Behind the Times (54 page)

In the course of a normal year at the
Times
, he encountered a battalion of chefs and waiters; Miller estimated that he dined out at least four hundred times a year, either for lunch or dinner, in the interests of his readers. Before writing his review, he tried to visit the restaurant under scrutiny at least three times and in the company of a minimum of three people; a Miller group might sample thirty to forty dishes so he could get “the proper handle on the restaurant’s style.” His American Express and Visa bills came to $125,000 a year for New York restaurants alone, not counting out-of-town and out-of-country expenses; or, more accurately, the
Times
reimbursed him that amount, plus his taxis and other costs. The
Times
’ tab for Miller’s dining out exceeded his salary by almost 40 percent; in all, Miller’s twice-weekly restaurant reviews cost the
Times
approximately as much as the paper spent to maintain a correspondent and bureau in Africa. Once Miller shared some feelings of guilt about his expenses with a senior editor. He was told to relax, and spend. Of course, the
Times
wants a bureau in Nairobi or Lagos, but “in terms of reader interest, we get a helluva lot more bang for the buck out of the
food column.”

Once, Miller resorted to an elaborate disguise, complete with a beard that took him two weeks to grow, in order to write about the food at Bellini, a New York restaurant whose owner had publicly announced that he did not want a Miller review.

The Affair Bellini illustrated one aspect of the
Times
’ critical powers, as well as its self-image. It began in 1985, when Miller gave, in his own words, “a lackluster review” to Harry Cipriani, the eponymously named restaurant in the Sherry Netherlands hotel. When the owner, Italian restaurateur Harry Cipriani, opened a second high-end restaurant, called Bellini by Cipriani, on Seventh Avenue in 1987, he ran advertisements in the
Times
asking Bryan Miller
not
to come. Restaurant Bellini, Cipriani informed the dining world, could get along without a Miller review. “Of course, I marched right up there,” Miller remembered; he also took two fellow
Times
men with him, Pierre Franey, the cook-author and at the time a contributing columnist for the Living section, and James Sterngold, at the time a business-news reporter. If the
Times
was going to pick up the $300-plus tab at Cipriani’s elegant new establishment, then the editors had the comfort of knowing that their own staff people would be the beneficiaries.

There was no bill that night; not even a menu was offered to Miller. The three
Times
men sat unattended for fifteen minutes. Cipriani’s son was running the dining room that day, and, says Miller, “we summoned” the younger Cipriani (the cachet of a
Times
expense account sometimes encourages upper-class styles even among the middle classes). “He told us that the kitchen refused to serve us.” Miller thought that was “a silly way to shirk responsibility.” The
Times
men left quietly. A few days later, Miller discussed his foodless night out with Max Frankel, the
Times
executive editor, and with the assistant managing editor, Allan Siegal. They instructed Miller to write a “dispassionate” “Diner’s Journal” item about
the episode. Casually, Frankel turned to Miller and asked: “Do you think you can get in?” Miller promised to try.

Miller is a clean-cut Irish-American, with a taste for preppie clothes. He began to grow a beard for an undercover operation aimed at Bellini. He called in a friend, Cris Evans, a theatrical makeup artist, who dyed the writer’s brown hair and gave him a modish haircut. She went to SoHo with him to pick out a new set of downtown clothes—“the kind of getup John Travolta would have liked in
Saturday Night Fever.
” A pair of shaded eyeglasses completed the make-over. Miller and Evans tested the disguise, successfully, at lunch at La Grenouille (“not exactly a Bryan Miller fan club,” either, the writer noted). Then Miller went unannounced with four other
Times
people—“my dining team”—to Bellini; he sat facing the wall of the downstairs dining area, undetected. He completed two more Bellini missions before delivering his verdict. As Miller later summarized his review, “the food ranged
from merely passable to dismal. Mr. Cipriani’s charms notwithstanding, service was slipshod if not outright clownish.” (Three and a half years later, Miller revisited Bellini and upgraded his opinion, advising his consumer-readers that the restaurant was “a reliable though pricy theater-district dining option.”)

That was the
Times
, as it saw itself: dedicated critic, ready to go to extraordinary lengths to get the story; high-minded editors, demanding an extra effort of their reporters; the institutional
Times
, taking its role of consumer guide seriously, and willing to pay all the expenses necessary to do the job. The Affair Bellini demonstrated that the
Times
reporters, writers, critics, and editors—the people’s surrogates—ought not be crossed. From the
Times
’ perspective, the story proffered the face of incorruptible authority—the
Times
’ power seen in the most flattering light, in the cause of dispassionate public service: a review, and then a re-review, all for the reader.

