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By Root 681 0

He’s having trouble accepting what’s going on here. I told him, ‘Aaron, Marc is here: We’re going to make some money.’” Apparently, Aaron had drastically misread the tea leaves: he had run through his patron’s stock of patience, as well as his bankroll. Marc was heading out for a meeting, and as we walked together down the ratty staircase to the second floor, he recalled his last exchange with the young Hammerstein. “I said to him, ‘Aaron, you’ve had two years. When are you going to start making money?’ And he goes, ‘We’ve got a new play coming in, we’ve got this thing and that thing.’ ‘Aaron, it’s a fucking loser. It’s a quarter of a million dollars so far, and no end in sight. I mean, it’s getting embarrassing.’” Marc had suddenly stopped talking in metaphors, which perhaps was also a bad sign. The name “Todo Con Nada,” he said, had already been removed from the marquee. In future, Marc said, “Aaron will have control over nothing.” He would be a promoter; he was free to promote, and Marc was free to buy or not buy.

Workmen were climbing all over the second floor, creating a very new kind of Show World. As we walked by, Marc pointed to a gray-haired figure standing with two workmen. “That’s Richard,” he said. I asked if I could at least say hello. Marc shook his head. “Best not,” he said.

I came by the following week for my interview with Marc and found him administering a dressing-down to Aaron. The latter was standing in the doorway in a red T-shirt and sky-blue sneakers, looking like a character from a Robert Crumb comic book. Aaron’s most recent production had bombed, and Marc, who was seated behind the desk in his tiny office—Aaron standing, Marc sitting—was delivering a lesson in accounting. “It doesn’t do any good to come to me and say, ‘Marc, I made eight grand last night’ if you lost twelve grand the night before. We’re still down four G’s, you get what I’m saying?” Marc was making imaginary entries on an imaginary ledger book. Marc talked about Frank, the accountant, and “the long finger of ET”—Frank’s probing finger, apparently. He spoke with the inch-thick patience one uses when addressing a refractory child. The child in question stood with his shoulders slumped, taking the blow, saying nothing. Aaron always seemed to know when not to be a smart-ass. He also knew when to take a punch—Mexican parochial school had taught him that. But he was still, in Marc’s ledger book, a loser.

Marc’s office was a bit cozy for an interview, unless one was sitting and the other standing, so he suggested we adjourn to the theater lobby. We walked down the fire stairs, threaded our way through the workmen, and sat in a blood-red banquette. An article on Show World’s transformation had just appeared, and it had used words like “smut.” Marc was fairly quivering with outrage; he seemed to be scrutinizing me with grim suspicion. He talked about Richard’s “integrity,” his “sincerity,” his “legitimacy,” even his “godliness.” It wasn’t just Richard but the “facility” that was misunderstood. “It’s kind of like looking in retrospect to you in junior high school,” Marc said. “When you dated a girl, what was your real assertion of why you dated the girl?” Marc gave me a waggish look; it was one of those questions that, at least inside Show World, answered itself. “Now you’re older, you want to marry her. So when you’re young at heart, years ago, back in the days of Show World, we had another image, and another assertion. Now we’re older, now we’re wiser, now we’re up-to-date in the evolution of the city.” The new Show World was the marrying kind. The irony was that Aaron wanted to exploit the dark cachet of pornography, but Marc was thinking of the uppity, good-time feel of dinner theater. Aaron seemed to believe in Show World a lot more deeply than Richie Basciano did.

Marc was a little defensive on the whole cultural-positioning front. “I want to make it clear that we’re very sensitive to the arts,” he said. They would be putting on shows in GoGo 1 and GoGo 2, including whatever downtown kind of shows Aaron could demonstrate would