Roger Berlind, who scored on Wall Road, Broadway, dies at 90

Right before he became a Tony Award-gathering theater producer, Berlind aided located Carter, Berlind, Potoma & Weill, which would propel the occupations of, amongst other folks, Sanford Weill, who went on to create Citigroup Inc., and Arthur Levitt, who led the U.S. Securities and Trade Commission.

In the late 1950s, Weill and Arthur Carter, neighbors in East Rockaway who commuted jointly to Wall Street, started plotting how to get started a new monetary organization. Carter recruited Berlind, his childhood good friend from close by Woodmere, New York. Berlind in change signed up Peter Potoma, his colleague at Eastman Dillon, Union Securities & Co.

On Might 2, 1960, Carter, Berlind, Potoma & Weill opened at 37 Wall Avenue.

“The companions were being youthful, principally Jewish fellas from Brooklyn and Extended Island — accurate outsiders in the clubby environment of Wall Road,” Eric J. Weiner wrote in “What Goes Up,” his 2005 book on Wall Avenue history. “Arthur Carter was the crystal clear chief of the group, and Roger Berlind served as his cerebral counterweight.”

Key Craving

Berlind “never had the exact same moi as the relaxation of us and almost certainly secretly yearned to return to his 1st adore of songwriting,” Weill wrote in “The Real Offer,” his 2006 memoir. “Still, Roger designed a reliable book of retail, institutional and spouse and children company.”

Weill, as chairman of the organization — which turned Carter, Berlind, Weill & Levitt — led it as a result of a series of mergers and acquisitions that remodeled it into Wall Street large Shearson Loeb Rhodes that he bought to American Categorical Co. in 1981 for about $930 million. Berlind stayed extended adequate to provide as vice chairman of Shearson Hayden Stone Inc., just one of the firm’s interim iterations.

His profession transform was prompted by the June 24, 1975, crash of an Japanese Airways 727 on arrival at John F. Kennedy Intercontinental Airport in New York. The 107 passengers killed integrated his 39-calendar year-old spouse, the previous Helen Polk Clark, and 3 of their kids: Helen, 12 Peter, 9 and Clark, 6.

Their youngest youngster, 2-calendar year-aged William, experienced remained residence in New York with Berlind even though the other people frequented Helen’s mom in Mississippi.

New Commencing

Berlind sought a new start off. “The whole plan of constructing a business enterprise and creating money didn’t make feeling any longer,” he explained to the New York Instances in 1998. “There was no extra economic determination.” Harkening back to his love of music and theater from his college or university times at Princeton University, he put his prosperity to do the job as a producer, setting up with the Richard Rodgers musical “Rex,” which ran for 48 performances in 1976.

He had his initial strike four many years afterwards with “Amadeus,” which he imported from the U.K. with the Shubert Group and McCann & Nugent Productions. It was named ideal engage in for 1980-1981, profitable Berlind the initially of about two dozen Tonys. He adopted that with the strike musical “Sophisticated Ladies,” which ran from March 1981 to January 1983.

On Broadway, Berlind was identified for an “easygoing nature” at odds with “the aged, regular archetype of the producer as a manage-hungry despot,” Iris Dorbian wrote in her 2008 e book, “Great Producers: Visionaries of American Theater.”

Berlind advised the author that theater producers test “to make perception out of a generally senseless business,” including, “The only actual interest for me is helping create what goes onstage. To get to that level, there are loads of issues to offer with.”

Princeton Productions

Roger Stuart Berlind was born on June 27, 1930. His dad and mom ended up Peter Berlind, govt director of Unity Medical center in Brooklyn, and the former Mae Miller, a painter. The second of four sons, he grew up in Woodmere, and from age 11 would vacation into Manhattan to see shows on Broadway, according to a 2006 profile in Princeton’s alumni magazine.

At Princeton, from which he graduated in 1952, he examined English and directed and composed music for productions with the Triangle Club. He then expended three a long time in the U.S. Army’s counter-intelligence corps. Immediately after becoming turned down by a raft of Wall Street firms, he last but not least was employed by Eastman Dillon.

Berlind’s purpose at Carter, Berlind, Weill & Levitt was the cause for a messy break up in 1968.

It began, according to Weill’s account, when the difficult-driving Carter proposed lessening Berlind’s ownership share. The other companions resisted, and Carter still left. The business grew to become Cogan, Berlind, Weill and Levitt, with Berlind serving as the compromise selection for main executive officer.

“Of class, I believed I could run the business very best,” he advised Weiner. “But in fact I imagine I was the least-threatening associate to the other a few.”

Berlind’s other Tonys ended up for productions which includes the musicals “The E book of Mormon” and “Jerome Robbins’ Broadway” and performs “The Real Detail,” “Proof” and “Doubt.”

His $3.5 million present to Princeton aided fund development of the Roger S. Berlind Theater, a 350-seat addition to the McCarter Theatre Center.

In 1979 he married the previous Brook Wheeler. She survives him, along with his son, two granddaughters and a brother, Alan, the Occasions noted.

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