BUY IT Letters Profiles ALSO TODAY Blue Glow MTV's "Real World" invades Seattle; the 100 greatest films ever Home Movies By Charles Taylor Women on the verge RECENTLY IN ENTERTAINMENT American squirm By Sarah Vowell Uneasy rider (06/15/98) Mr. Jealousy Reviewed by Charles Taylor Noah Baumbach's new urban comedy smartly satirizes self-involvement -- without being too self-involved (06/12/98) Six Days, Seven Nights Reviewed by Stephanie Zacharek As cheap and predictable as a discount package tour, but still a terrific getaway (06/11/98) Back in the U.S.S.R. By Julia Barton After a brush with American fame, perestroika poster boy Boris Grebenshikov has returned to his Russian roots (06/10/98) Sharps & Flats Reviews of new music by Dwight Yoakam, the Smashing Pumpkins, Tuatara, Nicholas Payton and the Jesus and Mary Chain (06/10/98) BROWSE THE ENTERTAINMENT ARCHIVES FEATURES TELEVISION MOVIES MUSIC

THE LOST ART OF CELEBRITY JOURNALISM | PAGE 1, 2 - - - - - - - - - - There is, of course, a way around this. A writer doesn't need access to celebrities in order to write about them. Tynan did know a great deal of the people he wrote about, and he interviewed them for his profiles. But it's hard to imagine the critical acumen of those pieces being any less had he never met his subjects; he focused on drawing a portrait of them from their work. That approach, of course, means that a writer must be allowed to have an opinion, a concept that, if most magazine editors had their way, would be relegated to a stoppered bottle adorned with skull and crossbones and kept hidden in the darkest corner under the sink. Hating magazines like Vanity Fair and Premiere, and TV shows like "Entertainment Tonight," for acting as PR firms is a little like hating the desert because there's no water in it. But why have no other magazines stepped in to fill the breach? Why isn't there a place in Harper's or the Atlantic (the oldest magazine in America, and it reads like it, too) for a journalist who wants to write a serious consideration of an actor or comic or filmmaker or musician? My guess is that, in the eyes of those magazines, that would be a violation of the serious aura they cultivate, a sop to celebrity culture. Apart from the rare critical appreciation in a general-interest magazine (like GQ executive editor Lisa Henricksson's superb tribute to Barbara Stanwyck last year), the form is now relegated almost exclusively to "specialty" magazines like Film Comment or Sight and Sound. The "serious" magazines are terrified of being thought of as trendy, the glossies terrified of being thought of as anything but. But good writers (like good readers) are often caught by enthusiasms that come out of left field, and the question that inevitably confronts any writer who pitches a piece based on one of those enthusiasms is, "What's the hook?" (There would be little chance in interesting any editor in a piece on Kenneth Tynan, most of whose work is out of print, if there were not these new collections to tie it to.) Tynan did some of his best work under William Shawn at the New Yorker, work he wouldn't have a chance of getting into the magazine under Tina Brown. (In the interest of full disclosure, until recently I was one of the authors of the New Yorker's Book Currents column.) Let's imagine someone pitching Tynan's classic profile of Louise Brooks: "Ms. Brown, I'd like to write a 10,000-word profile of a forgotten silent-movie star whose reputation among film buffs rests largely on one film and who has been a recluse in her Rochester apartment for years." The glacial silence that would ensue might be useful for chipping some ice off of to stir in your cocktail, but not very conducive to actually getting work. It's not that publicists have bought Tina Brown; there was no need, as was once said of a certain critic's relation to Hollywood studios, for them to buy what was already theirs. If there's a remedy for this current state, it does not lie in a return to that quality heralded time and again as a panacea for all that ails journalism, objectivity. Good criticism has nothing to do with objectivity (which is not the same thing as being able to see clearly). Tynan's criticism didn't have anything to do with objectivity, and neither did his profiles. In a letter he wrote toward the end of his life to agent Swifty Lazar, Tynan described himself as "a talent snob ... I've always wanted to meet and know and analyze the people I admire." In the course of reviewing plays or movies, a critic writes about the performers he or she comes across. A critic acting as a profiler has the chance to focus on the performers he or she treasures. Tynan understood that a good profiler must be a good fan -- not an uncritical one, but one able to see the career of his subject in long view while still being able to zero in on the defining detail. Appreciation is not a matter of obscuring distinctions, but of sharpening them. Tynan's tribute to Greta Garbo withholds the accolade of "great actress" because Garbo never attempted the great female roles. But Tynan pinpoints her glory in the way she "exhibited herself more profoundly to the camera than any of her contemporaries." How many theater critics (or film critics, for that matter) have understood that the essence of film actors can lie in the way they offer themselves up to the camera? In the introduction to "Profiles," Simon Callow writes, "Like many people of my age, I did my formative theatergoing ... in my own front room, with a copy of Kenneth Tynan's 'Curtains' in my hand ... Reading and re-reading the reviews, I felt I had seen the productions so enticingly described." "Curtains" (which begs to be returned to print) hums with that vividness. So