Genius in Disguise Page 14
For a burlesque edition of the magazine to mark Ross’s birthday in 1926, Rea Irvin rendered the editor as Eustace Tilley. The insect under inspection is Alexander Woollcott.
Yet if Ross had learned anything in 1925, it was that nothing is more fickle than a magazine’s momentum. He was proud of his accomplishment, certainly, but far from satisfied with it. For all the talent he had brought together, The New Yorker still didn’t crackle. There were weak departments, the humor was uneven, and most important, the distinctive stylistic identity he sought for the magazine continued to elude him. The New Yorker might skate along as the charming parvenu for an indeterminate while, but he knew that long-term success depended on carrying the magazine to the next plateau, to the status of “must” reading in New York.
All of which meant that prosperity, rather than calming Ross, only made him more manic. For one thing, The New Yorker was quickly becoming the biggest editorial organization Ross had ever been responsible for, and he was having an immensely difficult time making the adjustment. He constantly wrestled with questions of how best to structure the staff and use his own time. What should he tend to himself, and what should he leave to others? He had yet to learn the manager’s essential trick of staying involved in the magazine’s routine without undermining his lieutenants or usurping their authority. The supervisor in him tried again and again to delegate and to establish personal priorities because he knew he must, but the entrepreneur in him was almost incapable of letting go. He found himself spending as much time reconciling a secretary’s vacation time as he did editing a Profile.
This situation, exacerbated by Ross’s perfectionist streak and the ever-evolving cast of characters, kept the editorial offices in a constant stir. The editor lurched backward and forward on assignments, stories, covers, cartoons—everything he touched. Robert M. Coates, whose dark fiction would become a New Yorker staple but who first came to the magazine in the late Twenties as a part-time Talk writer, likened the frenetic decision-making of Ross’s early years to “the chargings-about of a man in a canebrake, trying blindly to get through to the clearer ground he is certain must lie beyond.”
To the staff, Ross’s manic performance was exasperating—and worrying. Fillmore Hyde, the first writer of Notes and Comment (always referred to internally simply as Comment), was an old friend and colleague of Ross’s from San Francisco and Panama. About this time, the two had a falling-out over Hyde’s pay and his suspicions that Ross was souring on Comment; in fact, the editor was seriously thinking of discontinuing the department. When Hyde tried repeatedly to confront him about their differences, he was always steered to Ingersoll instead. Eventually Hyde spilled out his frustrations to Ingersoll, as well as his candid concerns about Ross. “I think the organization, instead of being gradually got in hand by Ross, is constantly confusing him more and more. It appears too big for him; he is on the verge of a nervous and abnormal condition,” said Hyde. “I have a great deal of sympathy for Ross, whom I regard as facing difficulties too great for him just at present. But he won’t let anybody help him. It’s his magazine.”
However erratic Ross’s demeanor behind the scenes, it must be said that in the magazine his touch only grew more sure. Perhaps the greatest dividend of The New Yorker’s improving fortunes was that now he could afford to be a good bit choosier about what he published and whom he hired. It was also becoming clearer to him what The New Yorker should, and shouldn’t, be. He was more than happy to arch some eyebrows, for instance, with a refreshingly saucy Profile of First Lady Grace Coolidge. Among other things, the piece politely chastised Mrs. Coolidge for her bland couture and asserted that “her own mother [had] objected to her marrying Calvin Coolidge. Mrs. Goodhue has been quoted as having said that she ‘never liked that man from the day Grace married him, and the fact he’s become President of the U.S. makes no difference.’ ”
The New Yorker’s artwork, meanwhile, was continuing to elevate the magazine above its competitors, as fresh artists seemed to turn up every few issues. In 1926 these included a prolific pair, Otto Soglow and Alan Dunn, and the following year, Dunn’s future wife, the brilliant Mary Petty. At the same time two naughty Peter Arno biddies, the Whoops Sisters, were creating a mild (if now somewhat inexplicable) sensation. More significant were Arno’s witty and graphically bold cover illustrations, which Ross particularly fancied. (One autumn cover featured a gardener, rake in hand, patiently waiting for the final leaf of the season to drop; the following April the same fellow was back on the cover, this time holding a watering can as he hovered over the first spring bud on the same tree.)
