One-Man Show

After fleeing New York for Los Angeles in the late 1970s, Miles Kreuger unloaded two trucks into the bottom floor of a 17-room white stucco duplex that would one day hold the world’s largest private collection of musical theater and musical film memorabilia.

The Library of Congress values the Kreuger archives, known as the Institute of the American Musical, at more than $1 million. State Librarian Emeritus Kevin Starr describes the stash--visitors gain access by appointment only--as a “cultural resource of international importance.” Yet Kreuger, who lives among the floor-to-ceiling artifacts with his ancient dog, Molly, depends on the kindness of benefactors for financial support. Over the years, several of these friends have gently urged him to transfer the collection out of his darkly furnished duplex near the Fairfax district to a more secure and accessible site. But Kreuger resists every effort to pry away his things, showing the same tenacity he has deployed during the more than 50 years it took to acquire them.

“The institute is Miles. He is it,” explains Robert Kimball, a musical theater historian and longtime member of the institute’s board.

The number and variety of items stuffed into two floors is stunning: thousands of books; movie and stage ephemera; movie stills; 75,000 disc, cylinder and tape recordings and laser discs; donations from composers Richard Rodgers, Irving Berlin and Harold Arlen, acting teacher Bobby Lewis and MGM. Also residing here en masse are tangible artifacts such as posters, autograph books and even chunks of the long-gone theaters of the vaudeville and silent film eras.

It’s an exhaustive list.

“We don’t have time to deal with teeny, tiny bits of history the way Miles does,” says Betty Auman, donor relations specialist at the Library of Congress.

The stories of how Kreuger managed to amass these far-flung bits make up an oral volume of Kreugerology that circulates among historians, librarians, composers and show business people. Composer/lyricist Sheldon Harnick tells a tale in which Kreuger smuggled a camera into a New York performance of Peter Weiss’ play “Marat/Sade” and the actors chased him down the street. Kreuger also snatched up shards of the Paramount Theater in New York left by demolition crews.

Among these lesser treasures are real gems that lyricists and composers or their heirs bestowed on Kreuger. “Seeing Miles’ copy of the original script for ‘Show Boat’ moved me enormously,” says Sam Brylawski, who until recently headed the recorded sound section at the Library of Congress.

That precious script resides in Kreuger’s home, but where exactly? Perhaps only its 70-year-old keeper and his one loyal volunteer, associate director Eric Davis, know. Though the institute claims nonprofit status and has won numerous grants--Rockefeller, National Endowment for the Humanities, California Arts Council, to name a few--it lacks the sort of administrative support found in other archives of comparable historical value. Twenty years ago, when the collection outgrew the duplex’s first level, Kreuger just started dragging stuff upstairs. “He is the most disorganized organized person I’ve ever known,” Davis says.

From the outside, the institute resembles the house in the TV series “The Munsters.” A giant rubber tree obscures the facade. Plywood covers a small window near the door. Inside, laser discs cover tables. Wood cabinets bulge with phonograph records. The few gaps between towering bookshelves are filled with photographs and lithographs and posters from plays. It smells like musty dog because, Kreuger says, Molly needs a bath.

Glasses dangling from a tether around his neck, Kreuger stoops slightly as he escorts a visitor through the collection. When the tour reaches his bedroom, Kreuger rummages inside a cabinet drawer and withdraws director Rouben Mamoulian’s trademark round spectacles and then a weighty silver hand mirror that actress Anna Held, Florenz Ziegfeld’s common-law wife, used onstage in the 1890s. Among the few non-theatrical files in the house is one devoted to assorted clippings about the foibles of President Bush. Kreuger shares it with a smile.

Kreuger is a raconteur of considerable charm. He serves tea and biscuits at a dining room table cluttered with postcards of historic theaters and heavy books as he holds forth on people who now exist only as Al Hirschfeld caricatures (several of which he owns), on film and in his memories. On one wall hangs an oil portrait of Kreuger with pouty lips and wavy black hair.

He says he prefers everything old to anything new and cites as an example his use of the old-fashioned alphabet locution for telephone exchanges. “Don’t you think it’s more elegant?”

He drops names and places.

“I remember Charlestoning with Dorothy and Lillian Gish in the 1950s. Lillian had no personality and Dorothy was a live wire.”

And, he says, “Adele Astaire told me I was a better social dancer than Fred.”

Then, at the end of a long soliloquy about the real Rita Hayworth beneath the gorgeous image, “She wore choppers like Clark Gable.”

