Clurman, Richard Michael

(b. 10 March 1924 in New York City; d. 15 May 1996 in Quogue, New York), journalist and longtime executive for Time Inc., and its first chief of correspondents.

Clurman was one of three children of Will N. Clurman, a prominent builder and real estate developer, and Emma Hertzberg, a homemaker. His father was from New York’s Lower East Side and began building homes and apartment houses on suburban Long Island in the late 1930s. Richard’s uncle, Harold (“Edgar”) Clurman, was a famous Broadway and motion picture director, author, and critic. His grandfather, Samuel Michael Clurman, was a prominent physician who wrote a medical column in the newspaper the Jewish Day. Clurman had longed to be a journalist since he was a boy growing up on Long Island. He edited newspapers for his grammar school, high school, college, and the U.S. Army, where he served during World War II in the Information and Education Division. After graduating from the University of Chicago in 1946 with a Ph.B. in political science, he became an editor for Commentary magazine in New York. In 1949 he joined the staff of Time magazine, editing its press section (“Judgments and Prophecies”) and opinion section.

During his sixth year there, Clurman wrote a 4,000-word cover story for Time titled “Alicia in Wonderland” (13 September 1954). Alicia Patterson, editor-publisher of the Long Island—based tabloid Newsday, the most successful daily newspaper of the post—World War II era, had just won a Pulitzer Prize for an investigation of corrupt labor leader William DeKoning, Sr. A child of the famed Patterson-McCormick newspaper publishing dynasty, her father, Captain Joseph Medill Patterson, had invented tabloid journalism in America. In September 1955 she hired Clurman, aged thirty-one, away from Time as her editorial director and assistant, hoping he would offer a “more cosmopolitan view of the world.”

In April 1957 Clurman married Shirley Potash, who had variously been an assistant public-relations director for Time Inc., assistant to Oscar Hammerstein, and a public-relations staffer for Twentieth Century—Fox and the Rockefeller family. This was his second marriage; they had one son. (His first marriage had produced two daughters and ended in divorce.) Their uptown apartment was the scene of fascinating, star-studded dinner parties where Clurman, who disdained small talk, told people he “refused to be bored,” tapped a spoon against a glass to rouse everyone’s attention, and announced a topic for discussion.

Clurman returned to Time Inc. in 1958 as deputy chief of domestic correspondents. One year later he was named chief of domestic correspondents. In 1962, Time Inc.’s founder and editor-in-chief, Henry R. Luce, appointed Clurman chief of correspondents of the Time-Life News Service. This was the first time all thirty of the company’s domestic and foreign news bureaus were combined into one operation. Clurman was in charge of 105 staff correspondents and 300 part-time correspondents, stationed in thirty-four cities around the world. He traveled constantly, visiting different bureaus and meeting the leading figures of the day. Before he took this position, he underwent a crash course in foreign affairs since he had only been overseas for three days.

In 1968 Clurman, at age forty-four, was named board chairman of the New York City Center of Music and Drama by Mayor John V. Lindsay, the center’s president, who had urged the selection committee to choose someone with a fresh perspective. The center, which pioneered the concept of civic art centers in America, had outgrown its current sites. Included among its seven constituents were the New York City Opera, New York City Ballet, Joffrey Ballet, and Alvin Ailey City Center Dance Theater. Although Clurman soon recruited experts in the fields of business, real estate, city planning, law, and the arts and announced a plan for four new theaters on the old Madison Square Garden site, the scheme failed because he was remiss at fund-raising and did not solicit enough from affluent patrons.

In 1969, Clurman assumed a new post at Time Inc. as vice president in charge of editorial development and acquisitions. In 1970, toward the end of his career, Clurman was made head of Time-Life Video to develop programming for the fledgling cable television industry. He also was appointed chairman of the board of Time-Life Broadcast Inc.

In November 1972, Mayor Lindsay prevailed upon Clurman to become commissioner of parks and administrator of parks, recreation, and cultural affairs. He took a year’s leave of absence from his Time Inc. job, and in January 1973 he announced a shake-up of the agency’s top echelon, warned of firings, and threatened to withhold maintenance funding from those parks excessively violated by vandalism, unless the surrounding community helped stop it.

When Clurman retired from Time Inc., he had devoted twenty-three years to his field. By the end of his life, the onetime slim and sandy-haired six-footer, who was seldom seen without a cigarette dangling from his mouth, had given of his expertise to the cultural and civic betterment of New York City. The Richard M. Clurman Award ($5,000) is presented to young journalists in his memory.

Clurman died of a heart attack at age seventy-two at his summer home in Quogue, Long Island; his remains were cremated. A memorial service held in June at Manhattan’s Temple Emanu-El attracted the media’s elite: Barbara Walters, David Halberstam, David Greenway (editorial-page editor of the Boston Globe), and Harry Evans (president and publisher of Random House). One eulogist, Clurman’s best friend Oz Elliott, a former editor of Newsweek who had been with him at Time, said, “While Dick made himself an expert at many things, his true specialty was friendship.” William F. Buckley, Jr., said, “I have always subconsciously looked out for the total Christian, and when I found him, he turned out to be a non-practicing Jew.” Mike Wallace said Clurman called him every Sunday after viewing the 60 Minutes television show to discuss how the segment had gone. Time writer Hugh Sidey said, “He never panicked in a crisis, was always instructive when correcting you, and there was always laughter when he was around.”

Clurman wrote Beyond Malice: The Media’s Years of Reckoning (1988) while doing pro bono work as board chairman of Columbia University’s Seminars on Media and Society. It examines sensational front-page stories that had elicited hostile public reaction, which he blamed on the media’s propensity to invade privacy and emphasize bad news. He decided to write another book, To the End of Time: The Seduction and Conquest of a Media Empire (1992), two weeks after he heard the first incredulous merger announcement about Time Inc.—the world’s largest combined magazine and book publisher—and Warner Communications Inc.—an entertainment conglomerate of films, records, and cable television. An obituary is in the New York Times (17 May 1996).

Melani Sue Boultier