A Dorothy Parker casual, “Dialogue at Three in the Morning,” was a dark little piece and a faint precursor of the phenomenon that came to be labeled the “New Yorker short story.” The “dialogue” is really a drunken, self-pitying monologue by a woman in a speakeasy, whose companion (“the man with the ice-blue hair”) cannot get a word in edgewise. Parker was no stranger to late-night conversations in speakeasies, and it was said her protagonist’s boozy soliloquy was more recollection than invention. As for Parker’s Algonquin pals, Ross finally imposed a moratorium on all the Round Table fluffery, and likewise began to replace the newspaper gossip with stepped-up criticism of the New York press. Not only was he trying to raise the overall tone of the magazine, but he was consciously setting out to demarcate The New Yorker’s brand of journalism from the prosaic norm in the dailies. Manuscripts that struck him as too superficial or mundane he began to tag as “newspaper-conscious,” and before long the phrase became a virtual New Yorker epithet.
And Ross was continuing to make some astute hires: George F. T. Ryall, who began “The Race Track” column, which he would produce for fifty-two years under the pseudonym Audax Minor (an homage to British turf writer Arthur Fitzhardinge Berkeley Portman, whose pen name was Audax); John Mosher, a versatile writer and critic, but perhaps most influential as the longtime first reader of unsolicited manuscripts (“I must get back to the office and reject,” he liked to say after a leisurely lunch); and most significant, the redoubtable Rogers E. M. Whitaker, who would enhance The New Yorker in so many guises—as the first head of the magazine’s vaunted fact-checking department, as a brilliant and acerbic editor, as a football writer (“J.W.L.”), jazz and nightclub writer (“Popsie”), train buff nonpareil (“E. M. Frimbo”), and Talk’s “Old Curmudgeon.”
In his quest to find new talent, Ross had the good sense to look under his nose. In those days he had a firm rule: if The New Yorker purchased three pieces from any contributor, he invited the writer down for a get-acquainted session. Emily Hahn, a young geology teacher at Hunter College, sold the magazine three short casuals in its early years and was excited by the prospect of meeting the editor. Whatever she expected Ross to be, it wasn’t what she found. “He was very earthy, like an old shoe,” she recalled. “I was sitting on the edge of my chair. He said, ‘Young woman, you have a great talent. You can be cattier than anybody I’ve ever read, with the possible exception of Rebecca West. Well, keep it up.’ Then he turned down my next three pieces.”
Emily Hahn. (UPI/Bettmann)
Ross’s hands-on style, laudable in so many ways, invariably proved a sore point for his current Jesus—in this case Ingersoll. Ross said he wanted a man to whom he could, in confidence, turn over the entire magazine, because down deep that’s what he wanted to do: he always told himself, and Fleischmann, that he wanted to run The New Yorker until it was stable, then retire gracefully into the role of a consulting editor while he pursued new projects. To everyone else, however, it was plain that as long as he was on the premises, no one but Ross would ever really be in charge, and this reality made being his executive officer an ordeal. Over the first ten or so years of The New Yorker’s existence, Ross exhibited an almost pathological pattern: he built up impossibly high expectations in a Jesus, only to hasten along the poor bastard’s downfall when he saw, inevitably, that he was going to be disappointed. Failure became a self-fulfilling prophe
cy; Jesus tenures were brief and generally unhappy. One subsequent Jesus, a dour man named Bill Levick, perhaps summed it up best. Whenever James Thurber passed him in the hall and asked how things were going, Levick would invariably reply, “One day nearer the grave, Thurber.”
In 1926, it was Ingersoll who was making this mortal trudge. By that spring, the major editorial duties of The New Yorker were roughly divided between Ingersoll and the estimable Mrs. Angell, who before long was given the title of co–managing editor to reflect her status. For the most part she handled what was considered the more “literary” material—casuals, longer Profiles, and verse—and dealt directly with many of the artists. As the Jesus, Ingersoll was responsible for the reporting and other nonfiction, such as Talk of the Town and cultural criticism, as well as for the physical production of the magazine.
