Arthur Gelb, Critic and Editor Who Shaped The Times, Dies at 90

By SAM ROBERTS

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Arthur Gelb, who by sheer force of personality dominated the newsroom at The New York Times for decades, lifting its metropolitan and arts coverage to new heights and helping to shape the paper in its modern era, died on Tuesday at his home in Manhattan. He was 90.

His son Peter Gelb, the general manager of the Metropolitan Opera in New York, said the cause was complications of a stroke.

Hired as a copy boy in 1944, Mr. Gelb rose to become a singular Times figure in the second half of the 20th century, leaving a large stamp as critic, chief cultural correspondent, metropolitan editor, deputy managing editor and managing editor, the post he held when he retired at the end of 1989.

No matter the role, Mr. Gelb, a gangly 6-foot-2, was relentless, fidgety and in-your-face — whether in passionate response to a potential scoop or in fevered reaction to the whim of a fellow boss, typically the equally relentless A. M. Rosenthal, who had been two years his senior at City College and perpetually a step ahead of him in the Times hierarchy, finally reaching the newsroom’s top post, executive editor.

Mr. Gelb, writing for the culture pages, discovered stars in an expanding Off Broadway universe. His reviews and news coverage helped propel the fledgling careers of, among others, Woody Allen, Barbra Streisand, Dick Gregory, Lenny Bruce, Jason Robards, Joseph Papp and Colleen Dewhurst.

As a top editor he played a vital role, beginning in the 1970s, in conceiving and executing daily stand-alone sections — Sports Monday, Science Times, Dining, Home, Weekend — as well as special magazines on Sundays. All of them expanded and deepened news coverage while becoming durable vehicles for advertising in challenging economic times. Other newspapers emulated them widely.

Under Mr. Gelb’s watch as metropolitan editor, The Times’s investigation of systemic police corruption, spurred by revelations by Officer Frank Serpico, redeemed the paper’s sometimes gushing embrace of Mayor John V. Lindsay’s administration and led to the creation of the Knapp Commission, which prompted reforms.

Mr. Gelb also initiated or oversaw prizewinning investigations that exposed a virulent American Nazi’s hidden Jewish heritage, a modest suburban girl’s secret other life as a drug addict on the Lower East Side and the illicit provenance of an ancient Greek vase that had been smuggled out of Italy and prominently displayed in the Metropolitan Museum of Art (whose board included the paper’s publisher, Arthur O. Sulzberger).

Mr. Gelb and Mr. Rosenthal jointly edited several anthologies of Times articles, columns and obituaries. They also became embroiled in a well-publicized controversy over the author Jerzy Kosinski, their friend, whom The Village Voice accused of plagiarism and other literary crimes in 1982.

Attacked for shielding him, they commissioned a 6,000-word riposte in the Arts & Leisure section arguing that Mr. Kosinski had been the victim of a smear campaign engineered by the Communist government of his native Poland. Years later, reviewing a Kosinski biography, the critic Edward Neuert wrote on Salon: “It is clear now that Kosinski’s most energetic construction was his life.”

In his book “Behind the Times: Inside the New New York Times,” Edwin Diamond, a former Times reporter, wrote in 1993 that Mr. Rosenthal and Mr. Gelb “were much too smart to influence a critic to write a puff review,” but that “they did not hesitate to push for favorable mention of friends in the news pages.”

Known for nurturing young talent, Mr. Gelb developed a long roster of protégés, including Maureen Dowd, Paul Goldberger, Ada Louise Huxtable, Michiko Kakutani, Frank Rich and John Rockwell, the chief rock music critic.

“He has that surprisingly rare quality in an editor,” the author Renata Adler, a former Times movie critic, said. “He makes you want to write.”

He also cultivated a second career, with his wife, Barbara, as an authority on the playwright Eugene O’Neill. They published two definitive volumes testifying to O’Neill’s influence as a major American cultural figure.

A Creative Force

Everybody in the Times newsroom had a favorite Arthur Gelb story: about the reporter who, buckling under one more Gelb assignment, collapsed from exhaustion; about another harried underling who stopped speaking entirely, driven to a self-imposed vow of silence; about the time a colleague paged Mr. Gelb at a Times Square pornography theater, where, in the cause of investigative reporting, he and several editors had gone to watch “Deep Throat.”

