|
March-April 2007
|
< previous | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 Long ago, we entered the era heralded by Joe McGinness’s 1969 book, The Selling of the President, 1968. Rich uses the word sold advisedly in the title of his new book, whose two main sections are called “Making the Sale” and “Buyer’s Remorse.” “There’s a huge synergy between marketing products and marketing politicians,” he explains. “It’s increasingly hard to distinguish between the two in terms of their techniques.” One of Rich’s chapters takes its title from former White House chief of staff Andrew Card’s explanation for why the administration delayed making its case against Iraq until September 2002: “From a marketing point of view, you don’t introduce new products in August.”
Rich inherited some of his grasp of sales and marketing techniques: his father and grandfather, and the young Rich, worked together in retailing in Washington, D.C., running a store called Rich’s Shoes. In his 2000 memoir, Ghost Light (the title refers to the theater superstition of leaving a light burning onstage to prevent a ghost from moving into a totally dark house), Rich describes his parents’ troubled marriage, which eventually dissolved, and how his childhood obsession with the theater helped him escape tensions at home. “I was stage-struck and a theater nut,” he says; in a 1994 New York Times Magazine reminiscence on his career as a critic, he wrote, “By my early teens, I had become so conspicuous a Stage Door Johnny that the manager of the National Theater…took pity on me and hired me as a ticket taker, at $4 a show.” There was very little theater in D.C. then, but plenty in New York, and “the place to read about that was in the New York Times,” says Rich. “I was a fanatic about the Times; it was a sort of strange presentiment of my career.” In the late 1950s and early 1960s, he devoured Al Hirschfeld’s drawings of plays and Brooks Atkinson’s reviews in the Times, as well as Walter Kerr’s reviews in the Herald Tribune. Of course there were also train trips to Manhattan to take in shows. Like a proper Washingtonian, Rich was also obsessed with politics and, when he arrived at Harvard, he concentrated in history and literature, a field that reflected his twin passions. At the Crimson he was the main theater critic and also reviewed films. He covered not only Harvard productions but Boston tryouts of Broadway-bound shows, like the Stephen Sondheim musical Company in 1970. And as the Crimson’s editorial chairman, he ran the paper’s editorial page in 1970, at the height of the Vietnam War. “In my era, there were two guys who arrived at the Crimson fully formed,” says Boston Globe writer John Powers ’70. “Frank Rich and [Washington Post and Slate columnist] Mike Kinsley [’72]. In terms of style, voice, and well-grounded opinions, Frank was years ahead of where the normal writer would be. Some critics work with cleavers and hacksaws, but Frank always operated with a stiletto; he had a creative maturity that was rare.” The first piece Rich ever sold (during his senior year at Harvard) was a New York Times op-ed on Charles Reich’s controversial bestseller The Greening of America. That year he also met an MIT teaching fellow, Daniel Ellsberg ’52, Ph.D. ’63, who “started hanging out in the Crimson newsroom and telling these stories about Vietnam, Robert McNamara, the Pentagon, all based on his firsthand experience,” Rich recalls. “The week I graduated, the Pentagon Papers story broke in the New York Times, but no one knew who the source was. From the first installment, we immediately recognized that these were Ellsberg’s stories. “On my way to the Class Day exercises, I stopped to buy cigarettes and saw Ellsberg buying a pile of copies of the Times,” Rich continues, “and I knew he had to be the source. I asked, ‘Could I do a profile of you?’ He said, ‘I’m going underground,’ and gave me the name of his lawyer. I was enrolled in the Radcliffe Publishing Procedures Course, but I rarely went because I spent that whole summer reporting this story. I had a contract with Esquire.” Rich turned in his story, which Esquire ran later that year, and left for England on a Shaw Fellowship. The following year, along with Garrett Epps ’72, Peter Galassi ’72, and Lynn Darling ’72, he started The Richmond Mercury, a muckraking weekly newspaper in Richmond, Virginia. In 1973 he headed to New York City as an editor and film critic for New Times magazine; a year later, he was hired as a film critic for the New York Post, then owned by Dorothy Schiff. When Rupert Murdoch bought the Post in 1977, “The editor called in the entertainment staff and said, ‘From now on, we’ll have to take our advertisers’ views into account when we review things,’” Rich recalls. He resigned and went to Time magazine as a film and television reviewer until in 1980 the New York Times recruited him to succeed Walter Kerr as chief drama critic. Returning to New York that summer from the Williamstown Theater Festival, Rich crashed his rental car, which skidded across the country road and overturned. “On an examination table back in Manhattan,” he later wrote, “an orthopedist inspected my fractured collarbone. As the doctor manipulated my shoulder, making me writhe in pain, he looked solemnly into