July 28, 2025 Issue

Stephen Colbert, in this week’s issue, writes about one of my all-time favorite New Yorker profiles – Kenneth Tynan’s “Fifteen Years of the Salto Mortale” (February 20, 1978), an indelible portrait of Johnny Carson. Colbert delivers some great lines, most of which mock the twenty-thousand-word length of Tynan’s piece. For example:

My doctor says the words were clogging my carotid, and, after reading “Fifteen Years of the Salto Mortale,” I need a statin.

That article is twenty thousand words. Let me repeat that: words. Can anyone read that much Tynan without adopting his native tongue wag?

And Tynan liberally salts his voluminous causerie (!) with references unassociated with current (and what he might deem intellectually jejune) late night: Keats, Rabelais, Ezra Pound, and Hieronymus Bosch, though one can imagine H.B. appreciating the earthly delights of Floyd Turbo, Art Fern, and Carnac the Magnificent.

Where now is the audience for ten verbal tons on the King of Late Night? Where is that Kingdom? 

Here is something Kenneth could have learned from Johnny: fewer words.

Fewer words? No way! Tynan’s piece is perfect as is. Colbert acknowledges this (“Tynan is a great writer, and it’s a great read”), but then asks “Was he right for the job?” It seems that Colbert prefers one-liners to extraordinary essays. He says, “Tynan bakes a tasty meringue, but I prefer the Good Humor Man.”

Well, I’m here to say that Tynan provides both. Example of the tasty meringue:

He [Fred de Cordova, Carson’s producer] is a large, looming, beaming man with horn-rimmed glasses, an Acapulcan tan, and an engulfing handshake that is a contract in itself, complete with small print and an option for renewal on both sides.

Example of the Good Humor Man:

“Another time, he asked Fernando Lamas why he’d gone into movies, and Lamas said, ‘Because it was a great way to meet broads.’ I loved Johnny’s comeback. He just nodded and said, ‘Nietzsche couldn’t have put it more succinctly.’ ” [Quote from interview with Ed McMahon]

It also contains brilliant descriptions of Carson’s cool, quick-witted, comedic style:

Tone of monologue is skeptical, tongue-in-cheek, ironic. Manner: totally relaxed, hitting bull’s-eyes without seeming to take aim, TV’s embodiment of “Zen in the Art of Archery.” In words uttered to me by the late screenwriter Nunnally Johnson, “Carson has a delivery like a Winchester rifle.” Theme: implicitly liberal, but careful to avoid the stigma of leftism. The unexpected impromptus with which he rescues himself from gags that bomb, thereby plucking triumph from disaster, are also part of the expected pleasure. “When it comes to saving a bad line, he is the master”—to quote a tribute paid in my presence by George Burns. Carson registers a gag’s impact with instant, seismographical finesse. If the laugh is five per cent less than he counted on, he notes the failure and reacts to it (“Did they clear the hall? Did they have a drill?”) before any critic could, usually garnering a double-strength guffaw as reward. Whatever spoils a line—ambiguous phrasing, botched timing, faulty enunciation—he is the first to expose it. Nobody spots flaws in his own work more swiftly than Carson, or capitalizes on them more effectively. Query: Is this becoming a dangerous expertise? In other words, out from under how many collapsed jokes can you successfully climb?

Colbert, in his piece, shows himself to be an excellent writer. I love this line:

From Hollywood to the Hasty Pudding, we waft like smoke from an unfiltered Pall Mall through Carson’s worlds, most of which are gone. 

Carson’s world is gone, but if you want to revisit it, read Tynan’s superb “Fifteen Years of the Salto Mortale” – ten verbal tons of pure pleasure. 

Postscript: “Fifteen Years of the Salto Mortale” is collected in Tynan’s 1980 Show People, a wonderful compendium of his New Yorker profiles, including his masterpiece “The Girl in the Black Helmet” (on Louise Brooks). Curiously, his later, much more comprehensive collection Profiles (1989) includes all his New Yorker work, except “Fifteen Years of the Salto Mortale.”  

