There was also the Merrick classic, "At last, people are holding hands in the theater again!" to help promote Oh, Kay!
Frank Rich relates the story in his piece, "Exit the Critic":
"Merrick had come back to Broadway with "Oh, Kay!" a feeble attempt to create a musical in the style of "42d Street," his last hit, now a decade old. At the critics' preview I attended, he pulled one of his old tricks: in the seat next to Alex Witchel, the Times theater columnist whom I was dating, he planted a loud, disruptive woman who talked and bounced in her seat throughout the show. After my negative review of "Oh, Kay!" came out, Merrick circulated a protesting letter to The Times in which he claimed Alex had talked through the performance. To heighten the public relations push, he then placed an ad in which a negative quote from my review and a news item from Alex's column about an Actors Equity dispute involving "Oh, Kay!" were contained within a cupid's heart. "At last, people are holding hands in the theatre again!" read the headline.
The stunt was a replay of a famous one he had pulled on Walter and Jean Kerr three decades earlier, when he publicly accused Jean of influencing Walter's reviews by dramatically "nudging" him at the theater. (Walter's answer to the charge in The Herald Tribune -- "Surely, Mr. Merrick, someone, somewhere has liked you well enough to give you a little dig in the elbow. No? Ah, well" -- is a journalism classic.) And by Merrick standards, the treatment I got was mild. In his prime, Merrick likened Brooks Atkinson's successor, Howard Taubman, to Adolf Eichmann during a half-hour tirade on Johnny Carson's "Tonight" show, on which the producer also accused the critic of feeding poison nuts to the squirrels in Central Park and spraying pesticide at Hubert's Flea Circus. Those were the days! It's hard to imagine any theatrical producer even being booked on a network talk show now.
Merrick's ad ran for one edition in The Times and was reprinted widely. The publicity did not save "Oh, Kay!" which died ignominiously in a welter of financial disputes pitting Merrick against his own employees. The great producer's career was over. But the notion Merrick perpetrated that Alex and I were in league either to reward or punish the New York theater hardly died with "Oh, Kay!""
"Exit the Critic"
Begin at the beginning and go on till you come to the end: then stop.