What emerges is a picture of a happier time, which began with his childhood in Manhattan and ended with his flight from the city.

Kreuger’s father was a mink coat manufacturer. His mother wanted to work as a scene designer, but encountered gender barriers and settled for fashion illustration and design. On his first outing to the theater, escorted by his grandmother to a musical biography of Gilbert and Sullivan called “Knights of Song,” the 4-year-old was smitten.

“When the curtain went up, there was the deck of a ship and sailors doing the hornpipe,” he recalls. At one point during the production he grabbed his grandmother’s arm so hard that he left welts.

He also developed a love for museums. He dallied at the Museum of Modern Art and the Museum of the City of New York, which were starting their own ambitious archives.

At 16 he entered Bard College, where he studied theater and literature and dreamed of becoming a director. For his senior project, he directed a version of William Butler Yeats’ “Deirdre.” After graduation, he directed one or two showcase projects off-Broadway. But Kreuger was too shy, too passive, recalls composer Sheldon Harnick. “To protect himself he started to build a wall between himself and the directorial world.”

Kreuger tried on other roles. He played producer, bringing the mime Etienne-Marcel Decroux to the United States for his American debut. He was director of publicity for “My Fair Lady” co-writer Alan Jay Lerner. According to Kreuger, in the mid-’50s Lerner cast him as Freddy Eynsford-Hill in the play. He was ashamed to work on the show, he jokes, because he and “everyone else in New York” could not believe in the idea of a musical based on George Bernard Shaw’s “Pygmalion.” But Kreuger couldn’t sing as well as he read for the part. The role went to John Michael King and the production ran for six years.

Kreuger instead worked on a WBAI radio program about the theater called “Opening Night” and for Columbia Records impresario Goddard Lieberson. He wrote introductions for memorabilia books and souvenir programs. And he collected nonstop, stowing his finds in his apartment at 93rd and Broadway on the Upper West Side.

“No one took musicals seriously,” Kreuger says. “No one was paying attention.”

The idea to form the institute in collaboration with friend Al Husted came in 1972, after Kreuger watched several early musical theater collections dispersed at estate sales. It was incumbent on him, he thought, to preserve the history of his mentors, whatever it took.

Meanwhile, New York was slipping into the future. By the late 1970s, Kreuger viewed the American musical theater as dead. “Theaters were being torn down,” he says. “I couldn’t bear to be there. It was awful.”

The trip west was eventful. One of the two trucks that left New York packed with his collection spun out in the Mojave Desert, the air conditioner fell on Kreuger’s head and many precious early American cylinders and 78s flew into the desert.

As a newcomer to Los Angeles, he taught briefly at USC and UCLA and embarked on numerous projects--some of which are still percolating. He is, for example, reconstructing all of the material that went into the staging of “Jumbo,” the 1935 production by Billy Rose and featuring the Paul Whiteman Orchestra. He writes liner notes for CDs and DVDs and participates in panel discussions about musical theater and film.

Kreuger is now a beloved figure on both coasts. “He’s Zelig-like,” says Jane Klain, an old friend who is research services manager at the Museum of Television & Radio in New York.

Legendary composers and lyricists donated their papers to Kreuger instead of more established institutions because, Kimball observes, “it’s impossible to resist his generosity, his enthusiasm.”

Without Kreuger’s flawless memory and command of the subject, musical theater scholars say, their work would suffer. “I’ve never known him to be wrong [about musical theater],” says Steve Nelson, author of several books on the American musical.

For a man who enjoys the comfort of always being right, Kreuger can deliver decrees with surprising ferocity. “I would never move back to New York,” he says. “There’s nothing left of Times Square. The Astor Hotel is gone.”

And when others contradict his colorful stories, Kreuger bristles.

In a closet resides the institute’s crown jewels: 16-millimeter film excerpts of 175 Broadway shows from 1931 to 1973. Or, as Kreuger puts it, from “Of Thee I Sing” to “A Little Night Music.”

For years Kreuger knew of the reels. He searched for tips on the whereabouts of a Florida man who had filmed inside theaters without authorization. Finally Kreuger procured a phone number for the elusive Ray Knight and screened the footage at ‘60s soirees in his apartment. Later Knight bequeathed the reels to Kreuger.

According to Kreuger, the footage inspired the 1970 creation of the Theatre on Film and Tape Archives at Lincoln Center, an archive also devoted to preserving live theater performances. But Betty Corwin, the archive’s founder and first director, disagrees. “Why, TOFT did not come about that way at all. I got the idea from my sister-in-law, Helen Harvey, the theatrical agent.”

