Genius in Disguise Page 13

  With deadlines looming daily—magazines are produced and printed in sections that close throughout the week, rather than all at once—the work regimen amounted to a veritable treadmill. It seemed to Ingersoll that he was constantly meeting with Ross—during, after, and even before work; the editor was known to conduct meetings at 412 while still shaving. On a Saturday afternoon in August, Ingersoll found Ross and March in the office, “wan-faced with exhaustion, counseling each other not to work tomorrow.” As Ross’s top lieutenant, the sensitive March was the magazine’s first so-called Jesus, and therefore drum major in that ignominious procession that came to be known as the Jesus Parade. In the New Yorker lexicon, “Jesus” was a corruption of “genius,” but the term was less sacrilegious than apt because it characterized Ross’s constant search for that editorial messiah who was as good with a production schedule as he was with a blue pencil. But divinity being a rare commodity in publishing, he was forever let down, and he systematically ground the spirit out of one Jesus after another. March was only the first to buckle under the pressure, and one afternoon, according to Ingersoll, he “was actually removed from the office by little men in white coats.”

  As Talk grew more confident, so did Ingersoll, and in October a staff reorganization gave him more responsibility; his ascendance had become apparent. It had been Ingersoll’s intent to make Talk a “magazine within the magazine,” and he was the principal architect of the format that became such a success: a menu of alternating short essays and anecdotes, “visit” pieces, mini-profiles, and background news pieces. He extended Talk’s reach from Broadway to Wall Street to Park Avenue. “Done right,” Ingersoll said, “the whole would give the reader—unobtrusively—the feeling that he had been everywhere, knew everyone, was up on everything. And each week a different locale and subject pattern—so that over, say, a month or six weeks with Talk, a reader really did get around.”

  To secure this range of items, Ingersoll recruited a number of strategically placed people around town into a kind of information exchange. Ironically, one of his first and best sources was a young Walter Winchell, who in a few years would become New York’s biggest and most feared gossip columnist and a passionate enemy of Harold Ross.

  Ingersoll’s mind was at once logical, analytical, and obsessive (when in later years he covered college football games for The New Yorker, he scrupulously diagrammed each individual play in his notebook). His peccadilloes matched or exceeded Ross’s own and were guaranteed to set the editor’s teeth on edge. In meetings he would nervously chew on paper clips until Ross yelled at him to stop. Then he would start chewing on paper, neatly lining up the little wadded balls before him on the table.

  But Ingersoll was organized and, above all, got results. In November Ross made him his second Jesus, appointing him managing editor. In five months he had gone from new hire to senior staff member—though in fact the government’s postal regulations forced the question of his title because they required that the name of the managing editor appear in the magazine’s statement of ownership. Ross took great pleasure in reminding Ingersoll not to read too much into the gesture; next time, he said, he was thinking of naming his butler the managing editor.

  ——

  As The New Yorker poised for its fateful autumn push, Ross could truthfully say he had upheld his end of the bargain. The magazine’s tone had become more natural and self-assured. The basic format was in place, and so were many of the key people who could at last help Ross put it across.

  On the art front, the first of Helen Hokinson’s popular dowagers and clubwomen had begun to appear, as had the promising offerings of a former jazz-band piano player, Curtis Arnaux Peters, who called himself Peter Arno. (Inevitably, the dashing and roguish Arno soon took up with beautiful Lois Long, one of the first of many dreaded office liaisons to plague Ross. “There’ll be no sex, by God, in the office!” he was to insist in vain.)

  A defection, and one with violent consequences, was that of the resourceful Mankiewicz. It was Mankiewicz who had consoled Ross when his Round Table friends let him down (“The half-time help of wits is no better than the full-time help of half-wits,” he remarked), but despite his commodious talent he had proved an intimidating, unsettling presence in the tiny office. Even Ross was unnerved at times by his patronizing tone. That fall, needing money, Mankiewicz was also seduced by Hollywood. He fully expected it to be a temporary diversion, however, and was stunned when Ross sent him a telegram firing him. That February, when he returned to New York, Mankiewicz regaled his Algonquin friends with how he planned to take his revenge by caning Ross. Legend has it that when he came around looking for the editor, Ross hid in his closet, leaving Mankiewicz no option but to rap his cane on the editor’s desk and depart. Indisputable, however, is the fact that Mankiewicz eventually caught Ross in the office, and the two squared off in a vitriolic argument that Ingersoll and a few others overheard in shock and wonder. Mankiewicz left in a rage, still fired, but Ross was exhausted and bruised; Ingersoll said that the ugly confrontation was one reason Ross began to have underlings deliver his unpleasant tidings for him. Mankiewicz was replaced as theater critic by the novelist Charles Brackett.