The face of the
Times
its critics presented to the world sometimes revealed a less attractive side. All power is said to corrupt, and the fact that pettiness and pique sometimes influenced the stances of the
Times
’ powerful critics ought not be too surprising. What, after all, was Harry Cipriani’s crime that the
Times
should pursue him so? If he was guilty of offering overpriced food, his beautiful-people clientele didn’t seem to care, nor did the expense-account set; like Miller, corporate diners passed on the bill to their companies (the restaurants Cipriani
and
Bellini both stayed afloat despite the
Times
’ equivocal judgments). The real surprise came in the form that the “corruption” took. The
Times
did not use its acknowledged powers over entertainment, culture, or the arts to advance personal careers, assuage swollen egos, push an ideological agenda or promote the
Times
’ own reputation—although each of these elements did show up from time to time on the arts, leisure, and news pages. Deplorable as such ad hoc lapses were, the more pervasive fault was systemic. News and cultural coverage increasingly reflected the
Times
’ newfound devotion to that self-deceiving banality of contemporary Big Media—audience research. More and more, the
Times
allowed calculations about what a desired readership might want to shape its news report. The critics, reporters, and editors of culture gulch, the warren of desks and cubicles where the arts and leisure department worked in the newsroom, began to pick up on the trite Newspeak of the audience researchers. The
Times
, they began hearing, was market-driven rather than news-driven.

Miller meant it when he said that the
Times
expected his restaurant reviews to be a service to consumers. Out of concern for its own operational comfort level, if not for reasons of flat-out financial gain, management turned to market researchers to plumb readers’ cultural-news interests. Much like a modern political candidate, Arthur Sulzberger’s
Times
polled target constituencies, found out what excited them, or
thought
might excite them, and shaped its cultural campaign accordingly. Many of the changes on the arts and leisure pages in the past decade, from the decline of space devoted to classical music reviews to the prominence given the “Critic’s Notebook” pieces of the
Times
’ star writers, were influenced by the findings of this market research. Perhaps high culture wasn’t out, but it was certainly down for the count; consumerism, pop culture, and bright, smart—often, smartass—writing were in. Readers told the surveyors that’s what they liked. “It’s
a generation thing,” the
Times
cultural reporter Richard Shepard explained to me in the winter of 1991. “They want younger readers and what appeals to them. They got annoyed with me when I mentioned our ‘traditional’ readers.”

Shepard joined the
Times
in 1946 as a copy boy; he did shipboard interviews with celebrities when sleek oceangoing ships still docked at the West Side terminals. In his forty-five years at the
Times
he wrote about everything from the Yiddish theater on Second Avenue to the story of an Iowa farm girl who was a pen-pal of Anne Frank. That was then. Now Shepard and Gerald Gold, a cultural news editor and classical record reviewer, arts reporter
Grace Glueck, cultural reporter C. Gerald Fraser, and a dozen other
Times
editors and reporters all saw the market-research writing on the wall. They digested these findings, along with brisket and borscht at the “Polish Tea Room” of the Edison Hotel. The market research, the Tea Room crowd realized, indicated that the critics could set the “tone” and “pace” of the arts and leisure pages. And so the
Times
was giving greater emphasis to its stable of bright writers who, like Miller, were in their thirties and early forties.

The editors talked up the new thinking. The
Times
wanted to “read young,” explained Warren Hoge, the assistant managing editor in charge of cultural coverage during the period of transition in the late 1980s. (The slim and elegantly outfitted Hoge wasn’t the sort of
Times
man who would be seen in the Edison’s shabby booths; for his fiftieth birthday, he gave himself a party at the Russian Tea Room, the
expense-account restaurant the old-timers were sending up when they “renamed” the Edison luncheonette.) Naturally, some stories had to give to make way for the snappier—read: “young”—
Times
; the pages are printed on paper, not stretch Lycra. Reviews of “small” recitals, cultural-news stories, and offbeat features of the kind that Shepard and Fraser had specialized in, were downgraded. The critic Peter Davis, who spent twelve years as a reviewer of concerts and classical music recordings for the
Times
, remembered when he wrote up three or four recitals a week for the paper, “and that was when there were
eight of us covering serious music.” Davis left the
Times
in 1986. Another reviewer of classical music, Donal Henahan, the winner of a Pulitzer Prize for music criticism, left in 1991. By then, the
Times
was sweeping together into a once-weekly package short, five-paragraph reviews of concert-recitals. Short reviews of independent dance companies, off- and off-off-Broadway and experimental theater, and art show openings at smaller galleries were similarly packaged. Performances of a select two or three of the scores of dance companies in the city, for example, were reviewed on Mondays, under the headline “Dance in Review”; smaller theatrical companies on Wednesdays (“Theater in Review”). The package of short classical-music reviews appeared on Saturdays, the day of the week when the
Times
has its lowest circulation.

