by Gay Talese
With regard to the Rosenthal-Gelb book, the assignment to Hentoff had been made by a bright young iconoclast who had recently joined the “Review”—a man who read the Voice and who, in the absence of Francis Brown, head of the department, had sent the book to Hentoff with an awareness that the review might produce a bit of flack. Although no sanctions were levied against the impolitic editor, it was a fairly good bet that, among the 6,354 employees of The Times, his future was not now the brightest; nor would his erudition and literary judgment henceforth be considered so trustworthy as, for example, that of Eliot Fremont-Smith, the daily critic, who had written favorably about One More Victim.
Fremont-Smith, a neat and tweedy man of thirty-eight, had come a long way from his own days as a book critic for the Village Voice. A graduate of Antioch, with graduate work at Columbia and Yale, he had started out on The Times in the Sunday “Book Review” but had moved to the position of daily book critic in 1965, assuming the role of chief literary tastemaker that had been the function of Orville Prescott. It is remarkable on The Times how the title makes the man, and how the deprivation of that title suddenly does the opposite: Orville Prescott for years had been the terror of the book industry, an arbiter whose every approving nod could supposedly sell a thousand books; and yet when Prescott was replaced as the principal critic by Fremont-Smith, and although Prescott in semiretirement continued to review books in The Times and elsewhere, there was suddenly no longer fear nor felicity over the pronouncements of Prescott. However, Fremont-Smith, upon inheriting the mantle, soared to oracular heights; his words were reprinted in publishers’ ads, he was the brahmin of Brentano’s, the literary guide to ladies in Great Neck. Like his predecessor, he received more attention and earned more money from writing about other people’s books than he probably could have from his own. Worse, he might never know if he could write his own. A critic spends his best years reading other men’s words in quiet rooms, refining his own taste, making greater demands on his contemporaries, and most critics have neither the time, nor perhaps the nerve, to be tested themselves—their taste is possibly too good for their own good. The critic also knows that as a critic he has made enemies, and should he venture forth with a book of his own, they will be waiting in the wings to see that he gets his due.
So it is a rather vexatious life for the Times critic who writes well and who nurtures secret ambitions to gamble on his talent. His choice is to step down from his pedestal and risk being at the mercy of such men as he had been, or to try to play it safe within the House of Ochs, hoping that he will not be adversely affected by executive changes and will not lose touch with contemporary taste in literature, as it appeared that Prescott had done in his final years. Prescott had become a white-haired gentleman who fancied the traditional and who seemed offended by the literary outcroppings and droppings of the mid-Sixties, and this had hastened the appearance of his successor. Bright-eyed, sharp, engagé, an astute individual who knew better than to send a Timesman’s book to Nat Hentoff, Eliot Fremont-Smith was the sort of modern critic that Clifton Daniel wanted—a versatile journalist who could write an interesting and intelligent review, could carve with the best, and could parry and tiptoe when a situation seemed ticklish, as perhaps it was when the book by Svetlana Alliluyeva had been scheduled for review. Fremont-Smith had handled it well, not dismissing the work as a nonbook that had been trumpeted in the West for its propaganda value, but rather rhapsodizing the fact that Stalin’s daughter was indeed alive and safely on American shores. In another column, reviewing The News Media by John Hohenberg, Fremont-Smith managed to work in the opinion that while criticism of the press was desirable, and while influential criticism was lacking, the particular brand of press coverage exhibited in the Village Voice was not the answer. The Voice, he wrote, “appears increasingly to have its own personal and political ax to grind, and is probably counter-influential”—a sentence that did him no harm with the front office.
As the emergence of Fremont-Smith had caused Times readers to forget Orville Prescott, so did the new theater critic, Clive Barnes, make readers forget Stanley Kauffmann and, to a degree, even Walter Kerr. Shortly after Kerr had replaced Kauffmann as the daily drama critic, and after the disappearance of the World Journal Tribune, there was great concern both on Broadway and within The Times about the excessive power of The Times’ single critic; and it was Kerr who suggested that the paper have two drama critics—one who would review plays for the daily edition, the other who would write a roundup every week for the Sunday drama page. Kerr, wishing to take a longer view of the theater, volunteered for the Sunday assignment, and he was replaced on the daily beat by Clive Barnes, a short, bouncy Englishman of thirty-nine who, though primarily a dance critic for seventeen years, was very knowledgeable about the theater. Barnes was also sufficiently energetic to handle both ballet and drama criticism; he had insisted, in fact, that he be allowed to retain his position as a ballet critic, dance being his overwhelming passion, and he contemplated a schedule whereby he would attend most Broadway first nights and ballet second nights, altering the routine on occasions by attending, as Stanley Kauffmann had done, the final Broadway previews.
