The Kingdom and the Power (69 page)

As a
Times
man, Daniel had respected this system. It had brought him compensation and an identity with greatness, and it would hopefully continue to do so unless the system was abruptly altered by the young publisher. This prospect had not concerned Daniel during Sulzberger’s first two years at the top—Sulzberger had then seemed to be gently and effectively guided by Turner Catledge. But during the late summer of 1966, and into the fall and winter, things had occurred within the organization that had made Daniel wonder. Decisions that had seemed imminent were suddenly changed; there seemed to be a subtle shifting of attitude, of pondering and postponing from Catledge’s back office. It was as if Catledge’s regentship was now being counterbalanced by the weight of an emerging figure from above.

The plan to hire a team of psychologists under the auspices of an independent research firm—Daniel Yankelovich, Inc., of 575 Madison Avenue—to sample the thinking of
Times
employees seemed rather injudicious. Not only was it an open admission that all was not well within, but it seemed contrary to
Times
policy to permit outsiders to probe into the paper’s internal affairs, and it also suggested a lack of confidence in the paper’s own editors to analyze the situation and deal with it. There were other things, too, that had begun to concern Daniel. There was the continuing prospect that his chief aide, Harrison Salisbury, might be transferred out of the News department. And there was the unexpected survival of Tom Wicker as the Washington bureau chief after Wicker had been told by Catledge during the summer that he would have to relinquish the bureau if he wanted to take over Arthur Krock’s column upon Krock’s retirement, at the age of seventy-eight, on October 1, 1966. Wicker had agreed, saying that if forced to choose between running the bureau and writing the column, he would take the column. But then somehow, after becoming a columnist, Wicker had also managed to hold onto his title as bureau chief.

But what had most directly and personally perturbed Clifton Daniel during the late summer of 1966 was the abrupt dismissal, on orders relayed by Catledge, of the theater critic, Stanley Kauffmann, whom Daniel had hired eight months before and whose work he admired. Kauffmann had come to
The Times
from the
New Republic
, where he had been the film critic, but he had also had a background in the theater: he had been trained for the theater through four years of college, had spent ten years in a repertory company devoted to classics, had written and published plays, had directed in summer theaters and elsewhere, and between 1963 and 1966 he had been the drama critic of the educational television station in New York, Channel 13. Before being hired, Kauffmann had been invited by Daniel and Salisbury to the
Times
building for conversations about the so-called “cultural explosion” in America, the affluent society’s fling with the arts, and how
The Times
had responded to this by forming, in 1962, a Cultural-News department with a staff of forty to examine, report, and appraise the cultural scene. It had worked out quite well, Daniel and Salisbury conceded, but they were not entirely satisfied with some of their critics’ intellectual capacity or writing style, which was too often couched in generalities and glib journalese. When they sought Kauffmann’s own opinion of
The Times’
cultural coverage, he said frankly that it seemed like a “cultural dump,” adding that it was also the opinion of the intellectual community, as he knew it, that
The Times’
critics were held in very low esteem. He excepted
The Times’
critic on architecture, Ada Louise Huxtable; its dance critic, Clive Barnes; and one of its art critics, Hilton Kramer.

Kauffmann could not have made three more appropriate exceptions when condemning the critics—Daniel and Salisbury were also admirers of the work of Mrs. Huxtable, and they had been active in the hiring of Hilton Kramer and Clive Barnes. In the case of Kramer, whose criticism had appeared in
The New Leader
,
Commentary
, and
The New York Review of Books
, Harrison Salisbury had seemed more knowledgeable than Daniel about Kramer’s work—although before Kramer had been hired officially, he had talked not only with Daniel and Salisbury, but also with Emanuel R. Freedman, an assistant managing editor; Joseph G. Herzberg, the cultural-news director; Seymour Peck, the editor of the arts and leisure section; Daniel Schwarz, the Sunday editor; and Turner Catledge. Clive Barnes had gone through pretty much the same ritual, although his employment by
The Times
had been entirely
Daniel’s idea. Daniel, who had become an appreciator of ballet during his years in London and his friendship with Dame Margot Fonteyn—about whom he wrote his final
Magazine
piece in 1956 before settling down as a
Times
editor—had read and enjoyed Clive Barnes’s dance reviews in the London
Times
and the
Daily Express
, and thus began a series of transoceanic phone calls from Daniel to Barnes that led, in 1965, to Barnes’s leaving London to join
The New York Times
.