  Helen Hokinson. (AP/Wide World)

  Peter Arno. (AP/Wide World)

  An early Hokinson cartoon shows that she was already in firm control of her unique and gentle humor.

  (By Helen Hokinson, ©1928, 1956 The New Yorker Magazine, Inc.)

  Meanwhile, Jane Grant had written to a friend living in Paris, Janet Flanner, practically pleading with her to begin contributing a regular “letter” to the magazine. Ross was looking for someone there who could pull together smart items about the arts, fashion, and other subjects of interest to worldly New Yorkers, but he had been disappointed by the superficiality of some early freelance submissions. Jane pitched hard. “Certainly you know your Paris, better than anyone I can think of,” she wrote, “and while I know it is difficult to make long distance arrangements, I feel sure you can get the idea if anybody can.”

  The Indiana-born Flanner had fled to New York after the war; there she became friends with Jane and Neysa McMein, joined the Lucy Stone League, and moved on the periphery of the Round Table. When she fell in love with another writer, Solita Solano, they moved to Paris in 1922 in order to live more openly. Flanner was a vigorous personal correspondent, and Jane felt that any of her newsy, idiosyncratic letters “would be just the thing” for The New Yorker.

  Flanner always said that Ross’s only directive to her was “I don’t want to know what you think about what goes on in Paris. I want to know what the French think.” She retained this as her charge for the next fifty years. In exchange, Ross was prepared to offer her forty dollars per submission, every other week (it was later cut to thirty-five). Flanner agreed to try. Ross cobbled together her first two efforts into a single column, which appeared on October 10, 1925. By now Ross was, logically enough, calling the department Paris Letter, and it was signed Genêt (sans circumflex; this oversight would not be corrected for two more years). Ross never explained to Flanner what Genêt was supposed to connote, but she assumed, almost certainly correctly, that “to his eyes and ears [it] seemed like a Frenchification of Janet.”

  While Jane wooed Flanner, Ross worked diligently on another important recruit. As he combed the newspapers for talent, he had taken note of a young reporter and rewrite man at The New York World, Morris Markey, who possessed a writing style more graceful, even literary, than that of the usual inky wretch. Markey had other job opportunities and was perfectly aware of The New Yorker’s wobbly gait. But Ross was at his persuasive best, and he uttered the words that every journalist longs to hear but seldom does: “Write exactly what you see, exactly the way you feel.” The young man was hooked.

  Markey was a rock for Ross in 1925, week after week pounding out sassy commentaries and reliable news features about New York—on the Chinatown tongs, on Tammany, on the futility of Prohibition enforcement—and gave the otherwis
e feather-light magazine some badly needed gravitas. In the longer run, he helped Ross establish the standards and expectations of New Yorker fact pieces and was the first in its long and distinguished line of resident journalists. In hiring Markey, Ross had urged him to disinter some of the fascinating stories that the dailies had buried, and to tell them fully and in detail—even to employ the fiction techniques of narrative and mood. Markey’s initial pieces that summer were news features, under the heading “In the News,” which more or less alternated with criticism of New York’s newspapers, in a department called “The Current Press,” the forerunner of Benchley’s (and later Liebling’s) “The Wayward Press.” Then that December Markey officially became The New Yorker’s first “Reporter at Large.”

