Merle Debuskey

Legendary theatrical press agent who fought for the right to free Shakespeare

Basil Merle Debuskey, theatrical press agent. Born: 24 March 1923 in Baltimore, Maryland, US. Died: 25 September 2018 in Englewood, New Jersey, aged 95

Merle Debuskey, a press agent who was an influential force on and off Broadway for decades, especially as chief promotor of the Public Theatre and advisor to the man who ran it, Joseph Papp, died on Tuesday at the Actors Fund Home in Englewood, New Jersey. He was 95.

Debuskey was no mere disseminator of news releases, though he disseminated plenty.

“He was much more than a press agent,” Birsh said. “He was something of an invisible hand in a lot of things.”

According to Robert Simonson’s biography, The Gentleman Press Agent: Fifty Years in the Theatrical Trenches With Merle Debuskey (2010), after the actor Zero Mostel was severely injured when a bus ran over his leg in early 1960, Debuskey recruited an old friend, Dr Joseph R Wilder, a leading surgeon, to weigh in on the case.

Wilder is credited with saving Mostel’s leg, and Mostel, in turn, introduced the surgeon to painting. Wilder later became a well-regarded artist.

Another beyond-the-callof-duty effort by Debuskey involved Purlie, a musical he represented, which became a Broadway hit in 1970. Watching preview performances, he sensed a lull.

“I had been monitoring the audience reaction,” he said in an account related in Simonson’s book, “and I thought that they were waiting for another song by Melba Moore, whom they rightly adored, and that they were disappointed when none came.”

His pestering eventually led to the addition of I Got Love, which became a signature song both for Moore, then in her mid-twenties and relatively unknown, and for the show.

Perhaps no behind-thescenes effort by Debuskey had a more lasting effect than his advice to Papp in the late 1950s when Robert Moses, the public-works baron of New York City, tried to force Papp to charge admission to his still-fledgling Shakespeare in the Park productions. Moses claimed the Central Park shows burdened the city with expenses.

“It was Debuskey who counseled Papp that free Shakespeare was worth fighting for,” Jeffrey Horowitz, founding artistic director of Theatre for a New Audience, wrote in the foreword to The Gentleman Press Agent.

A court battle ensued. Moses won the first round, Papp the second, and Moses then backed down.

“All New Yorkers would not have free public theatre were it not for Merle Debuskey, period,” Birsh said.

Basil Merle Debuskey was born on 24 March 1923, in Baltimore. His father, Robert, was a wine salesman, and his mother, Freda, came from a family prominent in the oil business. He grew up in an Orthodox Jewish household. Merle was a well-regarded athlete in high school, especially in lacrosse, and in 1941 he enrolled at the University of Virginia on an athletic scholarship.

He didn’t stay long, though, enlisting in the Navy Reserve just before the US entered the Second World War and serving in the South Pacific and elsewhere during that conflict. After the war he didn’t want to return to the University of Virginia, where, he said, he had encountered anti-semitism, so he finished his undergraduate degree in English literature at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore in 1947.

He was interested in journalism and, after being rejected for a job at the Baltimore Sun, went to New York to try his luck. He fell into public relations work somewhat by accident. “My intent was to get a job in journalism involving sports because I really knew a lot about it,” he said in an oral history recorded in 1993 for the American Jewish Committee. He also wanted to use his GI Bill benefits, so he enrolled in graduate courses at the New School. “I took public relations because I could have all my courses in the evening, which allowed me to spend my days pursuing employment,” he said.

His journalism aspirations fell by the wayside after he began socialising with a group of people who hoped to start a theatre collective and they asked him to act as their press agent. Among his early theatrical pals were actress Bea Arthur and director Gene Saks, who were married for many years.

Debuskey began to get a reputation as a promoter of offbroadway theatre (a term just then coming into use), and in 1953 a young producer and director, Joseph Papirofsky – soon to go by Joe Papp – asked him to do publicity for a programme he was calling An Evening of O’casey. The next year, when Papp began staging free Shakespeare on the Lower East Side, Debuskey was at his side. The association lasted some 30 years, if you don’t count the many hiatuses.

“Papp fired him 50 times,” Birsh said. “They were two men who were doing something new and exciting, and Merle was the only guy who would tell Papp ‘no’.”

A similar forthrightness marked his overall approach to press relations. In a profession known for spinning and stretching the truth, he had a reputation for honesty.

“One could say he had an acute sense of integrity wholly at odds with his occupation,” Simonson wrote. “In direct contrast to the publicist’s innate reflex to be a ‘yes man,’ he posted a sign on the wall reading ‘No is also an answer’.”

Debuskey represented hundreds of shows, including Broadway hits like How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying (1961) and A Chorus Line (1975). He had a knack for clever gimmicks. Promoting Larry Gelbart’s political-scandal satire Mastergate in 1989, he sent out a news release that was shredded.

In 1950, for Michael Todd’s Peep Show, which featured an actress who took an onstage bubble bath, he came up with a way to make the theatregoing experience linger.

“I ran to the Stork Club and got two bottles of their Sortilege perfume, and we put it in the bubble bath,” he recalled at a 2009 gathering of old-school press agents. “The audience could never get the smell off their clothes.”

But he also deftly handled more serious matters, as when Jesus Christ Superstar caused an uproar among various religious groups when it reached Broadway in 1971. He coaxed a mollifying statement out of the producers that expressed hope audiences would find the show “spiritually exalting” – which is to say, he wrote the statement himself and got them to sign off on it.

Last year Debuskey was back at the Public Theatre vicariously, as a character in Illyria, a Richard Nelson play staged there about Papp and the Public’s early days. The actor Fran Kranz portrayed him.

Debuskey’s first marriage, to Christine Karner, ended in divorce. His second wife, Pearl Somner Debuskey, died in January.

Debuskey was president of the Association of Theatrical Press Agents and Managers, his profession’s union, for many years. Among numerous other positions, he had been a board member at Theatre for a New Audience from 1996 until this year.

“We couldn’t have built Polonsky Shakespeare Centre without his advocacy,” Horowitz said, referring to the facility Theatre for a New Audience opened in 2013 in Brooklyn. “When it came to making people listen about what mattered, Merle was persuasive, eloquent and funny. He was an athlete of the body and mind who could spontaneously coin compelling arguments; he had both Damon Runyon and Shakespeare in his soul.” NEIL GENZLINGER