The Man with the Popular Mind

His column is concocted of bile and bilge. There is no barrier of good taste that he won't breach daily.

--TV Producer

The only TV critic in the nation who is rude, inaccurate, un-Christian and vengeful.

--TV Star

He's a murderer. Anyone who gives him the time of day has lost his mind.

--TV Network Executive

This man writes with his glands. I avoid him, because 1 would probably hit him if I saw him.

--TV Press Agent

To all such acrimony, TV Critic Jack O'Brian, 50, responds with the unruffled self-assurance of a man who has managed to outstay most of his manifold detractors. His column, On the Air, has appeared in Hearst's New York Journal-American for 14 uninterrupted years. "I don't blame the people who hate my guts," says O'Brian. "I do have a capacity to cut very close to the bone, and these people must react. They can't very well blame themselves. So they blame me."

The Muscle. O'Brian's column ignores the conventions to which most TV critics subscribe. He seldom, if ever, indulges in lengthy think pieces; he finds he can contain his reaction to any given show or performer in brief, sharp, personal observations. And TV being TV, his prevailing attitude is aggressively hostile: he frowns on most of what he sees. Steve Allen, a TV performer who has repetitively borne the brunt of O'Brian's scorn, once assayed the critical content of a single column and counted 33 pans against only three bits of praise.

O'Brian lards his critical comment with gossipy, digressive asides. Before this year's presidential election, he solemnly informed his readers that Lyndon Johnson was Jack O'Brian's man. When Lawyer Roy Cohn, a personal friend, put in a guest appearance on TV, O'Brian seized the opportunity to describe his buddy as "articulate, poised, informed, brilliant and even humble"--virtues rarely lumped together in a description of Senator Joe McCarthy's onetime sidekick.

O'Brian's critics might forgive such departures from duty if he took a better view of them and their product. But the performers who bask in O'Brian's favor --Bert Lahr, Perry Como and Walter Cronkite, to name most of them--are vastly outnumbered by those who do not. O'Brian has excoriated Danny Kaye for 15 years on the grounds that Kaye's comic talent never escaped infancy. He is equally steadfast in his disapproval of Ed Sullivan ("Old Smiley"), David Susskind ("Little David"), CBS News Commentator Mike Wallace ("a vacuum") and scores of other performers who fall short of the O'Brian standards. "I'm not a Hessian soldier," says O'Brian. "I can't write what I don't believe. The muscle in my column is opinion, and I can't write anyone else's opinion but my own."

The Standin. Born in Buffalo, N.Y., the son of a New York Central conductor, John Dennis Patrick O'Brian showed early signs of an incisive critical taste. Soon after he joined the Buffalo Courier-Express as a cub reporter, O'Brian was assigned to audit a performance of the local philharmonic orchestra. Offended by a guest appearance of some juvenile accordionists, O'Brian took the orchestra so severely to task that the incident became a civic cause celebre. When the orchestra changed hands shortly thereafter, O'Brian, with obvious satisfaction, claimed part of the credit.

Ambition brought him to New York, where the late George Jean Nathan, then theater critic for the Journal-American, helped him get a job on the paper in 1949. At the time, O'Brian had been the Associated Press's drama critic and sometime radio critic for six years. After a brief stint as a Journal-American rewrite man, O'Brian was assigned to do a radio-TV column. This was in the days when everybody who had a TV set was watching four to five hours a night and wanted to talk about it the next morning. O'Brian suddenly found himself a stand-in for millions of televiewers. "I'm no intellectual," he says. "I like what attracts me. I have the popular mind. About all I demand from TV is that it reach the target it aims for."

Six Eyes. He has stormed at pretension and what he considers meretriciousness or bad taste. His two daughters, Bridget, 7, and Kate, 6, are not allowed to watch "shoot 'em up" shows or waste a minute on Soupy Sales, a slap-sticking echo of vaudeville who appears on TV's children's hour. The first time that Ed Sullivan booked the Beatles, O'Brian praised the act. But after the air waves filled with Beatle imitators, he called a halt. "If this vast musical wasteland, this sump, continues," he wrote in his column, "it inevitably will encourage young people to forget neatness, ignore barbers, bypass cleanliness and turn into a nation of slobs."

O'Brian's effect on television is best measured, perhaps, by the fact that few of his detractors are willing to declare publicly against him. Almost without exception, network executives and press agents fulminate from behind the refuge of anonymity. Their barbs fly toward well-insulated ears. There are six TV sets in O'Brian's six-room apartment on Manhattan's 73rd Street, and they command his" undivided attention at least six hours out of every day.

After 14 years, that big, multiple eye has finally begun to pall. "Who the hell ever said there should be TV 24 hours a day?" O'Brian asked last week. He is thinking seriously of switching off all six sets, he said, in favor of seeking broader battleground with a column conditionally titled "Jack O'Brian at Large." In its way, that ambition constitutes Jack O'Brian's most devastating TV criticism yet.

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