Mr. Gelb was “a lanky creative tower of tension,” said Gay Talese, who worked under him as a metropolitan reporter. When Mr. Gelb was onto what he was sure would be a front-page story, “he’d get all excited,” Ms. Dowd said, “eyes going like a slot machine and arms like airplane propellers.”

His claims to juvenile shyness notwithstanding, Mr. Gelb’s self-image could also loom large. Once, when a friend jocularly likened him to Sol Hurok, the theater impresario, Mr. Gelb replied, half-jokingly: “Bigger.”

Arthur Neal Gelb was born on Feb. 3, 1924, in the back room of his parents’ dress shop in East Harlem. Both parents were Jewish immigrants from what was then Czechoslovakia and is now Ukraine. His father, Daniel, had settled on the Lower East Side of Manhattan and was a cigar maker before deciding to open the store and sell children’s dresses made by his wife, Fanny.

The family later moved to the Bronx, where, at DeWitt Clinton High School, in a class led by the revered teacher Irwin Guernsey (known as Doc), young Arthur was introduced to “The Front Page,” the newspaper melodrama by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur. He embraced Walter Burns, the play’s “cunning and unflappable” fictional managing editor, as his role model.

After dropping out of City College — he later graduated from New York University — he was hired by The Times as a $16-a-week copy boy in a time when “journalism,” he recalled, was considered a dirty word. (With World War II still raging, he was rejected by the Army for poor vision.)

Three days into the job, he persuaded editors to let him publish a weekly house organ about goings-on at the paper — a venture that insinuated him into the paper’s hierarchy as he pursued senior reporters, editors and executives for interviews. He was promoted rapidly.

On a foggy July 28, 1945, Mr. Gelb was enlisted to help cover the crash of a B-25 bomber into the Empire State Building. At Bellevue Hospital, he wrote later: “I managed to talk my way into the emergency room to ask the nurses some simple questions. Because of my youth and obvious inexperience, I guess they felt sorry for me, and they gave me a vivid account of their lifesaving efforts. My success alerted me unwittingly to a journalistic virtue: naïveté.”

(Pete Hamill found the same in Mr. Gelb’s 664-page autobiography, “City Room,” published in 2003 and reviewed by him in The Times. “A sense of intelligent innocence permeates this affectionate memoir,” he wrote.)

Mr. Gelb met Barbara Stone, the niece of the violinist Jascha Heifetz and the stepdaughter of The New Yorker writer and playwright S. N. Behrman, in the Times newsroom, where both were working as clerks. They married in 1946, the same year he graduated from N.Y.U. She survives him. Besides his son Peter, Mr. Gelb is also survived by another son, Michael, who designs and builds homes in Massachusetts; four grandchildren (including David Gelb, who directed the documentary film “Jiro Dreams of Sushi”); and one great-grandchild.

A Nose for New Talent

As an assistant critic under the drama critic Brooks Atkinson, Mr. Gelb trolled the coffeehouses and cabarets of Manhattan for new talent.

In 1960, he wrote that one of the pleasures of the Bon Soir, a club in Greenwich Village, was a “startlingly young, stylish and vibrant-voiced gamin named Barbra Streisand.”

A month later, he described a new comedian’s act as “derisive shock therapy,” peppered with a vocabulary of “four-letter words, of which the most printable is Y.M.C.A.” Nonetheless, he concluded, although the comedian, Lenny Bruce, “seems at times to be doing his utmost to antagonize his audience, Mr. Bruce displays such a patent air of morality beneath his brashness that his lapses in taste are often forgivable.”

One night, at a Midtown nightclub, Mr. Bruce saw Mr. Gelb in the audience and said from the stage: “Put the spotlight on that man. That’s Arthur Gelb. He introduced sex to The New York Times.”

In 1962, Mr. Gelb proclaimed that “the most refreshing comic to emerge in many months is a slight, bespectacled, unhappy-looking, former sketch writer of 26.” Woody Allen, Mr. Gelb wrote, “approaches the microphone on the unadorned platform at The Bitter End, a Greenwich Village coffeehouse, as though he were afraid it would bite him. As it turns out, he is afraid it will bite him.”

