As chief drama critic for The New York Times from 1980 to 1993, that enthralled youngster would become the most powerful critic in American theater—the "Butcher of Broadway" to those punctured by his dagger-sharp pen. In his new memoir Ghost Light, the Times' Op-Ed columnist lifts the curtain on the tumultuous childhood that led to his passion for the stage. "I was re-meeting parts of myself that I hadn't looked at in a long time," he says. "It was cathartic and exhilarating.... I was re-creating what it was like to discover the theater for the first time."
Rich was 6 when he saw his first musical, Damn Yankees. His joy didn't last long. A few weeks later the Washington, D.C., native's parents—Frank Sr., now 79 and heir to a shoe-store chain, and Helene, an elementary school teacher—split up. As Helene moved Frank and his younger sister Polly to a succession of new apartments, the sensitive boy endured cutting comments about his "broken home" and developed a paralyzing fear of the dark. "I could not understand it," says Rich. "On TV, nobody was divorced."
But his mother's remarriage in 1958 only made things worse. Joel Fisher, an influential lawyer-lobbyist, could veer from dynamic to volcanic in an instant, Rich says. Frank, 9, Polly, 7, and the divorced Fisher's twin children Johnny and Susan, 8, lived in terror of his outbursts. "He could throw you down a flight of stairs for giggling at the wrong time," says stepsister Susan Fisher Sullam, now 50 and a press secretary for Maryland Rep. Ben Cardin. Rich's increasingly distant mother didn't intervene—although Rich believes she eventually suffered abuse too. "He was a villain, an abject villain," says Rich. "His abusiveness to everybody, from waitresses to his family, cast a huge shadow in my life."
Paradoxically, Fisher nurtured the family's love for the theater, often wrangling tickets to sold-out New York City shows. "He would give with one hand and take away with the other," says Sullam. After thrilling to Gypsy, Camelot or Hello, Dolly!, Frank would scavenge trash cans for discarded Playbills from other shows. "The Music Man dealt with a boy who has no father," says Rich. "Gypsy was about a divorced mother of two kids. I found something I could identify with."
After studying literature and history at Harvard, Rich became a journalist, eventually landing a job reviewing movies and TV for TIME. In 1980 the Times named him drama critic. Rich could close a show with a few words—and didn't mince any, making enemies such as Andrew Lloyd Webber (whose Phantom of the Opera he judged "impoverished of artistic personality and passion") and top producer David Merrick (who called Rich a "savage dog"). "It was extraordinary, the hatred of him," says Rich's friend Alan Brinkley, a historian. "It got to him at times, but never in a way that shook his confidence."
What ultimately ended Rich's reign was his mother's 1991 death following a car accident. Fisher, who was at the wheel, survived. (He died in 1997.) "In my view, he killed my mother by his recklessness," says Rich. "For the first time in my entire life, the theater seemed less important. I was so upset and consumed with grief, and it did not console me."
At the beginning of 1994 Rich became a columnist, tackling topics from politics to culture. The shift, he says, helped give him the perspective he needed to start his memoir. "The column has been a way for Frank to liberate himself from the theater," says friend Brinkley. "He's part of a larger world now. It's good for him."
At home, Rich appears to have settled in for the long run. His first marriage, to book editor Gail Winston, failed in 1987 after 11 years. Splitting "was the hardest thing to do," he says—especially since they had two sons: Nathaniel, now 20 and a Yale junior, and Simon, 16. "I knew how much they needed me because I'd been there," says Rich. Sharing custody, "I cooked for them, I cared for them. I learned how to be a father from my kids."
He also learned to be a better husband. In 1991 Rich wed Alex Witchel, now 43 and a Times style reporter. Today, he says, "I feel pretty good, I have to confess. I love my family, I love my work." And the theater? He and Witchel "still see a lot, but we don't see everything," he says. "And sometimes we wait for the reviews."
Samantha Miller
Lynda Wright in New York City
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- Lynda Wright.
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