Genius in Disguise Read online

  Copyright © 1995 by Thomas Kunkel

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright

  Conventions. Published in the United States by Random

  House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada

  by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint both published and unpublished materials: The Estate of E. B. White: Excerpt from articles by E. B. White from May 28, 1927, September 9, 1939, February 17, 1945, and December 15, 1951, issues of The New Yorker. Reprinted by permission of the Estate of E. B. White. Jacqueline James Goodwin: Excerpt from “Dayton, Tennessee” by Marquis James from the July 11, 1925, issue of The New Yorker. Reprinted by permission. The New Yorker: Drawing of Eustace Tilley courtesy of The New Yorker magazine. All rights reserved. Memo (February 9, 1944). Copyright © 1944 by The New Yorker Magazine. Excerpt from book review of Ross and The New Yorker. Copyright © 1951 by The New Yorker Magazine. Excerpt from letter from Harold Ross to E. B. White (April 1943), excerpt from letter from Harold Ross to Charles Morton (April 3, 1950), memo (June 25, 1951), excerpt from letter from Harold Ross to H. L. Mencken, memo from James Kevin McGuinness to Harold Ross (undated), memo from Fillmore Hyde to Ralph Ingersoll (1926), memo to Ralph Ingersoll (1926), memos from Harold Ross (May 1931), memo from Harold Ross to Eugene Spaulding (March 12, 1930), excerpt from letter from Harold Ross to Lloyd Paul Stryker (July 25, 1944), excerpt from letter from Harold Ross to Arthur Kober (December 9, 1946), excerpt from letter from Harold Ross to Joseph Mitchell (February 13, 1945), excerpt from letter from Harold Ross to Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings (November 30, 1945), excerpt from letter from Harold Ross to Emily Hahn, excerpt from letter from Harold Ross to Rebecca West (January 7, 1948), excerpt from letter from Harold Ross to Samuel H. Adams (February 4, 1943), memo (September 6, 1940), excerpt from letter from Harold Ross to Henry Luce (November 23, 1936), excerpt from letter from Harold Ross to Katharine White (1939), excerpt from letter from Harold Ross to Frank Sullivan, excerpts from letters from Harold Ross to Gluyas Williams (August 7, 1934), excerpt from letter from Harold Ross to James Thurber (December 13, 1944), excerpt from letter from Harold Ross to E. B. White (June 24, 1941), excerpt from letter from Harold Ross to Alexander Woollcott (May 19, 1942), cable from William Shawn to John Hersey (March 22, 1946), excerpt from letter from Harold Ross to E. B. White (1946), excerpt from letters from Harold Ross to Lloyd Paul Stryker (July 4, 1945, and October 29, 1945), excerpt from letter from Harold Ross to Julius Baer (November 12, 1945), excerpt from letter from Harold Ross to Rebecca West (October 4, 1949), excerpt from letter from Harold Ross to Elmer Davis (September 13, 1949), excerpt from letter from Harold Ross to W. Averell Harriman (November 15, 1949), excerpt from letter from Harold Ross to Howard Brubacker (January 22, 1951), excerpt from letter from Harold Ross to E. B. White (October 1943), letter from Harold Ross to Rebecca West (June 20, 1951), excerpt from letter from Harold Ross to E. B. White (September 1951); Harold Ross’s query sheets. Copyright © 1955 by The New Yorker Magazine. All rights reserved. Reprinted courtesy of The New Yorker Magazine.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Kunkel, Thomas.

  Genius in disguise: Harold Ross of The New Yorker / Thomas Kunkel.

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-82941-2

  1. Ross, Harold Wallace, 1892–1951. 2. Journalists—United States—20th century—Biography. 3. The New Yorker (New York, N.Y.: 1925). I. Title.

  PN4874.R65K86 1995 070.92—dc20

  [B] 94-33647

  v3.1

  I was going to wire you, but I couldn’t think of anything to say that would sound tactful; I’m hypersensitive because I hear Harper’s said I wasn’t tactful, which is the grossest misstatement ever made about me. I am the God damnedest mass of tact known to the human race. That’s about all I am. Fortune said I never read a book and Harper’s says I’m tactless. American reporting is at a low ebb.

