Genius in Disguise Read online

  ——

  Considered in a more mercenary light, the disintegration of Ross’s marriage in the late Twenties was just another facet of his brutal on-the-job training. In managing creative people, who can be overly sensitive, given to self-doubt, and capable of leading messy personal lives, hand-holding is as critical an editorial skill as blue pencil editing. If Ross’s grasp of interpersonal relations was still infirm, soon enough he became something of an expert. He had to; about this time his office was turning into a precursor of Peyton Place.

  Not that it showed in the magazine, which in 1928 and 1929 cruised blithely on. Mrs. Angell embraced the work of a prolific and desperately ambitious newcomer named John O’Hara, whose naturalistic stories would pave the way for so many New Yorker writers to follow. In Paris, Janet Flanner was gradually moving beyond fashion and the arts to a meatier correspondence. Morris Markey’s Reporter at Large subjects too were steadily more wide-ranging (“Markey’s gotten to the point where he thinks everything that happens to him is interesting,” Ross grumbled). The magazine was printing the initial pieces of a dazzling new breed of reporter, Alva Johnston—at the Times he had garnered one of that paper’s first Pulitzer Prizes—whose Profiles would set the New Yorker standard. And Thurber and White were rapidly becoming reader favorites.

  Also in 1929, Ross overcame his own editorial ambivalence toward his friend Woollcott—according to Samuel Hopkins Adams, Ross once said that no other living writer had so successfully mined so thin a vein of ore as Aleck—and gave him a regular column, “Shouts and Murmurs.” The column was unalloyed Woollcott; in it he used some pretext to recycle old stories or wax extravagant about the latest great thing to confront “these old eyes.” Nonetheless, it was a savvy play on Ross’s part, coming just as Woollcott’s personal popularity was about to explode on the radio. Shouts and Murmurs had the distinction of being the only New Yorker feature ever written to a preset length—one page. The job of enforcing this, as well as excising the blue stories Woollcott tried to slip in, fell to Mrs. Angell. Ross was willing to run Shouts only on the condition that she take complete responsibility for it. This Mrs. Angell didn’t mind because she got on well enough with Woollcott, despite his best attempts to rattle her—such as the time she came by his apartment to go over a column and he answered the door naked. Unfazed, she said, “Go back and put your clothes on, Mr. Woollcott.”

  By now Ross’s formula was beginning to look like genius. In reality, it was rather simple; as Ross’s first biographer, Dale Kramer, pointed out, there were only four key elements: New Yorker stories were factually correct, clear, casual in tone, and “mildly ironical but paternal” in attitude toward New York. (He might have added a fifth: they were usually humorous, too.) Perhaps Ross’s real genius had been in getting the copy to match the concept, and now it was paying off. At the end of 1928, The New Yorker announced its first profitable year (income of $287,000 on revenues of $1.77 million). Circulation sailed past seventy thousand, well beyond the fifty thousand Ross had always said would be the optimal size. A grateful board of directors gave Ross a ten-thousand-dollar bonus for conceiving and successfully executing the magazine.

  Yet all the while, Ross’s staff was having a collective nervous breakdown. His own marriage was failing. So was Thurber’s. So was that of The New Yorker’s glamour couple, Peter Arno and Lois Long, whose breakup was especially ugly. Two tempestuous people who liked their alcohol, Arno and Long had high-profile rows that sometimes turned violent. Marcia Davenport, who often wrote Long’s departments when she was away, recalls, “Occasionally she would come into the office with a bruise or black eye and reply if sympathetically asked what had happened, ‘Oh, I ran into a door in the dark,’ or ‘I was in a taxi accident.’ ” On one dreadful occasion that was splashed all over the tabloids, Arno sustained a gashed cheek that police said Long administered with a well-aimed glass powder case. Arno moved out, and they were divorced shortly thereafter.