A passionate man in all things, Ingersoll devoted himself to Ross and The New Yorker. He was constantly at the editor’s side—even at meals, when, if the two weren’t talking about The New Yorker, they kicked around ideas for future publishing ventures. For Ingersoll, Ross became almost a surrogate father. Yet for his part, Ross always regarded Ingersoll with a nagging ambivalence. He respected the younger man and relied on him completely, but he never developed for him the genuine affection he later had for other important associates, such as Andy White or Wolcott Gibbs. Part of it was that Ingersoll, in one lanky frame, embodied two New York types that Ross always purported to suspect and disdain—fancy college men and society “sophisticates.” But part of it appears to have been nothing more than incompatible personal chemistry: Ingersoll simply drove him crazy. Whatever the reasons, he just couldn’t keep himself from deriding Ingersoll. He teased the sensitive young man about everything from his hypochondria to his thinning hairline. Once at the weekly Talk meeting, where the editors critiqued past departments and discussed upcoming ones, Ingersoll told Ross he had the information that the editor had wanted about Harry K. Thaw, the famous killer of architect Stanford White. Alas for Ingersoll, who had a slight lisp and the New Englander’s penchant for sounding Rs where Ws should go, “Thaw” always came out “Thor.” Hearing it again, Ross said, “I’ll have no mythological characters in this magazine.” And in a truly stunning double standard, Ross—the original “systems guy,” the man who hired a switchboard operator in a five-person office—professed disdain over Ingersoll’s parallel impulse. In the early Forties, when Gibbs profiled Ingersoll (by then the crusading founder of the newspaper PM and a globe-trotting war correspondent), Ross volunteered this recollection: “Ingersoll was a great man for system. If I gave him a thousand dollars a week just to sit in an empty room, before you know it he’d have six people helping him.”
However much they annoyed each other, Ross and Ingersoll more or less had a rapprochement until that June, when Ingersoll had the temerity to become engaged. Ross, who preferred his fealty complete, was apoplectic, though his ire is partly explained by the fact that he first learned the news from the papers. Nonetheless, Ross’s response, conscious or unconscious, was to tighten the screws on his callow managing editor: the teasing turned more cutting, the hard workload more burdensome yet. Ingersoll considered Ross’s response irrational, and his actions those of “a tyrant and sadist.” In Ross’s view, Ingersoll would later write, he had committed an act of treachery. “I had no right to take such a step without consulting him … I was crazy … I was going to ruin a life he thought might have promise. It was even worse than that. It was—goddammit, there wasn’t any other way of putting it—just plain disloyal!”
That July, in the midst of this intensifying war of nerves, Ross developed an impacted wisdom tooth—bad teeth, a legacy of his frontier upbringing, were a lifelong curse—that quickly degenerated into a serious infection. He wound up in the hospital for surgery and, with his recovery, was away from work for nearly a month. As it happened, Katharine Angell was then out of the country on vacation, so it fell to Ingersoll to pull three times his weight. To do so, he worked seven days a week, sixteen hours a day, and in the process exhausted himself.
Upon his return, Ross hastily pecked out a note commending Ingersoll for his yeoman work. He also apologized—sort of—for his boorish behavior. “If I have been cranky I am sorry and I haven’t intended to be. Please don’t think I am because I am not although I may indicate impatience, even exasperation at times and on the whole this is good for the business if nobody minds it because we are not making Ford automobiles. I admit that frequently I make unwarranted criticisms, etc. but it is the way I am and please don’t mind.”
The peace offering, such as it was, came too late. Ingersoll proceeded to have “a nervous breakdown the likes of which I never want to come near again,” he wrote. “Its first—and gentlest—symptom was a conviction that I had no legs below the knees, even though I could see and pinch them.” He hied himself to his father’s farm, where he chopped wood and entertained malicious thoughts about Harold Ross for a month. He seriously considered not coming back. In the end he did, but inevitably his role changed and he became something of a senior editor, handling special tasks and doing some writing. Years later Ross quietly helped Ingersoll get PM off the ground, and the latter’s respect for his old mentor was such that he dedicated his 1961 autobiography to him. But the two men would never again have the joined-at-the-hip relationship that built so much of The New Yorker. Ross had broken his second Jesus.