  —H. W. Ross to E. B. White

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Epigraph

  Prologue: A Hell of an Hour

  I / CHILD OF THE WEST: 1892–1924

  1. The Petted Darling

  2. Tramp

  3. The Stars and Stripes

  4. New Yorker

  II / A MAGAZINE OF SOPHISTICATION: 1925–1938

  5. Labor Pains

  6. Cavalry

  7. A Cesspool of Loyalties

  8. Fleischmann

  9. Life on a Limb

  10. Skirmishes

  11. Words and Pictures

  III / SEASON IN THE SUN: 1939–1951

  12. War

  13. Squire

  14. Recluse About Town

  15. Back to the Algonquin

  Epilogue: The Angel of Repose

  Appendices

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments, and a Note on the Sources

  Notes

  Selected Bibliography

  About the Author

  PROLOGUE

  A HELL OF AN HOUR

  In early 1950, precisely at the midpoint of the american Century, New Yorkers were of a mind to build. They got that way from time to time, and after slogging through two world wars and a global depression, with vacant apartments nonexistent and business desperate for more space, they could be forgiven for being more concerned with their future than with their past. Still, even hardened New Yorkers were unsettled by the announcement, in January, that the landmark Ritz-Carlton Hotel would soon be pulled down to make way for another nondescript steel-and-glass box. The hotel, on Madison between Forty-sixth and Forty-seventh streets, was only forty years old, and while it was nothing special architecturally, in that short time it had attained a kind of venerability. Many considered the Ritz, with its storied debutante balls, lavish parties, and state receptions, the most glamorous venue in the city. “In no other country of the world, and indeed in few cities of this country, would it be conceivable that a block-long, eighteen-story building in excellent condition and housing a world-famous hotel would be torn down after a life of only forty years,” commented The New York Times, managing to sound a little proud and ashamed all at once.

  More openly sad about the whole business was The New Yorker. Ahead of the wrecker’s ball, staff writer Geoffrey Hellman produced not one but two “Talk of the Town” lamentations on the Ritz. Beyond their obvious bond of a shared clientele, the magazine and the hotel had more or less grown up together, custodians of a distinctive urban gentility now in eclipse, and here one of them was about to be knocked down. It was fitting, then, that the last major fete in the hotel’s grand ballroom, on March 18, 1950, was The New Yorker’s twenty-fifth anniversary gala.

  This being The New Yorker, the invitation said in nonchalant fashion, “Dress or not, as you like.” Given the poignance of the occasion, few took this seriously, and it was very much a night for black ties and beautiful gowns. Seven hundred people crowded into the ballroom, and by almost every account, whether contemporaneous or recollected four decades later, it was that rare magical evening, the kind of party where everyone drank but not too much, the music played without end, and the toast beneath the lobster Newburg was crisp even at two in the morning. With the apparent exception of the Pecksniffian Edmund Wilson (“Prominent persons whom I will not name were guilty of wholesale malignant rudeness”), a splendid time was had by all. Every staff writer, every artist, every contributor, every editor who had had anything to do with the magazine through the years, was invited. Conspicuous by her absence was The New Yorker’s first lady, Katharine White, who
bought a new gown for the party, only to come down with flu at the last moment. But her husband, E. B. White, was there. So were most of the other old hands, reaching all the way back to the magazine’s colicky infancy in 1925, and a few, it seems, from even before: John Cheever reported hearing Wolcott Gibbs say, “I danced with Harriet Beecher Stowe twice.”

  Harold W. Ross had spent the better part of his life avoiding such high-profile affairs as this. The editor of The New Yorker liked parties well enough, but he was so self-conscious about the spotlight that he categorically declined speaking engagements and once fled the funeral of his dear friend Heywood Broun for fear that he might be asked to say a few words. This night, though, he was unavoidably, and for the most part happily, the center of attention. Still wan from his own case of flu earlier in the week, Ross was tugged at, toasted, and passed around the room. He made a great fuss over his special guest and crony, Mayor William O’Dwyer, who was just months away from resigning, under gathering clouds of scandal, to become Truman’s ambassador to Mexico. Ross formed up along the grand staircase a rather tipsy greeting party of writers Joseph Mitchell, Philip Hamburger, and John McNulty, then popped in and out with frequent updates on O’Dwyer’s motorcade, as if it were ferrying not the mayor but the pope.