my eyes. “‘Tell me something,’ he said. ‘Could you get me a pair for Barnum on Saturday?’” Rich calls that moment his introduction to “the omnipotence that strangers attach to the job of drama critic at the New York Times.” He himself seems mostly amused by the epithet, “Butcher of Broadway,” that British comedian Rowan Atkinson applied to him in 1986 when he panned Atkinson’s revue. A collection of Rich’s reviews, Hot Seat: Theater Criticism for the New York Times, 1980-1993, includes an appendix that lists hit shows Rich panned, and ones he loved that flopped. “It is a long list,” Rich says, mentioning that he “didn’t love Phantom of the Opera, and it’s still running, 20 years later.” To preserve the spontaneity of his response to a new show, Rich developed a practice of not reading about plays (or reading their scripts) before seeing them, and not talking with his friends about them, either. “This allowed me to still feel that rush of anticipation and surprise when the curtain went up,” he wrote. He aimed to write his reviews as stories that evoke the play’s impact, rather than as report cards. “The lowest form of criticism—actually worthless, in my opinion—is, ‘I give this an A or an F, or I give this four stars,’” he says. “What matters is making the case for why Stephen Sondheim’s Sunday in the Park with George is a visionary show, or why you feel the Bush White House is disingenuous as to how it sold the war in Iraq. The easy part is having the opinion. The fun part is telling the story of how you got there. Anyone can say, ‘I went to King Lear and I cried,’ or ‘I went to The Odd Couple and I laughed.’ The creative aspect is looking at all the elements, all the moving parts, to see how they fit together, and trying to crack the puzzle of how it produces that effect.” In the theater, Rich championed fresh writing talents like David Henry Hwang, August Wilson, Beth Henley, and Tony Kushner. Sometimes, when he was nearly alone in liking a show, as with Michael Bennett’s Dreamgirls, he enjoyed swimming against the current. Sondheim’s Sunday in the Park with George opened to generally hostile press, but Rich responded deeply to the play and continued to write about it, developing his case in the pages of the Times. It eventually won a Pulitzer Prize. “If Frank liked what you did, it was thrilling,” says librettist John Weidman ’68, a three-time Tony Award winner who has collaborated with Sondheim on three shows, including Assassins and Pacific Overtures. “But if he didn’t, the emotional recovery time could be quite lengthy, because you respect his work and the way he approaches material.” Michael Frayn’s Noises Off was the single funniest play he ever saw on the job, Rich has written; the worst one, Moose Murders, was “a murder mystery set in a hunting lodge in the Adirondacks. It reached its climax when a mummified quadriplegic abruptly bolted out of his wheelchair to kick an intruder, dressed in a moose costume, in the groin.” Nonetheless, Rich stayed to the end, obeying his policy of never walking out of a play he was reviewing. His hilarious review describes the set, studded with moose heads, and then observes, “Though the heads may be hunting trophies, one cannot rule out the possibility that these particular moose committed suicide shortly after being shown the script that trades on their good name.”
Despite such adventures, after 20 years as a critic, Rich says he felt “sick of reviewing. I was getting very antsy and bored. Theater was shrinking in New York—big-budget tourist musicals and the economics of the business made it prohibitive to produce new plays, or much that I found intellectually exciting. I felt I was reviewing the same five people over and over again; if you’ve reviewed five David Mamet plays, what are you going to say about the sixth one, other than it was a little better or worse than the last?” And in 1991, Rich’s mother was killed in a car crash. “She had played a big role in shaping me as a theater lover,” he says. “When she died, I felt I lost a deep connection to theater.” At the end of the 1992 season, Times editors Joseph Lelyveld and Howell Raines suggested an option that Rich himself had not thought of: becoming a columnist. “They saw something in my writing, the way I mixed culture and news,” he says. That summer, Rich and his friend Maureen Dowd joined forces to write a daily column from the Republican and Democratic conventions. “I remember Frank being really jazzed about reporting, which he hadn’t done in some time,” Dowd recalls. “As we trolled around the convention hall, he raced ahead of me like a husky bounding across the Arctic tundra, totally comfortable in this new element. We threw in references to King Lear and Death of a Salesman and Oklahoma! and had a really fantastic time. And of course, Frank was a political junkie, so he knew as much as all the self-important pundits put together.” Rich and Dowd reprised their pas de deux during the week of the Clinton inauguration in 1993. The pair went on a National Public Radio show, where Rich dismissed it as a “K-Mart inaugural” and the switchboard lit up with complaints. But, says Dowd, “His theatrical assessment was correct, as always.” 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | continued >  
 
 
|
