“Then, a few weeks later, I was flipping through a back issue of Time magazine from 1974, and there was a photo of Walter dancing at Sly Stone’s Madison Square Garden wedding. “When I first met Walter, I thought he was just another one of those strays who had followed Graydon back to the office,” said John Brodie, a Spy alum who is now an editor at Grand Central Publishing. It was the conga-line, all-access Walter that Monheit preferred to let his public see. Late Night with David Letterman wanted to scout out Walter as a possible guest or regular-perhaps Larry “Bud” Melman was in a contract holdout at the time-and thus, I was charged, at 23, with chaperoning Walter, My Favorite Year–style, as he took a meeting with Daniel Kellison, then a Late Night writer-producer, more recently in charge of Jimmy Kimmel's show. My first-ever ride in a chauffeured town car was with Monheit, at NBC’s expense. family, this writer included, came of age at Spy, and therefore count Walter stories among our formative workplace experiences.
Musto, in one of his nightclub columns for the Village Voice, once expressed skepticism that Monheit actually wrote the blurbs ascribed to him, saying that Walter didn’t come across “like a typical irony-laden Spy preppie.” To which Walter replied, “I write, and they write also.” The erstwhile powers that be at Spy stand by this statement. And certainly the producers of the Robin Williams movie Cadillac Man (1990) didn’t seem to care, for they went ahead and used Monheit’s blurb (“Eight-cylinder, sedan-tastic, luxury-car har-dee-har-hars that rocked my chassis like a speed bump!”) in their print campaign for that picture. That Walter had never actually screened any of these movies was immaterial. Added Carter, “And he could balance a glass on his head while he did at least one of these duties-I can’t remember which, though.” “He was one of the oldest hyphenates in existence, and, as *Spy’*s messenger-movie critic, he handled both duties with characteristic dedication and aplomb,” said Graydon Carter, a founder and co-editor of Spy (and *V.F.’*s current editor), in a prepared statement. Monheit distinguished himself in print at Spy magazine, where he held the title of Messenger/Critic-at-Large in the late 80s and early 90s. “You never knew what the fuck he was saying,” Musto wrote, alluding to Monheit’s thick Austrian-Yiddish accent and rat-a-tat speech, “but he was always amusing and amazing.” Michael Musto, Walter’s friend and fellow traveler in the 1980s demimonde, first reported the sad news. This great, mischievous, elegantly mustachioed man, Walter Monheit, passed away last Friday night at a nursing home. On top of that, this critic was a devoted nightclubber and boulevardier, renowned, well into his autumn years, for his ability to enchant comely young ladies with his Mitteleuropean charm and floor-clearing dance exhibitions. But only one American critic held the distinction of being both a master of the haiku-like form known as the movie blurb and a fleet-footed messenger for the very magazine for which he blurbed.
The annals of criticism are rife with titans who became household names in America’s smarter households-Pauline Kael, Dwight Macdonald, *V.F.’*s own James Wolcott.