August 29, 2022 Issue

Kenneth Tynan is one of The New Yorker’s all-time greats. What’s amazing is that he achieved this status on the strength of just five pieces, all published in the late 1970s: “Frolics and Detours of a Short Hebrew Man” (on Mel Brooks); “Withdrawing with Style from the Chaos” (on Tom Stoppard); “At Three Minutes Past Eight You Must Dream” (on Ralph Richardson); “Louise Brooks Tells All” (on Louise Brooks); and “Fifteen Years of the Salto Mortale” (on Johnny Carson). One of those pieces – “Louise Brooks Tells All” – appears in this week’s issue (an “archival issue”) under the new title “The Girl in the Black Helmet.” What a splendid piece! I’d forgotten how good it is.

It’s a profile of the silent screen actress Louise Brooks. The first sentence is a beauty:

None of this would have happened if I had not noticed, while lying late in bed on a hot Sunday morning last year in Santa Monica and flipping through the TV guide for the impending week, that one of the local public-broadcasting channels had decided to show, at 1 p.m. that very January day, a film on which my fantasies had fed ever since I first saw it, a quarter of a century before.

None of what would have happened? It’s almost impossible not to read on. The film on which his fantasies had fed is Georg Pabst’s Pandora’s Box. Tynan watches it on TV. He writes,

On Channel 28, I stayed with the film to its end, which is also Lulu’s. Of the climactic sequence, so decorously understated, Louise Brooks once wrote, in Sight & Sound, “It is Christmas Eve and she is about to receive the gift which has been her dream since childhood. Death by a sexual maniac.” When it was over, I switched channels and returned to the real world of game shows and pet-food commercials, relieved to find that the spell she cast was still as powerful as ever. 

The next section of the piece shifts to Rochester, New York, home of the International Museum of Photography. Tynan goes there to see its “hoard of Brooks pictures” – six of them new to him – within a space of two days. On the eve of Day One, he “mentally recaps what I have learned of Brooks’s early years.” What a recap it is, containing several inspired descriptions, including this one:

At fifteen, already a beauty sui generis, as surviving photographs show, with her hair, close-cropped at the nape to expose what Christopher Isherwood has called “that unique imperious neck of hers,” cascading in ebony bangs down the high, intelligent forehead and descending on either side of her eyes in spit curls slicked forward at the cheekbones, like a pair of enamelled parentheses—at fifteen, she left high school and went to New York with her dance teacher. 

In the third and fourth sections of the piece, Tynan is in the Museum’s Dryden Theatre, watching Brooks films. His commentary is brilliant. Sample:

What images do I retain of Brooks in “Love ’Em and Leave ’Em”? Many comedic details; e.g., the scene in which she fakes tears of contrition by furtively dabbling her cheeks with water from a handily placed goldfish bowl, and our last view of her, with all her sins unpunished, merrily sweeping off in a Rolls-Royce with the owner of the department store. And, throughout, every closeup of that blameless, unblemished face.

Section five astonishes. After watching the Brooks films, Tynan leaves the Dryden Theatre, and takes a taxi to an apartment building only a few blocks away. He writes,

I rode up in the elevator to the third floor and pressed a doorbell a few paces along the corridor. After a long pause, there was a loud snapping of locks. The door slowly opened to reveal a petite woman of fragile build, wearing a woollen bed jacket over a pink nightgown, and holding herself defiantly upright by means of a sturdy metal cane with four rubber-tipped prongs. She had salt-and-pepper hair combed back into a ponytail that hung down well below her shoulders, and she was barefoot. One could imagine this gaunt and elderly child as James Tyrone’s wife in “Long Day’s Journey Into Night”; or, noting the touch of authority and panache in her bearing, as the capricious heroine of Jean Giraudoux’s “The Madwoman of Chaillot.” I stated my name, adding that I had an appointment. She nodded and beckoned me in. I greeted her with a respectful embrace. This was my first physical contact with Louise Brooks.

Brooks lives! Tynan meets her! For the rest of the piece, we are with them, in Brooks’s austere two-room apartment, as she reminisces about that “halcyon decade” of her life, the twenties, when her career took her to New York, London, Hollywood, Paris, and Berlin, and she hung out with, among others, Herman Mankiewicz, Buster Keaton, and Charlie Chaplin. 

“The Girl in the Black Helmet” is a classic New Yorker profile – perhaps the best ever to appear in the magazine’s long history. Its only competitors are the other Tynan pieces listed above, especially “Fifteen Years of the Salto Mortale,” my favorite of the series. 

