A Man for All Scenes

Along Broadway he seems to be everywhere. The newlyweds are using his skylit walkup in Barefoot in the Park, and The Odd Couple (see THEATER) has just moved into his drab, cluttered flat. In Luv they are leaping off his bridge; gypsies are dancing in his fortunetelling parlor in Bajour. Sherlock Holmes is struggling with Moriarty on his cliffs of Dover in Baker Street; Ben Franklin is still joyously ascending in his balloon; and Dolly is giving her big hello from his Yonkers streetcar. In all, the seven sets account for more than one-third of the shows on Broadway, and all seven are the work of kinetic, white-haired Oliver Smith, 47.

He is a man for all scenes and the delight of all producers. "Most designers are masters of a single color," notes Producer David Merrick. "So if the basic color of your show is red, you get so-and-so; if it's green, you get somebody else. You can get Smith for anything." He also proves himself happily at home in all genres and periods--from the romantic realism of his squalid bed-sitter in A Taste of Honey to the sculptural expressionism of his revolving turntable for Dylan. He is also uniquely fast (he splashed out 250 watercolor sketches for Hollywood's Oklahoma! in a fortnight), prodigiously productive (eight Broadway openings this season and a lifetime score of some 250 shows), and justly celebrated, with more Tony awards--six--than any other Broadway designer.

Three Fairs in One. Smith confesses to have been stage-struck ever since he saw Carmen at age ten in Buffalo, but he took a roundabout route to Broadway. He studied architecture at Penn State, did a stint as a Roxy usher ("The stage design was hideous"), tried selling mackinaws in Gimbels' basement. He was also a member of the menage in the Brooklyn Heights town house shared by W. H. Auden, Benjamin Britten, Carson McCullers and Richard Wright. Smith was the dishwasher and furnace man. He also thought he was a painter. His first show, if little else, attracted William Saroyan, who instantly commissioned Smith, then 23, to design his Beautiful People for Broadway.

Smith established himself within a year, mostly doing ballet backdrops, soon added a staff of up to four in the busy season. But they were only mockup builders and draftsmen to turn the Smith brainstorms into blueprints, for Smith has always been his own idea man. His most lasting innovation was the development of mobile scenery: his choreographed ballroom stopped the show in the midst of My Fair Lady. But Smith has never been criticized for scene stealing. He just takes them when they are there for the taking. In a viable writer's show like The Odd Couple, Smith abstemiously designs "a set no one will ever notice." It is primarily in musicals with undernourished books that he lets fly. Prime examples: Camelot, which glittered as if it had been ripped from a medieval Book of Hours, and was called by Critic John McClain "the most beautiful show in the world." Or in Baker Street, whose eyeball-melting panoply was likened by Walter Kerr to "three world's fairs rolled into one."

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."

"Scenic designers," he maintains, "are the most underpaid people in the theater." And he notes that the cost of carting off and burning the sets of Kelly, after its inadvertent one-night stand on Broadway last month, was $6,000--slightly more than Smith's fee for creating them. Not that Smith is hurting. His take from My Fair Lady alone reached $65,000, with royalties still acoming. And in any case, he has managed to move out of the old artists' commune to a bachelor pad of his own a few blocks away. It is a yellow brick Federal house, with a staff of three for the dishes and furnace. It also has 16 rooms and 16 fireplaces and, consequently, more Oliver Smith sets than even David Merrick could afford.

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