It was somehow hoped that the combination of Barnes and Kerr would split the power of the drama chair and provide readers with a divergent view of the theater. But the new arrangement did nothing of the sort—it merely shifted the daily spotlight away from Walter Kerr to Clive Barnes. Kerr’s weekend reviews sometimes appeared a week or ten days after an opening, and they lacked the immediacy of Barnes’ quick appraisals. No matter what Kerr wrote in his weekend column, the verdict was in, The Times had spoken. Another reason that the focus had shifted to Barnes was his more lively and lucid prose style. Since leaving the Herald Tribune for The Times, Kerr’s style seemed to have lost some of its edge and vivacity; it was as if, in coming to The Times, he had been affected by the increased power, the awesome responsibility; the weight of the institution seemed to be pressing upon him. Clive Barnes, however, had not worked in the shadow of the Times building for years; had, in fact, known very little about The New York Times when it had first sought to hire him in London. Barnes had occasionally seen copies of the paper on London newsstands and in the offices of British publications, but what he had seen was the slim, unimpressive overseas edition, and he had not become aware of The Times’ full influence until he arrived in New York.
Nevertheless, being a man who took neither himself nor his surroundings too seriously, Barnes continued to do what he had done before, which was to write about a great many things at great speed, pounding a typewriter with two tireless fingers, relying on his instinctive judgments. And his style had an instant freshness; his intellectuality seemed brilliantly dashed off and not intended to be ex cathedra. Barnes was witty and clever, and this helped him in his delicate task on The Times: instead of condemning a play in an exacting manner, as Kauffmann might have done, Barnes was capable of treading lightly, of adroitly conveying two things at once, of sometimes both praising and criticizing a production in a single sentence, thus preserving his own integrity and perhaps a bit of the box office. In reviewing the Broadway production of Joseph Heller’s We Bombed in New Haven, Barnes wrote:
If I was forced to a judgment I would call it a bad play any good playwright should be proud to have written, and any good audience fascinated to see.
In Barnes’ appraisal of two of Harold Pinter’s short plays, “Tea Party” and “The Basement,” he wrote:
To some extent—and please do not let me put you off from going, for these plays are exquisitely exciting—these are minor Pinter. But Pinter is one of the most important English-speaking playwrights since O’Neill, and minor Pinter is better than major almost anyone else.
There was also working in The Times’ Cultural-News department at this time another critic who was gaining wide attention—a dark-eyed, dark-haired, determinedly dowdy young woman of twenty-nine named Renata Adler. Born in Milan of American parents, a graduate
of Bryn Mawr, Miss Adler had attended the Sorbonne and had received a master’s degree in comparative literature at Harvard. Prior to her joining The Times as its film critic in November of 1967, she had spent five years on the staff of The New Yorker, writing on a variety of subjects—the clamorous existence of New York disc jockeys, the Civil Rights march in Alabama, a New Left convention in Chicago; “Talk” pieces, and occasional reviews on films and books, the most memorable of which was a merciless vivisection of the work of novelist Herbert Gold. That Gold could have continued to be a productive writer after that review was an indication of rare resolve on his part; and that Miss Adler, who in person seems so disarmingly sympathetic and tentative, could have written the review was a revelation of another sort.
Miss Adler’s work in The New Yorker had attracted the attention of Clifton Daniel, Harrison Salisbury, and other editors, but they had been unable to interest her in joining The Times until they had offered her the position of film critic, replacing Bosley Crowther, who had held the job for twenty-seven years. Crowther was still in fine health at sixty-three, but the editors believed that contemporary films required a more youthful observer, and thus Renata Adler was hired and Crowther was named a critic-emeritus. Emeritus is a gloomy word at The Times, and within a year he had retired from the paper to become an executive consultant for Columbia Pictures.
Miss Adler quickly became, as Crowther had been in his final months, a very controversial critic: Crowther’s protest mail had largely concerned his failure to appreciate the symbolic significance of the casual mayhem in Bonnie and Clyde, while Miss Adler was regarded in the entertainment industry as priggish and passionless about films. According to Variety, she was happy with only two of the first twenty-seven films she reviewed (Charlie Bubbles and The Two of Us); she had reservations about such widely acclaimed productions as The Graduate and In Cold Blood, and one producer spent $6,000 for a full-page ad in The Times to question her taste after she had panned one of his films. The ad strongly implied that she did not really like films, a contention that she denied to a reporter from Newsweek: “I like movies and I like bad movies but that doesn’t mean I have to say they’re good.”
The reaction to her criticism, however, seemed to upset her in the beginning, and when a free-lance writer sought her cooperation to do a personality profile on her for a magazine, she pleaded that the idea be postponed, explaining that she would probably be fired in the near future. But the editors at this point had no such intentions. While recognizing her considerable influence over moviegoers, particularly in the foreign or art-house market, she did not have, like Barnes, the power to make or break a production, and The Times’ editors were also in agreement that Miss Adler wrote very well and entertainingly about subjects that often failed to entertain. In reviewing a United Artists release, The Wicked Dreams of Paula Schultz, in January of 1968, she wrote:
Even if your idea of a good time is to watch a lot of middle-aged Germans, some of them very fat, all reddening, grimacing, perspiring, and falling over Elke Sommer, I think you ought to skip “The Wicked Dreams of Paula Schultz,” because this first film of the year is so unrelievedly awful in such a number of uninteresting ways … [it] is a bit of bumbling, color pornography, a little nude film that lost its way on 42d Street and drifted on over to the Astor.
