The Great Twilight Way

...The book displays an acute shortage of logic and taste, the very qualities Goldman finds lacking on Broadway...

...That's what is known as "introducing vivid details," and what could be more vivid than the fact that, after shuffling those papers, Saint-Subber put them down...

...and...

...For Goldman, though capable of analysis, is too often prey to middlebrow prejudices and resentments, or bogged down in careless inconsistency...

...But worse than these faults is the sheer commonness...

...Such reading at so tender an age could easily stunt a boy's development...

...Beyond the distasteful diction, Goldman here displays his weak reasoning: Victoria and Palmerston can be made—quite aside from their historical importance or...

...Goldman himself, as his rather despondent tone indicates, is not unaware of this...

...Besides, Brustein was known and respected well before he wrote about Arthur Miller, which is why attention had to be paid to his critiques of Miller...

...Saint-Sub-ber is discovered "sitting on the sofa in his office on the fourth floor of his Sixty-fourth Street town house...

...When an Arthur Miller play comes along, Brustein is conditioned...

...From this one would have to conclude that the patient is beyond help, and look for life elsewhere...

...It is a device meant to suck you into the action, and Goldman refines it to vacuum-cleanerish perfection in the first sentence of chapter 15: "One has to be very precise about this: at seventeen seconds after two minutes after nine o'clock, on Sunday evening, November 5, 1967, on the stage of the anta Theatre in New York City, Peter Masterson began to speak...

...And although he is a successful popular writer—or because of it-he is possessed of a garish, shrill and meretricious style, complete with extremely poor English...

...We know who, throughout the book, was rebuking producers, critics and allegedly snobbish audiences for favoring British plays...

...We go from foul writing like "I don't know, but son of a bitch—that's what it's all about" to fine writing like "How to Be a Jewish Mother deserves but little more space," which is, if anything, fouler...

...At 9:25, the first autograph hunters arrive...

...Goldman is particularly exercised by Clive Barnes, yet this wrath is as nothing compared to his jeering contempt for intellectual critics or, to use his term, "supercritics," who can be spotted by the fact that they pan everything mere critics liked...

...The author of several successful popular novels, and co-author with his brother (the James Goldman of The Lion in Winter) of a couple of unsuccessful popular Broadway shows, Goldman has also written some screenplays, is a baseball and mystery-novel fan, and has an M.A...

...But, elsewhere, Goldman says that "a positive review from the Times means less now than at any time in memory...

...From a number of his other statements—such as the fact that "good" plays mostly lose money, that experts are saying things like "What worries me is the audience," that theatergoers are seen as motivated by the herd instinct, that a typical spectator comment on a fine play is "I don't suffer enough at the office...

...in journalism...

...For this undertaking, Goldman was by no means unequipped...

...Pavlov...

...As critics go, Brendan Gill "is really beyond belief," whereas "Kerr was the best...

...For the many and various ills of Broadway, Goldman suggests, in his last chapter, a few tentative remedies...

...Critics, Goldman informs us...

...Barbara Ferris is "young and cute as hell, with one of the splendid bottoms"—we are not told who owns the other...

...Indeed, is it worth saving...

...March 27, the limousines start to arrive...

...I think the last-named may be the clue, for elsewhere Goldman tells us that by the age of 10 he was already subscribing to Variety...

...Even professionals will pick up choice bits of inside information here, and the average theatergoer will gain a clearer—and gloomier—picture of Broadway: fun house, morass, robbers' den, and occasional reluctant caravanserai of the muses...

...It must smart to be praised by one who writes so funny...

...A proposition is "titani-cally logical," whereas another is "I think, bullshit...

...of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, "I thought it was terrific, but the audience . . . sure didn't...

...9:26, and Merrick appears...

...He wrote funny and he wrote smart...

...To what...

...A little later we are told that "He shuffled some papers on the table before him...

...Then we let our gaze cross over to page 121...

