By Albert Amateau
Luminaries of the theater gathered at The Players Club on Nov. 23 to honor one of their own, a man of the theater and a writer of distinction, the journalist Jerry Tallmer, who now writes for The Villager.
Actors and writers, including Edward Albee, Marian Seldes, Austin Pendleton, Jules Feiffer, Anne Meara and Jerry Stiller, and yet more friends and colleagues paid tribute to the man who was among the founders of The Village Voice and who began the Off-Broadway Obie Awards more than 50 years ago.
A journalist all his life, Tallmer, 89, also worked on The New York Post from 1962 to 1993 under its serial ownerships, at jobs including reporter, editor, drama critic, film critic, feature writer and layout editor.
“He is the last of the newspaper romantics,” said Bill Ervolino, the award-winning humor columnist for the Bergen Record who toiled with Tallmer on The Post from 1985 to 1990. “It was a thrill to work with a gentleman and a scholar who had respect for our readers and for the people we worked with,” Ervolino told the gang at The Players.
Honoring Jerry, the actors let it all hang out.
Jerry Stiller and Anne Meara did stand-up at Tallmer’s celebration; Tallmer and Edward
“Jerry said in a review once that I looked pretty,” said Seldes, the distinguished Tony Award-winning actress. “That made me so happy, so foolishly happy,” she added. Coincidentally, Seldes’s late aunt, Dorothy Schiff, owned The Post when Tallmer worked there in the 1960s. And her father, the late cultural historian and critic Gilbert Seldes, started writing for The Voice when Tallmer was an editor there years earlier.
Stiller and Meara, in a duologue that elevated stand-up schtick to sublime hilarity, remembered Tallmer’s early recognition when others were indifferent or hostile. Meara recalled her anguish years ago when the late Frances Herridge, theater critic for The Post gave her a humiliating notice.
Seldes later noted another coincidence: “Frances Herridge was my father’s mistress.”
Friends said that Tallmer “opened the door” for them when they needed a break. Feiffer recalled walking into The Voice as an unemployed cartoonist more than 50 years ago and meeting Tallmer, whom he described as the “cultural mind and heart” of the fledgling paper.
“He was the first literate, sensible critic to write about Off-Broadway theater in a completely personal way,” said Feiffer.
Albee, three-time Pulitzer laureate for drama, said he was proud to list Tallmer in his personal pantheon of heroes.
Charles Busch, actor, playwright and drag performer, remembered as a teenager reading a Tallmer review of Judy Garland.
“Years later, he came to interview me one afternoon and I ended up interviewing him — all the people he’s known! I treasure that afternoon,” Busch said.
Cabaret artists KT Sullivan, Mark Nadler and Baby Jane Dexter gave signature performances adapted to honor the man of the hour.
Albee; Mark Nadler performing cabaret; Baby Jane Dexter singing at the Tallmer event.
The playwright Tom Stoppard e-mailed his tribute from London, recalling that when he first came to New York he headed for The Voice office because he credited what he knew of the theater on these shores — the venturesome Off-Broadway theater — to reading Tallmer.
“Jerry is a man of the theater. No one deserves the title more than Jerry with his 55 years of service in the American theater,” Stoppard said.
Tallmer responded with dry humor, correcting some stories and elaborating others — and recalling his friendships in journalism and theater.
“My teacher was George Bernard Shaw, who said, ‘Be yourself and care,’” Tallmer remarked.
He spoke of his days at The Voice and of his newest and current editorial home at The Villager — “a better newspaper,” he said. His recent column in defense of Roman Polanski was “not a defense really but disgust at the press persecution” of the film director, he added. Never one to step away from a risky or unpopular position, Tallmer assured his admirers, “The old bastard is still at it.”
