Behind the Times (58 page)

The comparable figures for the two major newsmagazines,
Time
and
Newsweek
, amounted to half or less than half of the third-ranked
Post
’s totals. Other publications’ figures reflected still more modest resources. These more recent figures confirm David Shaw’s earlier conclusion that the
New York Times
, “as even its detractors acknowledge, does a better job of covering culture than any other national general interest news organization.… [It] is really the only national news organ that even purports to thoroughly cover the entire country.”

*        *        *

Shaw and Booth were more concerned with the high culture than with popular culture. Not all ventures lived or died on the word of the
Times.
The audiences for mass media entertainment—big studio motion pictures, television shows, rock, pop, rap, country and western, and other nonclassical music—are large and scattered. They consult many different sources, including their peers’ and their own opinions. In the areas of high-end culture, art, entertainment, and leisure activities, though, the
Times’
powers in New York and throughout the country were unquestioned.

As a rough rule, the more expensive the entertainment or cultural fare, the more important the
Times’
opinions. Upper-end commercial culture was especially vulnerable to the question, “What did the
Times
say?” In some cultural worlds, there was
no
other verdict worth considering, a situation that caused much gnashing of capped teeth among elites.
Art & Auction
, for example, devoted a long, rancorous article to Rita Reif, a
Times’
auction reporter, in its issue of January 1991. The magazine noted Reif’s “feared status” at those citadels of class consciousness, auction houses. According to the magazine, Reif set the tone for the
Times’
treatment of auction-house news and, by extension, of all auction coverage—no other paper has a reporter assigned full-time to the field. As a consequence of being the
Times’
lead reporter, the magazine explained, Reif was “treated with kid gloves” by Sotheby’s and Christie’s; the auction houses called her first when important consignment contracts cleared, spoon-fed her exclusive advance information on sales, and arranged private screenings and interviews for her. The velvet ropes used at auctions to separate the house staff from the public, including members of the press, always came down to make room for Reif.
Art & Auction
seemed most offended by Reif’s alleged lack of knowledge about the business—compared, that is, to
Art & Auction.
The magazine claimed that, despite all the special attention showered on Reif, her work was still full of mistakes, that it lacked both balance and depth, and that it was badly written. The article was called “
Educating Rita.”

Variations of the “Educating Rita” story were repeated about Bryan Miller, John Rockwell, and any number of other
Times
reporters and critics. (The tales of favoritism and philistinism in the pages of the
Book Review
attained mythic status in the publishing world; they could fill a book—they are treated in the next chapter.) One
Times
critic
above all others, however, inspired the greatest mixture of fear, admiration, respect, and loathing. Frank Rich’s presumptive stranglehold on the American theater was analyzed and reanalyzed constantly, until both supporters and detractors had memorized one another’s positions, like professional wrestlers on television. In the early spring of 1992, these predictable gruntings and posturings took an unexpected turn. Rich and his supervising editors were accused of regularly exercising arrogant power—and appearing to enjoy themselves. They had discovered a useful marketing tool. The diffident mask of “service to the consumer” had slipped a little.

Rich’s accuser, Robert Brustein, could not be dismissed as easily as one of the chronic complainers-around-the-coffee-cart in culture gulch. Brustein was a producer, a professor at Harvard, and artistic director of the American Repertory Theater. He took the case against the
Times
public in an essay in the
New Republic.
Brustein didn’t waste any time arguing about the
Times’
power; he assumed as a given “the causal link between Rich’s dramatic opinions and the crisis in the American theater.” Brustein said that Rich promoted the work of his friends and favorites in
Times
reviews while putting down the serious and the avant garde (including some of
Brustein’s favorites). The typical Rich review, Brustein wrote, was safe, centrist, and, in the bargain, slick: Rich’s lively literary style had the effect of “exacerbating the problem, since it has helped enhance his position with his editors and his readers.”