Mr. Gelb had begun discovering talent as early as 1956, when a young director named Joseph Papp encamped himself in The Times’s office and threatened to remain until Mr. Atkinson reviewed his production of “The Taming of the Shrew” in a Lower East Side park. The chief critic was traveling overseas, so Mr. Gelb agreed to attend the performance.

He watched one lusty act before the show was rained out but wrote about it anyway, saying that three more performances were planned that weekend and that unless $750 was raised by then, the company, which is “evidently bringing so much joy to so many people,” would have to disband. It was an unabashed appeal for the survival of what would evolve into the Public Theater.

“Arthur,” said Bernard Gersten, the executive producer of Lincoln Center Theater, “was a clarion call to a much more open-minded view of the theater in New York, to individuals like Joe, the Shakespeare Festival and Circle in the Square, when the establishment views were so narrow.”

With a shared consuming interest in O’Neill, America’s only Nobel Prize-winning playwright, Arthur and Barbara Gelb set about writing his biography, interviewing some 400 people as part of their research. Published in 1962, nine years after the playwright’s death, “O’Neill” was “a sprawling work of passion, with the rough edges still showing and its own nervous energy throbbing slightly out of control,” the historian Joseph J. Ellis wrote in The Times in 2000.

The occasion was the publication of “O’Neill: Life With Monte Cristo,” in which the Gelbs revisited their earlier work to expand and update it. (Its title referred to O’Neill’s father’s most popular role as an actor.) A third volume, “By Women Possessed,” will be published next year by the Marian Wood imprint of Putnam.

As metropolitan editor from 1967 to 1978, Mr. Gelb directed the coverage of a turbulent city besieged by civil rights protests and antiwar demonstrations. (He later acknowledged that The Times had dwelled on the protesters but overlooked police violence in squashing demonstrations at Columbia University.) And he sent reporters into the metropolitan-area suburbs to chart their often wrenching growing pains, from commuter bedroom towns to increasingly congested homes for corporate headquarters.

He became deputy managing editor in 1977 under Seymour Topping and was named managing editor under Max Frankel, the executive editor, in 1986. Facing the company’s mandatory retirement age of 65 for news executives, Mr. Gelb then became president of The New York Times Company Foundation, and was later the first head of a Times college scholarship program for students who have overcome hardships.

Finding the Big Story

Mr. Gelb was particularly admired for his news sense, being able to identify what had the makings of a big story and then, with infectious passion, coaxing it onto the front page. Ralph Blumenthal, a veteran metropolitan reporter, recalled the day Mr. Gelb asked him to investigate taxis.

“ ‘What about taxis?’ I asked,” Mr. Blumenthal said. “He seemed surprised at the question. ‘Taxis,’ he said. ‘There’s a good story there.’ I didn’t know what he was talking about, but I made some calls. After about three weeks I came up with a great scandal about payoffs to inspectors in Queens. How did he know?”

Not every brainstorm proved so bountiful.

“He also asked me to investigate Chinese restaurants,” Mr. Blumenthal said. “ ‘Who really owns them?’ he said. I ate well for two weeks and found out Chinese restaurants are owned by Chinese people.”

Mr. Gelb himself conceded: “I’m not sure I would have wanted to work for me when I was an editor. I was well aware that not every reporter was eager to chase down the countless (if sometimes dubious) leads I proposed — and some eyed me as though I were some kind of madman.”

But he remembered getting sweet revenge after one particularly frustrating cat-and-mouse game with his staff.

“Just before noon one day, I walked around the city room asking one reporter after another if he happened to be free,” he said. “The first four I approached claimed they were tied up on assignments I’d given them earlier. The fifth, Peter Millones, allowed that he was available. ‘Here’s a ticket to the World Series,’ I said.”

For all his bravado, he sometimes stopped to take the measure of himself.

Once, as an editor, he cornered a reporter and genially began: “You know what the guys say about me ...”

“Oh, sure,” the reporter replied matter-of-factly.

“What?” Mr. Gelb demanded.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/21/business/media/new-york-times-editor-arthur-gelb-dies.html?_r=0