Timothy Crouse
Encyclopedia

Family

Timothy Crouse's affinity for campaign reporters and the theater took root thanks to his father, Russel Crouse
Russel Crouse
Russel Crouse was an American playwright and librettist, best known for his work in the Broadway writing partnership of Lindsay and Crouse.-Life and career:...

, who was a career newspaperman and playwright
Playwright
A playwright, also called a dramatist, is a person who writes plays.The term is not a variant spelling of "playwrite", but something quite distinct: the word wright is an archaic English term for a craftsman or builder...

. "The stories he told me of his newspaper days—especially traveling around the country with prankish sports teams—had a fatal tinge of romance about them," said Crouse. His father's career in the theatre began in 1928 when he played Bellflower in the play Gentlemen of the Press. Later, his father turned his attention to writing. In 1934, he and his long-time partner Howard Lindsay
Howard Lindsay
Howard Lindsay was an American theatrical producer, playwright, librettist, director and actor. He is best known for his writing work as part of the collaboration of Lindsay and Crouse, and for his performance, with his wife Dorothy Stickney, in the long-running play Life with...

 together revised P. G. Wodehouse
P. G. Wodehouse
Sir Pelham Grenville Wodehouse, KBE was an English humorist, whose body of work includes novels, short stories, plays, poems, song lyrics, and numerous pieces of journalism. He enjoyed enormous popular success during a career that lasted more than seventy years and his many writings continue to be...

 and Guy Bolton's
Guy Bolton
Guy Reginald Bolton was a British-American playwright and writer of musical comedies. Born in England and educated in France and the U.S., he trained as an architect but turned to writing. Bolton preferred working in collaboration with others, principally the English writers P. G...

 book for the Cole Porter
Cole Porter
Cole Albert Porter was an American composer and songwriter. Born to a wealthy family in Indiana, he defied the wishes of his domineering grandfather and took up music as a profession. Classically trained, he was drawn towards musical theatre...

 musical Anything Goes
Anything Goes
Anything Goes is a musical with music and lyrics by Cole Porter. The original book was a collaborative effort by Guy Bolton and P.G. Wodehouse, heavily revised by the team of Howard Lindsay and Russel Crouse. The story concerns madcap antics aboard an ocean liner bound from New York to London...

.
"My father and Howard's trademark was a painstaking craftsmanship," says Crouse. "They spent months on an outline for a play, then worked on the dialogue, then rewrote and rewrote until everything was just right." And more than fifty years after his father collaborated on the original score, Timothy Crouse's revised libretto
Libretto
A libretto is the text used in an extended musical work such as an opera, operetta, masque, oratorio, cantata, or musical. The term "libretto" is also sometimes used to refer to the text of major liturgical works, such as mass, requiem, and sacred cantata, or even the story line of a...

 of Anything Goes opened on Broadway.

Crouse is the brother of actress Lindsay Crouse
Lindsay Crouse
-Early life:Crouse was born in New York City, the daughter of Anna and Russel Crouse, a playwright. Her full name—Lindsay Ann Crouse—is an intentional tribute to the Broadway writing partnership of Lindsay and Crouse. Her father and his writing partner, Howard Lindsay, wrote much of...

 and also the grandson of Pauline Ives and John Erskine (the novelist and former Columbia professor). He attended Harvard University
Harvard University
Harvard University is a private Ivy League university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States, established in 1636 by the Massachusetts legislature. Harvard is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States and the first corporation chartered in the country...

.

Early career

Crouse served as a Peace Corps
Peace Corps
The Peace Corps is an American volunteer program run by the United States Government, as well as a government agency of the same name. The mission of the Peace Corps includes three goals: providing technical assistance, helping people outside the United States to understand US culture, and helping...

 Volunteer in Morocco
Morocco
Morocco , officially the Kingdom of Morocco , is a country located in North Africa. It has a population of more than 32 million and an area of 710,850 km², and also primarily administers the disputed region of the Western Sahara...

 from 1968 to 1969. Returning to the United States he wrote for the Boston Herald
Boston Herald
The Boston Herald is a daily newspaper that serves Boston, Massachusetts, United States, and its surrounding area. It was started in 1846 and is one of the oldest daily newspapers in the United States...

before joining the staff of Rolling Stone
Rolling Stone
Rolling Stone is a US-based magazine devoted to music, liberal politics, and popular culture that is published every two weeks. Rolling Stone was founded in San Francisco in 1967 by Jann Wenner and music critic Ralph J...

where he worked as a contributing editor from 1971 to 1972.

The Boys on the Bus

Crouse is the author of The Boys on the Bus
The Boys on the Bus
The Boys on the Bus is author Timothy Crouse's seminal non-fiction book detailing life on the road for reporters covering the 1972 United States presidential campaign....

, a largely critical look at the journalists who covered the 1972 US presidential campaign
United States presidential election, 1972
The United States presidential election of 1972 was the 47th quadrennial United States presidential election. It was held on November 7, 1972. The Democratic Party's nomination was eventually won by Senator George McGovern, who ran an anti-war campaign against incumbent Republican President Richard...