Retrospective Review: The Food Issue, September 5, 2005

To sharpen my taste buds for the feast that The New Yorker’s Food Issue is serving up next week, I revisited what is, for me, the greatest Food Issue of them all – the September 5, 2005 issue (with Wayne Thiebaud’s delectable, painterly “Food Bowls” on the cover), containing, among other succulent items, Judith Thurman’s “Night Kitchens,” John Seabrook’s “Renaissance Pears,” and Burkhard Bilger’s “The Egg Men.”

Thurman’s piece is about Japan’s artisanal-tofu masters. She says, “When a tofu master offers you a slice of bean curd he has just unmolded, he is inviting you to partake, insofar as a stranger can, of what it means to be Japanese.” “Night Kitchens” brims with superbly noticed details – “the accoutrements – even the sink – are handmade of cedar,” “the stove is a slab of lava,” “adobe walls of clay mixed with rice straw are sheathed in bamboo,” “the ceiling is tented in thatch,” “the floor is cobbled with sea stones,” “a ginkgo counter with ten seats,” “parchment walls decorated in drippy ink by an inebriated artist,” “pottery on which breakfast is served – rust-and-ash-colored vessels with a dark under-glaze and a primal beauty,” “an ivory-colored attar of bean curd that arrives on a turquoise plate, with a coral drop of sea-urchin (uni) purée.” My favorite sentence in the piece is the simple, sensuous, “The windows of the shed were open, and the sea breeze carried a scent of rain, wildflowers, and algae.” “Night Kitchens” is included in Thurman’s splendid Cleopatra’s Nose (2007).

Seabrook’s “Renaissance Pears” is about arboreal archeology – “the pursuit and recovery of old varieties of fruit”– as practiced by Umbrian agronomist, Isabella Dalla Ragione. Of its many pleasures – a trip to a Perugian mountain valley to visit an old pear tree (“Its black bark had deep crevices, and the trunk and lower branches were covered with scabrous white lichen”), a visit to a villa near Florence to view the fruit paintings of Bartolomeo Bimbi (1648-1729), attendance at a fruit show staged by Dalla Ragione in an old palazzo (“The seeds rattled inside some of the apples, like natural castanets”) - the most piquant is Seabrook’s sketch of Dalla Ragione’s eighty-four-year-old father, Livio, the “genius loci” of the Dalla Ragione orchard (“Livio has a long white fringe of hair around his bald, speckled. Shakespearian dome, and he has the hopeful expression that very old men get in their eyes. He is gruff and blustery, and Isabella treats him as she does the fruit trees – tenderly but firm”). My favorite sentence in “Renaissance Pears” is a description of the flavor of one of Livio’s winter pears: “The taste was so clean – not buttery, which is the standard by which the commercial pear is bred – that it was almost metallic.” Seabrook is like the Medici still-life painters he mentions in his piece - a wonderfully precise, sensuous describer of fruit: see also his excellent "Crunch" in last year’s Food Issue, and his brilliant “The Fruit Detective” (in Flash of Genius, 2008).

Bilger’s “The Egg Men” is about Las Vegas short-order cooks. I’ve extolled its abundant pleasures before (see my post "Retrospective Review: Burkhard Bilger's 'The Egg Men,'" January 30, 2011). I think it’s destined to be a New Yorker classic, ranking with such masterpieces as John McPhee’s “Atchafalaya,” Kenneth Tynan’s “Fifteen Years of the Salto Mortale,” and Arthur Lubow’s “This Vodka Has Legs.” I’m pleased to see that Joshua Rothman, The New Yorker’s new Archive Editor, recently named it one of his favorites ("Staff Favorites From The Archive," “Double Take,” newyorker.com, November 26, 2012). Suffice it to say here, it’s one of my favorites, too.

All three of these pieces are gloriously subjective. Pursuit of the story is part of the narrative: “So at five o’clock one morning, I rolled off my futon in a lovely old ryokan, the Yoyokaku, near the beach in Karatsu, ready for research” (Thurman); “Earlier this summer, I accompanied Isabella on a trip to visit the old pear tree” (Seabrook); “On early mornings, well before the first rush, Gutstein would let me work at the over-easy station for an hour or two” (Bilger). It’s one of the ingredients I’ll be looking for when I’m devouring next week’s Food Issue. I can hardly wait to get started. 

