Richmond Crinkley, RIP - obituary

National Review, March 10, 1989 by William F. Buckley, Jr.

THE OBITUARY notices confined themselves to Richmond Crinkley the man of the theater, and this is not surprising given that he was for five years the executive director, however controversial, of the Vivian Beaumont Theater, a rather disheveled part of the Lincoln Center complex in New York. He came in riding high having co-produced The Elephant Man, which was a great hit, commercial and artistic. What then happened is of no particular interest to readers disinclined to follow theatrical controversies based on factional disputes in New York. Suffice to say that the Establishment prevailed by stuffing the board, electing former mayor of New York John V. Lindsay as chairman, ousting Crinkley, who went on to establish a theatrical production company (Cerberus Enterprises Inc.) and to continue to serve as trustee of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts and as a member of the advisory board of the National Society of Arts and Letters, Washington Chapter.

It was not known about Richmond Crinkley (19401989), Doctor of Philosophy from the University of Virginia, and Fulbright Fellow at Oxford from 1965 to 1967, that he was a closet conservative and for more than three years wrote the unsigned CATO Column for the magazine, and the (also unsigned) WINSTON column for the defunct National Review Bulletin. In 1971, we acknowledged the distracting pull of the theater on his life, and the special strengths of a competitor for the position, and gently retired Richmond, and appointed George F. Will to fill that slot.

We remained friends, though his political writing all but ended. And when he launched Cerberus, bis very first enterprise was to seek the right to dramatize my political novels, a project that never materialized because of a conflicting commitment, by the author, to another potential producer. In 1966, Richmond Crinkley welcomed thc editor of NR to Oxford (I was looking for young writing talent, found Ferdinand Mount, and brought him to New York for a year), and contrived an invitation for dinner at All Soul's, a memorable venture (though the memory dimmed sometime between the seventh and tenth libation, so ceremoniously served) in pure hedonism. He was a jolly, spirited, enthusiastic companion and brought much life to his (undercover) political writings.

The editors forward their condolence to Richmond's family, and mourn his loss at the early age of 49.