After Daniel’s and Salisbury’s consultations with Kauffmann, and after Kauffmann had made the rounds and made his recommendations on how
The Times
might improve its cultural coverage, he was offered the position of drama critic, replacing Howard Taubman, a former music critic who had succeeded Brooks Atkinson in the drama chair after the latter had begun writing a critic-at-large column. But with Atkinson’s retirement, Howard Taubman was assigned to write critic-at-large pieces on cultural affairs, although not as a regular columnist, and Kauffmann was to move into Taubman’s spot. It was agreed that Kauffmann would have the job for a minimum of a year and a half, but as one executive put it, the hope was that “this will be for life.”

Kauffmann’s career as a
Times
man had begun on January 1, 1966, and except for minor complaints about his polysyllabicisms and elliptical references, he had received only praise from the editors. But as one who took his critic’s job very seriously, perhaps too seriously, Kauffmann was soon making enemies among a number of Broadway producers, performers, and backers. In several letters to the publisher’s office, and in visits to certain of the publisher’s representatives, they complained that Kauffmann did not seem to like anything, and there was the indication that even when he did, he could not write a selling review. Although this was not really true, a few
Times
executives privately felt that Kauffmann was a bit too ponderous and professorial about the theater: he seemed mainly interested in analyzing the play, examining its weaknesses and strengths, and did not create sufficient excitement in his reviews, a sense of anticipation and pleasure that many ticket buyers associate with the theater.

In fairness to Kauffmann, he had problems that no other critic had on
The Times
, that of being second-guessed behind his back by numbers of
Times
executives who regularly attend Broadway shows, who socialize with producers and investors in Sardi’s and around New York, who have an emotional interest in, and a conviction
about, the theater that they do not have about films or ballet, art, television, or architecture. Kauffmann was also unfortunate in joining
The Times
during its transitional period when no editor knew precisely which way the new publisher and the top executives were leaning, and there was also the problem of the power inherent in the drama job itself. Unlike the movie critic, whose influence on the box office is mitigated by the fact that a film may be opening in fifty different cities simultaneously, the theater critic’s comments are directed at one stage in New York, and bombardment by
The Times
can possibly destroy a play’s chances of survival on Broadway as well as its touring opportunities elsewhere—unless the production is endowed with a large advance sale, or a superstar with great appeal, or with several fine reviews in other publications, particularly from Walter Kerr in the
Herald Tribune
and from the news magazines and
The New Yorker
. After the departure of Brooks Atkinson, whose eminence and seniority as a drama critic had made him invulnerable to countercriticism from
Times
editors or Broadway people,
The Times’
top executives had thought of Kenneth Tynan as a replacement, having respected his judgment and literary style in
The New Yorker
, and seeing him as a kind of witty, skillful surgeon who could cut without killing. The drama job on
The Times
, the executives generally agreed, was potentially a blunt and dangerous instrument in improper hands—
The Times
was fearful of the power invested in that one employee, and it was felt that Tynan might concurrently fulfill the need of serious criticism, responsibility to the theater, and entertainment to
Times
readers. But Tynan himself admitted that he could not produce his kind of review in the little more than one hour that was available to a critic on a morning newspaper; and Tynan was also anxious to be getting back to London.

When Stanley Kauffmann had been approached by
The Times
, he had raised the same point—there simply was not sufficient time between the end of the play and the paper’s deadline to write a considered review, and as a result of this discussion, Clifton Daniel had arranged for Kauffmann to attend plays during their final preview before opening night—the assumption being that if a play was not then in shape it could not be significantly improved within twenty-four hours, and it would also permit the critic to give more time and thought to the words that carried such weight with ticket buyers. Daniel had hoped that the critics on other newspapers would follow this practice, but they did not, and one reviewer described
The Times’
plan as a confession of Kauffmann’s journalistic inability to meet a deadline. When Kauffmann’s reviews began to appear, the producers mounted their protest; but at first neither Catledge, Sulzberger, nor anyone else on the paper seemed unduly concerned.
Times
executives are accustomed to a certain amount of criticism of their critics: Howard Taubman had been condemned regularly around Sardi’s as a weak replacement for Brooks Atkinson; and even Atkinson had been denounced by producers on many occasions, and one of
his
predecessors, Alexander Woollcott, had even been barred from a theater after an unfavorable review. This had occurred in 1915 after Woollcott had described a particular Shubert brothers’ comedy as “not vastly amusing” and “quite tedious”; and the Shuberts had retaliated by sending a set of tickets to their next production to Carr Van Anda, with a note suggesting that
The Times
assign another critic to review it, adding that if Woollcott presented the tickets they would not be honored. When Adolph Ochs learned of this, he instructed Woollcott to buy his own ticket. Woollcott did, but when he arrived at the theater door he was blocked by a doorman and Jacob Shubert himself.

