For 37 years Jack was the soul of this magazine, and the owner-proprietor of its best-stocked mind. He called himself a “cultural journalist.” He came in 1963 as an art critic, but he could write about videogames, Magic Johnson, Truman Capote or Radio City Music Hall–which his advocacy helped save from demolition. His 1963 story on Jack Ruby’s shooting Lee Harvey Oswald began: “It was as if Damon Runyon had written the last act of a tragedy by Sophocles.” That sentence is him all over: highbrow and lowbrow allusions colliding to create intellectual fission. For the decade he edited NEWSWEEK’s arts coverage–and wrote his own reviews after tweaking everybody else’s–he maintained that balance between elite and popular culture with cover stories on Pierre Boulez and Janis Joplin, Joyce Carol Oates and “All in the Family,” as well as the 1973 special issue “The Arts in America,” which won a National Magazine Award. As critic-at-large from 1975 on, he championed Harold Pinter and Sharon Stone with equal gusto–OK, almost equal gusto–and won a George Jean Nathan Award, the drama critic’s equivalent of an Oscar. But film director Robert Altman considered him “not just a critic, but primarily a writer and thinker.” Here’s the end of a review Jack wrote last year, of Patrick Marber’s play “Closer”: “His actors… become affecting embodiments of a failure to love that is in the end a mystery, an affliction of the modern soul that sets the body on fire and leaves the spirit cold.”
But you really had to know him. Jack’s e-mails must have far outbulked his published work. Here’s part of one a colleague saved: “Why is a Mozart melody genius and a Puccini melody not, although again we get a lot from Pooch. Six or seven notes and we say F—ing genius! Six or seven notes and we say Oh nice, I like it.” To another writer, on another pet topic: “Just how good an actress is Sharon Stone? is a hilariously irrelevant question. These icons, from Garbo to Brando and on, are… part performing bears, part conscious artists. That’s why they’re fun.” And a genre of which he was the master: the plea to an editor for more space. “I entreat you not to use two pix, thus forcing me to write about nuclear physics in 38 lines.” Some of us got to watch the Super Bowl with him and his wife, NEWSWEEK photo editor Joan Engels, while he analyzed each play as if it were an Eisenstein film. Some of us knew he’d been a jazz drummer. An ad copywriter. Had served in Korea. Once gave Kathleen Turner a foot massage. None of us knew it all. But much as he loved to reminisce–“I know I’ve told you this before, but”–he embraced each year’s new books, new plays, new films, new actors, in his perpetual high hopes for the human future. You could even get him to listen to Beck, though the last music he asked to hear was Billie Holiday.
On the day Jack died, his office looked just the same. The color Xeroxes of him with his granddaughter taped to the door below the cutout newspaper headline reading stranger than the average bear. Inside, his Dr. Seuss-like towers of books. His blue Gap shirt, draped over the back of his chair. The red message light still lit up on his telephone. There was so much life in this little room. It brought to mind a highbrow allusion, that line in “Hamlet” where he says he could be bounded in a nutshell and yet count himself a king of infinite space. Jack’s not here anymore to run these things by. We’ll have to see if it flies without him.
