BUY IT Letters Profiles ALSO TODAY Blue Glow MTV's "Real World" invades Seattle; the 100 greatest films ever Home Movies By Charles Taylor Women on the verge RECENTLY IN ENTERTAINMENT American squirm By Sarah Vowell Uneasy rider (06/15/98) Mr. Jealousy Reviewed by Charles Taylor Noah Baumbach's new urban comedy smartly satirizes self-involvement -- without being too self-involved (06/12/98) Six Days, Seven Nights Reviewed by Stephanie Zacharek As cheap and predictable as a discount package tour, but still a terrific getaway (06/11/98) Back in the U.S.S.R. By Julia Barton After a brush with American fame, perestroika poster boy Boris Grebenshikov has returned to his Russian roots (06/10/98) Sharps & Flats Reviews of new music by Dwight Yoakam, the Smashing Pumpkins, Tuatara, Nicholas Payton and the Jesus and Mary Chain (06/10/98) BROWSE THE ENTERTAINMENT ARCHIVES FEATURES TELEVISION MOVIES MUSIC

- - - - - - - - - - Letters By Kenneth Tynan, Random House, 665 pages Profiles By Kenneth Tynan, Random House, 541 pages BY CHARLES TAYLOR | A bracing anachronism. That's the impression you take away from reading Kenneth Tynan's "Letters" -- finally published in this country after a long delay -- and its companion piece, "Profiles." By "anachronism" I do not mean "dated," but something out of place in the present. Given much of what passes for criticism today, and almost all of what passes for critical portraiture, that's a high compliment. Tynan's name has slipped out of public consciousness in the 18 years since he died, and it would be wonderful if these books -- "Letters," edited by Tynan's widow, Kathleen, who herself died in 1995, and "Profiles," selected by Kathleen Tynan and Ernie Eban -- returned to him the recognition he deserves as one of the greatest arts critics of the century. Tynan was drama critic for the London Observer and the New Yorker; in the '60s he was chosen by Laurence Olivier to be literary director of Britain's then newly founded National Theatre. Through it all he produced appreciations of those who intrigued him -- performers, directors, writers, athletes. The selection of these pieces in "Profiles" offers not just a sense of discovering subjects you don't know (in my case, Beatrice Lillie or the British comic Eric Morecambe), but shocks of recognition from the precise and glittering definitions of familiar subjects. Here is Tynan on Ralph Richardson's voice: "Something between bland and grandiose: blandiose, perhaps." On the novels of Graham Greene: "[He] has never been able to build up a resistance to sin: no sooner has a nip of it reached his stomach than the hangover begins." On the reluctant stage presence of Miles Davis: "A dapper, tapering figure in evening dress of black Italian silk, he would take the stage like a fawn in a fairground, or a hermit poet thrust against his will into a populous market place." On the writing of Tennessee Williams: "From that round, rubbery face, those dazed eyes which nothing, no excess or enormity, can surprise -- from here the message comes, the latest bulletin from the civil war between purity and squalor." On Marlene Dietrich's nightclub act: "She stands as if astonished to be there, like a statue revealed every night to its own inexhaustible amazement." On the allure of Greta Garbo: "What, when drunk, one sees in other women, one sees in Garbo sober." It's hardly worth saying that we won't soon see another of Tynan's kind (what unique talent can't that be said of?); what seems much more pertinent is that we aren't likely even to see another who attempts to follow his example. The problem goes deeper than the fact that there's hardly a journalist at work who writes great (let alone good) celebrity profiles. There is currently no place in the culture for anyone who approaches celebrity profiles as a critic. For a while now, much of the press that claims to be reporting on, or writing criticism of, the entertainment industry has in fact been promoting it. Several years ago, in a piece on publicist Pat Kingsley, the New Yorker said that she "was probably the first publicist to ask a magazine editor, 'Why do you always get to decide who's on your cover?'" At this point, those of us whose idea of editors has been formed by the likes of "His Girl Friday" or "All the President's Men" probably imagine an obscenity-laced retort reminding this upstart just who's in charge here. Instead, the article went on to reveal, "having been given no satisfactory reason that she couldn't decide, she now has almost as much control over magazine covers featuring her clients as the magazine's editor." Why would an editor buy into that? Simple. Having a celebrity on the cover sells magazines. That keeps advertisers and the publisher happy, and that, in the here-today, gone-tomorrow world of magazines, keeps the editor employed. And what are journalistic ethics when, after landing Tom or Brad or Demi, you can crack open a bottle of Vichy water and toast your success? It's now accepted practice for agents to refuse to make their clients available unless they receive a guarantee that their client will appear on the cover, and unless they have control over the choice of both the photographer and the journalist. When a magazine plays ball with publicists in this way, it increases its chances for access to other celebrities. Glossy magazines have become something like the girls in high school who had a reputation for being "easy." Those reputations were often unearned, the product of rumor and wishful thinking. Glossies, on the other hand, are proud of their reputations, and work to maintain them. In this atmosphere, what could be more disingenuous than Vanity Fair's recent severing of ties with Lynn Hirschberg, allegedly for showing Jerry Seinfeld's publicist an advance copy of her profile? I don't know whether Seinfeld's people had prior approval from Hirschberg. But how likely was Vanity Fair, for Christ's sake, to run an uncomplimentary cover story (at least on somebody still living)? The publicist has become the unacknowledged collaborator in the majority of today's celebrity profiles. N E X T__P A G E .|. There's a better way