Genius in Disguise Read online

  This Profile, written by John K. Winkler, was generally favorable but not altogether flattering, and was notable chiefly for its extraordinary detail (all it seems to have overlooked was Marion Davies) and the length it went to put the extravagant publisher into contemporary context. Here is Winkler on Hearst’s role in promulgating the Spanish-American War:

  The little shindig with Spain that followed the destruction of the Maine would have been pure opéra bouffe except for its accompaniment of political and bully beef scandal. Although today he might not be so eager to claim the credit, the Spanish-American conflict was W. R. Hearst’s war. He spent half a million dollars on cables and correspondents and spectacular stunts. He fed raw meat to his hirelings and roused even the dignified, deliberate Richard Harding Davis to extraordinary efforts.

  These were heady days around The New Yorker. Most of the magazine’s staffers were young, single, inexperienced, woefully underpaid—and thrilled to be in the service of a publication that Ross once said was not a magazine but a movement. Marcia Davenport, who would go on to win acclaim as Mozart’s biographer and chronicler of the Communist overthrow of Czechoslovakia, was typical; her first professional job, in 1927, was as a Talk reporter. She prowled the city at all hours to dig up the information that Thurber and White turned into Talk stories. In her memoirs, Davenport recalled becoming swept up in the excitement and commotion. “We thought nothing of working from early morning until nine or ten at night, with a sandwich for lunch at our desks. Then after a dinner break the proofs would start coming in. They had to be corrected and rewritten in whole or in part after Ross got his hooks into them, so it was the rule rather than the exception to work from eleven or twelve at night until dawn. Three or four hours’ sleep and we were at it again.”

  Of course, when they did get a little spare time, these red-blooded youngsters tended to drift into the city’s speakeasies and other dark nooks and crannies. Keeping track of his feckless children brought out the worrier in Ross. Certainly on principle he didn’t mind their carousing; he had simply learned that too much of it often kept them away from their typewriters, and this was not good for the magazine. S. N. Behrman recalled an evening at “21” with Ross and a party prone New Yorker writer who had managed to stay on the wagon for more than a week. Another friend came up to their table and persistently pressed them all to join him in a glass. The abstinent writer begged off repeatedly, but it was clear that his resolve was flagging. Exasperated, Ross finally growled, “When one of my writers, no matter how insincerely, refuses a drink, don’t you go urging it on him!”

  It was at about this time that Ross’s Mother Hen tendencies reached a ridiculous extreme. He decided that the most efficient way to monitor his staff’s off-hours activity was for The New Yorker to establish its own speakeasy. He appropriated the basement of another Fleischmann building just down the street, furnished it with a bartender-bootlegger and battered secondhand tables and chairs, and then advertised it to his writers and editors as a counterpart to Punch’s famed literary salon. The noble experiment ended abruptly the morning Ingersoll, the nominal proprietor, came in and found two contributors passed out behind a sofa in clothesless embrace.

  If Ross wasn’t busy parenting, he was prodding. This was especially true in the case of two Round Tablers who were just joining the staff to produce some of The New Yorker’s most popular early departments. In 1927 Robert Benchley, a voracious reader of newspapers, began his irreverent Wayward Press column, under the pseudonym Guy Fawkes, and then two years later took over the magazine’s theater criticism from Charles Brackett. Also in 1927, Dorothy Parker began regular book reviews for Ross under the name Constant Reader. She tended to overlook the serious literature of the day, preferring to squelch more popular titles. Her tart opinions were meant more as entertainment than as criticism, however, and her column, like Benchley’s, was immensely well-received at a time when The New Yorker was still searching for an audience. In fact, a decade later, Ross went so far as to say that Parker’s “Constant Reader, in the early days, did more than anything to put the magazine on its feet, or its ear, or wherever it is today.”

