Behind the Times (57 page)

Enlisted men (and women) normally gripe about their officers, whether in the Army or in a similarly hierarchical institution such as the
Times.
One senior editor in culture gulch seemed exempt from the troops’ complaints; indeed, he and the section he edited, Sunday Arts and Leisure, won their praise and admiration.

By all accounts,
Seymour Peck stood out in the newsroom. He was a journalist with a rakish Popular Front past. He joined the
Times
in 1952 after working for the left-liberal newspaper PM, a short-lived experiment in daily journalism.
Times
people from his era remember Peck for his efforts to liven up the culture pages, not so much politically—he had by then blended into the centrist ethos—as journalistically. Peck collected around him a varied group, including editors Guy Flatley and Wayne Lawson, and Charles Higham, a “full-time free-lance” critic. Higham was born in London in 1931, emigrated to Australia in his twenties, and then moved to California in 1969, to pursue a lifelong love affair with film. From 1970 to 1980 he wrote about the movies and movie people for the
Times
while publishing well-received biographies of figures from Hollywood’s golden age, such as Orson Welles, Errol Flynn, and Bette Davis. When he was interviewed
in the late fall of 1990, his book on the Duchess of Windsor had been on the
Times
best-seller list for nineteen weeks and he was well along on his next project, an unauthorized biography of Prince Philip and Queen Elizabeth.

To hear Higham tell it, the arts and leisure pages in the years when Peck was more or less left alone were the golden age of the
Times
’ cultural coverage, unmatched before or since. Peck was a risk-taker by
Times
standards. When the film director Peter Bogdanovich criticized Higham’s book on Orson Welles, Peck commissioned Higham to reply in an article in which he interviewed himself. It was the first of the hundred-odd articles Higham did as the
Times
’ man in Hollywood. Higham remembers the day he entered culture gulch for the first time. “Sy Peck wore a striped shirt and a modish tie. He struck a note of color in a monochrome room, where everything was gray—the people, the suits, the air.” Peck encouraged Higham as well as Chris Chase, an actress turned writer. The theater reviews of Clive Barnes and Walter Kerr appeared regularly. When Higham was assigned to do a standard piece on the actor Robert Young, Peck urged the writer to get Young to talk of his alcoholism. Peck also encouraged a more skeptical approach. He wanted the
Times
to be a sharp-eyed chronicler of culture, recording the shifting tastes of the post-Vietnam years without necessarily judging (and dismissing) them. Peck was a middleman: his mildly irreverent staff on one side, the top editors and the publisher on the other, wary and in shock of the new. Management wanted an “even-handed” approach, remembered the critic John Leonard. There was an uneasiness in culture gulch around the time of the publication of a big new book, or the opening of a major play, Leonard recalled. “The editors worried about The
Times
’ deciding what was praiseworthy: They wanted to wait for critical and public support to develop.” Peck’s skill lay in keeping both staff and editors happy. He was good at judging “the climate.” When Higham suggested an article idea, Peck would say, “Let’s wait for ‘word.’ ” “Sy was always conscious of the need for
consensus within the house,” Higham said.

Sunday Arts and Leisure came under the control of Arthur Gelb in the great realignment of 1976. Because Gelb wanted his own choices in the top Sunday editing posts, Peck was moved off the culture pages and assigned to the Sunday
Magazine.
Visiting from California, Higham found Peck a changed, beaten man; his face had aged, he looked miserable. Construction was going on around him; carpenters
were building his successor’s office. Lawson and Flatley left the
Times
entirely; their careers flourished—Lawson’s at
Vanity Fair
, Flatley’s at
Cosmopolitan.
Chase became a television reporter-host. Higham continued to contribute features, though with less edge. The
Times
wanted “generalized pop pieces,” for example, violence in the movies and previews of the Oscar awards. Peck was transferred a second time, to a dead-end editing job at the
Book Review.
He had been effectively emasculated; “the execution of Sy Peck,” Higham called it. On New Year’s Day, January 1, 1985, Seymour Peck died in an auto accident. The car he was driving was hit head on by another car traveling the wrong way on the Henry Hudson Parkway. Peck was sixty-seven years old.

When Paul Goldberger was appointed cultural news editor, he became the single most formidable cultural journalist in the country. Unlike Gelb, Goldberger kept his hand in as a working critic. In the
Times’
company of young eager-to-succeed talents, it was all but impossible to stand out. Goldberger managed the art of success; he was contributing free-lance articles to the
Times
while a Yale undergraduate. He joined the
Times Magazine
in 1972, after a brief stay at the
Wall Street Journal.
When Ada Louise Huxtable moved to the editorial board a year later, Goldberger
became daily architectural critic. He won a Pulitzer Prize for criticism in 1984, as well as a reputation for being literate, industrious, and a fast writer—he was known for getting his copy in well ahead of deadline. Architecture and architectural criticism, however, are notoriously clique-ridden and vendetta-prone, perhaps because the field is small and everyone knows everyone else. The critics’ language can turn personal and intemperate, as if in inverse ratio to the cool abstractions of design blueprints. Both Goldberger the man and the
Times’
aesthetic authority attracted ferocious attacks. Usually, such criticism of the critic could be discounted as the sour grapes peddled by lesser known writers envious of Goldberger’s status, and the
Times’
reach. Pointedly, though, the criticism replicated the traditional complaints—that the
Times
promoted its personal favorites and played safe cultural politics—while adding a third charge. The establishment architects Philip Johnson, Robert Stern, and Robert Venturi, complained Michael Sorkin, himself an architect and an architectural critic, “are by actual count, Goldberger’s most frequently recurring subjects.” They are “the architectural clique who invented Goldberger”—Johnson was, in fact, an early mentor. “Never mind the
one’s a monstrosity, the next’s a mediocrity, and the third, for all his merits, has built almost nothing in the city.…” Sorkin was withering in his treatment of the typical Goldbergerian appraisal, a style that Sorkin characterized as seeming to convey “the impression of measured consideration while at the same time camouflaging a lack of independent insight.” At best, “Goldberger leaves the reader the impression of an opinion but no recall as to what it might actually be.” Further: No point of view is offered at variance with the interests of Goldberger’s “
Times
constituency.” It all made sense, Sorkin concluded, because Goldberger is “the embodiment of the aesthetics of yuppiefication now ascendant” at the
Times.
Goldberger replied in kind: “Michael Sorkin’s brand of writing is to thoughtful criticism what the Ayatollah Khomeini is to religious tolerance.” Still, the yuppiefication line hit home. Goldberger’s columns on megadevelopments around the city were kinder and gentler than the “difficult” Huxtable’s (Sorkin’s specific point of departure was Goldberger’s initial support of the Times Square renewal project—a development of direct interest to the Times Company). And, in his early forties, culture news editor Goldberger was hardly older than most of the urbane young writers he supervised.