When later told of this account, Kreuger counters: “Well, maybe she wouldn’t know about it.”

Another source of dispute is the Spewack case. In 1991, while settling the estate of “Kiss Me, Kate” collaborator Bella Spewack, the executor discovered that Kreuger owned letters pertaining to the writing of the musical. They were stolen, the executor claimed. They were a gift from Spewack herself, Kreuger said. Three years later at a pre-trial conference, Kreuger revealed that he had put the letters in a storage facility that was destroyed in the Northridge earthquake. According to the Wall Street Journal, the case was settled in 1999 and Kreuger admitted no wrongdoing. David Packard, of the Los Altos-based Packard Humanities Institute, paid $210,000 on Kreuger’s behalf to Spewack’s heirs, with about $150,000 going to legal costs.

Long before the Spewack drama, though, Kreuger’s friends and colleagues worried that he was overprotective of the institute. Some suggest that Kreuger’s grip on his collection stems from writer’s block. His last book, “Show Boat: The Story of a Classic American Musical,” was published in 1977.

“Miles got obsessed with what he was collecting. Writing was secondary,” says Sheldon Meyer, his editor at Oxford University Press. “We talked about his writing a book on the American musical theater, but then he left New York.”

The downside of the obsession is that a quarter century after Kreuger’s arrival in Los Angeles, after a steady stream of press and grants, the institute remains more of an elite club than a public archive.

Kreuger “is very quixotic as to who he will or who he will not let in,” says Ted Chapin, president of the Rodgers & Hammerstein Organization.

Unlike conventional museums, which organize material by show title, the Institute of the American Musical arranges clipping files according to the date of the show’s opening night. Anyone eager to find something here better arrive with in-depth knowledge of the subject.

Michael Kantor, director of “Broadway: The American Musical,” complains that Kreuger made it so difficult to use the Ray Knight reels in the documentary that he ultimately incorporated only 50 seconds of footage. His offer to transfer all of the footage to high-definition video and to procure permissions--at a cost of tens of thousands of dollars--earned him nothing.

Working with Kreuger, Kantor says, was challenging for other reasons too. “He takes these minute particulars and obsesses over them. He’s not a collaborator, he’s a one-man band. It can be an exciting band, but it’s absolutist.”

When the owner of the duplex wanted to sell it and threatened to evict Kreuger, the Judge Roy and Dene Hofheinz Trust, a Texas philanthropic group, stepped in with funds so he could stay. And when the institute’s roof began to leak, Ira Gershwin’s widow paid for repairs. Kreuger worries constantly about the institute. A recent concern is thieves. As he squeezes past the bookshelves on the narrow first floor hall, Kreuger points out several gaps between books. He pokes a finger in one of the holes. “Someone stole from me,” he says. But Kreuger shows no signs of giving up.

In the late 1990s, some senior staff members from the Library of Congress, two staff members from the Ira and Leonore Gershwin Trusts and Robert Kimball ventured a solution: install the institute in the Library of Congress. But, ultimately, the library could not meet Kreuger’s terms.

Kreuger is adamant that the institute not be swallowed up in a larger institution. His ambitious vision for it includes a stand-alone building, a small auditorium and an exhibition room. That’s a dream, Auman says. “We don’t do buildings. We’re a government agency.”

And yet the institute has recently made some small steps toward opening its doors, in large part because of Kreuger’s devoted volunteer of the past several years. For the first time in the institute’s 32-year history, Davis, a 38-year-old musician, set out to write a white paper describing its virtues, with the hope of impressing new donors. Perhaps more important, he managed to get two Library Services and Technology Act grants--$42,000 and $55,000--from the California State Library on the basis of an endorsement from Kevin Starr. The money has been earmarked for construction of a database of the institute’s recordings.

Board members are reluctant to address the subject of the institute’s future.

“That’s a big mystery,” Kimball says. “We’re just trying to get from one day to the next.”

But he defends Kreuger’s reluctance to allow a large organization such as the Library of Congress to swallow the institute. “The more I work with other institutions, the more I think it’s right,” he says.

Kimball concedes that potential backers of the institute sometimes balk because of its informal setting. But, he points out, how could the institute be like other institutions? There is no one like Kreuger at their helm.

“There are many other institutions, but they have no throbbing heart, no intelligence, no soul,” he says.