...But if it is power enough to get Goldman so furious, why should it kill them: and if it isn't enough power, why should it, as it plainly does, kill him...

...Thus a favorite device of his is to set up timetables for events of the utmost unimportance, as for the opening night of The Seven Descents of Myrtle: "At 9:20...

...Pinter "is an English stylist, talented as hell...

...Still earlier...

...Topmost on Goldman's list of pet hates—ahead even of venal theater-party ladies, corrupt producers, thieving box-office personnel, gang-sterish "ice" brokers, and prima-donnaish directors like Mike Nichols and Gower Champion—are critics...

...Reviewed by JOHN SIMON William Goldman's book was a very good idea—rather too good for its author...

...No mention, unfortunately, of the conjunction of the planets...

...Corruption is all but total in the theatre...

...Wednesday...

...Quite aside from the crassness of his vocabulary, there is the sleaziness of his sentence and paragraph structure...

...One sees Goldman sedulously applying the precepts of some benighted journalism or writing teacher...

...Other Goldman favorites include tv reviewers Harris and Newman, Walter Kerr, Harold Clur-man...

...Accordingly, we can identify the owner of those serenaded ears: Goldman the Broadway Lover...

...What he refuses to acknowledge, however, is that the drift of his book leads inevitably toward one of two conclusions...

...There is simply no way to tell someone how bad a bad Broadway show can be...

...His energy and endurance are to be commended, as well as his gift for ferreting things out...

...He is not unaware of the problems, and sometimes willing to expose them, but he docs not name enough names, rake enough muck, or think things through rigorously enough...

...They flunked the test of time, as did the man who raved about them...

...Although the procedure tends to be Procrustean, preventing full examination of either the play or the principle or practice it exemplifies (e.g., unpredictability of success, importance of the casting director), it does give the book an increased sense of documentary reality...

...An industry that is running at less than half of capacity and is not increasing its share of the potential market cannot be called healthy . . . there is a slight but discernible scummy taint over the whole operation...

...The fact that the recent creative burst of the British theater is tapering off, Goldman writes, is "music to a Broadway lover's ears...

...where Goldman is discussing what was wrong with Portrait of a Queen...

...From this contrariness it must follow that they feel equally obliged to like what the other bunch panned, which...

...Nobody can make a reputation by attacking a Great Good Thing unless (1) the Great Good Thing is in fact not all that it's cracked up to be...

...Now although I share Goldman's low esteem for Broadway reviewers, what am I to do with an argument that uses the play Loot as an example of how badly, despite their snob value, English plays can do over here (Goldman is an Amer-ica-Firster when it comes to play production), but earlier blames Clive Barnes' insufficiently favorable review for letting down this worthy play...

...Then what good would a Barnesian rave have done...

...But even when the observation is astute, the ambience convincingly evoked and the reasoning pertinent —as sometimes, though not nearly often enough, happens—the book remains irritating and unfulfilling...

...And with those attitudes you do not become a critic and a reformer, only a lover...

...The truth is that Goldman, for all his righteous and unrighteous indignation, loves Broadway, and accepts the world as it is...

...This is one of the more revolting features of women's-magazine writing, but Goldman is equally the master of the mannerisms and platitudes of men's magazines...

...at off-off-Broadway, downright perfunctory...

...Critics, it seems, are failures who are suddenly given power, but not enough power, and that's what kills them...

...True enough, but expressed so crudely and unwittily as to make one side with the victim...

...The flashy, vulgar, commercial style in which The Season is written would suggest an M.A...

...or (2) the public that makes a hero of the dastardly attacker is in fact so many idiots or swine...

...They are not unsensible, yet they are rather like poultices prescribed as a cure for leprosy...

...Then he put the papers down...

...Later, he tells us that the Broadway Establishment sloughs off criticism by calling it sour grapes...

...A performance by David Burns was "simply so real, so fine, so goddam perfect...

...A scene of The Serpent was "even in rehearsal . . . incredibly powerful...