  More tragic was the death of Gibbs’s first wife, Elizabeth, in late March of 1930. Elizabeth Gibbs, twenty-two, who had married Gibbs just eight months earlier, was a promotion writer for The New Yorker, good at her job and popular with coworkers. Gibbs told investigators that his wife had been obsessed with a play the two of them had seen a few days before, Death Takes a Holiday, a mystical fairy-tale drama that culminates when the lovestruck heroine walks away with Death, who has been masquerading as a prince. Gibbs and his wife were in their apartment discussing the play after lunch that day when, after he momentarily excused himself, Elizabeth calmly walked into the bedroom and threw herself from a window. Some have speculated that Elizabeth was a frustrated writer and that the jittery, ever-insecure Gibbs had suppressed her ambition; Ingersoll said the two had argued about this the night before. In any event, the devastated Gibbs called Mrs. Angell, who rushed over and found him moaning repeatedly, “I never should have left the room.” She rescued him from the clutches of the suspicious police, persuading them that if they didn’t let Gibbs go “he would be the next suicide.”

  Throughout this whole period, however, the drama that genuinely captivated the staff—it was, after all, unfolding literally in front of them—was the burgeoning romance between Katharine Angell and Andy White.

  Katharine Sergeant and Ernest Angell were wed in 1915, but by the time she came to The New Yorker she had been miserable in her marriage for several years. Ernest, a brilliant lawyer who would become a leading figure in the American Civil Liberties Union, had returned from service in World War I France with a decidedly “modern” view of philandering, and his trysting grew more flagrant and intolerable for Katharine, who also had two children and her own aspirations to look after.

  E. B. White, seven years younger than Mrs. Angell, had always liked and respected her, but sometime in late 1927, it appears, his admiration turned into serious flirtation. In January the magazine published a White love poem, “Notes from a Desk Calendar,” wherein one office worker contemplates his infatuation with another. Katharine must have approved the poem and certainly took its meaning. At this point, though, White couldn’t have been too ardent, for soon he had a new pursuit, one of the magazine’s young secretaries.

  By the next spring, however, Andy had refocused his affections on Katharine, sending her billets-doux via his New Yorker verse and F.P.A.’s “Conning Tower.” Then in June the three members of this triangle played out a scene worthy of Hollywood—they all set sail for France. Not together, of course: Ernest and Katharine presumably were going to repair their marriage, though Ernest also intended to look up an old flame from the war; White, on a different liner, was going for a surreptitious rendezvous with Katharine. Indeed, they met in Paris, where he took her canoeing on the Seine, and then moved on to the romantic venues of St.-Tropez and the island of Corsica. Their Mediterranean idyll was as wonderful as it sounds.

  But idylls end, and back in the States, returned to reality, Katharine and Andy began thinking better of the affair. She was riddled by guilt, while he wrestled with his fear of commitment. Realizing matters were apt to come to a bad end, they agreed to stop seeing each other outside the office. They were desperately trying to do the right thing—and they were miserable. Soon their colleagues were again taking note of their ardent glances in the hall, or a poignant, clandestine moment on the fire escape at dusk.

  In February of 1929, Katharine and Ernest had a bad quarrel, during which he slapped her to the floor. She walked out, having come to the conclusion that divorce, ghastly as it was, afforded the only way out. She made the necessary arrangements, and on May 11 White and Ross put her on a train bound for Reno. There she would spend the next three months establishing Nevada residency in order to obtain a divorce.

  Katharine was despondent, alone, racked by guilt. Ernest’s family, as well as her own sisters, wrote her urging her to forgo divorce. She didn’t know what she would do when she got back; she didn’t even know if she wanted to come back. In her feverish mind The New Yorker was n
ow “poison”; she persuaded herself that the magazine had been “an escape from the life I didn’t like.”

  White was in no better shape. He had not promised Katharine marriage, and in truth he still didn’t know what he wanted. Indeed, much apprehension and many misunderstandings passed between them as they corresponded during this anxious hiatus. Perhaps transferring his anxiety, White too became disenchanted with The New Yorker, or at least the many demands Ross had come to put on him. Feeling pressed and alone, he bailed out that summer for a favorite retreat in the Canadian woods. In July, in a letter to Ross, he wrote to say things would have to be different when he came back:

  On account of the fact that The New Yorker has a tendency to make me morose and surly, the farther I stay away the better. I appreciate very much your extraordinary capacity to endure, and in fact cope with, my somewhat vengeful attitude about The New Yorker and my crafty habit of slipping away for long intervals.… Next to yourself and maybe one or two others, I probably have as tender a feeling for your magazine as anybody. For me it isn’t a complete life, though.

