Marvin Kitman, satirist whose main focus was TV, dies at 93
Marvin Kitman, who survived longer as a television critic than most of the programs he gleefully criticized, and who, as a satirist and amateur historian, daringly, if belatedly, audited George Washington’s Revolutionary War spending account, died Thursday at the Actors Fund Home in Englewood, NJ He was 93.
His son, Jamie Kitman, said the cause was cancer.
Mr. Kitman joined the leftist but anti-Soviet magazine The New Leader in 1967 as a TV critic after the magazine’s editor agreed that he could reveal in his first column that he had never watched television regularly.
He began writing a syndicated column for the Long Island daily Newsday on December 7, 1969—”a day that will live in infamy,” he said, “as far as the TV industry is concerned.”
Over 35 years, he released 5,786 columns, championing groundbreaking shows like “All in the Family,” “Seinfeld,” and “Monty Python’s Flying Circus,” while relentlessly filming others. He labeled the 1980 debut of the sixth season of “Saturday Night Live” as “offensive and raunchy” and wrote about “Kentucky Woman,” a 1983 TV movie starring Cheryl Ladd, the former “Charlie’s Angels” star: ‘Cheryl Ladd as a coal miner was a very moving television experience. I felt like switching to nuclear energy.”
In 1982 Mr. Kitman a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism. His last column appeared on April 1, 2005. (“Newsday gave me a tryout,” he wrote, “and after 35 years, we decided it wasn’t working.”)
He also wrote a number of books. Probably the most notable was “George Washington’s Expense Account” (1970), for which he was listed as Washington’s co-author under the name Marvin Kitman, Pfc. (born)
A work of non-fiction and not satire, it contained a facsimile of Washington’s ledger detailing Madeira’s personal use cases and military expenditures for his army’s frequent, if sometimes strategic, advance to the rear.
An article about the book in The New York Times stated that Mr. Kitman straddled “the line between truth and travesty” — similar to Washington himself, who “wrestled fiercely at times over whether a particular expense was public or private” and “usually resolved the issue in his favor.”
Historian Robin W. Winks, writing in The Times Book Review, stated that the book was a vehicle for Washington’s famed cherry boom to retaliate. As evidence of Mr. Kitman’s prodigious investigation into Washington’s intemperance, he cited a record that the general had put on 28 pounds during the war, which lasted more than seven years.
Washington magnanimously rejected the $6,000 annual salary offered by Congress (the equivalent of about $1.7 million in today’s dollars over eight years). Instead, Mr. Kitman wrote, the commander-in-chief demanded reimbursement of $480,000 in expenses (about $17 million today).
Mr. Kitman also wrote about Washington in “The Making of the Prefident 1789” (1989), exposing the political machinations behind Washington’s nonpartisan election—and incidentally, with the unorthodox spelling of the title, disliked the writing style of that time.
His first book was the bold title “The Number One Best Seller: The True Adventures of Marvin Kitman” published in 1966. His latest was “Gullible’s Travels: A Comical History of the Trump Era” published in 2020.
One of the more surprising works of the liberal Mr. Kitman was “The Man Who Would Not Shut Up: The Rise of Bill O’Reilly” (2007), which Jacob Heilbrunn, reviewing for The Times, pronounced “a mash” to Mr. O’Reilly, noting that Mr. Kitman saw the belligerent conservative culture warrior as “a powerful (and welcome) antidote to the porridge the television industry has been dishing up for decades.”
Yet, wrote Mr. Heilbrunn, the book eventually revealed that Mr. O’Reilly’s work was not so much about conservative ideas as “flaunting his seething personal grudge to become what he claims to despise: a celebrity.”
Publishers Weekly wrote that it was “difficult to imagine a more researched or less biased work on such a divisive figure as O’Reilly.”
Mr. Kitman himself was no stranger to the political arena. He briefly ran for president in the 1964 New Hampshire Republican primary under the banner “I’d rather be president than write.”
When his deputy reportedly received 638 votes in the primary, more than half the number that went to perennial candidate Harold Stassen, Mr. Kitman demanded a recount. “There was some kind of fraud in my getting so much,” he complained.
If his 1964 mock campaign had succeeded, he could have run against the incumbent Democratic president, Lyndon B. Johnson, whose press secretary was Bill Moyers, who recruited Mr. Kitman as publisher of Newsday in 1969.
“I hired Marvin,” Mr. Moyers said in an email, “because we needed his humor, without which a media critic is a warrior without a sword.”
“In the early days of television – the ’50s and ’60s – he thought satire was the best way to persuade television to exploit its cultural and creative potential,” added Mr. Moyers. “How could the big moguls in their plush counting houses high above Manhattan not read a man who wrote that ‘on the TV screen, pure nonsense tends to drive out ordinary nonsense’?”
Marvin Kitman was born on November 24, 1929 in Pittsburgh to Jewish immigrants from Russia. His family moved to New York in the 1930s. His father, Myer, was an inspector and clerk for Western Union. His mother, Rose (Kaufman) Kitman, worked in a glider factory in Brooklyn during World War II.
“Some parents send their children to Switzerland ‘to finish them off,'” Mr. Kitman often said. “Mine took me to Brooklyn.”
After graduating from Brooklyn Technical High School, he attended City College of New York. His parents hoped he would become a draftsman, but he discovered an opportunity to write while working on the student newspaper. He graduated in 1953 with a bachelor’s degree in English.
In 1951, Mr. Kitman married Carolyne Sibushnick, who later became a photographer. In addition to his son, she outlives him, along with their daughters, Suzy Kitman and AJ Knight, and three grandchildren.
After being drafted into the army, Mr. Kitman from 1953 to 1955 as a sportswriter for the Fort Dix grassroots newspaper in New Jersey. He then moved to Leonia, NJ, where he worked as a freelance writer and wrote a column for an article about horse racing and consumer advocacy for the underground humor magazine The Realist.
He co-founded the satirical magazine Monocle with Victor Navasky and was a staff writer for The Saturday Evening Post.
He later appeared on TV as a critic for WPIX and WNEW (now WNYW) in New York. He found himself no less disappointed in broadcast television after working in the medium himself than he was when he wrote about it. Particularly daunting was his experience helping to create and write a short-lived CBS sitcom entitled “Ball Four” starring former major league pitcher Jim Bouton (who also starred, as a fictionalized version of himself) and the sportswriter Vic Ziegel, based on Mr Bouton’s book of the same name.
“It was the constant rewriting at night, how everyone was always so exhausted,” he recalled in The Record of Bergen County, NJ, in 2013, “and the input from the executives — all they knew about writing was the alphabet .”
He went on to write for The Huffington Post and started his own blog in 2013 marvinkitman. com, in which he expounded on the anthropological impact of television in a Marshall McLuhan-esque manner. “Our kidneys had changed,” he wrote. “We had to go to the bathroom more often, like during the commercial breaks.”
Resorting to his usual modesty, Mr. Kitman, with his tongue firmly planted in cheek, also spoke only of his bona fide character as a constructive critic rather than a chronic kvetch.
“Thirty-five years of telling the commercial networks they were sending them into an iceberg is the reason they are not threatened today by cable, Netflix and anyone who streams on portable devices, including the electric toothbrush. (Have you ever tried to watch TV on it?)”, He wrote in 2013.
“The dinosaurs,” he added, “are dancing as fast as they can into LA’s La Brea tar pits and no longer need my help.”