  This was quite a concession, considering the lengths Parker went to goad Ross—she called him Junior, for instance—and how difficult her chronic procrastination made his life. He emerged from his office one day with a big grin, reporting that he had just telephoned Parker to inquire about the whereabouts of her overdue column. “Aw, Harold,” she replied, “I’ve been too fucking busy. Or vice versa, if you prefer.” But then, she had learned at the feet of the master deadline-pusher himself, Benchley, who once reported to his editor that his theater column would be late because he was in Philadelphia and there didn’t seem to be any typewriters there. Like all ex-reporters, Ross had a grudging respect for creative foot-dragging, and he happily tolerated such shenanigans from his stars.

  On a deeper level, however, the overall grind was beginning to wear on Ross. It had been three years (if one includes the start-up) of relentless pressure, and increasingly he wondered if all the aggravation was worth it. His marriage was strained, his stomach was worsening, he was tired all the time, and he could see himself becoming a nervous wreck. Besides, he had always maintained that he never intended to make The New Yorker a permanent career. Indeed, he continued to nurse along the idea of starting up his own true-crime magazine; it would be a stylish, well-written variation on the familiar pulp model, and he was thinking of calling it Guilty.

  Ross wasn’t dwelling on his problems simply out of morose habit. An unforeseen development had suddenly forced the issue: a syndicate had approached Fleischmann in the latter part of 1927 with an offer to buy The New Yorker for three million dollars. Still nagged by the guilt of dragging Fleischmann so deeply into the hole, Ross assured his partner he would not stand in the way of a sale, and even urged him to accept the offer. If Fleischmann sold out for a nice profit, he figured, his own obligation would be erased once and for all. Conversely, if Fleischmann passed up the money, any future indebtedness would belong to his own conscience, not Ross’s.

  As it turned out, Ross’s departure was the last thing Fleischmann wanted. Now that The New Yorker was finally profitable, he preferred to hang on to it, but only if Ross committed to stay. No fool, Fleischmann understood that for all its success the two-year-old magazine likely couldn’t survive the loss of its eccentric creator. As Jane Grant explained in a letter to Ross’s mother, “Fleischmann frankly said that he would not for a moment entertain a thought of selling if Ross would only agree to stay with it. And that he has refused to do.” Ross’s waffling, whether out of coyness or genuine indecision (or most likely both), maddened Fleischmann. He “begged” Jane to try to persuade Ross to sign a new contract—with disastrous consequences for her. Ross already felt under attack, and now it appeared that the gang included his own wife. “That was one of the factors that made Ross think we were all trying to double-cross him and say that he wanted nothing to do with any of us,” Jane wrote. “He really fancies that he is being tricked.”

  Fleischmann was panicked by the prospect that Ross would walk away, and this may well have been the first time—there would be others—that he approached Katharine Angell about assuming the editorship should it be necessary. It wasn’t. In the end, as he always would when forced to choose between staying or leaving, Ross stayed and Fleischmann turned down the offer to sell The New Yorker, but the tense interlude was not without its ramifications, both professional and personal.

  ——

  The failure of a marriage is nearly always sad, and that of Ross and Jane seems especially so because there was no single promulgating trauma, no “other woman,” no real end to their affections. The dissolution played out like a slow-motion wreck that no one—neither Jane, nor Ross, nor their despairing friends—seemed able to stop. If there was a true third party in the breakup, it was The New Yorker, which was consuming Ross. “I’m married to this magazine,” he told Thurber once in a melancholy m
oment. “It’s all I think about.”

  By 1926, when Jane asked Woollcott to leave 412, a visible crack had developed in her marriage—she and Ross used the vacated space to establish separate bedrooms—and the vindictive Aleck proceeded to drive wedges into it. According to Jane, Woollcott went out of his way to invite Ross along to dinners, parties, and first nights, while pointedly leaving her out. Meanwhile, Ross was tiring of Jane’s increasingly shrill feminist cant, not to mention the incessant teasing from his friends. And the noisy household was making it impossible for him to work at home. He was known to lug his typewriter from room to room in search of a little peace.