  Ross was bending over backward to accommodate these two distraught people, who by now were not just valued colleagues but good friends. Other editors and writers scrambled to fill their intimidating voids; as White suggested, coping was something Ross was always able, albeit loath, to do. But especially in view of his own domestic nightmare and exhaustion (that July he made the first of several trips to recharge at the Austin Riggs sanatorium in Stock-bridge, Massachusetts—“when I went to the bughouse,” he liked to say), not to mention the staff’s other emotional crises, he can be forgiven for feeling like a man drowning in a sea of melodrama. “I have an anguished letter from Ross that sounds as though he could only hang on three days longer,” Andy wrote, rather too lightheartedly, to Katharine. “He takes things too hard.”

  That August, finally, the newly free Katharine returned to start reassembling her life. The following month, White returned from Canada. On November 13, a Wednesday, they drove quietly to a little town fifty miles north of New York City and were married in a Presbyterian church. They told no one, not even Ross, and were back at work the next day. That Friday the world learned of the marriage in Walter Winchell’s gossip column. In time, all was right again with the world and The New Yorker.

  As if to prove it, the Whites’ marriage coincided with the publication of a book cowritten by Andy and Thurber, entitled Is Sex Necessary? Or Why You Feel the Way You Do. It was a parody of the many clinical books on sex that had recently appeared on the market, and it was a big hit. The most astonishing aspect of the book was the illustrations by Thurber. Suddenly he was being hailed as an artist for drawings just like the curious, amorphous, tossed-off doodles that littered his office and turned up on the bathroom walls. Not for the first or last time, Ross was flabbergasted.

  Is Sex Necessary? appeared nine days after the stock market crash, the first shudder of the Great Depression. By coincidence, that October The New Yorker had announced that henceforth it would be publishing two editions: one for New York City (as a vehicle for those advertisers who wanted to reach only that audience), and one for national distribution. It seemed that despite Ross’s best intentions the old lady in Dubuque was devouring the magazine.

  On the face of it, the timing could scarcely have been worse, but in fact the announcement merely presaged one of the remarkable paradoxes of the Thirties: while the Depression ravaged so much, including many of Ross’s competitors, The New Yorker would flourish.

  CHAPTER 7

  A CESSPOOL OF LOYALTIES

  After his divorce, Ross moved into an apartment on east Fifty-seventh Street that he shared with a burly, genial man named Edward McNamara. Once upon a time (for his was a fairy-tale career) McNamara had been on the police department in Paterson, N.J. But he possessed a fine, robust baritone, and billed as “the Singing Cop” he eventually managed to sing his way off the force and into vaudeville, then the legitimate stage and movies. He became a great favorite of the Round Table, where Ross got to know him, and of show-business types in general. His famous friends ranged from Enrico Caruso, who gave him occasional pointers on voice, to James Cagney, who in turn became chummy with Ross.

  All his working life, Ross found it useful to compartmentalize his various selves: editor, husband, father, reluctant celebrity. As a rule he did not bring his personal problems to work, and conversely when he was away from the magazine he welcomed the chance to talk about matters other than The New Yorker. He had some intimates at work—Hawley Truax, for instance, was a lifelong companion and confidant—but his true cronies, the people he fished with, drank with, or just palled around with, tended not to be from the magazine, or journalists at all. They were people like McNamara (who, fortunately for Ross, was also a good cook), photographer Alfred Pach, vaudeville comedy partners Joe Cook and Dave Chasen, and, later, New York mayor William O’Dwyer. A particularly good friend was a private detective, Ray Schindler, with whom Ross engaged in innumerable practical jokes—such as the time Ross stole from a bookstore a little metal placard that read “This property is under the protection of the Schindler Detective Agency” and mounted it conspicuously in his own office. When Schindler saw it, he reciprocated by taking a bathmat from the New Yorker Hotel and putting it in his own bathroom. When Ross, in his turn, noticed this, he got some stationery from the hotel and wrote Schindler a letter from the “House Detective,” demanding the mat’s return. For Ross, a man with no real hobbies or avocations, such byplay served as a kind of safety valve for the pressures of his work and gave him as much simple pleasure as almost anything in his life.

