NY Times Writer Relates Life's Mission

Adding his voice to the recent media memoir frenzy, New York Times columnist Frank Rich '71 read from his book Ghost Light, the story of his childhood infatuation with the theater, last night at WordsWorth Bookstore in Harvard Square.

"It was a personal mission to tell a story about a kid, me, who had a somewhat dark childhood and escaped it through the theater," Rich said.

Ghost Light focuses on Rich's parents' divorce, his childhood in Washington, D.C., and, of course, his yen for the stage.

" I wanted to act, write, direct. I was so glad just to be around the theater, I didn't even think of it as a vocation," Rich said.

He first put his discriminating eye for theater to work as an arts writer for The Crimson.

"I'm embarrassed to say I can't remember what [my first review] was," he said. "I'm sure it was a great show."

Rich, who was editorial chair of The Crimson in 1970, went on to found a weekly newspaper in Richmond, Va. He said he wrote about everything from "school board meetings to senior proms for Seventeen magazine" before working at The New York Times.

After 13 years as the chief theater critic for The Times, Rich shifted gears in 1993 to write a column for the op-ed page, which he described as an ideal but daunting job.

"When I was first starting out, Bill Safire, another columnist at The Times, gave me some great advice...never start a paragraph with the phrase 'on the other hand,' because when you're writing for the Times, you're always going to make someone angry," Rich said. "You have to be true to yourself."

Rich focuses primarily on the beginnings of his thespian obsession in his memoir, not on his eventual career in journalism, but he said last night that it was good to be back in the town where it all began.

"Everything I know about journalism I learned from The Harvard Crimson, so everything that went wrong is all their fault," Rich said.