his secretary left saying, “All the anger I felt toward this vulgar man all those years welled up and I burst into his office, and said. “How dare you treat me like that?” Teichman helped me get a job with David Suskind, Mr. Lawrence refused to give me unemployment insurance, but Mr. Teichman got me some. But in the end as Teichman’s wife Evelyn observed, "Lawrence was the Lawyers stooge. They pretended Lawrence was the head, but he was only playing a role.”

In ten years we’ll take over

Lawrence was in fact an employee of the Board of Directors of the Shubert Foundation. The foundation was setup by Lee and J.J. to honor Sam and to be sure the Shubert name never died. It also served their business interests. It was formed in 1945 but not announced until October 1947, and operated in secrecy for many years. John interpreted the establishment of the foundation as “something to make certain their name would live on long after they died,” he saw it as a vote of no confidence in the succeeding generation.

“The lawyers made remarks about how they planned to take over in ten years,” Evelyn Teichman said. “We thought they were kidding. In 1962 they were not the same men they are today. They were terribly insecure, and when they said they were going to take over it seemed like a joke.” It was not a joke, they began by firing those close and loyal to Lawrence. They even tried to get Teichman to quit. They needed Lawrence isolated. Ridding Lawrence of those close to him was the beginning but they wanted their own man at Lawrence’s side. They found Irving Goldman.

Irving Goldman was a paint salesmen who developed powerful political connections and managed to appear out of the air to proclaim he was Lawrence's best friend. He had claimed to be an old time friend of J.J.’s and said that J.J. gave him five thousand dollars to start a paint company, Gothic Color, which blossomed and by 1960 serviced about 95 percent of Broadway shows. That story was countered by Walter J. Keyser, who handled the Shuberts insurance for over forty years and knew J.J. very well. “J.J. wasn’t generous, and he wouldn’t have given five thousand dollars to anyone.”

According to Evelyn Teichman. “Suddenly he was there, as a shadow behind Gerald Shoenfeld. Tyke and I didn’t know who he was, or what his function was. I first met him at a luau at his house, which had the thickest rugs I ever walked on. The lawyers were at the party, and Lawrence, who got drunker by the minute. Irving Goldman kept saying to Lawrence, like a litany, ‘I’m your best friend, I’m your best friend.” Lawrence believed Goldman, and it helped to ruin him.”