Broadway Bigwig's Secret Struggle

Just before he died last month, Broadway mogul Gerald Schoenfeld finished a memoir revealing a secret but devastating battle with depression, Jeremy Gerard writes on Bloomberg. “This will surprise many of the people who thought they knew the Shubert Organization chairman well. It did me.” The Great White Way's most powerful player was voluble and outgoing in public, but deeply unhappy. “For most of my life, I never really knew how to enjoy who I was,” he wrote.

In his memoir, Schoenfeld describes his unlikely rise from a $40-a-week law clerk for the firm that handled Shubert business. “I was sued and investigated. I was demeaned and discouraged. Yet, I lived through it all and, ironically, charted the future course of the Shubert Organization.” In his later years, Schoenfeld got the disease under control, and at the end, he wrote in his memoir, “things couldn’t be sweeter.”
(More Gerald Schoenfeld stories.)