As I often am, I will be the exception to that hoary rule that forbids speaking ill of the recently deceased.
The long-time theater critic for various New York publications was really never all that competent. He positioned himself as an aesthetic elitist whose quixotic quest was to defend the highest intellectual standards of our European/American cultural traditions, but in reality much of his so-called criticism was less about ideas than it was about the appearance of actresses.
Here are some of his classics:
On Catherine Burns: “Insuperable homely… looks like a pink beach ball with a few limbs painted on it.”
On Mimsy Farmer: “Mimsy displays a small and flaccid enough bosom and a large and square enough bottom.”
On Angela Lansbury: “a fag hag.”
On Angelica Huston: “…has the face of an exhausted gnu, the voice of an unstrung tennis racket, and a figure of no describable shape.”
On Barbra Streisand: “What has not been stressed sufficiently is the repulsiveness of the star… so pronouncedly ugly… a full-face closeup of Miss Streisand is a truly terrifying experience… a cross between an aardvark and an albino rat…”
On Corinne Clery: “Rather swaybacked and has breasts lacking in absolute firmness.”
On Glenda Jackson: “So homely all over. Frighteningly plain. Her features are heavy and somehow malevolent in their irregularity; her body is like an uncarved stone except for her much-revealed breasts, shaped like collapsing gourds.”
On Lily Tomlin: “Horse-faced.”
On Liza Minnelli: “Plain, ludicrously rather than pathetically plain, is what Miss Minnelli is. That turnipy nose overhanging a forward-gaping mouth and hastily retreating chin, that bulbous cranium with eyes as big (and as inexpressive) as saucers; those are the appurtenances of a clown.”
On Sally Kirkland: “Shapeless-bodied and sick-faced.”
On Essy Persson: ” …has an ugly face, squat body, unsightly bosom, bad legs, stubby fingers…”
On Vanessa Redgrave: “No breasts to speak of”
On Brenda Vaccaro: “With the exception of Sandy Dennis, there is no more irritatingly unfeminine actress around these days than Miss Vaccaro, a cube-shaped creature who comes across as a dikey Kewpie doll.”
On Meryl Streep: “…she actually looks like a sickly, unpleasantly sharp-featured, homely boy”
Yes, he could be brilliant and those acerbic remarks could be amusing, but he was often simply cruel with neither purpose not accuracy. As his obituary, he deserves back exactly what he dished out. He made so many gratuitous, snide comments about make-up that he should have been the theater critic for Revlon.
Frankly, he was a total dickhead.
