A Life in the Movies

Roger Ebert was an eager young man fresh from Urbana when he started reviewing movies for the Chicago Sun-Times more than three decades ago. His intervening years have featured unimagined success, abiding friendships, too much booze (for a time), the death of a colleague, bouts with cancer, and (rather late) lasting love. Today, his passion for film has made Ebert a bigger star than many of the people he writes about.

By Carol Felsenthal

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View our gallery of photos from Roger Ebert's life

Photo: Anna Knott

Roger Ebert
View our Roger Ebert photo gallery

The movie critic Roger Ebert has often said he would never leave his cherished Chicago Sun-Times or his beloved city. Yet, in 1968, he was ready to do just that. In a letter to his mentor Daniel Curley, an English professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the young newspaperman confided that The New York Times wanted him to travel east to talk about becoming its second-string drama and movie critic. Ebert complained that his military draft status would preclude such a career move. "If The New York Times summons one only once in a lifetime, then I blew it," he wrote. But something else Ebert revealed in the letter suggests his state of mind at the time. "I continue to write about the movies," he noted. "I think a lifetime of such work would make [one] a moron."

Today, at 63, Ebert still writes about movies for the Sun-Times, and hardly anyone would call him a moron (well, maybe he would hear that from Rob Schneider, who speculated that one of the reasons Ebert had panned his Deuce Bigalow movies was that the critic had "never had sex in high school"). Rather, a lifetime of reviewing movies has made Ebert a number of other notable things.

He's rich-a multimillionaire whose latest contract is said to give him $3 million from his syndicated TV show. At the Sun-Times alone, he makes $500,000 a year.

He's famous-"more recognizable than most of the movie stars he writes about," says the Sun-Times columnist Richard Roeper, his current TV partner. "I've seen him walk into Hollywood parties, and the stars are turning toward him."

And his opinions carry enormous influence in the world of movies. He long ago transcended his newspaper. In Hollywood, nervous studio executives ask, "‘What did The New York Times say?' ‘What did USA Today say?' ‘What did Ebert say?'" It is not even a question any longer, says Michael Cooke, formerly of the Sun-Times and now the top editor of the New York Daily News, of how good or bad he is as a critic. "He's a brand, like Coke."

Remarkably, working in journalism and Hollywood-two businesses not known for their generosity of spirit-Ebert has attained this success for the most part without making enemies. Although some people do question the quality of his reviews, it is hard for a diligent reporter to turn up anyone who has a bad word to say about him personally, even in private. Rather, acquaintances cite his loyalty, his sweetness, his benevolence-and, of course, his vast store of knowledge and enthusiasm about movies and myriad other subjects.

The road to becoming the first film critic to win the Pulitzer Prize (1975) and the first to be awarded a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame (last summer) was paved with Ebert's hard work, his ability to write at typing speed, and his unflagging optimism and cheer, even in the face of obstacles: his father's death when Ebert was a freshman in college; a serious drinking problem; the writing of a ridiculed soft-porn screenplay; the death from brain cancer of his close professional colleague, Gene Siskel; his own repeated bouts with cancer. It's a life worth its own screenplay-the tale of a movie-obsessed boy from central Illinois who made very good.

The Natural

While still an undergraduate at the University of Illinois, Roger Ebert had his eye on big-city journalism; he was selling freelance stories to both the Chicago Daily News and the Chicago Sun-Times. In September 1966, James Hoge, then the city editor of the Sun-Times, took him to lunch at Riccardo's on Rush Street, the ersatz commissary for the city's newspapers, and hired him as a writer for Midwest, the Sun-Times's Sunday magazine. (Ebert continued pursuing a Ph.D. in English at the University of Chicago for another year before finally quitting.)

It was a lively time to work at the tabloid, the sister publication of the high-toned afternoon broadsheet, the Chicago Daily News. "We were like the steelworking sons who work so we can send our bright brother to college," says Paul Galloway, another Sun-Times reporter. Looking for young readers and hoping to inject personality into his paper, Hoge also hired Bob Greene, Ron Powers, and Roger Simon; all of them went on to wide recognition as writers.

As the features editor, Robert Zonka nurtured the bunch. Fourteen years Ebert's senior, Zonka was a charismatic teddy bear who loved to party and drink and recognized a soul mate in Ebert. When the paper's film critic, Eleanor Keene, a former society reporter, retired in April 1967, Hoge and Zonka asked Ebert to take her beat. He grabbed the chance to cover what he later described as the greatest art form of the 20th century.

His timing was perfect. At The New Yorker, Pauline Kael had just started "to blow the library dust off writing about films," recalls David Elliott, then the critic at the Chicago Daily News. The city had four newspapers in those days, each with its own film critic-Ebert; Elliott (now at the San Diego Union-Tribune); Mary Knoblauch at Chicago Today; and Gene Siskel, a rookie reporter who had maneuvered his way into the job at the Tribune. The most intense competition was between Ebert and Siskel, who, Ebert says, was hired "to knock me off."