. As a young Rolling Stone reporter he wrote music stories, but he wanted to try his hand at political reporting. At a 1972 Rolling Stone staff meeting the only other writer interested in covering the election was his colleague, the legendary writer Hunter S. Thompson
Hunter S. Thompson
Hunter Stockton Thompson was an American journalist and author who wrote The Rum Diary , Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72 .He is credited as the creator of Gonzo journalism, a style of reporting where reporters involve themselves in the action to...

, so Crouse latched onto him. "It only took a few days of riding the bus for me to see that the reporters themselves would make a great story," Crouse said. Crouse also profiled Hunter S. Thompson in the book. [Thompson] "wrote to provoke, shock, protest and annoy," wrote Crouse. Crouse also profiled R.W. Apple, the legendary reporter and editor at the New York Times. Reporters "recognized many of their own traits in him, grotesquely magnified. The shock of recognition frightened them. Apple was like them, only more blatant. He openly displayed the faults they tried to hide: the insecurity, the ambitiousness, the name-dropping" and "the weakness for powerful men." David Broder and Robert Novak
Robert Novak
Robert David Sanders "Bob" Novak was an American syndicated columnist, journalist, television personality, author, and conservative political commentator. After working for two newspapers before serving for the U.S. Army in the Korean War, he became a reporter for the Associated Press and then for...

 are also profiled in the book. In the book, Crouse coins the term pack journalism
Pack journalism
Pack journalism is an often derogatory term used to describe the tendency of news reporting to become homogeneous. The term was coined by Timothy Crouse....

. "The press likes to demonstrate its power by destroying lightweights, and pack journalism is never more doughty and complacent than when the pack has tacitly agreed that a candidate is a joke."

Later Work

After The Boys on the Bus, Crouse became the Washington columnist for Esquire
Esquire (magazine)
Esquire is a men's magazine, published in the U.S. by the Hearst Corporation. Founded in 1932, it flourished during the Great Depression under the guidance of founder and editor Arnold Gingrich.-History:...

and also wrote articles for The New Yorker
The New Yorker
The New Yorker is an American magazine of reportage, commentary, criticism, essays, fiction, satire, cartoons and poetry published by Condé Nast...

and The Village Voice
The Village Voice
The Village Voice is a free weekly newspaper and news and features website in New York City that features investigative articles, analysis of current affairs and culture, arts and music coverage, and events listings for New York City...

. In 1982 Crouse conceived the idea of reviving Anything Goes. He co-authored a new libretto for the musical with John Weidman
John Weidman
John Weidman is an American librettist. He is the son of librettist and novelist Jerome Weidman.He has written the books for a wide variety of stage musicals, three in collaboration with Stephen Sondheim: Pacific Overtures, Assassins, and Road Show...

 that opened at the Vivian Beaumont Theatre
Vivian Beaumont Theatre
The Vivian Beaumont Theater is a theatre located in the Lincoln Center complex at 150 West 65th Street on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. The structure was designed by Finnish American architect Eero Saarinen, and Jo Mielziner was responsible for the design of the stage and interior.The Vivian...

 on October 19, 1987, and ran for 784 performances. They re-ordered the musical numbers, borrowing Cole Porter pieces from other Porter shows, a practice which the composer often engaged in. ("Easy To Love" was from the 1936 movie Born to Dance
Born to Dance
Born to Dance is an American musical film released by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, and directed by Roy Del Ruth.The film stars dancer Eleanor Powell and was a follow-up to her successful debut in Broadway Melody of 1936...

.) In 2002 the musical was produced at the Royal National Theatre
Royal National Theatre
The Royal National Theatre in London is one of the United Kingdom's two most prominent publicly funded theatre companies, alongside the Royal Shakespeare Company...

 in London
London
London is the capital city of :England and the :United Kingdom, the largest metropolitan area in the United Kingdom, and the largest urban zone in the European Union by most measures. Located on the River Thames, London has been a major settlement for two millennia, its history going back to its...

. In 2000 Alfred A. Knopf
Alfred A. Knopf
Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. is a New York publishing house, founded by Alfred A. Knopf, Sr. in 1915. It was acquired by Random House in 1960 and is now part of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group at Random House. The publishing house is known for its borzoi trademark , which was designed by co-founder...

 published Crouse and Luc Brébion's translation of Nobel-prize winner Roger Martin du Gard
Roger Martin du Gard
Roger Martin du Gard was a French author and winner of the 1937 Nobel Prize for Literature. Trained as a paleographer and archivist, Martin du Gard brought to his works a spirit of objectivity and a scrupulous regard for details...

’s nearly 800 page memoir Lieutenant-Colonel de Maumort. Crouse has been working on fiction for the past several years and his story Sphinxes appeared in the Spring 2003 issue of Zoetrope: All-Story
Zoetrope: All-Story
Zoetrope: All-Story is an American literary magazine that was launched in 1997 by Francis Ford Coppola. Blooming from Francis Coppola's "Crazy Idea Department," All-Story is devoted to showcasing the most promising voices in short-fiction...

. Also, Crouse has become a production teacher for the Lee Strasberg Theater and Arts Institute working with the youth division. He has been praised by Anna Strasberg herself for their enormous success.

External links

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