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John was, in his prime, probably the most notorious critic alive.
If theTimess Frank Rich was the Butcher of Broadway, John Simon was its Hannibal Lecter.
Any of a thousand quotes from his reviews will give you the general flavor.
The responses to his reviews were almost as legendary as the articles themselves.
Peter Bogdanovich, in the script forWhats Up, Doc?,named a pompous character Hugh Simon.
the Worst Person in the World, and he was always heard eating an enormous, sloppy sandwich.
And heso enjoyedthose fights.
In the office, John used to do dramatic readings of his hate mail.
His villainous reputation was almost surely enhanced by his Serbian accent, which gave him a certain vampire quality.
This John enjoyed being the Bad One.
He was not, in doing so, merely expressing the benign grumpiness of the charming curmudgeon.
John Simon wrote things that would be unpublishable today and not because we have become oversensitive.
I cant wait till AIDS gets all of them!
(That last one was the rare remark for which he issued a public apology.)
Those views are not defensible, and I do not intend to defend them.
That was true even in inadvertent ways.
Bogdanovich once called John pseudo-intellectual, but the pseudo part of that is wrong.
John wasextremelylearned, comfortable in half a dozen languages, better read than almost anyone Ive met.
After he was fired in 2005, Id see him at the theater regularly, and he was cordial.
His opinions could also be surprising.
He had a soft spot for a certain kind of romanticism European art songs, for example.
He could be funny, too.
His very first piece forNew Yorkwasa bravura defense of booing.
(Wereposted that review in 2015, appending new annotations by the man himself.)
One other thing is worth noting about John: his relentless tenacity.
That is the part of John Simons career worth emulating.
Hell of a review.