The
Times’
critical talents shared social and intellectual backgrounds as well as the generational tie signified by the “yuppie” label. They were university trained (usually, but not always, Ivy Leaguers) and they were, journalistically, generalists. One of Goldberger’s classmates at Yale, Lawrie Mifflin, worked in the
Times’
sports department before becoming education editor of the national desk. Film critic Janet Maslin (University of Rochester ’70) spent four years as a music columnist for
New Times
magazine. Maslin was born in 1949, the same year as chief theater critic Frank Rich (Harvard ’70). Rich wrote film and TV criticism for
Time
magazine before joining the
Times.
Sunday theater reviewer David Richards was a professor of French and an actor before beginning his career as a theater critic. Michael Kimmelman became chief art critic in 1990 at the age of thirty-one, succeeding the seventyish John Russell (Oxford University). Kimmelman had degrees from Harvard
and
Yale; he wrote for the trade magazine
Industrial Design
before joining the
Times
in 1988 as a classical-music critic. In June 1992 Herbert Muschamp was named architecture critic, at the relatively advanced age of forty-five.

The new cultural team had one other distinguishing characteristic.
The
Times’
acknowledged influence was no longer confined to New York City’s artistic and leisure life. The field of vision encompassed all of America. “When the
Times
turns its attention to a given story, parts of the world light up,” Warren Hoge explained expansively. Hoge found little positive to say about anyone else’s cultural and entertainment coverage. “There’s not much check on our performance. Our business reporting competes with the
Wall Street Journal
, our foreign desk with the
Washington Post
and the
Los Angeles Times
, our metro desk with the tabloids. The cultural-news desk competes with some magazines and newspapers, and if the net is cast wide enough geographically, the
Los Angeles Times
provides competition in movies but not in other disciplines.” As for coverage of high culture, such as the theater, “We are told by that community that we have undisputed power. They think we do. We dispute this. But since the appearance of power gives power, the perception exists and it carries weight.”

Hoge was not far off the mark. In the “old days” of the 1950s and 1960s, the
Times’
cultural influence was confined to New York. The paper distributed no more than 35,000 to 40,000 copies around the country; of that, most were bought in Washington. By the early 1990s, the National edition of the
Times
had a circulation in excess of 240,000, and the paper was available to the cultural elites on a daily basis. In a study commissioned by the Twentieth Century Fund, John E. Booth, a member of the Fund as well as a former
Times
man, examined the critics’ power over the performing arts in the late 1980s and early 1990s. He found that the
Times
was particularly important for classical musicians. When a young performer makes a concert debut, “its critical reception can frame an entire career. For pianists, violinists, indeed any instrumentalist or singer, a New York debut is essential.” A business agent for classical music artists told Booth that a New York recital, along with a
Times
review, could make a non-New York artist as well. Booking agents and managers around the country read the
Times
, and planned their concert schedules accordingly. Booth, not so incidentally, emphasized the
“extraordinary clout” of the paper, rather than the reviewer: “In those instances where a critic has left the
Times
to go elsewhere, he has usually discovered how much less power his voice then commands.”

To paraphrase Gertrude Stein, there seems to be no elsewhere in American cultural journalism. The
Los Angeles Times
critic David Shaw systematically surveyed the state of cultural reporting across
the country in 1988, and reached a conclusion much like Booth’s—and Hoge’s. Shaw found that the
Wall Street Journal
did a good but highly limited job—offering but one page of
cultural coverage on the five days a week it published. The other national newspaper,
USA Today
, was far more interested in popular culture than high culture. The weekly newsmagazines
Time
and
Newsweek
“had too little space for cultural coverage, and the TV networks, except for CBS’s ‘Sunday Morning,’ virtually ignored culture.” Shaw omitted his own paper from his survey, though he discreetly observed that the city of Los Angeles, “despite recent efforts, has yet to win its battle for full respectability.” In the years following Shaw’s survey, the
Los Angeles Times
narrowed the gap, and became the only publication approaching the
New York Times
as measured by editorial resources devoted to arts, culture, and entertainment coverage. Nevertheless, an examination of the number of critics, reporters, editors, and staff of the two papers as of 1990 showed how great the disparity remained. For comparison’s sake, the other elite daily newspaper, the
Washington Post
, is included: