Tyne Daly, Angela Lansbury, Cady Huffman and columnist Liz Smith will be among the notables to appear Monday, Nov. 4, at a 1:30pm memorial tribute to well-remembered press agent Shirley Herz. A "Celebration" of her life in the theater, including some musical tributes, the event takes place at Manhattan Theater Club's Broadway home, The Samuel Friedman Theater, whose lobby was renamed "The Shirley Herz and Bob Ullman Lobby" in 2008.
Herz, a theatrical press agent for more than sixty years, died on Aug. 11 of complications from a stroke she had suffered in July.
Born Dec. 30, 1925, Herz dropped out of college in Pennsylvania to seek a career in the New York theater. She became the personal press agent of Rosalind Russell during the latter’s “Wonderful Town” years and then worked as an apprentice to publicists Dorothy Ross and Bill Doll. Shirley Herz Associates opened in 1971 and led to her repping the likes of Colleen Dewhurst, Rosemary Harris, Peter Allen, and Tallulah Bankhead. The Broadway shows she represented included “On Golden Pond”, “The Ritz”, “Do Re Mi”, “Dancing at Lughnasa”, William Inge’s “Summer Brave”, and Lanford Wilson’s “Burn This”. Her office also handled the off-Broadway companies Irish Rep and The Living Theater.
In 2009, Herz was awarded a special Tony for excellence, and a year later, she received a Founders Award from the Theater Hall of Fame. Though separated from her husband, Herbert Boley, whom she married in 1948, they never divorced and remained lifelong friends.
In a 2004 interview with Mervyn Rothstein, Herz noted, “I always thought I was going to be a doctor, and then, in junior high school, I would save my allowance and go to the Forrest Theater every Saturday matinee. One day I saw Katharine Hepburn in 'The Philadelphia Story'. She gave the first curtain speech I had ever seen. She came out, and there was some magic in it that made me think, ‘I want to be a part of that world.’ I never wanted to be an actress, but I thought there has to be something else for me to do.”
On a personal note, I knew Shirley for many years, and she always seemed one of the warmest and kindest of publicists. The news of her passing comes less than a month after the tragic death of Miller Wright, who worked in the Herz office for many years before starting his own agency. In my obituary for him, I noted that “when I first became a theater critic in the late 1980s, few established press agencies would take me seriously at first, and one office was downright hostile. By contrast, Shirley Herz, and her two staffers, Miller Wright and Sam Rudy, both treated me with friendliness and respect, granting me press tickets to shows I was reviewing, and photos and press releases I needed to research my work.”
My last memory of Shirley Herz was a few years ago when Irish Repertory staged a fine revival of Brian Friel’s “Philadelphia, Here I Come.” We chatted agreeably during intermission and, at the end of the show, which was quite moving, we both simply exchanged a look – the kind of look that acknowledged how deeply affecting the performance had been and how lucky we were to be spending our lives in the theater.