If Brustein had stopped at that, his essay would have been one more chunk of Broadway boilerplate. The power of the
Times’
man on the aisle has been a fact of life in the New York theater for five decades. In the 1950s, the
Times’
amiable critic
Brooks Atkinson complained that he had more power than he wanted—and that was when reviewers from a dozen other dailies covered opening nights. In the years since, one after another of the New York dailies disappeared, and the
Times’
cultural power increased. Since the 1980s, Rich has practically stood alone as the chief arbiter of middlebrow theater. In the early winter of the 1989–90 New York theater season, to take one example, the musical
City of Angels
opened with at least four strikes against it, given the prevailing bleak Broadway climate:
Angels
had no name stars; it was experimental, a big-budget American original, not an established British import; there were no crashing chandeliers or ascending helicopters; and the book and lyrics were somewhat demanding (reminiscent
of a Sondheim musical or a Pirandello play). Rich, however, liked
City of Angels.
“So potent was his rave,” critic Thomas M. Disch wrote in
The Nation
, “that the next day the box office at the Virginia Theater raked in half a million dollars in ticket sales, thereby averting a threatened closing.” One of Rich’s smart pans, on the other hand, could stop a big-budget musical in mid-note.
Carrie
, a restaging of the movie cult classic, was done in the worst possible taste; “a wish fulfillment fantasy for very naughty ids,” Disch called it. Sex and violence were its particular concerns, all played to excess with a catchy beat. Rich reacted in kind, excessively, with a devastating negative review. Charitably, Disch excused the
Times
man for his “sincere squeamishness,” calling it a fair reflection of Rich’s
Times
readership.
Carrie
quickly closed, having lost a staggering $7 million. Disch couldn’t help wondering whether, in time, enough word-of-mouth to counter Rich’s review might have spread to those adventurous theatergoers with an appetite for dirty dancing and glorious excess.

All that was background when Brustein widened “the Rich problem” to include an accomplice, Alex Witchel, the
Times’
theater reporter and Frank Rich’s wife of eight months. They were, Brustein wrote, “a one-two punch, a husband and wife team on the same art beat.” Both were talented but flawed writers, Brustein said, and they reinforced each other’s judgments, or covered over each other’s mistakes. They were, in short, “an embarrassment of Riches.” Rich and Witchel declined to reply to Brustein. But colleagues did speak up on their behalf, privately and not for attribution. One senior
Times
editor described Brustein as an unceasing grinder of axes, with his own conflicts of interests (he produced plays at his Cambridge-based theater as well as reviewing plays). Brustein was supposedly embittered because Frank Rich, with his
Times’
megaphone, was a more prominent voice in the theater than Robert Brustein.

Rich-Witchel versus Brustein made for good gossip within a twenty-block radius of Times Square. The blood feuds in the theater have such long histories that few people remember anymore why they are at each other’s throats, like Serbs and Bosnians. The
Times
considered Brustein for its chief reviewer’s job in the mid-1960s; he turned the job down, he said, because he didn’t want to pronounce judgment on a play within a two-hour deadline and “be responsible for people’s unemployment.” Rich, in his turn, declined a Brustein offer to be a visiting lecturer at Harvard.

But beyond the sideshow of dueling egos on the aisles, Brustein had reinvigorated the long-running argument about how the
Times
used its acknowledged powers over Broadway and the other arts and entertainments. In the past,
Times
critics would shift from one foot to another, and dissemble about their authority in an aw, shucks sort of way. “I don’t close plays; producers and theater owners do,” Rich said on more than one occasion. Brustein threw open for discussion the possibility that the
Times
had a chokehold on arts and culture and
didn’t intend to let go.
It relished its leverage.

