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PART TWENTY-SEVEN |
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Two gigs come to an end, but Mr. Show Biz goes on
of TheColumnists.com
As unbeatable a gig as writing a singles column was, it had a short shelf life, or so I thought. After a year of writing two columns a week on the subject, from 1984 to early 1986 (along with my reviewing chores) I had pretty well exhausted the major themes. Looking back later, however, I probably abandoned it too soon.
My main reason for giving up the column at the height of its popularity was that I wanted to use its success as leverage to launch a general interest humor column (always my goal), in which I might discuss “the single life” whenever an idea struck me. That way, as I told editor Bill German, I wouldn’t be forcing columns on singledom and have the freedom to write about all sorts of other non-singly things.
He said OK and I began writing a twice-weekly column on anything I chose, usually topical, but the new column, inventively called “Gerald Nachman,” didn’t get near the attention that “The Single Life” had. Writing on a current subject focuses your atatention--and the readers’, too--in a way that a general column never can. It was a worthy lesson. With “The Single Life” I had finally found the “common touch” that my old editor at the New York Daily News, Mike O’Neill, said I lacked. For about 18 months, I was a 40-year-old commoner, Mr. Single Guy himself.
Then I launched yet another column, in the Sunday Datebook “pink section,” called “Show Biz,” so I was writing a humor column and an entertainment column plus covering theater, films (occasionally) and cabaret. After three years, the features editor, Gloria Miller (the same person who had once asked me if I was on the take), called me into her office and said, coldly, “We’ve decided to end the Gerald Nachman column,” as if “Gerald Nachman” was somebody else.
Gloria didn’t really say why (mumbling only that it had “run its course”) and quoted no reader surveys. I was stunned. This was the second time the paper had pulled a plug on a column of mine--the thrice-weekly entertainment column and now this. True, “the Gerald Nachman column” wasn’t the howling success the singles column had been, but it was pretty well read and well placed inside the People section.
I skulked out of Gloria’s office,
feeling as if I’d been fired. It was her detached demeanor
and bureaucratic language that bothered me as much as anything.
I asked her if I still could contribute humor pieces to the Sunday
feature section and she said sure, which mollified me a little.
Now my major showcase became the Sunday “Show Biz”
column, which drew its own kind of attention, both brickbats
and bouquets, much as the singles column had. The section editor
let me write on any aspect of entertainment I liked, expanding
on some earlier review, or zeroing in on an obscure or overlooked
show, performer or trend. “Show Biz” led off the section
for eight years and attracted a lot of readers, if only because
its placement up front gave it a certain implied significance
it didn’t always warrant, plus it was the only opinion feature
in the entire section.
For years, the Chronicle’s Sunday “Datebook” (like most other entertainment sections around the country) functioned as a public relations arm of the movie and TV industry but increasingly of pop music. Nearly every piece was an advance story on an upcoming or just-opened film, TV show or pop concert. Theater and classical music/dance/art got a begrudging page or two, but the main thrust was to hype Hollywood. I once pointed out to the section editor that the cover line on the main story of a new movie called it a “hit” before it had opened.
Though I didn’t realize it then, “Show Biz” was really an antidote to all of that doting, obsequious, honey-soaked coverage. The column allowed me to weigh in with a more skeptical eye on a lot of the forces in show business that nobody else was much talking about. “Show Biz” gave me a prominent platform to shout my praise, sneer my sneers and give vent to anything that provoked me.
Most entertainment sections in newspapers are not even aware that they became partners of, indeed patsies for, the pop culture industry. Unconsciously co-opted editors believe they’re just covering the scene when, in fact, 85 percent of what gets printed is pap: adoring interviews, gaga pieces on the making of this or that film--all free advertising, which, coupled with the paid advertising, creates a movie monolith; any negative reviews are but peeps in this back-scratching orgy. The mere coverage of a new movie, TV show or pop figure confers approval by the newspaper. Many readers think a movie gets “great reviews” when what it mostly gets is ink.
So when I would weigh in with a minority voice on something, brainwashed readers would think I was just an evil old curmudgeon and berate me in hostile letters that the section editor loved to print. Editors covet controversy (proof that readers are paying attention) even if they have to manufacture it themselves, though I drew just as many, or more, letters of support. I’d argue with the editor that it wasn’t fair to misrepresent readership reaction, but he thought I was a cry baby. Not really. I didn’t mind being blasted but the skewed proportion of hostile letters painted a false picture of responses. It wasn’t my ego, just faulty journalism.
The daily Datebook editor accused me of “whining” whenever I’d complain that the copy desk had cut off a tagline that wrapped up a review or had stolen my lead for their headline, squelching a nice opening line. I was forever debating editors over these two cardinal copy desk sins, arguing in vain that a review is an essay, with a beginning, middle and end, not an inverted pyramid news story that can be trimmed from the end, but the editors would just brush me aside as a temperamental diva.
Copy editors love to flex their power as the last word before the printed word, understandably envious that the writer gets a byline and the editor must remain anonymous; some take a certain sadistic joy out of watching writers squirm. Many editors, however, saved my skin by catching stupid or sloppy mistakes.
