In his office at The Fortune Society

A Full Life
 Press agent, politician, producer, David Rothenberg has moved, shaken and stirred New York City for more than forty years

By Jerry Tallmer

It was the toothpick that David Rothenberg remembers – the toothpick in the mouth of Kenny Jackson.

 In truth, David Rothenberg remembers everything, or all but everything, from “a birth of humble origin” in Hackensack, New Jersey, on August 19, 1932 – Happy days are here again! – to, well, now, “Same birthday as Bill Clinton, Alfred Lunt, and [former Mets pitcher] Ron Darling,” Rothenberg murmurs, touching on the three key bases of his life; politics, theater, sports. “Not the same years,” he throws in, noncommittally.

 In 1966 David was as busy as a man could be as a Broadway and Off-Broadway theatrical press agent and/or fledgling producer. Most of the shows he was handling were revolutionary in one way or another: Hair at Joe Papp’s Public Theater, Michael McClure’s The Beard (in which Billy the Kid goes down on Jean Harlow), Megan Terry’s Viet Rock, Mart Crowley’s The Boys in the Band, various of the early works of Edward Albee, Harold Pinter’s The Birthday Party, Tennessee Williams’s Slapstick Tragedy, not to mention – most gutsy of all – a Broadway booking of the Negro dance company of Alvin Ailey.

 And then there was the Broadway: Hamlet, produced by Alexander H. Cohen, directed by Sir John Gielgud, starring Richard Burton, which had tried out in Toronto and was now in New York and was not revolutionary at all except in the size of the crowds and the general hysteria evoked on all sides. In Toronto, David had become friends with Nathan Cohen of the Toronto Star, dean of that city’s drama critics.

 “One day at lunch Nathan told me of a play that, he said, ‘will never come to New York.’ I said: ‘Nathan, the last show you liked was [the old Soviet film Potemkin. If you like this one …’. So he sent me the play. It was called Fortune and Men’s Eyes, and it was by a man in his early 40s named John Herbert who had spent some time in a youth detention center in Canada.

“Now I believe,” says David Rothenberg, “that plays should be seen and not read, like children. But I read this one, and at the end I felt what John Herbert had felt, trapped in a room with four other [crazy or violent or suicidal] prisoners. I knew nothing about prisons except for old movies in which they were either escaping or rioting, but here was a play about an ostensibly innocent kid who is destroyed by the system, and I told John Herbert I thought I could get a producer for it.”

 How wrong he was.

 “Everybody I approached thought I was out of my mind.” So Rothenberg installed himself as producer, brought the show in to the venerable 100-seat Actor’s Playhouse, just below Sheridan Square for $12,600, the last $5,000 of it by way of a personal loan. The production survived a “dismissive” review in the New York Times (offset by a “lifesaver” in The Village Voice). Rothenberg was “aghast” when his general manager suggested a Saturday-night ticket as high as $5.95, but soon found a smash hit on his hands which would run a year at the Actor’s Playhouse and then set forth around the world via four weeks that stretched to 18 weeks in Nathan Cohen’s Toronto. A production in Turkey was directed by none other than James Baldwin.

 Early in the Actor’s Playhouse run – before they knew whether they’d be there another week – they’d instituted, at the suggestion of a St. John’s University professor, what was to become a Tuesday-night series of after-curtain discussions with the audience. “That first night a man in one of the front rows challenged us -- challenged the whole play -- as ‘inauthentic.’ With which, a male voice in the back of the house proclaimed: ‘Not if my 20 years count for anything!’ This turned out to be a former inmate named Pat McGarry, and he got out 20 years of prison rage that night.”

 The discussion carried over to a coffeehouse, the Limelight, on the other side of Seventh Avenue, where producer Rothenberg asked McGarry to come back on another discussion night.

 Rothenberg recalls: “Pat said: ‘I’ve done my time. What you need is a black guy.’ I said I didn’t know any black ex-convicts, and Pat said: ‘I know a man named Clarence Cooper.’ He brought Clarence Cooper around the next Tuesday, and the two of them were so articulate, we made them regulars on Tuesday nights, and being a good press agent, I got The Times to do a story, which ran under the headline: THE DRAMA CONTINUES AFTER THE CURTAIN FALLS, and I was getting calls from teachers and ministers, and after four months of that I announced one night: ‘What we need is an organization, so we’re going to start a Fortune Society.’ Eight people in the audience gave me two dollars each toward a mimeograph machine.

 “Remember mineos?” says Rothenberg. “My office, with its show posters” – his publicity office – “became the Fortune Society headquarters. At the end of ’68 I had four guys go on the David Susskind show and the next day there are 250 guys on the stairway to my sixth-floor office.