"Before the late sixties, when we all came along," recalls Knoblauch, movie criticism was in the hands of "old fogies," who wrote as if they worked for the studios' publicity offices. The social sea changes of the 1960s and 1970s brought with them what Ebert calls "the film generation moment." Doris Day comedies and Rock Hudson romantic dramas gave way to Easy Rider, Last Tango in Paris, and Bonnie and Clyde. Attending his first New York Film Festival in 1967, Ebert met Kael, and afterward he sent her some of his columns. She called them "the best film criticism being done in American newspapers today," he says. A few years later, he took Knoblauch to meet Kael at her apartment, where they sat around the kitchen table talking about movies. "People always liked Roger because he knew so much," says Knoblauch.

The remarkable ease with which he wrote also caught the eye- and the ire-of his colleagues. The public-relations consultant Connie Zonka, then married to Bob, recalls Ebert strolling in on Thursday evenings, a half- hour before deadline for the Sunday paper, while the theatre and music critics sat agonizing over their copy. "Roger would walk around, tell some really terrible jokes, sit down at his typewriter, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding-and he finished his piece."

Days of Wine and Roses

After work, the gathering place in those days was a bar called O'Rourke's (on North Avenue, just west of Wells Street), a hangout with the look of a shabby Irish pub. O'Rourke's had photographs of Brendan Behan and William Butler Yeats on its walls, a coal stove, a polished oak bar, and a sign advertising a boneless chicken dinner for 15 cents (i.e., a hardboiled egg). "We thought of ourselves as bohemians or antiestablishment," Ebert recalls.

The typical slog went from the newspaper office to Riccardo's for dinner and drinks, to O'Rourke's until closing at 2 a.m., then down North Avenue a block to the Old Town Ale House, which stayed open until four. The trek became known as the Bermuda Triangle. "Night after night, year after year, all the time," says Ebert, whose drinking crew included Zonka, Galloway, and John McHugh, a former Daily News reporter whom Ebert calls his "oldest friend in Chicago." Although known for being gregarious, Ebert himself admits to a certain shyness, and his colleague Robert Feder, the Sun-Times's radio and TV columnist, calls him "inherently a shy young man in a great celebrity persona." But whatever shyness remained was washed away by the alcohol. Sometimes Ebert would interview stars at O'Rourke's-Jane Russell, John Wayne, Mel Brooks, or Clint Eastwood. Although Ebert's rules required the stars to be treated like anyone else, one night an O'Rourke's regular screamed at Charlton Heston, "My God, it's Moses!" and he cheerfully autographed her bra.

Ebert, who drank Johnnie Walker Black Label Scotch, could finish off a bottle by himself. Later, when he worried that he might be drinking too much, he told Galloway that he had his drinking under control-the night before, he had consumed only 15 highballs.

The more Ebert drank, the jollier he became. "He might just start singing or reciting a poem," recalls Marshall Rosenthal, who was then working as a reporter at the Chicago Daily News. Ebert and McHugh would quote Yeats, sometimes in unison, and Ebert would also compose limericks. When he stuck his hand in his pocket and pulled out a rumpled carbon copy, the regulars knew that he was about to read them his review for the next day.

Because his social life centered on O'Rourke's, Ebert met the women he dated there. For two years, he saw a nurse named Sarah Nance, who was divorced and the mother of three children. They talked about marriage, but looking back, Ebert says, he was not "marriageable." In 1975 at O'Rourke's, he met Ingrid Eng, an exotically beautiful mother of four. After her divorce, they dated, although not exclusively, well into the next decade. Ebert became close to her children and helped one of her daughters, Monica, get a "copy kid" job at the Sun-Times. Today she is a reporter for the Tribune. "I don't think I'd be in journalism if it weren't for him," she says.

Ebert remembers that they used to call O'Rourke's "the ultimate singles bar: you'd go there with somebody and go home alone." Home was a rental apartment cluttered with books and papers in a three-flat at 2437 North Burling Street.

The drinking did not seem to impair Ebert's writing. He was an alcoholic when he won the Pulitzer Prize in 1975, but he never missed a deadline and was never late for an appointment. Still, he was beginning to recognize that it was a dead end, says William Nack, Ebert's friend since college. Legend had it that one night, home from O'Rourke's, he threw his bowl of ice cream against the wall. "It was taking over my life," Ebert recalls today.

By then, he had embarked on the television show with Gene Siskel, and Ebert worried about being hung-over during the tapings, at the time every other week. He would stop drinking two or three days before. In the summer of 1978 he saw a doctor, who recommended Alcoholics Anonymous. Ebert said no, and the doctor told him to come back every month for a year to see how he was doing. "At the end of the year, I hadn't made any improvement, so he suggested seeing a counselor," Ebert says. She refused to talk to him unless he went to AA. Ebert will not talk about AA directly or even confirm for publication that he ever belonged to the organization, but friends say that he attended his first meeting in August 1979, and he has been sober ever since.

One woman, who casually dated Ebert, encountered him at an AA meeting the first week of his sobriety. It was a hot day; the door was open, and she glanced out at a Sun-Times delivery truck that had Ebert's picture plastered on its side and realized that the man in the row in front of her was a cohost of the television show about movies then distributed nationally by the Public Broadcasting Service.

For the gregarious Ebert, AA became another O'Rourke's, and people he met there have remained his close friends. In the beginning he went to meetings every day, sometimes more than once a day, and he eventually persuaded Paul Galloway to join (today Galloway credits Ebert with saving his life). After meetings they would go out for ice cream. Ebert describes himself as an agnostic, but Father Andrew Greeley, the novelist and columnist, recalls Ebert once saying that "his AA meeting was his Mass."