That November, Ingersoll went through with his marriage. The wedding was an elaborately formal affair, as was the reception at the Plaza Hotel. In the reception line, when a butler announced Ross to the bride and groom, he found the whole picture so funny that he began laughing uncontrollably—to the point where Ingersoll, his bride, and the entire wedding party were soon laughing with him.
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As 1926 drew to a close, The New Yorker was regularly pushing one hundred pages a week. The next year Ross’s little magazine actually would rival the vaunted Saturday Evening Post for total ad linage (though not, obviously, for revenues), and for the first time it broke into the black. But if 1927 was arguably the most important year in the long history of The New Yorker, the reason had to do less with the balance sheet than with a remarkable and serendipitous burst of recruiting. Within a matter of months, Ross managed to assemble a quartet of unlikely people who at last would be able to translate The New Yorker of his imagination to the printed page.
The first of these, Katharine Angell, was already on the premises. For all of Ross’s innate qualities—passion, audacity, humor, and a breathtaking capacity for hard work—he still lacked confidence in what constituted “sophisticated” work. In Mrs. Angell he found a helpmate who more than compensated for this shortcoming. As William Shawn would observe, “When he was unsure of himself, he was sure of her.”
As Ross went about the shaping of his magazine, Katharine Angell was his one truly indispensable editor. She had a hand in everything—because she wanted to be involved, and because Ross, having made her his de facto arbiter of taste and style, wanted her involved. Her discernment was so respected that even Fleischmann came to rely on her to adjudicate the acceptability of borderline advertisements. Katharine used to say that when Ross howled that he was “surrounded by women and children,” as he often did in those days, she looked around and was fairly certain she was the “women” he was inveighing against. But Ross knew he was lucky to have her.
Though her sensibilities were far different from Ross’s, Katharine prized humor as much as he did, and she was the single biggest reason The New Yorker moved so quickly beyond the Judge-Life school to something altogether different and refreshing. Her prodding took various forms, direct (such as editing and recruiting humor writers) and indirect (for instance, quietly prevailing on Ross to phase out baser stereotypical humor in the cartoons). She also encouraged new artistic talent, such as George Price. In 1931, after he had been contributing “spot” illustrations to the magazine for a few years, Mrs. Angell challenged him to tr
y his hand at cartoons. His first one appeared in 1932, and he stayed at it for six decades.
Whether he realized it or not, Ross—an only child who even as a man was never quite comfortable without his mother’s approbation—almost certainly was reassured by the many similarities between Mrs. Angell and Mrs. Ross. Born within forty miles of each other, both women were intelligent, no-nonsense, opinionated. Both could come across as imposing, even austere. And both possessed a strong sense of right and wrong where the written word was concerned—just the type of certitude to ease Ross’s perpetually uneasy mind. In the end, they would be the two most influential women in his life.
The relationship between Ross and Katharine was unique and complex, often remarked on by fellow staff members but never really understood. (Even Shawn, who knew them both so long and well, described their bond as “ambiguous.”) In a way, Ross and Katharine had a much more successful “marriage” than Ross ever did in the conventional sense. As with a venerable couple, their relationship transcended respect and affection; it was the kind of commitment that, over twenty-six years, endured every conceivable crisis—their respective physical and emotional traumas, relocations, even hair-pulling editorial disagreements. Later, after his own critical judgment had matured, Ross could be irritated with Katharine’s editorial limitations (as she could be with his, such as his perpetual suspicion of serious poetry). At times he even found her manner intimidating, as did some other New Yorker writers and editors. But Ross never stopped relying on her as a trusty compass. Such was his regard that while other editors typically came down to his office for discussions, Ross unfailingly went to Katharine’s.