 “What are they looking for? Jobs, a place to stay, somebody to talk to – and there I am with my walls full of theatrical posters, [and about as useless as] Frank Morgan in The Wizard of Oz.

 “And then this tall white guy with a toothpick in his mouth walks over to me and says: ‘You don’t know what you’re doing, do you? Get me a chair.’

 “He sits, and says his name is Kenny Jackson, and he literally became the first counselor of the Fortune Society. He’s so Brooklyn, you couldn’t believe it. And two days later he returns with Mel Rivers, a black guy from Bed-Stuy. Kenny at that time is a trucker for The New York Times – a trucker with an illegal license. And Mel is a gypsy-cab driver with no license.”

 Kenny Jackson, Mel Rivers, and David Rothenberg – the tripartite heart and soul of the Fortune Society, an all-purpose organization of aid – dwelling places, jobs, health care, friendship -- to former prison inmates. Kenny Jackson, toothpick and all, is gone now, but Mel Rivers and David Rothenberg are very much alive.

 “Things changed in 1971, when Attica happened,” he says of the State Police assault on upstate New York’s strike-bound Attica prison in which more than 20 prisoners and 10 guards or other “civilians” were killed.

  “Kenny, Mel, and I were in the Attica observers group [of journalists and others]. Afterward, back down in the city, we were the only game in town” – sources of information about Attica, thus collaterally putting the Fortune Society on the map. “The three of us went on salary at $100 a week. I stopped taking shows” – his whiz-bang publicity career – “and became director of the Fortune Society,” a post he held until 1985, when he quit to run for the City Council, the first openly homosexual political candidate in New York State history, “and we were lucky enough to find Joanne Page of Long Island to take over as director of Fortune,” which she still is.

Rothenberg, who had moved to Greenwich Village in 1964, and who still lives in the Village, had got into the City Council race by way of a group of doctors and nurses at NYU Hospital who, early in the awareness of AIDS, had started a movement called GRID, short for Gay-Related Immune Deficiency.

 Still, he hadn’t made a point about his sexual preference. It was the era of the Great Silence, when people were dying of AIDS – directly or indirectly -- on all sides.

 “Ed Koch wouldn’t talk about it. Reagan wouldn’t talk about it,” he remembers. Even the Village’s own longtime Ciuncil Member Carol Greitzer kept her lip zipped.

 “Somebody said: ‘Somebody has to run for office.’ Carol Greitzer” – on everything else a natural ally – “was both beatable and expendable. I had a reasonable visibility because of Fortune.”

 Rothenberg pauses, uncomfortably. Then on the run for office and all that goes with it, he says: “At first you think you’re actually above the battle. Then, you get caught up in it. You really want to win. Bill Kunstler” – the late embattled lawyer of many leftist causes – “warned me. ‘First of all,’ Bill said [ironically], ‘you make me register to vote. Then you’ll become a heel-nipper [everybody’s hound dog], and you’ll be miserable.’ Well, Bill was right.”

 For all that, Rothenberg can’t help a modest boast: “I got 45-percent against a 16-year incumbent [Ms. Greitzer]. And those numbers made me run the next year for State Committeeman” – and win.

 What kind of political animal is David Rothenberg? One who, in order to vote, had cut short a year in Italy and London, both of which he’d loved, “because I thought Barry Goldwater was going to be president,” he says.

 What did you do as State Committeeman, David?

  “Went to meetings and listened to sexist, homophobic, and racist comments. Particularly sexist.” Pause. “Here am I, involved with a group of men and women [ex-inmates], telling them to be brave about their lives, and I’m leading a double life.”

 In 1973 the time had come to come out.

 “I called together the [leadership] cadre of Fortune and informed them:

“ ‘1. I’m gay.

“ ‘2. I’m going on television to say so.

” ‘3. I hereby submit my resignation as director of Fortune.’ ”

 Nobody said anything. And then Kenny Jackson, toothpick flagrantly in place, opened his mouth. “What’re you gonna wear on television?” he snarled in full Brooklynese. “You always dress like such a slob.”

The slob had come by his radicalism (if that’s what you want to call it) by natural heritage. His parents, Leon and Leonore Weinberg Rothenberg, were, he says, “Depression babies who venerated FDR.”

 What did your father do in life, David?

 “What year?”

 From Teaneck High School young Rothenberg went on to the University of Denver – “I wanted to go far away, and I loved Denver, and blossomed there. I was the school liberal in the Eisenhower years, and chairman of Students for [Adlai] Stevenson.”