In Praise of Criticism - I (Contra Gopnik)

For a tonic alternative to Adam Gopnik’s recent, dismaying, dismal view that “Criticism serves a lower end than art does, and has little effect on it” (“Postscript: Robert Hughes,” newyorker.com, August 7, 2012), check out Dwight Garner’s “A Critic’s Case for Critics Who Are Actually Critical” in this week’s The New York Times Magazine. Garner says, “The best work of Alfred Kazin, George Orwell, Lionel Trilling, Pauline Kael and Dwight Macdonald (to name just a few of the past century’s most perceptive critics) is more valuable – and more stimulating – than all but the most first-rate novels.” I totally agree. I’ll take critical analysis over narrative any day. As Garner says, “Give me some straight talk. Give me a little humor. Give me something real. Above all, give me an argument.”

Interestingly, in conjunction with “A Critic’s Case for Critics Who Are Actually Critical,” Garner posted a list titled “5 Critics Who Deserve a Statue” on the Times’ blog “The Sixth Floor” (nytimes.com, August 16, 2012). Three of the five are New Yorker contributors: Helen Vendler, Clive James, and Kenneth Tynan. They’re excellent choices. I particularly like what Garner says about Tynan:

Elegant theater critic. His critical profiles, which appeared in The New Yorker, are master classes. His smoking style — he held a cigarette between his two middle fingers — will give his statue an unbeatable élan.

Tynan’s smoking style is shown in the above portrait by Snowdon, which was used to illustrate a series of entries from Tynan’s journals, titled “The Third Act” (The New Yorker, August 14, 2000). Tynan’s piece on Johnny Carson, “Fifteen Years of the Salto Mortale” (The New Yorker, February 20, 1978), is perhaps the finest profile ever to appear in the magazine. On the basis of this piece alone, Tynan deserves to be immortalized in stone.  

November 7, 2011 Issue

Of the many pleasures in this week’s issue – Ian Frazier’s wonderful “History Lesson” (“One of the young men from O.W.S. – the one who said they would never leave – was wearing a dark suit jacket, a white shirt, a burgundy tie, a bolo string tie, a beaded Indian necklace, and a silver pendant. On his head he had a wildly multicolored baseball cap, set sideways. His hair was a braided ponytail. His trousers were skin-tight leggings, also multicolored, and he had beige flip-flops on his feet”), John Lahr’s superb “The Natural” (“Her excitement made her luminous”), James Wood’s “Shelf Life,” with its short, rhythmic, three-beat sentences (“I found him hard to love, easier to admire, and I rather feared him”; “I knew he would say it, hated him for it, agreed with him”) and breathtaking, long, loaded-up lines (“His Algerian childhood, his intellectual ambition, the diversion of that ambition into run-of-the-mill moneymaking, his isolation and estrangement in America, his confidence and shyness, pugilism and anxiety, the drinking and the anger and the passion and the pressurized conformity of his businesslike existence: of course, in some general way, these thousands of volumes – neatly systematic, proudly comprehensive – incarnated the shape of this life, but not the facets of his character”); the enticing, exquisite opening sentence of Peter Schjeldahl’s “Old and New” (“Fourteen lamps hanging, aglow, beckon you to an entrance to the Metropolitan Museum’s Islamic wing, which is open again after eight years of expansion and renovation”) – the most piquant is the glorious descriptive power of D. T. Max’s “Her Way,” a profile of the pianist Hélène Grimaud. Here, for example, is Max’s description of Grimaud’s hair: “On album covers, her hair telegraphs a mood. It is pinned up in a Clara Schumann-like bun for a Brahms recording, and on the cover of “Credo” – a CD of Beethoven and a pair of mystic-minded modern composers – it is tucked behind her ears, in wan, heroin-chic strands. Ordinarily, her hair is shaggy, with too-busy-to-blow-dry bangs.” And here is his image of her at the keyboard: “Grimaud opened with Mozart’s Sonata in A Minor, playing it as if she were lashing a carriage down the streets of Salzburg.” And here is his rendition of the sound of wolves howling: “Two Mexican wolves, in a nearby enclosure, joined in, several tones higher, glissando-ing down while the red wolves added a frenzied pizzicato.” Grimaud is an outstandingly great subject, and Max’s profile of her is commensurately outstandingly great. It’s incredible color, nuance, and texture reminds me of Kenneth Tynan’s piece on Johnny Carson (“Fifteen Years of the Salto Mortale,” The New Yorker, February 20, 1978), perhaps the finest profile ever to appear in the magazine. That’s just about the highest compliment I can pay a piece of writing.