  Spirits ran so high that Ross was even persuaded, for the first time in years, to have a drink, which provoked his ulcer, but he didn’t mind. He was among friends, in a warmly familiar place. From time to time through the years the Ritz had been his home. He’d been here often for other functions, or just to have drinks in the bar. Then there was the memorable day in 1936 when he sat down to lunch in the basement grill with H. L. Mencken. Though it was their first meeting, the two men fell into such easy conversation that before long they were comparing their respective kinds of boobery. “I’m the boob who asks the waiter what is especially good on the menu,” said Mencken. Countered Ross, “I’m the boob who says ‘Fine’ when the barber holds the mirror so I can look at the back of my neck.”

  A rare snapshot of Ross in black tie.

  The night passed in surreal fashion, Ross wrote two days later to his friend Rebecca West, “like a movie film running at five times its normal speed.” The party was different from its predecessors, and not just in its scale or ostentation. For instance, The New Yorker’s tenth anniversary, in 1935, was basically a group of still-young people celebrating survival—the magazine’s survival, survival of the Depression, even personal survival. But the twenty-fifth was about accomplishment, about creating something of enduring importance. Those who had been present at the Creation were no longer young, and they were beginning to realize that their lives had been circumscribed by, and would be remembered in terms of, The New Yorker.

  Standing behind them—or more typically just off to the side, casting anxious glances from time to time—was Harold Wallace Ross, the unlettered immigrant’s son from Colorado who blew out of the West to create what was then, and many still consider to be, the most influential magazine in American history. Though in time The New Yorker came to fulfill all the rash promises Ross had advanced in the magazine’s famous 1924 prospectus, he could never have imagined what his little fifteen-cent “comic paper” would come to do, or how robust its legacy would be. Ross’s New Yorker changed the face of contemporary fiction, perfected a new form of literary journalism, established new standards for humor and comic art, swayed the cultural and social agendas, and became synonymous with sophistication. It replaced convention with innovation. And while Ross was never as interested in great names as in great writing, what indelible names paraded through his New Yorker. There were the storytellers: E. B. White, James Thurber, Dorothy Parker, Alexander Woollcott, John O’Hara, Ring Lardner, Clarence Day, Emily Hahn, Sally Benson, Arthur Kober, Leo Rosten, Kay Boyle, John Cheever, Irwin Shaw, J. D. Salinger, H. L. Mencken, S. N. Behrman, Frank Sullivan, S. J. Perelman, Ogden Nash, Shirley Jackson, Shirley Hazzard, Vladimir Nabokov, William Maxwell, Eudora Welty, Frank O’Connor, Jerome Weidman, Mary McCarthy, Jean Stafford, Niccolò Tucci. The reporters: Janet Flanner, John Hersey, A. J. Liebling, Joseph Mitchell, Rebecca West, St. Clair McKelway, Meyer Berger, Mollie Panter-Downes, Philip Hamburger, E. J. Kahn, Jr., Brendan Gill, Lillian Ross, Andy Logan, John Lardner, Berton Roueché, John Bainbridge, Richard Rovere. The critics: Robert Benchley, Wolcott Gibbs, Clifton Fadiman, Lewis Mumford, Edmund Wilson, Louise Bogan. The artists: Peter Arno, Helen Hokinson, William Steig, Saul Steinberg, John Held, Jr., Gluyas Williams, Gardner Rea, Otto Soglow, Miguel Covarrubias, Mary Petty, Charles Addams. The editors: Katharine S. White, Ralph Ingersoll, James M. Cain, Gustave S. Lobrano, Rea Irvin, James Geraghty, Rogers E. M. Whitaker, William Shawn.

  A more unlikely literary avatar than Harold Ross is hard to imagine, for he was a man of spectacular contradictions and wondrous complexities. The New Yorker aside, Ross’s personal reading ran to dictionaries (Fowler’s Modern English Usage, particularly) and true-detective magazines. He was a prototypical westerner whose magazine embodied eastern urbanity. He was a coarse, profane man with a near-perfect ear for language. He was equally capable of the rude or the gracious gesture, a charming weekend host who nonetheless could not—would not—abide fools (“We don’t run our magazine for dumbbells,” he was known to bark more than once). In the throes of concentration, Ross would absentmindedly cluck his tongue in the great yawning gap between his two front teeth. Looking upon these anomalies, some found it hard to believe that this peculiar man could be responsible for The New Yorker. But this was Ross at the margins. Anyone bothering to see beyond, to the core, found a keen native intellect, a searching curiosity, and a droll humor—qualities Ross imprinted onto his magazine. He conducted himself like what he was, a man with a very personal, even mystical, mission, that being The New Yorker. From Ross emanated a strength that creative people found reassuring and an artistic freedom they found intoxicating. In return, they advanced the mission with work of surpassing quality and taste. Richard Rovere, who began The New Yorker’s “Letter from Washington” in 1948 (in the beginning neither he nor Ross thought it an especially good idea), later would say that beyond his obvious contributions to journalism and letters, Ross was, at a more fundamental level, fighting to save the dignity of the printed word. Andy White, as was his wont, said it differently, and perfectly: “In retrospect I am beginning to think of him as an Atlas who lacked muscle tone but who God damn well decided he was going to hold up the world anyway.”

