Gentleman George

When the Greater Boston Feminist Fair voted Boston Globe Columnist George Frazier "Worst Male Chauvinist Pig" for his comments on the women's movement and awarded him a muzzle, he had it bronzed and placed over his fireplace. After he made the White House "enemies list," having labeled Richard Nixon "a louse" and David Eisenhower "the creepy kid," Frazier observed the occasion typically. He donned a starched dickey shirt, planted a carnation in the buttonhole of his 30-year-old Brooks Brothers suit, and sauntered over to Locke-Ober's Cafe for his favorite finnan haddie dinner. He was aspishly relieved that a local boy should have won such notice: "My God, what if I hadn't made the list? Men have been known to take the gas pipe with less provocation."

Equal Flair. Frazier need not have worried. Gentleman George is not only an ornamental Boston legend but a social commentator whose tart views reach an audience far beyond Boston. Besides writing four columns a week for the Globe, he discourses once a week on the CBS Morning News show and again on a local Boston TV program. At 62 he is one of the oldest writers to get an assignment from Rolling Stone. Most journalists his age have the years gentle their pace or prejudices. Frazier is as eager as ever to flay those he thinks pompous.

His targets are so inclusive--nearly all politicians and women's rights advocates, many fellow journalists and people who wear white socks--that he is doubtless on many enemies lists. Unlike most press scolds, who tend to ignore social trivia for headier political game, Frazier has anchored his reputation by roasting the large and the small with equal flair. He regularly assaults national institutions like Howard Cosell ("commits a public disturbance every time he opens his mouth"). But he also stalks such Main Street game as deer hunters ("revolting humanoids") and people who call up radio talk shows ("idiots who elude their keepers long enough to get to a phone").

Most of the columns are written in stream-of-consciousness style that leaps from notion to notion with scant regard for structure or logic, neither of which is a Frazier forte. Rather, his strength is an unerring eye for targets vulnerable to his wit, delivered in the bilious tones of an aggrieved headmaster. Once in a while he softens with memories of the good old days. He can sentimentalize at length about bar-hopping with Hemingway and Thurber, and pay tribute to Tim Costello, the late keeper of a Manhattan literary saloon, this way: "Without himself, who has been in the ground and as one with the heather on the heath these many unstylish years, Tim's was never again as it was when he was there softly singing John Anderson, My Jo or discussing the Dublin of Joyce."

Frazier wastes no sympathy on what he might call the Great Sartorially Unwashed: those who wear double-knit suits off the rack and monograms, which he regards as "manifestations of insecurity." He devoted an entire column recently to upbraiding a Los Angeles physician who had tried to crash Boston's proper Ritz bar in a Cardin turtleneck. A city councilor, Albert ("Dapper") O'Neil, has filed suit against him for $1 million because of Frazier's gibes at the crease in O'Neil's trousers.

Such hauteur may not become the son of a West Roxbury, Mass., fire inspector.

But Frazier, who went on from his lace-curtain upbringing to acquire a Harvard degree and Brahmin persona, views himself as a romantic in mourning for his era's lost grace and style. The common man (H.L. Mencken's Boobus americanus) is to Frazier the root of the new Philistinism--"ignorant, ill-clad, ill-spoken."

Frazier's acid snobbery occasionally backfires. He angered early employers at such papers as Boston's Record American ("The readers all moved their lips when they read, but then so did the editors"). His views do not exactly coincide with those of the liberal Globe either. In 1971, after Frazier savaged the TV performance of five earnest young Boston reporters, attacking them mainly for looking tacky on camera, Editor Tom Winship sacked him. Frazier promptly hired a small plane to fly over a jammed local football stadium trailing a banner: BRING BACK GEORGE FRAZIER. He was soon rehired.

Despite Frazier's outrageous excesses, he is an original whose following keeps coming back for more. "The whole trouble with this era," muses Frazier, "is that there is very little eccentricity. An age is great in art and every other way in proportion to the eccentrics who thrive in that time." What other eccentric would confound his readers by observing the Red Sox's winning baseball opener in Latin?

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