...To salivate...

...Writing, at least of the expository and critical sort, is not Goldman's strong suit either...

...Then to sort it all out, give a 360-degree panorama of the operation, and evaluate its chary splendors and lavish miseries...

...And we can identify his book, The Season, as a trivial and tedious lover's quarrel...

...To bite...

...How are we to accept the evaluations, favorable or unfavorable, of a man who is so much a part of this landscape that he clearly cannot see it in perspective, from the distance of disinterestedness...

...The grammar and syntax are abominable: Sentences often do not parse, tenses don't agree, words arc misused...

...according to Goldman, unimportance—every bit as interesting as Henry Higgins and Eliza Doo-little or Henry 11 and Elinor of Aquitaine...

...from Columbia...

...Goldman worked hard on the project for a year and a half, and he has indeed managed to get a little of everything into his book...

...But Goldman's glances at off-Broad way are cursory...

...Cook's Garden failed...

...Robert Bru-stein, a supercritic, "has made his place in the world," we learn, "by panning Arthur Miller...

...and Variety's Hobe Morrison...

...I should think, would easily even the score and make them no worse than the rest...

...In which case, can Goldman save the public...

...Among the handful of critics endorsed by Goldman we find Brooks Atkinson: "His influence was such, his following so faithful," Goldman tells us, that he could make a play like The Rope Dancers run close to 200 performances...

...one might arrive at the alternative conclusion that the audience is too apathetic and insensate to support even a commercial theater of any worth...

...To get the dominant tone of the book, we need only glance at page 120, where Goldman remonstrates: "Cue's critic has creamed over too many stiffs for anyone to take him seriously...

...and beyond them he does not even think of looking...

...His description of himself as an intellectual need not be taken seriously: It is only a bit of strategy, to enable him to scuttle intellectual values more effectively from within...

...I am a reasonably intelligent man," the author concedes, "with a reasonable amount of interest in the world around me and a reasonable curiosity about the past, but why should anyone expect me to give a shit about Victoria and Palmerston...

...This is, of course, patent nonsense...

...He goes to interview Saint-Sub-ber, the producer, about why Dr...

...It is just that the author of the show was Queen Victoria, on whose journals and letters it was based, and she wore better as a queen than as a playwright...

...His longest, most acrimonious and most muddily reasoned chapter is about them...

...and a bit of modesty, to convey by this admission that he knows himself to be less than perfect...

...He loves to end a chapter with a paragraph consisting of a few short words: "You gotta be there...

...Or just "Magic time...

...whereas Zena Walker, in Joe Egg, "was incredible," period, which is presumably even more powerful...

...Goldman has arranged his material into chapters built around individual productions of the '67-'68 season in roughly chronological order, thus keeping the passing parade of theatrical events in focus while expatiating on underlying and contingent phenomena...

...But from this admission Goldman likewise recoils...

...Nevertheless, Barnes' review should have been more positive...

...Goldman blamed Barnes for being disgracefully biased in favor of English plays...

...But what has become of that play and its author since then...

...Or: "Sad, sad, sad...

...are all failures in life and take it out on Broadway—sour grapes...

...The notion was to study one Broadway season "in depth": seeing and reseeing the plays at various stages of their development and run, interviewing the people involved in them, scrutinizing the critical and audience receptions, looking into the financial and statistical figures, examining the whole Broadway setup (from producers to labor unions, from theater-party organizers to ticket sellers, from ad agencies to public relations men, etc...

...Elsewhere he wallows in one-word paragraphs like "Heaven" or, even more sublimely irreducible, "Yet...

...That's what is known as "setting the scene," and, of course, such graphic details as "sofa" and "fourth floor" are enormously helpful in conjuring up the comfortable opulence in which the producer lives...

...above all, collecting reactions everywhere: in print, in the talk around you, even in specially commissioned market-research questionnaires...

...At least the development of his taste...