Show Business: The Hot Dice

"We all have flaws," gloats the nasty duke in The Thirteen Clocks, "and mine is being wicked." Thurber might have written the line to be spoken by David Merrick, the most consistently successful producer on Broadway. For something over a decade, Merrick. now 49, has thrown himself with glee into the passionate pursuit of two goals—turning out shows and making enemies. There is no reliable head-count of the showman's enemies, but Merrick has had 20 shows on Broadway since 1954, and 15 of them qualify as hits. No other producer, including Mike Todd, Flo Ziegfeld or the Shuberts, ever approached this record in a similar period of time.

This season Merrick has two of his old shows on the road (Destry Rides Again and La Plume de Ma Tante), one Broadway holdover (Gypsy), four new hits (A Taste of Honey, Irma La Douce, Do Re Mi and Becket) and one miss (Vintage )60). In all, his 20 shows have cost $4,000,000 to produce, grossed $40 million and repaid $8,000,000 to their angels, including Merrick. Says the producer, who sometimes talks in sporting terms although he is in no sense a sport: "I'm rolling a hot pair of dice."

Grace, Meet Fanny. The regularity with which Merrick racks up hits goads critics and competitors to talk of "mass production" and "supermarketeering." But his "packages" (Merrick's own ad-speak) invariably contain the best that money can option, and he is an excellent judge of show material. His only criterion for picking a show, he says, is entertainment value; yet he is capable of producing a drama such as Becket, whose expense is as high as its quality and whose entertainment is largely cerebral. Such sleaziness as Suzie Wong and such vulgar overproductions as Gypsy are balanced, surprisingly often, by a worthy and hopelessly unsalable show such as Menotti's opera, Maria Golovin. He can haggle with a star over $15, more or less, to be paid a dresser, yet he is often liberal with authors' advances. He is widely celebrated as Broadway's biggest s.o.b. since the heyday of Jed Harris, but he has the respect of many professionals from Josh Logan to Garson Kanin, and his steady, money-making backers think he is a major prophet.