Count Dracula Of Shubert Alley

A critic with a deadly bite

John Simon, theater critic for New York magazine, may be the meanest man on Broadway, but he rarely stoops to ad hominem attacks. He stoops to ad feminam attacks instead. Reviewing Liza Minnelli's new musical, The Act, he wrote: "I always thought Miss Minnelli's face deserving--of first prize in the beagle category. It is a face going off in three directions simultaneously: the nose always en route to becoming a trunk, blubber lips unable to resist the pull of gravity, and a chin trying its damnedest to withdraw into the neck, apparently to avoid responsibility for what goes on above it."

Minnelli is only the latest in a long line of actresses savaged by Simon. He has described Maureen Stapleton as inhabiting "a large, amorphous body out of which protrude flipperlike limbs and a face without a single redeeming feature." To Simon, Maggie Smith resembles "an upstart rooster aspiring to barnyard supremacy." Glenda Jackson "has the looks of an asexual harlequin." Most leading ladies suffer Simon silently, but after he characterized Sylvia Miles as a "party girl and gate crasher," she dumped a plate of food on him in a Manhattan restaurant.

At the moment, Broadway is abuzz over another kind of Simonize job. After Simon dismissed the Pulitzer-and Tony-winning play The Shadow Box in scatological terms on a local television talk show, the League of New York Theaters and Producers voted to recommend excluding him from the opening-night press list. The action means merely that Simon, or rather New York, must now scrounge for theater tickets, a sticky business for important shows that are booked long in advance. Still, Simon claims he has not yet missed an opening.

Simon attacks not only players and plays but also fellow critics. This fall he accused the New York Times's Richard Eder of such "tergiversation, equivocation, doublethink and simultaneous talking out of both corners of his mouth as took his predecessor, Clive Barnes [now at the New York Post], years of painstaking practice to master." Colleagues are quick to pan Simon in return: "The Count Dracula of critics!" (Andrew Sarris, the Village Voice); "The Transylvanian vampire!" (Robert Brustein. Yale Drama School); "Personally offensive!" (Brendan Gill, The New Yorker). Many of Simon's critics, however, would not dispute his immense erudition and frequent fairness. Says Harvey Sabinson, a director of the league that banned him: "He's an extraordinarily brilliant man when he sticks to basic matters. Personal attacks are his failing."

The Dracula of Shubert Alley was born in Yugoslavia 52 years ago, came to the U.S. at 15 and took a Ph.D. in comparative literature at Harvard. After contributing to a number of publications, Simon became New York's drama critic in 1969 and switched to film reviews in 1975. Simon's movie reviewing for other publications had been first-rate, but the scholar seemed miscast in that role for New York, wasting himself on recondite rhapsodies for slick-but-shallow entertainments like The Spy Who Loved Me, until New York mercifully put him back on the theater beat in September.

Courtly, long ago divorced and not exceptionally beautiful himself, Simon spins out his reviews from the study of a comfortable Manhattan high-rise apartment. He acknowledges that the New York theater scene is not a growth industry. "Movies, television, concerts and sports events are biting into Broadway," he told TIME'S Susan Tribich. Even so. Simon feels no obligation to arrest that trend with soft reviews. "I love plays, but I love them in a different way," he says. ''I'm not blind. I don't gush. I love the theater as it might be."

Less convincingly, Simon defends his preoccupation with feminine topography. "Theater is a total aesthetic experience, from costumes to diction, from scenery to actors' appearances, everything matters." Might Simon's own early experience include some Rosebud of an explanation for his professional difficulty with women? He offers no clues, nor will he even admit that his reviews are misogynistic. Says Simon of his comparing Liza Minnelli to a beagle: "I don't know why that caused such an outcry. Americans are famous for loving dogs."

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