Frank Rich - Interview

Interview, Dec, 2000 by Maer Roshan

THE RAZOR-SHARP CRITIC TURNS THE SPOTLIGHT ON HIMSELF

From 1980 to 1993 Frank Rich was the chief drama critic of The New York Times, a brilliant, often acerbic writer with a well-deserved reputation as the most feared man on Broadway. As an editorial page columnist for the Times since then, he has turned the same critical eye to politicians and others who populate the American cultural landscape. His new book, Ghost Light (Random House) reveals a different side of the man. It is a tender memoir of Rich's painful, starstruck childhood in Washington, D.C., where his love affair with theater began.

MAER ROSHAN: Gee, you don't seem like the "Butcher of Broadway."

FRANK RICH: [laughs] You've just caught me in a mild mood.

MR: I think a lot of people will be surprised by your book, which is a very poignant memoir that ends with you at Harvard. Why didn't you go any further?

FR: Because that is the story I wanted to tell. My childhood was the great, unresolved area of my life, and the idea of writing a memoir about my adult life just bored me. As interesting as my career has been, I'm not dying to write about it.

MR: Was it difficult digging up your early life?

FR: Very difficult. My biggest problem was that, for various psychological reasons, I had a lot of blackouts in my memory. But I vividly remember every single show I have seen in the theater from age five. I even remember where I sat, and what was happening in my personal life at that time. So I remember that Bye Bye Birdie was the night my mother and step-father had a huge fight, or whatever. Ever since I was a kid I've saved playbills and ticket stubs from every play I've seen. My original outline for the book was a list of all these shows. Some of them famous shows like The Music Man, most of them completely forgotten. Then I started filling in around them from memory about my family, my friends, my life, my feelings.

MR: Reading your book it's clear that the theater provided an escape from all the bad things that happened to you as a kid.

FR: It was both an escape and a balm. On the one hand, it gave me a better world to retreat to, but it also presented me with an alternative family at a time when my actual family was very shaky. I got to be, in a very menial way, a part of that family, even though I wasn't a great high school actor or anything. I was just a ticket taker. But that was enough for me.

MR: So what made you decide to actually sit down and write this?

FR: It was when my mother was killed in a car crash nine years ago that I decided, without really knowing why, that I wanted out of writing about the theater. My mother's death was traumatic and it really made me examine everything. At the time I was still writing my column, but I was crippled by grief about my mother, really unresolved about my childhood, wondering what it all meant. And as I started thinking more and more about my early life, I realized I needed to figure it out for myself. That was the genesis of the book.

MR: Your mother was a giant presence in your life, but I couldn't help sense some ambivalence about the way she treated you while you were growing up.

FR: Really? I guess there's a little bit of ambivalence, but not much, I hope. I feel my mother was a real influence for good on me, and someone I love very much. It's true that when she got married for the second time, she married someone who was arguably crazy and certainly abusive. He hit me and demeaned me, but my mother didn't protect me from him. So there's a little bit of ambivalence about that. But you know, she was also young, inexperienced, divorced; she had not had a wonderful life, and I think her second husband offered her a way out. At my age now, I can look back and understand the decisions she made.

MR: Your stepfather died while you were writing your book. Did his death make you view him any more sympathetically?

FR: Throughout my entire life I saw him as this bully who hit me and hit my mother. He was crazy and he was a tyrant. But he also gave me something in spite of all that. In some ways his dying liberated me to see the good in him. But it was very hard to forgive him. I mean, he was responsible for my mother's death. He had a history of accidents that had been covered up, and he was driving when he shouldn't have been. The rest of my family stopped talking to him when my mother was killed.

MR: Her death spurred you to give up being a theater critic. Do you miss that sometimes?

FR: Never. I mean, if something really exciting happens in the theater I can still write about it. But you know, I was a theater critic for twenty years; I was a movie critic for seven years before that As a critic I said all I had to say.

MR: How is writing about politics different from writing about theater?

FR: It's a much more active pursuit. You have a lot more involvement with people than when you're just sitting around watching a play and writing a review of it. I've met so many people through the column, from all walks of life. Ironically, I know a lot more theater people now, because when I was a critic I had to keep a distance from them. I had two or three theatrical friends when I was a critic, most conspicuously Wendy Wasserstein, but I never reviewed them. Back then I never went to the Tony Awards, I didn't go to opening night, I didn't do any of that. Actually, I still don't go to the Tonys, 'cause they're such a bore.