Broadway's Golden Ladies

By Gerald Clarke

A pair of top producers have a long string of hits

Elizabeth McCann has a recurring nightmare. It is first night on Broadway, and the curtain is about to rise on a play that she has produced. The chandeliers sparkle, the red carpeting looks freshly laid, the giltwork on the ceiling positively glows, as if waiting for the gates of heaven itself to open. And there is total, absolute and terrifying silence. She is the only one in the hall. No one else has bothered to come.

Fortunately, when she wakes up, McCann has her own kind of security blanket--the comforting facts. Last year the plays that she produced with her partner, Nelle Nugent, grossed more than $14 million. Since McCann and Nugent went into business less than five years ago, they have been responsible, in whole or in part, for some of Broadway's biggest hits: Dracula, The Elephant Man, Morning's at Seven, Amadeus. When they started, their colleagues referred to them simply as the girls. Now they are respectfully called the ladies--or, more appropriately, the golden ladies.

Piaf, their latest show, opened Feb. 5 to mixed reviews but good business. Rose, the next on their list, is scheduled to premiere March 26, with Glenda Jackson playing the same part she did in London, that of a schoolteacher frustrated with life in the provinces. Only one of their shows, Home, failed to make back its investment (some $300,000), and even that, says McCann, will probably turn a profit after its planned road tour.

McCann, 49, the daughter of a subway worker, grew up in Manhattan's garment district, attending parochial schools and Manhattanville College in Purchase, N.Y., which was then an expensive Catholic school for women. "It's a poor family that can't afford one lady," said her father, who had to struggle to keep her there. Working in school plays gave her a taste of drama. During a trip to a real backstage--to visit Rosalind Russell in Wonderful Town--she became infected with an incurable disease: the dread Broadway fever. Says she: "I was hooked."

After that she took almost any theater job offered and even finished law school at night so that she could become a theatrical lawyer. Finally, in 1965, she landed a job with James Nederlander, who not only produced plays but owned theaters. Nederlander worked her hard, and when she threatened to quit, he hired an assistant for her, another victim of the Broadway bug, Nelle Nugent.

Nugent's background, although a little tonier, is similar. Her father was a prominent New Jersey lawyer, and he did not have to struggle to send her to Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, N.Y., which at that time was also an expensive women's college. Nugent, 41, majored in drama as well, and she also took several low-paying jobs so that she could work in the theater, chiefly backstage. Nederlander reasoned that her backstage technical expertise neatly complemented McCann's experience in the front office.

He was right, of course, but McCann and Nugent did not realize it at first, and they were wary of each other for almost a year. Trust finally developed, and in 1976, six years after Nugent's arrival, they took the plunge and decided to go to work for themselves. Nederlander was not particularly pleased, but he accepted his loss graciously, paying them to manage two of his own plays. That provided a comfortable cushion, and their own imagination and energy did the rest. They had trouble finding money for their first venture, Dracula, but the show's success gave them credibility with investors, who wondered what the team would do next.

What they did, and still do, is what no one else wants to do. "The key to success is surprise," says McCann. "I always take a harder look at projects people think are bad ideas than the ones everybody supports." Unlike many producers, they also have great respect for the people who originate all drama: the playwrights. "We try to make it as easy as possible for them to create," says McCann. "What they do will survive. What I do won't. As it says in the Gospel, 'In the beginning was the word.' " The one criticism their colleagues make is that they have yet to put on original productions; everything they have done so far has been tried somewhere else first.

Though they confess to having some shouting matches, the two of them never disagree for much longer than it takes for the echo to bounce back. "We have mutual respect because we've never failed one another," says Nugent. "That gets us through a lot of dark nights." Each takes on the work she likes best. Nugent has a fine eye for details and supervises technical matters, such as lighting and sets. That sort of thing bores McCann, who handles advertising, artistic development and contracts. Nugent is an optimist, who is always certain things will work. McCann is a pessimist, who is just as sure they will not. Together they are realists.

Nor do the differences end there. Nugent has been married twice and will soon marry again, to William Hartley, her childhood sweetheart and the New York bureau chief of U.S. News and World Report. McCann has never been married. Nugent, an attractive blond, is a stylish dresser who loves to entertain and maintains a spacious apartment on Riverside Drive. McCann wears no makeup, keeps her white hair efficiently short and lives in the same cockroach-infested apartment she did 15 years ago. At work, however, her office is like a cozy nest, with stuffed Teddy bears and a desk covered with mementos.

Being female in a largely male field has not hurt their progress. It may even have helped a little, and McCann admits that it is "sometimes useful to play little girl lost. 'Oh, dear! Oh, dear! Please help me, you great big strong theater owner.' " Obviously that routine did not work for long, however, and Broadway's hottest new producers made it the usual way, through hard work, brains and just that little bit of luck. Even great big strong theater owners know that the girls are in fact ladies. And if McCann and Nugent have many more hits, those theater owners may start calling them something else--like wonder women

--By Gerald Clarke. Reported by Elaine Dutka/New York

With reporting by Elaine Dutka

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