  Ross made good his promise of editorial freedom, and Markey thrived on it. But the editor, still somewhat unsure of himself when staring at a piece of fiction or satire, was wholly comfortable with news reporting, and Markey therefore was one of the first New Yorker writers to get the full brunt of Ross’s confrontational challenges. When Ross edited a Markey story, he would grasp the manuscript firmly and cite its alleged shortcomings line by line. Both men would dig in their heels, and the haggling might go on for days. (In the parody issue the staff prepared for Ross’s birthday in 1926, Markey’s contribution was entitled “A Reporter in Chains.”) Like so many of Ross’s reporters, however, Markey was ultimately philosophical about, even grateful for, Ross’s sometimes maddening ministrations. “The only thing I had a talent for was looking at a thing and trying to tell people exactly what I saw,” Markey would say. “Ross knew that, and I suppose he was trying to sharpen it.”

  The fall push began with the September 12 issue, and its ad-filled forty pages are eloquent testimony to the effectiveness of Hanrahan’s promotional campaign. At the same time, The New Yorker stepped up an existing program of celebrity endorsers, which presently included Jimmy Walker, Irving Berlin, and George Gershwin. If business still wasn’t thriving, it was definitely improving, and for the first time in a year Ross, if he squinted, could detect light at the end of the tunnel.

  Then in November, the hard-luck New Yorker finally got a genuine break. Ellin Mackay, daughter of wealthy New York socialite Clarence Mackay and one of the city’s most celebrated debutantes, sent Ross a handwritten, leather-bound manuscript. What she had produced was a shrill attack on the hypocrisy and torpor of society’s private parties and balls, and a defense of the democratic nightclubs she and her friends frequented instead. Even as the author slapped her elders, her bred-in-the-bone elitism shone through: “We do not particularly like dancing shoulder to shoulder with gaudy and fat drummers. We do not like unattractive people,” she wrote. But wasn’t the cabaret hoi polloi infinitely preferable to the dreary stag lines at the white-tie functions, she asked, where “a young man who is well-read in the Social Register … prays that you won’t suspect that he lives far up on the West Side.”

  Ross disliked the writing but was otherwise mystified what to make of the manuscript. He sought Ingersoll’s opinion, deleting the author’s name so as not to bias his judgment. But even without knowing the writer, the socially savvy Ingersoll recognized the material’s explosive value. “It’s a must!” he told Ross.

  Ross had the piece rewritten, but when Ellin Mackay objected, he published it as submitted, under the title “Why We Go to Cabarets: A Post-Debutante Explains.” From the vantage point of seventy years later, “Cabarets” seems little more than a quaint, even puzzling, museum piece. But in its time it had roughly the same scandalous effect as would be produced today if, say, John Kennedy, Jr., wrote an op-ed piece in The New York Times trashing Cape Cod aristocracy, or a Hollywood starlet explained “Why We Smoke Crack.”

  Indeed, the Mackay article, published on November 28, at the height of the debutante season, provoked a sensation. This was largely because, through Jane’s public-relations cunning, the Times, World, and Tribune on the same day ran front-page advance stories on it. Editorials and rebuttals followed. For once, a copy of The New Yorker was hard to find on a newsstand.

  Two weeks later Mackay followed in the same vein with “The Declining Function: A Post-Debutante Rejoices.” But it would seem this time that her intended audience was her famous father. To his horror, Ellin had been seen around town with Irving Berlin, who to most was the millionaire toast of Broadway but to Clarence Mackay would always be Izzy Baline of the Lower East Side. Wrote the rebellious daughter, “Modern girls … marry whom they choose, satisfied to satisfy themselves.” Months later when she eloped with Berlin, the newspapers erupted again. Ross and Jane helped the newlyweds slip out of town until the tabloids could find something else to write about.

  Ingersoll and others later suggested that the Mackay stories were critical to The New Yorker’s success. This is crediting them too much, for it is clear the magazine was well on its way to stability by the time they appeared. Still, there is no question that the publicity was invaluable and helped fix the upstart magazine in the public’s consciousness.

  Another Ross masterstroke that fall was more calculated. In addition to Tables for Two, Lois Long kicked off a second popular service column, this one devoted to the subject of discerning shopping. Eventually known as “On and Off the Avenue,” the column was of particular value because it was honest. At the start, Long had asked Ross what she should say if certain merchandise was terrible. “Say it’s terrible,” he replied.

