Authors: Edwin Diamond
Another Tea Room regular, Gerry Gold, seldom came back to the old neighborhood, although he continued to be a faithful reader (the buyout package included cut-rate home delivery of the
Times
). At home in Queens, Gold skimmed his old pages and shook his head, sounding at times a bit like a Hilton Kramerian elitist. “All this emphasis on pop and rap and the rest,” Gold said. “In a period of cultural decline, they’re writing more and more about less and less.”
Arthur Sulzberger, Frankel, Goldberger, and the senior editors may have convinced themselves that their keen journalistic instincts had led them to the
Times
’ new attitudes about cultural coverage. Practically
speaking, however, the changes in the arts and leisure sections represented, yet again, the triumph of Mattsonism. The dour former production specialist Walt Mattson and his sales team from the business departments had pushed Abe Rosenthal and the news editors to produce a daily report with wider popular appeal for the prototypical “suburban housewife.” Even then, Mattson wanted the arts and leisure pages to devote more space to motion picture news and pop culture reviews; he regularly asked Rosenthal for more features of “service to
Times
readers planning their weekends.” At a minimum the business side thought the movie coverage should match the heavy volume of movie ads in the Friday and Sunday papers. Once, during the planning of the proposed new Weekend section, Mattson bolstered his case for more coverage of movies by circulating readership surveys showing that “the affluent” liked to read movie news and reviews and were frequent moviegoers. In contrast to the unsatisfactory amount of movie-related materials in the paper, Mattson complained, the
“intellectual” arts were getting ample space. The
Times
’ cultural coverage, he said, needed to be “more human.” In addition to coverage of Hollywood, Mattson proposed that the editors “work in at least four single-frame cartoons à la the old
Saturday Evening Post.
”
Rosenthal resisted, as he initially did all of Mattson’s incursions into the news department. Defending his independence and the editors’ responsibilities to decide what was newsworthy, Rosenthal circulated his own memos, darkly referring to efforts to change “the character” of the
Times.
Rosenthal argued, rather inconsistently, that there was not much real
movie news and that in any case the
Times
was already doing a terrific job
covering movies. As frequently happened during the sectional revolution, Rosenthal eventually embraced the strategy of added space for movies and the popular arts—making it appear to be the editors’ own idea—and later took the bows when the applause began. (Mattson’s cartoon proposal was a nonstarter; Punch Sulzberger agreed with the editors that it
would
change the character of the paper.) During an interview in February 1990, three years after he left the newsroom, Rosenthal proudly claimed that the major studios now opened their movies officially on Thursdays, in order to be reviewed the next morning in the
Times
’ Weekend section.
By the 1990s the desired new demographic was the young urbanite, a thirtysomething white-collar worker or professional who knew how to read (obviously) but didn’t necessarily read a newspaper every day.
These men and women, said to be “into” film, pop music, and video, had to be grabbed by their Perry Ellis and Donna Karan lapels to get them to pay attention to old, demanding, linear print.
The modern
Times
adapted to cultural Mattsonism rather awkwardly at first;
the Gray Lady image was hard to shed. “Reading the culture pages I think of a middle-aged woman learning to disco,” said Howard Kissel, the theater critic of the
New York Daily News.
“She put on a miniskirt and her varicose veins are showing.” It was a common, albeit nasty, metaphor. To create the new
Times
of the 1990s, Arthur Sulzberger, Frankel, Lelyveld, Goldberger, et al. had to shed a part of the cultural weight that had made the
Times
the
Times
over the decades. Some parts of this history were easier to lose than others.
The classic Gray Lady of the Adolph Ochs–Arthur Hays Sulzberger eras approached arts and leisure news almost as an afterthought. The city’s entertainment life and its popular culture interested Ochs less than national, international, and business news. A
Book Review
section was judged worthwhile as long as the books under consideration were clearly “literary” or dealt with public policy. Ochs’s son-in-law and successor Sulzberger assented more or less to the idea that hard news was the
Times
’ one true “franchise.” “Cultural affairs had for years been handled casually,” Turner Catledge wrote in his memoirs of the
Times
during the post-World War II years. “We chose our
critics often for the wrong reasons: seniority, or because a reporter had an interest in books or music, and no one else wanted the job.” Catledge tried to improve the coverage beginning in the late 1950s, arguing that readers were more educated, that the arts and artists were a “cutting edge” for social and political change, and that postwar prosperity had created a new national interest in culture. But Catledge didn’t think the
Times
should get too close to the edges of change. While he was interested in the high culture, he wanted a system of critical “checks and balances”; they suited his adroit style of office politics. He encouraged separate daily and Sunday book reviews—“the luxury of diversity,” he called it. But it was one way of locating the safe cultural center. When former
Times
man Gay Talese’s semiauthorized book on the
Times
appeared, Catledge was proud of the overlapping reviews; the daily staff reviewer was slightly negative while an outside reviewer for the Sunday
Book Review
enthusiastically praised it: the
Times
had it both ways, preening itself in its own mirror while appearing to be judiciously neutral.
