On the site where Trump Tower now looms above the Chicago River at Wabash Avenue there once was a squat building that was home to the Chicago Daily News and the Chicago Sun-Times and the thousands of people and giant printing presses that were in the business of newspapering, and among the very best of the people there was Richard Christiansen.
I first met Christiansen in that building in 1963 and now, in the wake of his death Friday, I join the many others sharing memories and praise. It’s there and everywhere in this modern age, a flood of internet words. And there is much detail in the artfully crafted obituary written by my colleague Chris Jones, who wrote, among many words, that Christiansen was “the single individual who did the most to put homegrown Chicago theater permanently on the global map.”
Christiansen was 90 years old when he died and I was fortunate to have known him for nearly 60 of those years, to have shared theatrical space with him over the decades, in storefronts, attics, and lofts, in suburbs and city, and even someone’s living room. I worked for him, and I worked with him, socialized with him and so it would be impossible to catalog the many things he taught me, indeed taught a generation of newspaper writers. One of the most important of these things was that if you are a critic, you don’t have to be an arrogant ass.
In 1963, my father, Herman Kogan, was starting from scratch a weekend arts and entertainment section for the Daily News. It was called Panorama. The first person to walk into his office was Christiansen.
He had been working since 1957 for the paper, where he had come after some time, at $65 a week, with the City News Bureau, the training ground for the city’s daily newspapers. He came to the paper and worked with Mike Royko on the night shift, which offered a steady diet of often tragic news. But it also honed the skill of writing on deadline, and it enabled Christiansen to tackle stories beyond hard news.
My father made him a staffer for Panorama, where he wrote a weekly “Best of the Paperbacks” column and filed a steady stream of stories, including interviews with Anthony Perkins, Marlon Brando, Kirk Douglas, a 22-year-old Ann Margret and a manic Jerry Lewis. He also wrote about the opening of the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis; an essay titled “Some Thoughts on Theater in the Summer”; a review of comic Bob Newhart’s theatrical debut in a play called “The Golden Fleecing,” which he called “a feather-brained … interminable three hours.”
The paper already had a theater critic in the erudite columnist Sydney J. Harris, but Christiansen was drawn to the city’s stages. If there was a “eureka” moment, it appeared in Panorama’s Aug. 24, 1963 issue, in a story about director Bob Sickinger, who had come here from Philadelphia and was charged with reinvigorating the theater program at Hull House. Christiansen, in one of his first efforts to promote local theater, wrote, “A new theater project founded on tradition, hope and hardhearted realism is beginning in Chicago, bringing with it seeds of life for Chicago’s drama desert.”
My father, who had been the drama critic for the Sun-Times, would leave Panorama after a couple of years to help run a TV station and Christiansen took his place, writing a weekly column, among his many duties. He was tireless, living up to what my father had written about him when he took over as editor. He had called him “one of our ablest and most versatile writer-reporters … and not the least of his attributes that will serve him well in his new assignment is the ability to work 90 hours a week without a whimper.”
In 1973 he was lured away, to become the editor of a splashy and ambitious new magazine call The Chicagoan, and I was there as a reporter, learning more about his knowledge and enthusiasms, his passions and skills. The magazine was chaotic and folded within 18 months and Christiansen returned to the Daily News, where he was free to cover anything he wanted as critic at large. Bill Newman — a dear man and once called “simply the greatest newspaper writer of his time” by Royko — was the Panorama editor then and we had a fine staff, which included me for a time that ended when the Daily News ceased publication on March 4, 1978.
Two days later Christiansen was on the staff of the Chicago Tribune and for some years we were competitors, of sorts. I had gone to the Sun-Times from the Daily News and reviewed plays when the paper’s lead critic, the late Glenna Syse, was unavailable.
Christiansen and I were at dozens of opening nights together. One of the most memorable was at Wisdom Bridge Theatre in 1983. In an upstairs space on Howard Street, I sat with Christiansen and my father and watched Bill Petersen give an astonishing portrayal of condemned killer Jack Henry Abbott in “In the Belly of the Beast,” directed by Bob Falls.
I raved about it in print and so did Christiansen, writing: “Driving back to the office to file my review after the play’s opening night, I had to pull over to the side of the road and rest there for a few minutes in order to collect myself.” From that night on, the theater community referred to a rave review from Christiansen as a “pullover.”
As Jones wrote, he was “always gentle and respectful in rhetorical tone, Christiansen epitomized what is often described as old-school reviewing.”
But when needed, he could be harsh. One memorably stinging example is in his 1985 review of the Remains Theatre production of a play titled “White Biting Dog.” He wrote, “(The play concerns) the sadomasochistic loves of a household of loathsome loons. … (The playwright) knows only the grotesque, but even her most outlandish creations have no point or purpose to their oddities. … The play offers only garbage. Intensity of emotion is reserved strictly for revulsion. … The Remains actors bravely or foolishly scream, howl and yap their impossible speeches.”
Christiansen retired from the Tribune in 2002 after 45 years in the newspaper business. He then wrote a spectacular book, “A Theater of Our Own: A History and a Memoir of 1,001 Nights in Chicago.” At the time, he told me of his first encounter with professional theater.
“A production of ‘Oklahoma’,” he said. “Before I was allowed to go, my mother had to make sure there were no dirty words in it. I was still able to see it even though it had one ‘damn.'”
He told me a lot of things, many of which have made me, I like to believe, a better newspaperman and better person. He could be charmingly, tearfully sentimental, a trait that further endeared him to people. But even some of his closest friends were mystified by his friendship with Royko. They seemed so vastly different, tough and tender respectively.
Over the years I learned that the basis of their friendship was formed at the City News Bureau, then extending to the Daily News and later at the Tribune. “When Mike started his column, he told me he thought that Mike Royko was too dull a byline,” Christiansen told me. “He said he wanted something classier and folksier for a first name, maybe something distinctive like ‘Theo’ of actor/singer Theo Bikel. So, after some lively talk, we hit upon ‘Meeko.’ It delighted us both, and that, for me, was his name ever after.”
That’s a great story and whenever these two would run into one another, often outside the Tribune Tower, there would be palpable affection and hugs, the word “Meeko” clearly heard, above the rush of traffic and along with the sounds of their mutual laughter.
rkogan@chicagotribune.com
