A Healthy Jaundice

In television newscasting nowadays, everybody's got his own private beat. but NBC's laconic Edwin Newman, 49. is a universalist, the one guy in the shop who is considered au courant on everything.

When George Romney resigned from the presidential race, Newman was hailed in to anchor a special report. He handled the same sort of job for twelve days during last year's Arab-Israeli crisis. When Lucy Jarvis produces a big documentary--Khrushchev, Picasso, Christiaan Barnard--she taps Newman for his narrative authority and scriptwriting dexterity. About twice a month, Meet the Press summons Newman to play moderator. Speaking Freely, Newman's urbane interview series with the likes of Harold Macmillan, Rudolf Bing and Physicist Hans Bethe, is so bright, lively and informative that 50 Public TV stations across the nation now carry it.

Box-Office Clout. Newman's official title at NBC is "critic at large." Over the network's New York City channel, he reviews opera and theater, and commands a respectable following. One recognition of Newman's box-office clout is that Producer David Merrick, who calls him "the undertaker," tried to bar him from the theater and demanded equal time to answer an embalming review. This was a characteristic Merrick publicity ploy, but then Merrick judged his adversary shrewdly.

Like the daily Broadway critics, Newman is given about an hour in which to prepare his reviews. When he goes on the air shortly after 11 p.m. on the night of an opening, he has 60 seconds in which to deal with his subject. That's "between 180 and 200 words, depending on how many are polysyllabic," he says. But despite the nerve-racking restrictions, he pours a remarkable amount of information, polish and tart viewpoint into his reviews. Of the flibbertigibbet comedy import, There's a Girl in My Soup, he observed: "Here we have the sort of English play that prevents the American theater from having a permanent inferiority com plex." Or recently, from off-Broadway If two foul-mouthed mental defectives shouting at each other is your idea of theater, there is The Beard." Of Here's Where I Belong: "As with so many recent musicals, none of the principals can really sing."

His criticism at large on radio has won Newman a Peabody Award and i television he has unburdened himself on everything from the declining grammar of the New York Times I he English is not always fit to print") to Charles de Gaulle's crude meddling in Canadian politics ("To put it kindly, he may be losing his grip") to the cliches of sportscasters (Roger Mans, according to a Newman parody, "swings a once potent mace but is still patrolling the outer garden with his ancient skill"). His architectural critique of the late New York World's Fair noted that most of the state pavilions "looked like the work of Governors' relatives."

Christmas "Doggerel." When Manhattan reporters complained last year about difficulties in getting access to Hubert Humphrey, Newman observed: "He is not exactly a man from whom words have to be torn against his will " When Lyndon Johnson transferred Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach to the State Department, Newman noted: "Mr. Johnson does not merely announce his appointments; he congratulates himself on having made them." And about the only joy of Christmas on the tube is Newman's annual "doggerel" reading on the Today show. A stanza from last year's:

The final tallyluyeva

On the book by Alliluyeva

Who is a lively galiluyeva

Despite much ballyluyeva

Did not cause booksellers to shout

halliluyeva.

Prose, obviously, is Newman's bag and he is one of the few TV newscasters who can write anything that stands jp. He has contributed over the years to the Atlantic, Harper's and Punch Newman started writing at George Washington High School in his native Manhattan, took a journalism degree at University of Wisconsin ('40) and did graduate work in government at Louisiana State University. Later he studied in France, covered the State Department for the United Press, then became a writer for CBS's Eric Sevareid. From 1952 to 1961, he worked mainly out of Paris and London for NBC.

Then it was back to New York to begin his $60,000-$75,000 annual prac tice of what he calls "a more personal type of journalism." His basic reportonal posture he describes as "healthily jaundiced." "If someone wants something done on the scenic wonders of the United States," Newman says wryly 'he wouldn't call on me. I am not very good at expressing awe." That goes for television itself. When he isn't first-nightmg or anchoring an NBC show Newman catches up with his reading' I m not entertained," he says, "by television entertainment."

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