Broadway Gives Its Regards to Bob Ullman
 Morgan McGivern
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(9/2/2008) “My father loved the theater. And besides a sense of humor he gave me the greatest thing a father could give a son — he sent me to the theater when I was 10,” recalled Robert Ullman, who will be honored this evening at a ceremony in which the Manhattan Theater Club’s Biltmore Theatre will be renamed the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre.
Mr. Friedman may get his name on the theater, but Mr. Ullman, who worked side by side with the pioneering Broadway publicist, will have a lobby named in his honor along with his colleague, Shirley Herz.
A voluble enthusiast of the golden age of Broadway, Mr. Ullman seems to find it astounding that he had a career on and off Broadway that lasted almost 50 years.
“I had no talent, no training, and no schooling,” he said the other day in the living room of his Springs house, where he and his partner of 55 years, Michael Freeman, spend four months of the year and which is filled with antiques, his other love, and signed photographs of the Broadway stage’s brightest lights. For eight months they live above Collectibles, an antiques store they started in the late 1960s in Bridgehampton and that they moved to the 1780 House in Water Mill in the ’70s.
The musical his father sent him to see with his sister was “Music in the Air” by Jerome Kern, which opened at the Alvin Theatre in November 1932 and ran for 342 performances. “It was the Depression and producers were looking for people to fill the seats,” said Mr. Ullman. The play is being revived in the Encore series at Manhattan’s City Center in the spring of 2009.
Another show he saw in 1933 with his sister was “Strike Me Pink” with Jimmy Durante, with lyrics by Lew Brown and music by Ray Henderson. “We were in the first row and Durante made his usual entrance, shuffling in from the back of the house. Suddenly, without any warning, he picked me high up,” Mr. Ullman recalled, laughing. “It was thrilling for me.”
Another night, the year before his father died, after one of his mother’s “killer meals — you know what they said back then: ‘The Jews, all on the Upper West Side, ate, and the Gentiles, all on the Upper East Side, drank’ ” — his father and he took a walk to the Alvin Theatre on West 52nd Street, where Ethel Merman, William Gaxton, and Victor Moore were playing in “Anything Goes.”
While his father was speaking to the house manager, Mr. Ullman could “hear all this glorious Cole Porter music and started jumping around. The manager let me go into the theater and onstage were Merman and Gaxton singing ‘You’re the Top.’ I couldn’t stand still and was dancing around. That sealed my fate and I knew that somehow or other I wanted to go into show business.”
Mr. Ullman’s father was a second-generation immigrant to New York from Lithuania, and worked in the family business, Ullman Brothers, that made men’s top coats and overcoats. He died suddenly in 1935, leaving his 42-year-old wife and three children in the middle of the Depression. Mr. Ullman’s grandfather supported the family.
The idea was that Mr. Ullman, who graduated from the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania in 1943, would join Ullman Brothers, which he did, for a year and a half, having been declared 4-F by the Army.
“I hated it and got up the courage to tell my mother, who loved me and supported me until I could actually do what I had wanted to since the age of 10 — work in the theater.” But for the two years in between, Mr. Ullman worked during the Christmas season selling ties at various Manhattan department stores.
In 1947, he apprenticed for the press agent at New Stages on Bleecker Street who was working on Sartre’s play “The Respectful Prostitute,” which ended up on Broadway. It took Mr. Ullman five years, however, to accumulate three years of credits, which were what he needed to get into the Association of Theater Press Agents and Managers. This was because a show had to run for a certain period of time in order for the apprentices to get the credits required. After being hired to be a gofer, which included being given a part in which he had to stick his head through a door in “Prostitute,” he was finally told, “You’re doing a great job opening mail, but you can’t be an understudy.”
“I never had any talent; I was just a stagestruck young man,” Mr. Ullman said. “You have to start when you’re a child because it’s so difficult to get into later,” he said. “That’s why mothers send their children to tap dancing and ballet classes.”
“I worked for three of the really great press agents,” he said, “Bill Doll, Samuel J. Friedman, and Harvey Sabinson. “The one thing I learned from them was that newspaper people never read past the first paragraph of any release. You have to put everything in the first paragraph.”
By 1951, Bill Doll had gotten Mr. Ullman into the union and then his career seemed to take off. Highlights of his career included working on “Top Banana” with Phil Silvers, “Call Me Madam,” starring Ethel Merman, “Mr. Roberts,” with Henry Fonda, and “Daphne Laureola,” with Dame Edith Evans.
When Mr. Ullman was working in summer stock at the Westhampton Playhouse, where Hume Cronyn and Jessica Tandy were starring in “The Fourposter” by Jan de Hartog, he and Mr. Freeman decided they wanted to live part time on the East End and in 1956 bought their house in north Springs, “when we knew all our neighbors,” he said, “and we named it Shubert Alley East.”
From 1954 to 1969, Mr. Ullman was the press agent for the summer season at the John Drew Theater, after Ron Rawson, a former voice-over radio actor, leased it from Guild Hall. He and Mr. Rawson had worked together at the Westhampton Playhouse.
He met Margaret Rutherford when she starred in her second Broadway appearance in “Farewell, Farewell, Eugene,” a comedy produced by Ron Rawson that he had first done at Guild Hall, where it was so successful that he decided to make his Broadway debut with it, but, there, it tanked.
Mr. Ullman has at least 33 Broadway and Off Broadway credits to his name, including handling “Compulsion” for Mr. Friedman, a fictionalized account of the Leopold and Loeb trial, which starred Ina Balin, Suzanne Pleshette, Roddy McDowall, and Dean Stockwell in Manhattan.
Mr. Ullman handled “Hello Dolly” with Carol Channing for Harvey Sabinson and from 1959 to 1964 he had his own press office, where he was the personal press agent for Farley Granger, Mr. McDowall, and Ms. Pleshette. He also handled “Little Mary Sunshine” and a revival of “The Boys From Syracuse,” and “every other flop Off Broadway show,” he said.
Other flops included “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” and “Mata Hari,” but “Porgy and Bess,” “Plain and Fancy,” “The Visit,” with Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontaine, “Anastasia,” with Viveca Lindfors, “Ulysses in Night Town,” with Zero Mostel, and “Cactus Flower,” with Lauren Bacall were not.
Mr. Ullman felt that “the most distinguished play he worked on was “The Visit,” and “the three musicals I enjoyed working on the most were “Little Mary Sunshine,” The Boys From Syracuse,” with music by Rodgers and Hart, and “A Chorus Line,” for which he was the publicist for six years.
Another high point was working for Joseph Papp for 10 years “in his golden period,” he said. Then, in what “was one of the happiest working experiences of my life,” Mr. Ullman said, he worked for Andre Bishop, who is now the artistic director at Lincoln Center, when he was the artistic director at Playwrights Horizons.
“I’ve had a very, very lucky life,” Mr. Ullman said. “I worked in the theater — I had background and chutzpah — for almost 45 years and was never unemployed during the golden age of Broadway. And I worked for legendary press agents. I had wonderful parents, a sister and brother, and a wonderful partner.”
He retired in 1988, but he and Mr. Freeman still have a co-op apartment in the city, where they stay when they go to see shows. “You can take the boy out of Broadway, but you can’t take Broadway out of the boy,” he chortled.