  This was at a time when it was commonplace for major retailers to expect, as a quid pro quo, favorable mentions in the magazines in which they advertised (cynics would say times haven’t changed much). Likewise, it was not unheard of for magazines to threaten reluctant advertisers with less than flattering publicity. Ross, whose own view of advertising was that it was at best a lamentable, unavoidable necessity, loathed this kind of blackmail. He was so concerned for The New Yorker’s integrity that on the first page of the first issue he took the remarkable step of putting his own advertising staff on notice. Addressing New York’s business community, he wrote: “If … someone should ask you to advertise in The New Yorker, and throw out the hint that your refusal might lead to some unwelcome publicity, you wouldn’t shock us much if you poured him into the nearest drain.”

  Lois Long. (©Harold Stein)

  Long, while mostly upbeat, was always honest (“Peck & Peck has broken a series of rather mediocre window displays with an exhibit of women’s sports things done in blacks, white, and greys—most effective”). Most of all, she was enthusiastic about the sport of shopping, treating it as intelligently as The New Yorker did the latest bestseller or the U.S. Open finals. In a short time the column became a popular fixture.

  By the end of the year, The New Yorker was over the hump and took more space in the same building in order to expand. Big advertisers like Saks and B. Altman’s were signing fifty-two-week contracts for 1926. The Christmas number was a fat, fifty-six-page issue chockablock with ads for French perfumes and luxury automobiles. The same issue featured a Ralph Barton Christmas card to New Yorker readers from “the old lady in Dubuque”—a busty, cigarette-smoking dame who in her tipsy excitement has just dropped a cocktail shaker.

  “The old lady in Dubuque,” as seen by Ralph Barton for The New Yorker’s 1925 Christmas issue. (By Ralph Barton, ©1925, 1953 The New Yorker Magazine, Inc.)

  Country boy Harold Ross was finally growing into The New Yorker. For forty-six weeks the names of the advisory editors had appeared on the opening editorial page in the magazine. With the issue of January 9, 1926, their names were gone.

  CHAPTER 6

  CAVALRY

  H. L. Mencken once felt compelled to offer a friendly piece of advice to William Saroyan. “I note what you say about your aspiration to edit a magazine,” said the man only a few years removed from guiding the groundbreaking American Mercury. “I am sending you by this mail a six-chambered revolver. Load it and fire every one into your head. You will thank me after you get to Hell and learn f
rom other editors how dreadful their job was on earth.”

  Given the chance, Ross would have concurred with his friend Mencken. His perspective is plain in one of The New Yorker’s few funny Newsbreaks of 1925. Said the news item, “A magazine written and edited by lunatics has been started in England.” The New Yorker’s heading: “A Big Step Forward.”

  Ross had come through the trauma of near-demise. Now he was confronting something altogether scarier: survival. Failure at least would have afforded him the respite of the dead; no more work, no more worry, no more pain, no more eight A.M. strategy sessions with Ingersoll over the washbasin. The specter of success, on the other hand, promised no such relief and gave rise to all sorts of pesky questions—like, What now?

  Through stubbornness and sheer force of will, Ross and Fleischmann had gotten The New Yorker up onto its thin, unsteady legs. The magazine at last had the public’s attention, and Ross had constructed a formula with earmarks of durability. The New Yorker’s first-anniversary number strung together advertisements from Bonwit-Teller, Pierce-Arrow, Helena Rubinstein, and other purveyors of premium goods like so many pearls. Advertisers were buying not only The New Yorker but also its presumed cachet, or that quality Ross simply called “snob appeal.” Thus an ad for one of the day’s ubiquitous self-improvement courses could proclaim with a straight face, “You are judged by the French you speak.” (It’s a mark of Ross’s sense of mischief and editorial temerity that only a year later he had E. B. White parodying this very type of ad.) Circulation bounded higher by the week, to fifty thousand by the end of 1926. Business, in fact, was too good, since The New Yorker’s paltry charter ad rates—$150 a page—were guaranteed through the second year. No matter: by that spring the magazine was widely regarded as a rousing commercial success.