  Jane concurred that the success of the magazine was paramount, but she resented that her husband was obsessed with it to the exclusion of all else. Who but Ross, for instance, would call a staff meeting at his house on Thanksgiving morning? Her resentment extended to the editors. As Ross told Marc Connelly, “Jane just doesn’t understand how I can dislike some of the people she likes, and I suppose I get on her nerves—no, goddammit, I know I do—with some of the people I want to bring home. She hates Mrs. Angell and Rea Irvin. Well, goddammit, I’ve got to be nice to them—they help me all the time in my work, and I ought to be able to bring them to dinner anytime, goddammit.”

  Desperate for some quiet space, Ross eventually took a hotel room near the magazine. This had been intended as nothing more than an adjunct office; increasingly, though, he was calling Jane to say he wouldn’t be home that night.

  Matters worsened dramatically over Christmas of 1927. After the 412 ménage threw its traditional holiday party, Ross essentially walked out on his wife. He and Charlie MacArthur spent several days in Atlantic City; when Ross returned he suggested to Jane a temporary separation. He urged that she take off three months to travel and rest up from a mysterous ailment that had nagged her, time he would use for some badly needed solitude at 412. Jane realized better than anyone how much stress Ross was under, and she had become accustomed to his stubbornness, grumbling, and alternating moods, one minute lashing out at her and the next apologizing, holding out the promise of better days just ahead. But his new proposal genuinely took her aback. She asked Connelly, their mutual friend, if he might ascertain what was really going on inside Ross’s head.

  In an angst-ridden three-hour conversation, Ross complained to Connelly about the usual things: the Lucy Stone business, his and Jane’s growing incompatibility, the pressure to make a commitment to Fleischmann. In reading between the lines, though, Connelly probably came closer to the true cause when, reporting back to Jane, he said:

  Of course, I don’t know how close these observations are to his main trouble. I am beginning to believe he is unconsciously passing off on you (because of convenience and tangibility) the strain he feels around the magazine. Ross really has no business trying to mold himself into a sedentary business man, which his job essentially demands he be. I think he’s just tired, but that he doesn’t dare admit it to himself because of the material responsibilities he faces here every day. Of course that doesn’t help your problem.

  Under the circumstances, Jane reluctantly acceded to Ross’s wish for a trial separation. She arranged for sick leave from the Times, and while she headed for Palm Beach, Ross moved back into 412. In late March, having been away less than a month, Jane quietly returned. Ross had not expected her back so soon. In a brief note, she informed him that she had taken a room of her own at the Barclay Hotel; he still would have his full three months to sort things through, she assured him.

  Caught off guard, Ross responded with a hastily written and heartbreaking letter—a primal, careening document that was part indictment, part recrimination, part apology. It was the anguished cry of a man who thought he wanted to leave his wife but was still trying to convince himself:

  We have different tastes, different interests, different instincts, different ideas. We are distinctly two entities, two personalities. We differ in almost everything. We are both terribly sot. Living with you on the basis that I have in the past is, I have concluded, impossible. You are a disturbing and upsetting person. From your standpoint I undoubtedly have most objectionable characteristics. I truly realize that I must be almost impossible. In the past I have yielded much to you, much, much more than I now am willing to yield. My brief period of freedom from you, while it has frequently left me at a loss, has convinced me that I am quite capable of arranging my own life on a much more satisfactory basis than it has been on in the past seven years.

  Ross went on to propose that they continue living apart indefinitely, but asked that he retain 412 in order to have a place to work and carry out “certain social obligations” that a magazine editor must undertake. He closed:

  The fact is that I feel hopeless about the whole thing.… My opinion is that [a definite separation] would be best. We are so far apart in most respects that compatibility is probably impossible. As for myself, I am a monstrous person incapable of intimate association.

