When I was young and ambitious, I decided, after a little more than a year working as a freelance music critic at the Los Angeles Herald Examiner, that I’d take a shot at working for the Los Angeles Times, the biggest game in town. I got the blessing of my Herald boss, Alan Rich — he knew that he couldn’t give me enough work, or at least not the amount I wanted — and I duly wrote a letter and sent some clips to Martin Bernheimer, the Pulitzer Prize-winning music critic at the Times, asking for an interview. This was quickly granted.
On the appointed day I was escorted to Martin’s office on the newsroom floor. It had a glass wall facing the newsroom and in the middle of it he had plastered a large poster of Ronald Reagan’s head with a ballistic missile going in one ear and coming out the other, with no resistance. Inside the office was even more striking. On one side of his desk and behind it the walls were covered from top to bottom with photographs, most of them from opera productions, many of them flamboyant and many of them nudes. The display was obviously meant to shock, and did so rather easily.
Martin made an immediate impression as well. He was an imposing figure, big and burly of torso, a large, balding, and heavily bearded head on top of it that was nothing less than eminent, like that of a 2nd century Roman emperor. Behind his large glasses, his eyes sparkled impishly, and I realize just now, looking at a photo of him, they were always like that, for as long as I knew him. He quickly took charge of the interview (I don’t remember talking that much) and laid out the law of the land.