Ochs immediately sought an injunction in court and he eliminated from
The Times
all of the Shuberts’ advertising. The controversy became the talk of Broadway, was publicized around the nation, and was not settled in court for months. Although Ochs’s injunction was ultimately overruled—an appellate division contended that while a theater owner could not bar a patron because of color, creed, or class distinction, he could do so for certain private reasons—the Shuberts, wishing to resume advertising in
The Times
, finally conceded
The Times’
right to select its own reviewers, and the bitterness ended with the Shuberts sending Woollcott a box of cigars at Christmas.

Ochs had made his point—outsiders were not going to tell
The Times
how to run its business—but this did not mean that Ochs was not personally offended on occasions when reading a snide or excessively negative review in his newspaper. Ochs’s philosophy was that of a booster, particularly insofar as business or community affairs were concerned; and since the Broadway theater was one of the major attractions of New York, he hoped that his critics would not fail to appreciate and applaud fine efforts whenever possible. In his final will, completed three months before his death, Ochs urged that his editorial page continue to be “more than fair and
courteous to those who may sincerely differ with its views,” and he expected the same from his critics. At the same time, he expected them to uphold standards, and he rarely interfered with the publication of a review once it had been written. In Brooks Atkinson’s long career as the drama critic, which had begun in 1925, he could remember only one occasion when Ochs had personally approached him and asked, after reading an advance copy of a review, that a word be changed. This occurred after Ochs had attended the opening of one of S. L. (Roxy) Rothafel’s theaters in Rockefeller Center, an extravagant spectacle that Atkinson criticized for its gaudiness. Ochs, dressed in formal clothes, had walked back to Atkinson’s desk later that evening and asked to read the review, and when he did Atkinson could see a look of pain beginning to crease Ochs’s face. Ochs was a friend and admirer of Roxy, a remarkable show-business entrepreneur and the son of an immigrant German shoemaker—Ochs admired any successful man who had come up the hard way, and he could anticipate how distraught Roxy would be upon reading this review. Ochs said nothing for a few moments. Then very softly and timidly, the white-haired publisher pointed to a line in the review and he asked, “Mr. Atkinson, would you mind changing this one word?” Atkinson looked at the word and thought that its removal did not alter the meaning of the sentence in any way; it was such a minor change that Atkinson soon forgot what the word was: but he changed it, and then Adolph Ochs thanked him, said good-night, and left.

Ochs’s successors, while equally reluctant to interfere with their critics, nevertheless have shared Ochs’s booster philosophy toward the community, and when in 1966 the paper’s critics panned the opening of the new $45.7 million Metropolitan Opera House in Lincoln Center, Punch Sulzberger was appalled. The opening featured Samuel Barber’s
Antony and Cleopatra
, which
The Times’
music critic, Harold Schonberg, found “vulgar” and “exhibitionistic”; the ballet within the opera was not satisfactory to Clive Barnes; the art on the walls was unexciting to John Canaday; the architecture was “sterile” to Ada Louise Huxtable; and the 3,800 first-nighters, which included Mrs. Lyndon Johnson, John D. Rockefeller 3d, and Mayor John Lindsay, were characterized by Charlotte Curtis variously as “overachievers,” “nabobs,” “moguls,” and a “mob.” When Punch Sulzberger had finished reading the views of these five
Times
writers in the paper, he exclaimed, “My
God
, couldn’t they find
anything
good to write about?” He expressed his feelings to a few executives, but there was no hint of restraining the critics. If he wished to temper a critic’s tone, or was otherwise dissatisfied, he would not lecture the critic—he would remove him. And that is what Sulzberger had done during the previous month, in August of 1966, in the case of Stanley Kauffmann. Clifton Daniel had learned of Punch Sulzberger’s plan gradually: first Daniel had heard from Catledge that the critic Walter Kerr, whose
Herald Tribune
had just merged with the
Journal-American
and the
World-Telegram
after a long strike, and who had not joined the new
World Journal Tribune
, was being considered for employment by
The Times
. Daniel was told to tell Kauffmann, who was on vacation in Connecticut, of the discussions that
The Times
had been having with Kerr. (Kerr was then in Austria participating in the Salzburg Seminar in American Studies.) But before Daniel could arrange to meet with Kauffmann, in fact on the very day that Kauffmann was scheduled to appear in Daniel’s office, Catledge told Daniel that Walter Kerr had just accepted
The Times’
offer.