The “new regime,” as Gerald Gold called it, placed more emphasis on the big feature, and on the star-critics. “They don’t want a lot of ‘little reviews,’ and so those three- or four-inch stories no longer appear.” Gold thought the senior editors were trying to reinvent the wheel. He hoped that “they” would settle down, and remember what had made the
Times
important culturally over the years. But Gold wasn’t too optimistic.

Neither was Grace Glueck, who joined the
Times
in 1951, when she was twenty-five years old. Glueck was born in Manhattan, the same year as Punch Sulzberger; she majored in English at NYU, and worked on a fashion magazine before the
Times
hired her. She began as a secretary-typist-receptionist and then spent ten years as an art researcher for the Sunday
Book Review
, during the period when the
Review
used paintings and museum graphics to illustrate its pages. She kept pressing her (male) editors, asking for writing assignments; one senior editor turned her down, advising her to go home and get married. Glueck managed to make her breakthrough in the early 1960s. “It
was the time of the great pop art explosion,” she said, “Jack the Dripper and all that. The Sunday editor Lester Markel wanted an art-news feature, something modeled on ‘News of the Rialto,’ the weekly theater-news column by Lewis Funt. The male art critics thought ‘news’ was beneath their dignity, and so I got the assignment. I had never been a reporter, and I was terrified, but a wonderful editor and human being, Seymour Peck, helped me.” Her column was called “Art People.” She did the column until 1972, singlehandedly creating the art-news beat at a time when New York had become the art capital of the world. When a group of
Times
women organized and challenged management with evidence of sex discrimination—as reflected, for example, in the minuscule number of women editors—Glueck was suddenly offered the title of cultural news editor. “I did it for eighteen months. I hated it; I wasn’t the real cultural editor. Arthur Gelb was.” (During this period she pronounced her memorable line, since widely quoted, “Who do I have to fuck to get
out
of this job?” Then she corrected herself: “Sorry. Whom …?”) In 1991 Glueck marked her sixty-fifth birthday. Although retirement was no longer mandatory for
Times
reporters, she counted herself smart enough to figure out what was going on. “Junior [Arthur O. Sulzberger, Jr.] wanted to see young faces around the newsroom. He was more comfortable with them.”

The emphasis on hiring and promoting younger talent was not happenstance, nor was it confined to culture gulch or, for that matter, to the
Times.
The clouded business climate of the late 1980s and early 1990s impelled other newspapers, the television network news organizations, magazine groups, and book publishers to search for ways to control costs and reduce staff (to become “lean and mean”). Younger employees typically earned lower salaries than older ones, and nonstaff “contract workers” were cheaper than full-timers, who received pension, health, and insurance packages. But the
Times
was not thinking only of the size of its newsroom budgets. As Warren Hoge explained, the
Times
wanted to “appeal to a new generation, people whose attention spans were shorter.” The market researchers, whose in-depth interviews and focus groups
Times
management was paying for, had a term for many members of the new generation: they were “aliterate”—they knew how to read but didn’t read very much. According to Hoge, it was imperative that the modern
Times
“replenish the supply” of older readers, with new readers. “
We have to grab younger readers by the lapels because they are less interested in reading,” Hoge said.
“That’s our challenge. We don’t think it is the Gray Lady, and we don’t want our language or our graphics to convey that impression, either. We monitor that.” Hoge was particularly proud of the young, ambitious team of staff critics and contract writers covering popular music concerts and records. “Everyone assumes we have the best Latin American coverage,” Hoge said. “They don’t realize that we have the best coverage of rock and pop music, too.” He had special praise for the work of Jon Pareles, Peter Watrous, and Stephen Holden.