Village Voice OBIE Awards Founder, Journalist Jerry Tallmer Celebrated at Players Club
by Gail Parenteau
On Monday, November 23, 2009
the A-List of the Stage and Cabaret turned out at The Players Club for a
Players Foundation Benefit/Celebration to honor the life's work of Jerry
Tallmer, the legendary, prolific NYC theater journalist and critic who was a
founder of the Village Voice and creator of the OBIE Awards. Artists and
admirers gathered to toast the man whose inquiring intellect and visionary
writings started many careers.
It is unlikely that the New
York arts scene, with its respect for new work and its dependence on a constant
inflow of new talent, would be the same today without Jerry Tallmer's
reportage. Energetic, principled, keenly intelligent, ever-curious and
unstoppable in his literary output, he has discovered and championed more
blooming talents than any other single source in the American news media.
Master of Ceremonies for the
event Austin Pendleton welcomed Edward Albee, Charles Busch, Baby Jane Dexter,
Jules Feiffer, Marian Seldes, Jerry Stiller & Anne Meara, KT Sullivan and
other special guests.
ALL PROFITS WILL BE PRESENTED
TO THE HONOREE.
https://www.justgive.org/nonprofits/donate.jsp?ein=26-2772109&designation=Jerry+Tallmer+Celebration
If you were unable to attend,
contributions can be mailed to The Players Club, 16 Gramercy Park South, NYC
10003. Make checks payable to The Players Foundation and indicate "Jerry
Tallmer Celebration" in the subject line.
PHOTOS BY TEQUILA MINSKY
Baby Jane Dexter and Jerry Tallmer, 89
Jerry Tallmer & playwright Edward Albee
F. Fmurray Abraham & Anne Meara
Edward Albee
Austin Pendleton MC’d the benefit at the
Players Club for Jerry Tallmer
Jerry Stiller and Anne Meara told stories
about how Jerry Tallmer gave them their first great reviews
11/23/09
Jerry Tallmer
K.T. Sullivan performed for Jerry Tallmer
Marian Seldes
ABOUT Jerry Tallmer
Born in NYC on December 9, 1920, Jerry Tallmer graduated Lincoln School of
Teachers College in 1938. He enlisted in the U.S. Army a few days after Pearl
Harbor and was a Radio/Radar Man in the US Army Air Force from 1941 to 1945,
serving in the Caribbean and Western Pacific. He saw the Nagasaki mushroom
cloud from an aircraft 130 miles away and, as he now says, "didn't like
it then or now." He graduated from Dartmouth College in 1946 (as Class of
1942).
He was on the founding staff of
the Village Voice and was that publication's Associate Editor and drama critic
from 1955 to 1962. He was involved in every aspect of the first seven years of
that great adventure, from recruiting and encouraging a vast array of gifted,
often then unknown talent (Jules Feiffer, Nat Hentoff, Bill Manville, Jonas Mekas,
Andrew Sarris, Jill Johnson, Charles Marowitz, etc.), to the ongoing weekly
struggle for survival, finding printers, assigning stories, editing copy,
handling layout, reading and rereading and proofreading down to the last comma
in the smallest classified ad. With it all, he provided the best writing of his
own that he could do.
This writing had much to do in
those years with appreciations, pro and con (very early in the game, here in
America) of Samuel Beckett, Jean Genet, Eugene Ionesco, Jack Gelber, Edward
Albee, John Osborne, Jack Richardson, Leonard Melfi, Michel De Ghelderode,
Lorraine Hansberry, William Gibson, Alan Kaprow and his Happenings, Julie Bovasso,
Irene Fornes, Jean-Claude van Itallie, A.R. Gurney, the Judson Poets''
Theater, The Living Theater, La MaMa E.T.C., and a very great many other
artists and breakthrough institutions. Tallmer created the Off-Broadway "Obie"
Awards and ran them from 1956 to 1962.
In 1962, he was awarded the
George Jean Nathan Award in Drama Criticism. Pete Hamill wrote in "Downtown:
My Manhattan" (Little, Brown, December 2004), "The Village Voice . . .
published for a while after 1955 upstairs from Sutter's Bakery on Greenwich
Avenue, was central to what was suddenly happening all around us. The Voice
drama critic was Jerry Tallmer, a gifted writer and an intelligent man of
passionate tastes who was able to express enthusiasm without sounding like a
publicist. Like any good journalist, he saw what was new in the event he was
watching, and for many of us, he became the essential guide . . . In the
Village, theater was part of the psychic geography."