  In a postscript Ross urged Jane to reply by note rather than in person because this would “bring in the emotional element, which is the last thing that ought to be brought in.” Clearly he was not so confident in his decision that he believed he could withstand seeing her. Jane sensed his wavering, of course, but she also knew that soon sheer stubborn pride would be governing his actions, and that reason was useless. In desperation, she appealed to Ross’s mother, something she had promised Ross she wouldn’t do. (He had assured Jane he would tell Ida of their problems, but he hadn’t.)

  The news from Jane upset Ida Ross but didn’t terribly surprise her; she had detected something wrong, even at her long remove. In a tender reply to “my dear little girl,” Ida said she knew her son was under great strain. “I have worried ever since he has been on that mag. that there was a danger of a nervous breakdown, as I know how he works his brain on things he undertakes.” Then she promised to intervene and help in any way she might.

  Jane was greatly relieved by Ida’s offer, not to mention by her sympathy. “I did not know how you would feel toward me in this matter,” Jane confessed. “Mothers are so apt to think their sons are faultless.” She went on:

  I am sure now that if he did not write to you it was because he dreaded telling you. He does not feel right about the whole affair, but in his behalf I want to say that he can’t seem to help what he is doing. At the moment he is so nervous that half the time he does not know what he is doing. I cannot tell you the agony I have suffered.…

  The whole thing is that he has done a superb job on something that is foreign to his nature and is at the moment unable to rise above it. He is a simple and direct person and a sophisticated and biting mag., such as The New Yorker is, is unnatural for him and the undertaking has almost got the better of him.…

  Together, I am sure we can accomplish something. I do not want to hang onto Rossie. If he is happier without me I can regulate my life, of course, but so far I have not been able to convince myself that we have come to the parting of the ways. Of course, this will leave such a hurt that I fear it will never be healed, but then time does wonderful things.

  One can see that as much as Jane was wishing for the best, she had begun bracing for the worst. And when Ida at last did talk to her son, she, like Connelly, came away with no cause for hope. “My heart ached for Harold,” she wrote. “He seemed so nervous, and his doctor told me that he was dreadfully overworked, and I think that New Yorker was too much strain on him and on you both.”

  So it was to be divorce. It was not generally Ross’s style to discuss his private affairs, but years later he did touch on this subject in a letter to Woollcott’s biographer, Samuel Hopkins Adams. He was remarking on the disparate 412 personalities, specifically on Aleck’s talent for rationalization, which he said was matched or exceeded by Jane’s. Then he engaged in a little rationalizing himself. “The reason I left Jane Grant, or whatever it was, was that I never had one damned meal at home at which the discussion wasn’t of women’s right
s and the ruthlessness of men in trampling women. You go through several years of that and you can’t take it anymore.”

  The particulars notwithstanding, once the matter had been decided it was all rather amicable (with the exception of some of the financial loose ends, which dogged Ross for years). “Never for a moment did Ross lack consideration,” Jane would say. This was fortunate, for in New York State at the time, obtaining a divorce was no simple matter. Serious grounds had to be alleged—in this case adultery—and ostensibly proved; in friendly partings this generally required some artful choreography all around. There is no indication that Ross was in truth unfaithful to Jane, though it would not have been surprising if he had been, especially toward the end. For instance, in the spring of 1928, when Hecht and MacArthur’s The Front Page was trying out in Atlantic City, Ross was among a number of their buddies who came down to frolic, according to Ben Hecht, while “a small harem … was kept out of sight.”

  The divorce decree was final in the summer of 1929. Ironically, Jane was in the hospital at the time; her illness had finally been diagnosed as operable cancer. When Ross found out, he reverted to gallant form: he called in several specialists to corroborate the diagnosis, sent for Jane’s sister from Joplin, lavished flowers and presents on the patient, and helped arrange her lengthy recuperation.

  Jane Grant would remarry happily, and as a special consultant to Fleischmann she proved instrumental in The New Yorker’s explosive growth after World War II. For all their problems, Ross never forgot that, in his own words, “there would be no New Yorker today if it were not for her.”