Brustein’s case for “an embarrassment of Riches” required a labored reading between the lines. According to Brustein, shows that Rich liked out of town, for example, the musical
Falsettos
, received advance attention in Witchel’s “On Stage and Off’ column. The innovative director-producer Joanne Akalaitis, the late Joe Papp’s successor at the Public Theater, was “regularly panned” by Rich and “regularly assailed” by Witchel. (Bereft of the
Times’
support, Akalaitis soon lost the support as well of the Public’s board; in March 1993, she was fired.) A Sunday feature by Witchel, a 2,648-word personality interview with the actress Joan Collins, was followed by an exquisitely sandpapered Rich review (Noël Coward’s
Private Lives
, “while not remotely a satisfying production … may well titillate Miss Collins’ most ardent admirers”). To the fair-minded, these examples did not prove collusion. A Joan Collins interview had become a Sunday
Times
staple: big feature treatment for a popular star. If another of culture gulch’s up-and-comers had done the Collins story, it would have turned out the same. Similarly, absent Witchel, Rich in his Collins review wouldn’t have strayed very far from his middle-of-the-road sensibility.

Times
editors’ reactions to the more general point about abusive power was disingenuous. They chose to talk about Rich-Witchel narrowly, as a “problem of perceptions,” in the same way that the Bush administration airily ignored the faltering American economy of the early 1990s as just a matter of how consumers “feel.” While some people might think that a “husband and wife team might collude or influence each other,
Times
men and -women were too conscientious for that to happen. What’s more, the
Times
had husband and wife teams reporting from all over the world, including China, where Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDun won a Pulitzer Prize last year” (as if there were no difference between two people covering a country with a population of one billion and two people on Broadway assignment).
The institutional
Times
, acting in character, took no public notice of the Brustein brief; perhaps the editors hoped that, like George Bush facing the national recession, if they ignored it, it would go away. “
The
Times
does not like to be told by the outside world how to run its affairs,” the magazine
TheaterWeek
commented. But because the institutional
Times
also does not like to be embarrassed, or see its reputation for fairness undercut,
TheaterWeek
suggested that the
Times’
editors would wait a decent interval post-Brustein and then “do something to break or at least temper the couple’s hammerlock on the theater.” True to that scenario, the
Times
quietly resolved its “embarrassment of Riches” by moving Witchel off the theater beat. A year later, the
Times
announced that Rich himself was moving to the Op-Ed page to do a twice-weekly cultural column. There he could produce more opinion “product” with no need to await the opening of a new play.

Witchel’s reassignment represented nothing more than the rearrangement of the deck chairs on the
Times.
The editors had no intention of changing the paper’s new course. Indeed the
Times
welcomed the attention its critics received. Rich was bankable; the
Times
intended to feature him, as well as the reviews and “Critic’s Notebook” of its other bright, snappy writers. They were stars, as big at the box office as a Joan Collins.

The ascendancy of the critic-star, a crowd-pleasing kind of guy, came at a bad moment culturally in New York. The three other dailies in the city that regularly covered the theater were struggling to make a profit. On television, Channel 5 dropped its reviewer Stewart Klein from the staff (he was paid for a time by the review) and Channel 11 dropped its reviewer, Jeffrey Lyons, completely. In March 1992, WINS radio dismissed its theater critic, Leida Snow, after thirteen years. Snow’s old listeners could turn the dial to the
Times’
radio station, WQXR-FM, where
Times
critics regularly read from their reviews. Snow herself took an announcer’s job at the same station.

When
City of Angels
opened to Rich’s warm praise, other theater critics, including Thomas Disch of
The Nation
, liked the musical as well. But Disch understood the importance of the
Times’
word in keeping
City of Angels
alive. “There is a God,” Disch concluded, adding pensively, “whether that God’s name is Rich and whether he is a just God” were matters for more discussion.

The godlike authority of the
Times
over the fate of plays—on, off,
and off-off-Broadway—as well as its effects on the economic health of new books, ballet, music, and other cultural and entertainment offerings was a fact of commercial life. Some plays survived a scathing review from Rich, just as some restaurants weathered a bad write-up from Bryan Miller—but not that many.