  Ross was, in fact, always most comfortable around other men, whether hatching pranks or just talking shop over a late-night Scotch. He loved women, respected them, admired them, enjoyed their company, but, as he said himself many times, he never understood them. He found them mystifying, inherently and sometimes purposefully so, and he would prove to have a very hard time living with them. Perhaps it was inevitable: as a child he grew up in the rough environment of hard-rock mining; he came of age in the exclusively male world of tramp reporting; then he joined the army and went to war. He didn’t even have a sister to mitigate his masculine take on the world. “Harold, of all the men I’ve known, was most essentially a man’s man,” says Clifton Fadiman, who was The New Yorker’s book reviewer from the early Thirties to the early Forties. “I think he was happiest in a bar, with other men. He of course liked women and married three of them, but I don’t think he ever really understood them. Marriage was probably not his natural state. His natural state was talking with guys at a bar or at dinner. He was very male—very male.”

  Each of those three marriages came to a bad end, and it may be more than coincidental that all three wives remarried happily the next time around. As utterly charming as Ross could be with a date or even a casual female acquaintance at a cocktail party, he could be that hard on a spouse. If this seems odd, it was nonetheless consistent with Ross’s erratic, almost schizophrenic behavior where women were concerned—one of the most pronounced dichotomies in a life and personality fairly brimming with them.

  This particular contradiction can be explained a little more readily than some of the others. At heart a nineteenth-century man, Ross had predictably Victorian attitudes about sexuality, virtue, and women’s roles. Yet at a still-impressionable age he tumbled into Jazz Age New York, a time and a place where those traditional attitudes and roles were being pitched out like so much bad bathtub gin. The man who emerged could appreciate the modern woman, all right, but more so intellectually than emotionally. Thus the challenge of an independent, spirited woman might bring out the best in Ross the paramour but the worst in Ross the husband. Likewise, he could profit enormously from the recent arrival of clever and ambitious women in the workplace (he simply could not have pulled off The New Yorker as we know it without the likes of Jane Grant, Katharine Angell, Lois Long, Dorothy Parker, Janet Flanner, and Helen Hokinson
); yet it would be many years before he was wholly comfortable with the idea of women reporters—or even women secretaries, for that matter. Women belonged on a pedestal, he believed—to be venerated, yes, but also to be kept an eye on.

  Even so, and as hard as it was for many of his male friends to conceive, Ross was immensely attractive to many women. Some found a certain handsomeness in the rugged, rubbery face and its odd commingling of features. For most, though, his appeal was wrapped up in intangibles. Harold Ross was strong, impish, intelligent, unorthodox in appearance, a great talker, and, it should not be forgotten, a man of no small influence—a rare convergence of qualities that add up to a powerful personal magnetism. Many who knew him well attest that Ross was that singular person one noticed the moment he walked into a crowded room, a characteristic all the more impressive for his utter lack of pretense. Albert Hubbell, a longtime New Yorker artist and writer, says it was the same kind of charismatic force that he had seen in James Joyce, whom Hubbell knew when he lived in Paris as a young man.

  (Ross was not unaware of his attractive qualities, even if they didn’t always carry the day. Once, on a fishing trip with some friends and a grizzled fishing guide, he was holding forth on why different trout are to be found in the East than in the West; it all had something to do with the Continental Divide, Ross maintained. “Just as he gained cruising altitude in this discourse,” recalled Nunnally Johnson, who was present, “the guide looked at him with contempt and said, ‘Bullshit.’ I never saw a man so taken aback. ‘But goddammit,’ Ross kept saying later, ‘I’m recognized by everybody as one of the finest conversationalists since Oscar Wilde. So how the hell does this son of a bitch get off saying “Bullshit” to me!’ ” Added Johnson, “I have no explanation for this.”)