Exit of the Executioner

Actor Cyril Ritchard calls her "Acidy Cassidy." Director Tyrone Guthrie finds her "vicious and irresponsible." Contralto Marie Powers once threatened to clout her in the snoot, and had to be restrained from doing so. The object of these strong sentiments is the Chicago Tribune's deceptively frail Claudia Cassidy, whose barbed pen has made her the most widely read and feared critic of the lively arts in the Midwest. She has written finish to many a career in Chicago, notably those of two local conductors who left after continual Cassidy pannings.

Last week word got out that Claudia Cassidy, 65, will retire Dec. 1. Many people were relieved. They honored her for the high standards that she set, which in turn caused producers and impresarios to think twice before sending second-rate road companies to Chicago, but they felt that she had achieved too much power.

Comic-Strip Shaw. For 23 years on the Tribune, Cassidy not only criticized the cultural world of Chicago; to a large extent, she ran it. She helped persuade Conductor Fritz Reiner to take over the Chicago Symphony (1953-62), and she helped build up the estimable Chicago Lyric Opera. When she liked something --or someone--she lavished compliments. She was one of the first to praise and promote Tennessee Williams. Reviewing the 1944 world premiere of The Glass Menagerie, she wrote: "It is honest, tender, tough and brilliant."

But Cassidy was read mostly for her attacks. Her reviews were often florid, sometimes shockingly inaccurate--she once confused Haydn with Prokofiev--but rarely dull. After seeing Olivia de Havilland in Candida, she wrote: "A pallid, one-dimensional heroine in a kind of comic-strip Shaw. When she enters, she is an interruption, nothing more." She dismissed Conductor Rafael Kubelik: "The symphony was as shapeless as his curious beat, being distorted by arms stiff as driving pistons or limp as boiled spaghetti."

Keep On Writing. A redhead from Southern Illinois, Claudia Cassidy studied journalism at the University of Illinois, wrote reviews for Chicago's Journal of Commerce and the Chicago Sun before moving to the Trib. After one of her slashing assaults on the Chicago Symphony brought 200 complaining letters to the Trib in a week, Claudia offered her resignation to Publisher Robert R. McCormick. Said the austere "Colonel": "Two hundred letters to the music department! You keep on writing," and he gave her a raise (she now earns about $19,000).

In company with her husband, an ex-stock salesman, she sometimes takes in two plays a night. Then she dashes off a review, headline and all, in as little time as 15 minutes. Why her violent reactions? Explains Claudia: "My strong opinions about anything bad originate from the fact that it makes me suffer so much. It makes me desperate. It kills me." When she retires, the Trib will pay a high compliment to her energy and enterprise. It will assign two men to cover the beat that until now has been handled by one woman.

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