Broadway: A Man for All Scenes

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Too Much Spinach. Smith is also valued for his unflappability in what he himself concedes is a business for egomaniacs. Though he believes that the rehearsal theater must be a cockpit of egos to produce greatness, Playwright Jean Kerr (Mary, Mary) notes that Smith himself "is an island of calm in the sea of temperament." In an atmosphere of round-the-clock convulsion, when the likes of Alan Jay Lerner are hitting the pill bottle or gulping milk for their ulcers, Smith has never been seen to order a sandwich in.

Over the years Smith has developed the flexibility and strength of Toledo steel. Author Arthur Laurents stood him down once in the Washington try-out of West Side Story by threatening to urinate on one set if Smith didn't replace it. Smith did, but vowed never to work on a Laurents show again. Smith also lost a round to Tennessee Williams, who forced him to add more shrubbery in Night of the Iguana—though Smith still swears it "would have been more successful without all that spinach." On the other hand, when Bette Davis complained that Iguana's raked, ski-jump stage was "sheer hell," Smith stood his ground—even after the props kept hurtling into the orchestra seats and Actor Patrick O'Neal busted a rib.

But for all the years of built-in abrasion, Smith has never been canned and has resigned only once. That was in Flahooley in 1951, when Producer Cheryl Crawford "saw it as a social document, I as a fantasy." Smith got his vindication when the show closed after 40 performances. It was a triumph to compare with his showdown with Sam Goldwyn during their film collaboration on Guys and Dolls in 1955. "Here I am," Goldwyn would say, "at work since 8, and you don't show up until 12." "I told him," recalls Smith, " 'I am a genius.' " "That's different," conceded Goldwyn.

Home in Brooklyn. What he really prefers to design is opera—he did La Traviata and Martha for the Met—or ballet, and he serves as unpaid co-director of New York's top-rated American Ballet Theater. Smith has also, over the years, co-produced a number of plays. His bonanza was Carol Channing's Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, but he is fonder of his failures, like Sartre's No Exit. Further sidelines—clients like Agnes de Mille complain that his work suffers from spreading himself so thin—include interior design, like his 1962 renovation of the Waldorf-Astoria Grand Ballroom into an 18th century court theater. "It had been so damned ugly," explains Smith, "and besides, I'm not averse to making money."