Clifton Daniel, in his turn, showed less Ochsian caution. He promoted Charlotte Curtis to women’s page editor, just at the right social moment in the 1960s, and told her to cover that old standard, “society news,” as if she were a sociologist among a tribal culture. Curtis was on hand, with notebook open, for Leonard and Felicia Bernstein’s cocktail party for the Black Panther Defense Fund, held in the composer’s thirteen-room Park Avenue duplex penthouse. Daniel also helped hire Ada Louise Huxtable as the
Times
’ architecture critic, and encouraged her to treat New York’s changing skyline with the same informed wit that Curtis brought to the New Society. Assessing “Black Rock,” Eero Saarinen’s CBS Headquarters on the Avenue of the Americas, Huxtable listed her reasons for praising the building: “It is not, like so much of today’s large-scale construction, a handy commercial package, a shiny wraparound envelope, a packing case, a box of cards, a trick with mirrors. It does not look like a cigar lighter, a vending machine, a nutmeg grater.” Daniel, however, continued the Catledge search for critical “balance.” He was too politic to break wholly with tradition, and so he consulted “the experts in the field” when deciding on the hiring of a new critic (a practice that still continues at the
Times
). The consultations sometimes produced surprising information. When John Martin retired after four decades as the
Times
’ dance critic, Daniel solicited the recommendations of the great American choreographer
Agnes de Mille. She told Daniel to be sure to hire a heterosexual critic. According to de Mille, Martin “used to fall in love, now and then, with some of her dancers.” Further, she had angered Martin, “because I wouldn’t favor him in certain ways relating to certain young men that he was interested in. He simply ignored me for seven years … [using] his great weapon of
The New York Times
personally.” De Mille remembered that Daniel expressed his wide-eyed surprise that the
Times
“ever had any homosexuality in our critical forces.” When Daniel was asked about de Mille’s story, he said he had not been aware that the choreographer’s work was ignored for seven years; less wide-eyed, he added: “John Martin was certainly not the first critic to fall in love with dancers whose performances were being reviewed.”
Catledge and Daniel never quite got a handle on the
Times
’ cultural coverage, in large part because of the bifurcated organization of the
paper in their day. The formidable Lester Markel ran the Sunday department, which included the Sunday Arts and Leisure section and the
Book Review.
While Markel’s tastes were also traditional, he occupied himself through the war and the postwar years mostly with the great matters of public policy, spending a large part of his energies on the
Times Magazine
and the Week in Review section. When Punch Sulzberger finally forced Markel out, his immediate successors as Sunday editor kept much the same focus on the
Magazine
and the Review. The daily cultural coverage, meanwhile, came under the control of a new metropolitan editor, the energetic, manic Arthur Gelb. Beginning in 1967, and continuing over the next twenty years, Gelb was the boss of culture gulch. Other editors had formal responsibilities for the
Times
’ arts and leisure sections; but no one doubted where the true cultural power lay, no more than anyone was neutral on the subject of
the Gelb Years.