So Renata Adler passed her trial period at The Times and became the latest in a line of young journalists bringing sophistication into the news columns of The Times, fulfilling one of Daniel’s aims as the managing editor.
As Clifton Daniel began his fourth year in that position, he could properly take pride not only in the more lively coverage of the arts, and, of course, society, but also in the better reportage emanating from other special departments. The decision to appoint Robert Lipsyte as a sports columnist, alternating with Arthur Daley, had brought a smooth literary touch to sports writing that had been missing in New York’s morning newspapers since the disappearance of the Herald Tribune and Red Smith. Daniel had also played a role in The Times’ better obituary writing, having assigned a dedicated specialist named Alden Whitman to that task. Fred M. Hechinger, installed as head of the Education-News department, had succeeded after other men in that position had not. Tom Mullaney had run the Financial-Business department admirably since the retirement of Jack Forrest a few years before; and the department that decides which wedding and engagement pictures will appear in The Times was under the capable jurisdiction of a status-conscious, unbribable man named Russell Edwards.
The foreign, national, and local staffs were clearly under the authority of New York, and Daniel seemed more self-assured now than he had in several months. The ungraceful dismissal of Kauffmann, a disturbing experience for Daniel, had been superseded by the success of Daniel’s discovery, Clive Barnes.
Corporate life had seemed better for Daniel, in fact, since the triumphant return of his friend Salisbury from Hanoi in January of 1967; and while Daniel’s relationship with Punch Sulzberger was not as warm as both men might have hoped, they had gotten along reasonably well through 1967, and with the arrival of 1968, Daniel was fairly certain of his place in the hierarchy. Catledge was still lingering in the background, but the executive editor had done considerable traveling of late, and one Times reporter who had visited New Orleans had brought back word that Catledge was building a home there. Perhaps Catledge was closer to retirement than most executives thought.
The only unresolved and pressing matter in the newsroom at this point was what to do about the Washington bureau chief. The 1968 political campaigns were already beginning to accelerate, and Wicker would be very busy with his column and often out of the capital; if there was ever a proper moment for Wicker to relinquish the bureau to another man with more time for administrative details, that moment was now. But, as in the past, there appeared to be no acceptable replacement for him. Daniel and most other New York executives, though not Rosenthal, were still resistant to Max Frankel, and no one else in Washington seemed qualified. In New York there had been hints dropped in Rosenthal’s direction, but Rosenthal had not been anxious to vacate the executive mainstream for Washington, and Salisbury was probably still too controversial a subject in Washington to be able to function agreeably there. The same might be said of the chief London correspondent, Anthony Lewis, whom the Washington bureaumen remembered unsentimentally. If Lewis were given Wicker’s title, it might result in the resignation of Frankel, among others; Frankel had done very well in covering the White House this year, and regardless of the reservations that Daniel, Catledge, and others had about Frankel’s administrative capacities, they did not wish to lose Frankel’s services as a reporter.
So the situation seemed almost unsolvable. Wicker, who possibly did not even want the job at this point, was stuck with it. He had to hold onto it as one must often seem to cherish an unwanted gift from a very important donor. Reston’s vanity was involved, and Wicker was compelled to respect it until some graceful retreat or alternative could be arranged to Reston’s satisfaction. It was obvious to nearly everyone, however, that Wicker was devoting most of his time and energy to the writing of his column, which had become an excellent addition to The Times’ editorial page. Even the New York editors privately admitted this. Salisbury, in fact, had lately become a fervent fan of Wicker’s writing, admiring the emotion and perception that Wicker regularly displayed in his reports of shifting moods within the capital and the nation.
And yet, strangely, Wicker was the only columnist who was not being featured by The Times in its promotional advertising. Russell Baker, C. L. Sulzberger, and Reston were regularly advertised by The Times, often with their photographs, and The Times did the same for such specialists as Craig Claiborne and Charlotte Curtis, and for its leading cultural critics. At first Wicker thought it was merely an oversight, although he had felt slighted on the very day that he had replaced Krock as a columnist. The Times story that announced Krock’s retirement had rightly recounted at great length the colorful career of
the veteran Timesman; it had failed to mention, however, that Wicker was Krock’s successor. When for the next two years Wicker continued to be omitted from the house ads, it appeared that a Southern vendetta had indeed intruded upon the quiet carpets of The Times. Wicker’s pride prevented him from pursuing the matter openly, but within himself he smoldered, and perhaps it was partly this, along with his many other frustrations as the bureau chief, that had driven him more deeply into his column, permitting the bureau to operate largely on its own momentum. He was not the bureau chief by New York’s choice, but despite it, and he had survived primarily because New York had been unable to produce a substitute. It seemed, too, that the impasse might continue indefinitely. Then, suddenly, this situation changed. Wicker learned that New York had selected James Greenfield to replace him.