 Upon graduation he took a year hitchhiking across the country, with a stop in Chicago that turned out to be auspicious.

 “I had a friend who was stage manager there for Inherit the Wind. They needed a kid to play a townsperson; I was 21, looked 12. I stayed with the show to San Francisco, which is where I got my draft notice. This was 1956, pre-Vietnam. I was lucky. Spent two years at Fort Benning editing The Bayonet. Can you imagine me editing a newspaper called The Bayonet?"

 Out of the Army, David headed for New York, where theater was popping up -- bursting up like mushrooms – everywhere, particularly Off- and Off-Off Broadway, mostly downtown. But his immediate fate was “a series of jobs that I hated.” Then one day he saw an ad in a theatrical trade paper. A press agent named Max Eisen, who had offices in the Sardi’s Building on West 44th Street (and still does to this day), was looking for an assistant to handle summer shows in summer tents. “He kept me in the New York office at $65 a week, six days a week. I remember the first show I worked on: Leave It to Jane, with George Segal. Lainie Kazan was in it. She was 18.

 “Then Bob Ullman had a hit called Little Mary Sunshine, and I went to him for $85 a week. Max wouldn’t talk to me for a year.”

 One person who would talk to David, a lot, was Sir John Gielgud, up there in Toronto. “He asked me to have lunch with him. ‘If I eat alone,’ he said, everybody comes over to me. Actors are so needy.’ So I had lunch with Sir John during the rehearsals of Hamlet, four days a week. He told me 20 stories about somebody named Laddy. I finally figured out he was talking about Laurence Olivier. He also told me wonderful stories about people like Ellen Terry, Sybil Thorndyke, Edith Evans.”

 Did he ever make a pass at you?

 “No,” said David succinctly.

 Another lunchtime companion was Elizabeth Taylor. “A vibrant, brilliant woman. I loved her and she loved me. I was her date on opening might in Toronto.”

 It was also Elizabeth Taylor who led the comforting when the security guards at Logan Airport beat up David upon the Hamlet chartered plane’s arrival in Boston. The aircraft had been shunted into a remote empty hangar to keep it from being mobbed by groupies, and when David spoke up as the advance man for the show, he was clubbed in the stomach for his pains. The security guy knew a smartass troublemaker when he saw one.

 A nurse in the first-aid room looked at his papers and screamed: “He is the advance man!” They threw David onto a stretcher and rushed him out to the plane, where he was enfolded in the solacing arms of Ms. Taylor and the whole company.

If nothing else (and there’s been a great deal else), Rothenberg has earned his spurs as a troublemaker just by being heard every Saturday morning from 8:30 to 10:30 on radio station WBAI – “99.5 on your FM dial, slightly to the left of center.” When he was invited onto the station in the 1970s by program director Samuri Marksman (now deceased), David said: “I want to be Martin Block.”

 What’s that mean?

 “Music and comment.” He’s been at it there for 25 years now.

 Rothenberg has always urged his Fotune Society members to go to theater, think about theater; he has frequently invited this one or that one to go with him to a show. Many turn him down prima facie; theirs is another world, they tell him, they have enough real-life problems as it is. But there are others who do sometimes go to theater with him. One such in especial was the late Hamzah Hakim – a Muslim friend of Jewish-born/agnostic David Rothenberg.

 “Once I took him to something at Second Stage (just off Eighth Avenue in the 40s). He looked around and said: ‘This used to be a bank.’ I said: ‘How do you know?’ Hamzah said: ‘I used to rob banks.’ ”

 David’s lifelong passion for theater has lately come to fruition in another way. After extended search for some quarters to serve as a residence for what a press release calls “the formerly incarcerated,” Fortune Society found and acquired an impressively Medieval-looking four-story greystone edifice overlooking the West Side Drive at Riverside Drive and 140th Street a few years ago.

 Here, in The Castle, some 40 or 50 members of the Fortune Society, male and female, have found that place to stay, to start their lives again, and here four of the “formerly incarcerated” have, at David Rothenberg’s instigation, put their life stories to paper.

 Rothenberg fashioned these brief searing autobiographies into a play – performed by the four authors themselves -- Vilma Ortiz Donovan, Kenneth Harrigan, Angel Ramos, Casimiro Torres – under David’s direction. It was such a smash in its extended run at The Castle itself that it was picked up for Off-Broadway by producers Eric Krebs and Chase Mishkin.

 It’s at New World Stages on West 50th Street, every Saturday and Sunday at 5 pm. The telephone number is (212) 575-9710, in case Elizabeth Taylor wants to know.