Between 1962 and 1993, he
worked at the New York Post under under the ownerships of Dorothy Schiff,
Rupert Murdoch, Peter Kalikow, Abe Hirschfeld, et al, and again Rupert Murdoch.
He was a reporter, editor, drama critic, film critic, art columnist, occasional
TV critic, feature writer, interim editorial writer, rewrite man, makeup man,
copy editor, etc. He wrote hundreds--maybe thousands--of articles,
human-interest stories and think pieces about movies, theater, actors,
directors, producers, books, authors, painters, sculptors, museums, politics,
personalities, news events, world events, sports figures, women in the news,
men in the news, oddments, national traumas and obits for the great dead
("more than I can or like to count").
Tallmer once reflected,
"Many people on and off The Post were kind enough to think me the best
writer but one, on the paper in those years -- that one being Murray Kempton,
who in fact had brought me there."
He also fulfilled a heavy
editing function at The Post, writing headlines, captions, trimming, putting
sections to bed in the composing room, cutting 500-or 700-page books (like "The
Power Broker" ) down to six- or 12-part article length; and most especially,
working side by side with young writers (at the computer, the typewriter, with
pen and pencil), nursing them through the labor pains of producing clear,
concise, accurate journalistic copy.
For Rupert Murdoch's first stab
at a New York Post Sunday edition (early in his first regime), Tallmer was
editor of and writer for the edition's eight-page "Week in Review,"
which was generally regarded as the "class" of the paper. Tallmer was
terminated at the New York Post in 1993 when Rupert Murdoch broke the union (NY
Newspaper Guild) and fired 287 people.
During all those years, he also
free-lanced for Evergreen Review, Dissent, New York Magazine, Woman magazine,
Hollywood magazine, the London Independent, the Toronto Star, Playboy,
Cavalier, Show Business, The Nation, Saturday Review, P.S. magazine,
Architectural Forum and B'nai B'rith Bulletin. He wrote the introduction to
"Pull My Daisy" (Grove Press), was the "A" of a lengthy
Q&A in Peter Manso's book on Norman Mailer and helped Sammy Cahn write his
biography, "I Should Care." During the 13-week NY newspaper strike of
1977-1978, he was Arts Editor of the prizewinning National Public Radio
two-hour "Sunday Papers" program. He did regular reviews and
commentary while also assembling staff (from the struck newspapers), laying out
programs, slotting times, handling intros, etc.
Between 1994 and 2005, he was
Senior Copy Editor at General Media (Penthouse) while maintaining an unusual
velocity of free-lance arts writing He contributed articles, interviews and
reviews to Playbill (Broadway and Off-Broadway), Penthouse, Lifestyles, The
Villager (theater, films, profiles, news), the Downtown Express, Gay City News,
Newsday, Book magazine, Daily News, The Village Voice, The Bergen Record (film
and book critic), New York Times Syndicate, New York Times, Backstage and
numerous other publications. He also wrote an introduction to Four New Plays by
Horton Foote (Smith & Kraus) and helped shape and organize Jerry Stiller’s
memoir, "Married to Laughter." He wrote several hundred pages on the
trial of Zion vs. New York Hospital and four or five doctors as center of a
proposed book on the Libby Zion case. He also worked with the late Art D'Lugoff
on his memoirs of jazz, folk music, the Village, the Village Gate and the
period of the 1950s to 1990s.
Tallmer was a pioneer in online
journalism for the arts, contributing to The New York Theatre Wire from 1996
onward. In June, 1997, he began that publication's cinema coverage with a
critique of Martin Scorcese's release of Jean-Luc Godard's
"Contempt." He was a frequent contributor to Playbill until 2006.
Since 2005, the Villager
Newspapers group has been his primary journalistic home. He contributes several
articles each week to The Villager, Downtown Express and Chelsea Now,
continuing an outflow of feature stories at an unflagging pace despite being troubled
by a series of ailments in the last few years.
Mr. Tallmer has been married to
the Ballet and Spanish Dancer Frances Monica for 20-plus years. He has two
grown children, Matthew and Abby (twins) by a previous marriage.
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