Gelb’s supporters on the staff praised his ideas, curiosity, enthusiasm—“his spewing imagination and unmatched news sense,” in the words of Alex Jones. Frank Rich, the theater critic, declared that Gelb approached journalism like a playwright or novelist; “he never lost the artists’s sponge-like ‘sense of wonder,’ without which an artist cannot stay an artist.” The metro desk reporter Maureen Dowd, later a star Washington correspondent, recounted how Gelb worked “on the presumption that every conversation contains the germ of a great newspaper story. I would make some pompous or inane remarks, just trying to make conversation, and I would suddenly find myself with a story assignment. ‘Brian de Palma is so derivative,’ I said. ‘
That
’
s a story,
’ Arthur screamed. ‘Woody Allen is so secretive,’ I said. ‘
That
’
s a story,
’ Arthur bellowed.” Everyone had a Gelb story, including Gelb himself. He joined the
Times
in 1944, as a copy boy. By his own description, he was a tall, gangling kid from an immigrant family in the Bronx, and he was stagestruck. He traveled down to Broadway to spend Saturday matinees in the theater; second-balcony seats cost 50 cents then. Trying to figure out how to be part of The Theater, he decided to become a reporter. Gelb found his life’s work as well as his wife at the
Times
; Barbara Stone was a fellow copy boy. They married in 1946. By the mid-1950s he had worked his way up from running copy to the metro desk and then to the heady assignment of combination drama critic and reporter—covering a developing beat called Off Broadway.
When Punch Sulzberger eased Daniel aside to make Abe Rosenthal the top editor, Rosenthal persuaded Gelb to be his deputy. Thus began the long-running Abe ’n’ Artie Show of
Times
legend, and the successful start-ups of Business Day, SportsMonday, Home, Living, Weekend, and Science Times.
The Abe ’n’ Artie Show had its share of bad scenes, as well. Post-Daniel, both the ascerbic Curtis and the independent Huxtable were “promoted” to new positions that effectively removed them from the news and cultural sections. Curtis traded in her reporter’s notebook and became the editor of the Op-Ed page; Huxtable went to the
Times
editorial pages to become a member of the Board of Editors. Her criticisms of building projects by major real estate operators upset other pro-development board members, as well as publisher Sulzberger. As a critic Huxtable could make any aesthetic comments she wanted. On the editorial board, she had to be part of a “consensus.” Huxtable resigned from the
Times
in 1981. She was at the peak of her intellectual powers, or so the MacArthur Foundation thought: It awarded her a $250,000 “genius” grant.
Complaints of cronyism and critical backscratching haunted both Rosenthal and Gelb throughout their careers. The
Times
’ solicitous treatment of cultural figures as disparate as Jerzy Kosinski, Joseph Heller, and Betty Friedan became a running joke among the Polish Tea Room crowd. The sharpest lines were saved for the news department’s role as keepers of the Eugene O’Neill flame.
Because Barbara and Arthur Gelb were O’Neill experts, the scorekeepers noted not only the
Times
’ legitimate attention to O’Neill revivals but also its continuing coverage of O’Neill minutiae (in perhaps the greatest reach, the Wallingford, Connecticut, hospital where O’Neill was treated for tuberculosis in 1912 was the object of a long story in the
Times
). The influence of the Gelbs on critical opinions supposedly descended unto their son, Peter Gelb. The younger Gelb was the business manager for both the pianist Vladimir
Horowitz and the conductor Herbert von Karajan. The editors of the satirical magazine
Spy
jumped on this connection, and ran a data-base search of cultural-pages coverage of the two musicians. The computer turned up nineteen major
Times
stories of 750 words or more on Horowitz in the period from August 1981 to April 1988. The 1981 date was picked because it marked the beginning of Peter Gelb’s management of Horowitz’s career. The search also uncovered a thousand-word feature about Horowitz’s new
manager, Peter Gelb, without mentioning that he was the son of the editor of the section in which the article appeared. Independent of the
Spy
survey, critic Peter Davis recalls how an article of his was scaled back to make room for a story “ordered from on high”—another in the “seemingly endless series of articles that we ran about Horowitz.”
Spy’s
accounting of the
Times
’ von Karajan coverage was equally malicious; according to
Spy
, the
Times
struck a deal with manager Gelb for a friendly von Karajan profile in the culture pages: The
Times
would get access if it promised not to mention the conductor’s Nazi past. The Polish Tea Room crowd turned all this into a long-running punch line; whenever a senior editor, Gelb or anyone else, pushed for a major cultural story, newsroom schmoozers would ask, with more humor than malice, “Who’s got the contract?” When Gelb left the newsroom in 1989 to become head of the New York Times Foundation, he dismissed the stories with a wave of his hands, and derided the notion of an Abe ’n’
Artie Show; “I don’t know where anyone got that idea. We weren’t linked together; I was my own man.” But he didn’t deny his high opinion of the
Times
when he was second in command: “We were
the
great paper, the showcase and model for the world. Other editors came to our newsroom to see what we were doing.”