The Icemen Melteth

On the night that My Fair Lady opened, Lyricist Alan Jay Lerner waited nervously in the 21 Club for news of the critics' reactions. The telephone rang at last. Lerner listened silently for several minutes, then turned to Composer Fritz Loewe and said softly: "The iceman cometh."

Even theatergoing children are now sophisticated enough to understand Lerner's remark, which, in his case, was made only in jest. For non-theatergoing children, ice can be defined as Broadway's term for the great sums of money made by various theater employees through the scalping of tickets. Over the past winter and spring, following investigations by New York State Attorney General Louis J. Lefkowitz, the term has been all over the theatrical pages of newspapers, and the corruption growing out of Broadway abuses has finally been illuminated.

Lobster Pot. Ice exists, of course, because when fat cats want theater tick ets, the price does not matter. So $20, $25, $50, sometimes $100 is paid for a $9.60 ticket. The annual take in ice has been estimated at more than $10 million. Among major icemen, box office employees have always had the longest tongs, which goes a long way toward explaining why they have always behaved with such freezing contempt toward the wretched public that lines up to buy ice-free tickets at the wicket. Brokers testified that they regularly delivered envelopes to box offices containing checks covering the list price of tickets plus agreed amounts of extra cash, usually about $5 to $7 for an orchestra seat.

Beyond the scalping stories, rats ratted on one another all over Lefkowitz' hearing room. Tales were told, for example, of one producer who cleared $52,000 from a play whose investors lost $32,000, and of another producer who sadly watched a sick production fail, costing its investors $180,000 but somehow netting him $11,000. Producers also own theaters and rent them to themselves. They hire themselves as "pressagent" or "stage director" at fat salaries out of the basic investment. They sometimes make speculative investments of their own with investors' money. One producer even used part of the nut to buy himself a lobster boat.

Thou Shalt Not. The New York state legislature last April passed two bills making it a misdemeanor to take ice and requiring standard accounting procedures for all productions. Then last week the League of New York Theaters --which includes theater owners and producers--announced its own new codes of ethics covering ticket sales and production practices. In many instances the rules were more rigid than the state legislation.

The League has asked Lawyer John F. Wharton to serve as its commissioner, enforcing the new codes. The production code is a long list of thou-shalt-nots that inferentially describes all the sleazy habits of producers at the moment: it forbids them to commingle investors' money with their own personal funds; it requires them to keep books; it forbids them to take kickbacks; it says they have to notify investors if they rent their own property to the production.

The code on ice is simpler. In sum it says: no ice. Beyond the printed price of the ticket, $1.50 is the legal maximum broker's fee. The code requires all brokers to make available to the league all records of sales, and brokers caught taking ice will lose their future ticket allocations. Of course, if all those fat-cat buyers from the plains insist on waving $50 bills at ticket sellers, no one is likely to tattle on them, and some violations of the code can be expected. But if a cold-eyed broker tries to shake down a customer by demanding sums like that, the victim now has a commissioner to complain to.

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