I usually got along with editors, deftly avoiding the bullying martinets and the tin-ear schoolmarms who blithely ruin the cadence of a line in the interest of an obscure grammatical law, or rewrite a phrase to spell out the obvious, or add a reference to explain a joke--the sort of stuff that turns writers prematurely gray.
The “Show Biz” column enhanced my petty power and status as a daily critic. If I had loved a show I could give it a big added boost in the Sunday column. I never enjoyed hurting shows and would lay off them after I’d had my negative say in the daily paper. I preferred using “Show Biz” as a forum for topics or people otherwise ignored or taken for granted, often in tribute columns to figures like Lee Remick, Nat King Cole or a raft of lyricists who never got the attention they’d deserved when they were alive--guys like Al Dubin, Leo Robin, Mitchell Parish.
I was/am an old time musical and cabaret freak and devoted many columns to those increasingly obscure forms--not just because I loved them but because they got almost no attention in the daily hullabaloo over movies, TV and pop music. So I took up the cause of cabarets and covered them regularly, which nobody had for years, focusing my little spotlight on such deserving newcomers as Michael Feinstein, Andrea Marcovicci, Wesla Whitfield and Mary Cleere Haran.
Wesla became my favorite cause non-celeb, then a friend. Because she’d been shot in a cruel purse-snatching and lost the use of her legs, some people thought I was just being a good Samaritan when, as people later discovered, Welsa was/is a remarkable singer, seated or standing, among the best--not just in San Francisco, but in America, and not just now but anytime. She can hold her own against many of the giants; Tony Bennett and Margaret Whiting praised her, among many.
In 1980, early in my career at The Chronicle, I reviewed Wesla when she began singing in cabarets and was no longer able to act in stage shows (though she subsequently did a few, refusing to be limited by a mere wheelchair, playing Mama Rose in “Gypsy” and Bloody Mary in “South Pacific”). Wesla opened a few months after I started at the paper and I first reviewed her on Valentine’s Day. Hey, I thought, this cabaret gig is a piece of cake, assuming many other equally terrific singers would follow. I was badly misled by her; few even approached her artistry.
I’ve long said--though nobody believes it--that critics would much rather rave about a show or a performer than knock them. I would anyway. It’s a curious phenomenon --people tend to remember the negative comments you make far more than they do the positive ones, part of human nature’s dark side. As a result, you have to keep hitting readers over the head, even overstating your view, to get them to pay attention. Walter Kerr said people love any excuse not to have to see a show. Now that I’m a civilian and have to lay out money for shows, I realize he was right. Pauline Kael admitted that she had purposely cranked up her rave for “Last Tango in Paris” (and other films she feared might get lost) to get people to go see it.
So I reviewed Wesla as often as I could, until people got sick of reading my raves (and the editors said enough already), and eventually started going to see her. I happily take credit for her success, or for giving it a push at the start. It was a major kick, after years of reviewing Wesla in dives, to attend a performance of her singing at a San Francisco Pops Concert, a long way from Buckley’s Bistro, the little joint she used to sing at behind Davies symphony hall.
People wrote about Wesla, and network shows profiled her, not because she’s a great singer but because she’s a crippled singer, so she often got attention to the wrong reason (to which her flip, pragmatic view was: hey, whatever it takes!), until, finally, she was recognized for all the right reasons.
I’ll further toot my horn and say that I gave crucial early boosts to Andrea Marcovicci and Mary Cleere Haran, plus a few lesser local lights (some of whom dropped off the radar screen), but the major discovery was Michael Feinstein, whom I was tipped off to by San Francisco’s premiere cocktail pianist Peter Mintun, who nudged me to see Feinstein when I next was in Los Angeles.
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in putting Michael Feinstein on the show biz map, he didn't get much credit for it from the performer. |
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Feinstein, then in his mid-20s, was just a kid playing in the lounge at the Mondrian Hotel on Sunset Boulevard. Tourists would gather with shopping bags and gab noisily as he sang, the usual lounge and cabaret behavior that made me want to go over and bop them over the head with their Pottery Barn bags. Feinstein had never been covered by The Los Angeles Times and remained a well-kept local secret, although Liza Minnelli was a fan and brought her showbiz friends to hear him; he had a little L.A. cult when I discovered him.
On the strength of my initial rave, Feinstein got booked into San Francisco’s leading cabaret, the Plush Room. After another big roar of approval from me and others, he was catapulted to New York, where cabaret guru Donald Smith got him booked at the Algonquin Hotel’s Oak Room, the city’s sparkling cabaret showcase. Feinstein never looked back, not even after he’d made it and neglected to mention those crucial excitement-filled months in San Francisco that sent him on his way.
I have enough ego to confess that it would have been nice to get a nod from Feinstein (who inscribed his first album to me as the guy “who put me on the map”), but Feinstein, like many performers, wants the public to think he did it all on his own. In defense of us poor maligned critics, we are regularly and often deservedly beat up for uttering hurtful things but rarely are we cited for giving aid and comfort to performers, greasing their careers. But, as I say, readers respond to nasty comments over nice, especially in the case of critics, show biz’s favorite heavies.
©2007 by Gerald Nachman. The Nachman caricature is ©2000 by Jim Hummel. This special extract from a work in progress is published by special arrangement with the author. All inquiries about this work should be directed to the author by use of the Talkback feature below. This excerpt first posted here Sept. 17, 2007.
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