  Such was the wide affection and esteem for Ross that more than a few people at the Ritz gala actually had been fired by the editor in his early and most manic incarnation, in the years when it was a week-to-week proposition whether there would even be a New Yorker and Ross was grinding up editorial talent like so much pork butt. One of these was Charles Morton, who by 1950 was the respected editor of The Atlantic Monthly but who as a budding reporter in the early days of the Depression made an unsuccessful attempt to join the staff of The New Yorker. After the party Morton sent Ross a note of thanks. “The main satisfaction of it for me was the chance to see you at the end of a twenty-five-year hitch firmly possessed of every one of the objectives you set out to reach, still breaking new ground, never lowering the standard.… Your anniversary guests were a talented lot, no doubt, but every one of them is probably further in your debt than you could ever bring yourself to believe.” He added that Ross needn’t reply, but not replying went against Ross’s compulsive nature, and so shortly thereafter Morton got a letter in which, in a rare instance, Ross commented on the job he had done at The New Yorker.

  “I guess we’ve made most of our objectives; I should say two-thirds of them, which is probably pretty good, and in some instances we’ve exceeded them, as I appraise things now,” Ross said. “I hadn’t thought of it that way before, being, of course, gruellingly unsatisfied most of the time, which must be the case with anyone getting out a magazine and shooting high. Getting out this magazine has been a tour de force, of course, and a tour de force of twenty-fiv
e years is wearing.”

  Anyone who knew Ross was accustomed to his organic complaining—all his life this Atlas had, in fact, walked in the stooped fashion of a man carrying too much weight—but in this instance the weariness he professed was real. It was true that to all outward appearances, Ross, at fifty-seven, was at a pinnacle. Aside from his professional accomplishments, he had a beautiful wife and an adoring teenage daughter. If he was not as wealthy a man as many assumed, his holdings were substantial enough, including a sumptuous Park Avenue apartment and a country estate of more than one hundred acres in north Stamford, Connecticut. As editor of The New Yorker he made fifty thousand dollars a year, plus twenty-five thousand dollars for expenses. His collection of friends reached from the White House to Hollywood, from industrialists to retired railroad men in Nevada, the “one-armed poker companions” he loved so well. And of course he was on a last-name basis (Ross’s address of choice) with many of the best writers in the world.

  Yet within a year his life would be slipping away. In the spring of 1951, Ross, a heavy smoker for more than forty years, would be told he had cancer. He kept his condition from family and friends, but his absences from the office grew so frequent and long that colleagues knew something was amiss. (Thurber guessed the worst about Ross when his old friend confided that sardines were the only thing he could still taste.) Not long after, Ross left his third wife, Ariane. She would eventually sue him for divorce on grounds of abandonment, and press on him a series of lawsuits alleging that he had cheated her out of tens of thousands of dollars. He would wind up back in a suite, alone, at the Algonquin Hotel, where he read manuscripts, took infrequent meals, and saw a few intimate friends. By Christmas, he would be dead.

  Yet even in death there was indignity. In reminiscences, various colleagues caricatured Ross—some affectionately, some not, but all along the same general lines. This cartoon Ross was said to be aggressively ignorant, unfailingly rude, sexually naïve, and generally intolerant. His comic tendencies were exaggerated, his editing acumen trivialized, and his achievements laid to dumb luck and the skill of his bemused, solicitous associates. As with all caricatures, there were nuggets of truth underlying each of these assertions, but on the whole they were rubbish. Even so, this deleterious view of Ross took such firm hold that today, if he is remembered at all, it is as Ross the Wonder Editor, the literary equivalent of the precocious pony at the sideshow who taps out sums with his hoof.