does "Profiles." I have never seen British comic actress Beatrice Lillie, but Tynan's profile made me feel as if I had. He mentions her habit of wearing a pink fez to hide her perpetually brush-cut hair, then goes on to say how her title (she was, by marriage, Lady Peel) "sits drolly on her, like a tiara on an emu." The piece ends with a report of Lillie's one-woman show. A description of a geisha sketch during which, Tynan says, she "mewed like an asthmatic sea gull," gives rise to the observation, "Her gift is to reproduce on stage the grievous idiocy with which people behave when they are on their own: humming and mumbling, grimacing at the looking glass, perhaps even singing into it, hopping, skipping, fiddling with their dress, starting and stopping a hundred trivial tasks -- looking, in fact, definably batty." Tynan's profiles are not concerned with the atmospheric reporting of his contemporaries, the New Journalists. They're as far as can be from the approach of pieces like Gay Talese's classic "Frank Sinatra Has a Cold." Their revelations are not the false intimate glimpses trumpeted in current profiles ("Inside: Madonna on how motherhood has changed her"), but rather the shock of definition that makes you feel you're seeing the familiar anew. There is an inescapably adulatory tone to much of "Profiles." But even as it exalts, Tynan's brand of adulation means to get down to essences. It's not until the later New Yorker profiles (whose subjects include Richardson, Tom Stoppard and two Brookses, Louise and Mel) that he ventures into the characters behind the public personas. But with those he was working for an editor willing to give him the time and space to explore. It shouldn't be held against the thousand-word portraits that make up the bulk of "Profiles" that they don't approach that depth -- especially since they're models of what short pieces can accomplish. They're proof that editors who are willing to trust critical acumen over puffery and who take the time to find writers with a connection to their subject might find themselves with the "positive" pieces they're looking for, without having to bow and scrape to publicists. There are sides of Tynan not represented in "Profiles," and not nearly as much of his political side as I might have wished in "Letters." I'm thinking particularly of his determination to make a coherent, nondogmatic political view a foundation for his writing. He knew bad writing when he saw it, but he refused to dismiss what he called the theater of "parable, polemic and pamphlet" if it struck a nerve, if it did something to reaffirm theater as "an independent force at the heart of a country's life -- a sleeping tiger that can and should be roused whenever the national (or international) conscience needs nudging." The private side is certainly here. There are glimpses of the young roué, proposing marriage to his girlfriends as quickly as he cheated on them, and there are frankly unflattering views of his romantic dependence that translated as control. One letter to a girlfriend ends, "Answer all these queries, do everything I say, and love me absolutely." And Kathleen Tynan did not spare her privacy, including letters her future husband wrote her at the beginning of their affair (he was married to writer Elaine Dundy at the time) and later letters when their marriage was straining at the seams. But because theater was a force at the heart of Tynan's life, the best and most moving selections in "Letters" are the ones that deal with work. We read of his struggles at the National Theatre, where he fought the conservatism of the advisory board (particularly over the mounting of Rolf Hoccuth's "Soldiers"), and also sometimes his ally Olivier, who had to be prodded into accepting roles that turned out to be among his biggest triumphs (Othello and James Tyrone in "Long Day's Journey Into Night"). And there is the sadness as he leaves the National Theatre after a decade, with no steady reviewing job and a feeling of drift punctuated by bursts of extraordinary work. Answering John Osborne's vituperative remarks about his tenure at the National, Tynan said, "I feel rather like a good Samaritan who has crossed the road to be greeted by a kick in the face." He was summing up his feeling of rejection after a lifetime spent championing and shaping London theater, acknowledging that any art you dedicate your life to is bound, sooner or later, to break your heart. It's Shaw that Tynan the theater critic is most often compared to. But it's an odder comparison I thought of from time to time while reading "Letters": to Norman Mailer. Like Mailer, Tynan made large claims for his chosen art. He saw theater as doing nothing less than reflecting, influencing and leading the tenor of the times. And as with Mailer, his willingness to put himself on the line in defense of those claims sometimes made him risk ridiculousness, and at others made him appear ridiculous in the eyes of people for whom art and passion will always be frivolous diversions. But Tynan is one of those writers whose passion and commitment can make his critics look puny. He left behind an enormous amount of writing, which does not mitigate the sadness of his death, at 53, from emphysema. At his memorial service, Tom Stoppard addressed Tynan's children and said, "For those of us ... who shared his time, your father was part of the luck we had." Reading these two books, there's no escaping the sinking feeling that, for those who try to write as critics and not as publicists, admirers but not sycophants, both time and luck have nearly run out. SALON | June 16, 1998 Charles Taylor is a regular contributor to Salon.

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