BY ALBERT AMATEAU | Man of the theater, consummate journalist, mentor and friend: Jerry Tallmer was all that and more to his friends and colleagues who gathered on Feb. 23 for his memorial at The Theater for the New City.
For the 150 theater and newspaper folk at the event, and for many others who sent messages, Jerry Tallmer, who died last November, is still among us.
They recalled his integrity and openheartedness, his humor and his vision. When playwrights like Samuel Beckett, Jean Genet and Edward Albee were little known, he wrote about them. When theater off Broadway was virtually ignored by the mainstream press, he gave it his attention and respect.
“Jerry Tallmer got it,” was the consensus of the crowd at the Monday gathering.
“It was because of Jerry Tallmer that there is a Theater for the New City,” said Crystal Field, director of the theater founded in 1971 and located for the past 28 years on First Ave. at E. 10th St. “He was the voice of all of us who were trying to change the nature of art in America. With Jerry Tallmer in the Village Voice, we began to find our public,” Field said.
“Jerry was the only one of us who knew how to put out a newspaper,” said Ed Fancher, who with Dan Wolf and Norman Mailer founded the Village Voice in 1955.
Fancher recalled a party in 1954 where Tallmer, who was then working at The Nation, complained about his writer’s block. A year later at the fledgling Voice, Tallmer agreed to write movie reviews for the Voice and “never complained about writer’s block again,” Francher said.
While The Villager was a strong and established, albeit stodgy, paper back then, he noted, they were precarious days at the Voice.
“In the spring of 1956 we were running out of money,” Fancher said. “Jerry and I added up our accounts receivable and found we had $25,000 coming. We found an ex-boxer, heavy and menacing, and were able to collect some of it,” Fancher recalled.
Then there was the time the Voice threw a big benefit in the 3,000-seat Loews Sheridan Square, starring the great jazz musicians of the day. Billie Holiday was booked as the last number.
“But Billie had a gig in Philadelphia, so Jerry, who had a car, drove down to bring Billie and her boyfriend back to the concert,” Fancher said. With the theater crowd impatiently waiting, “Jerry finally arrived with Billie, who stopped for a shot before she came in, and she went on to sing the closing number,” recalled Fancher.
In 1955 Tallmer founded the Obie Awards for Off Broadway theater, an event soon picked up by the daily press. Needing a real salary in 1960, Jerry Tallmer went to the New York Post.
“We never quite forgave him for that,” said Fancher.
“Jerry was the most principled man I ever met,” said Diana Maychick Foote, a fellow writer who Tallmer mentored at the Post. “He was an idealist and still a child at heart. I never really learned to write until I had Jerry Tallmer at my side. He loved words. He loved words as if they were people, and he loved the beguiling Fran [Frances Tallmer, Jerry’s wife].”
Jerry Stiller, who with his wife and acting partner, Anne Meara, became Tallmer’s and Fran’s good friends, recalled that he was once engaged to play Launce in Joe Papp’s production of “Two Gentlemen of Verona” for Shakespeare in the Park. Another actor was hired to play Crab, Launce’s dog, but a real stray dog that attached himself to Stiller replaced the actor.
“Tallmer wrote about the show, and the dog got the review,” said Stiller. “We kept the dog until Anne got pregnant and he had to go,” he added.
Jonathan Slaff, the actor and theatrical press agent who was master of ceremonies at the Monday memorial, read a column that Tallmer wrote for The Villager about his being a young radar/radio man in a B-17 that was in the sky over Japan when the plane dropped the atomic bomb on Nagasaki, and watching the mushroom cloud rising from 130 miles away.
“ ‘I didn’t like it then and I don’t like it now,’ “ Tallmer wrote in another Villager column.
Slaff read tributes from the cartoonist Jules Feiffer, whom Tallmer hired for the Voice soon after it opened. Pete Hamill, the legendary newsman and novelist, wrote that Tallmer was one of his great teachers in the newsroom.
“He was a superb writer and a generous teacher,” Hamill wrote. “He never wrote down to the reader. He didn’t believe in making people dumber.”
Playwright Terrence McNally wrote a tribute and so did Tom Stoppard, the latter who met Tallmer when he first came to New York.
“In fact,” interrupted Fancher, “Stoppard slept in the Voice office for a night or two. He didn’t have a place to stay, so Jerry told him he could sleep in the office.”
Actor Austin Pendleton said, “His good reviews were a call to responsibility and his critical reviews never felt like an attack. It was more like a caress… . He made people feel humble, because he was humble. I told him that he was humble because he was so secure, and he said he was secure because of Frances.”
Playwright Mario Fratti effusively said that a good critic’s job is to encourage not to tear down artists, and that Tallmer was all about nurturing young talent.
“He loved women, he loved Frances,” said John Sutter, former owner of The Villager, which ran hundreds of Tallmer’s columns over the last 25 years. Sutter read a column that Tallmer wrote about a 1971 roundtable in which Norman Mailer sparred with a trio of prominent feminist writers.
Bill Ervolino, a humor writer and standup comic, recalled meeting Tallmer at the Post 27 years ago.
“I was the younger kid in the office,” he said. “We all looked up to him. He was so smart and so generous. He knew the answer to everything. There are times, when I don’t know what I’m going to do, I say, ‘What would Jerry do?’ I do it and it’s mostly the right thing to do.”
The evening’s final speaker was Lincoln Anderson, The Villager’s editor in chief, or as Slaff put it, “Jerry’s last editor.”
“Bukowski said of great writers, ‘He could lay down a line,’ ” Anderson said. “Jerry could lay down a line. He laid down billions of them. He told me he liked to pull disparate ideas together in his columns, and that he had to get angry to write a good piece. But I don’t think he was always angry. He was great to work with. Some writers are neurotic, difficult, but he was at the other end of the spectrum, always a gentleman.
“I was honored Jerry asked me to cover his induction into The Players Hall of Fame, when Edward Albee praised him as the preeminent theater critic of his era,” Anderson added. “I was happy for him when he won first place in 2012 for Best Column for his Villager talking points and notebooks in the New York Press Association’s annual newspaper contest. The key with Jerry was to find pieces of his that tied into current issues, because the contest criteria is for an ‘issues-based column.’ His best piece that year mixed his great nostalgia with current events, as he reflected back on Rupert Murdoch’s ruthless takeover of the Post, while relating it to the phone-hacking scandal.
“Again, in addition to being an amazing arts writer, Jerry’s op-ed columns helped also us win awards for Best Editorial Pages several times,” Anderson said. “And he frequently helped us take first place for Best Obituaries, since he knew so many prominent people and, of course, because he was such a fluid writer. Jerry knew everyone who was anyone.
“I was glad that I got to work with Jerry and edit him in the latter portion of his career,” Anderson said. “I think it’s cool that he started out as a founding editor at the Voice but then wound up writing for The Villager. I think it’s a nice connection. People say The Villager today is like the early Voice in ways.
“I was honored to know Jerry Tallmer and to work with him,” Anderson said.
Jerry Tallmer, born in 1920 in Manhattan, entered Dartmouth, the Class of 1942, but joined the Army Air Force soon after Pearl Harbor and graduated in 1946. Leo Caproni, president of the Dartmouth Class of 1942, read a letter of tribute to the memorial.
