Op-Editor in Pink

There is no better sampling of opinion in daily U.S. journalism than the three-year-old Op-Ed page of the New York Times. It carries the regular columnists of the Times plus outside contributors both obscure and famous. Such disparate commentators as Warren Burger, Casey Stengel and Alexander Solzhenitsyn find a place along with college students and soldiers.

The page's reach is a reflection of its first editor, Harrison Salisbury, who won a Pulitzer Prize as a Moscow correspondent, has written or edited 17 books, and is considered one of the more cerebral journalists of his generation. Now about to turn 65, Salisbury is retiring, and last week the Times chose a surprising successor: Charlotte Curtis, the peppery editor of the paper's Family/Style section.

"Charlotte Curtis is the best possible person to fill this job," said Editorial Page Editor John Oakes. "She is really in touch with modern life and modern civilization." Indeed, she has transformed the Times's predictable women's page into a provocative section about the way people live. But does she have the heavyweight credentials to take over Salisbury's job? "I majored in American politics and history at Vassar," she says. "What we wear, the way we eat, how we live--these are all commentaries on the political scene. Now, on Op-Ed, I'll be going at it in a more classical fashion." The fashion she foresees for the page includes "significant different ideas" from west of the Hudson. "I'd like to find someone as imaginative as John Kenneth Galbraith who hasn't been discovered yet," she says.

Wit is something else she will seek, though she notes, "This is not the time to worry about the price of caviar."

Pithy Style. Curtis, 44, has come a long way covering caviar and its consumers. She started her newspaper career as a women's reporter for the Columbus Citizen (now Citizen-Journal), and joined the Times in 1961, becoming women's news editor in 1965. She is known for her pithy writing style, and often tartly exposes the foibles of the jet set. Her scrapbook includes a satiric report on a meeting of high-powered feminists that was thrown into an uproar when one of the participants decided to go topless, and a story on Willie Morris' fall from the editorship of Harper's that brilliantly exposed the machinations of the publishing business and "the literary pack" in New York. When she is not working, Curtis heads to Cleveland, where her husband, Dr. William Hunt, lives. When she moves to the Times's editorial offices on Jan. 1, she will become the highest-placed woman editor in Times history. That will not stop her from taking along her pink evening gown. "I won't need it as often," she says. "But I'll still need it."

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