Genius in Disguise Read online

  On a Coney Island excursion, Ross, center, is flanked by Constance Collier, Noel Coward, Marc Connelly and Jed Harris. (Courtesy of the Dramatists Guild Fund)

  Women who knew Ross mention other qualities when discussing him. For one thing, in their company he was courtly, unfailingly gracious, less noisy, and never profane. Unlike many men, when he talked with a woman (that is, a woman not his wife), he listened carefully and was genuinely interested in what she had to say. “He had a wonderful kind of embracing quality,” said longtime New Yorker theater critic Edith Oliver. “When he was talking to you, it was to you.” Others recall his naturalness and lack of guile. “He was bluff and funny and famous. He was very masculine,” said Daphne Hellman Shih, who socialized regularly with Ross when she was married to New Yorker writer Geoffrey Hellman. “You had the sense that he was absolutely sure of himself; whether he was or he wasn’t, you had that sense. But in a very comfortable way. He wasn’t arrogant.”

  Then there was that charm, which, when it suited, Ross could switch on like an incandescent lamp. Climbing into a taxi one evening with a date, he asked where she wanted to have dinner. “Oh, I don’t know. You choose some nice place,” she said. He asked several more times, and each time she demurred. Suddenly Ross hit on the solution; he instructed their driver, “Follow that taxi ahead of you.”

  But if there was charm, there was sometimes its flip side, gaucherie. More than a few stories were told of how Ross’s dating etiquette failed him, especially in his younger, wilder years, and especially when he was trying to make a pass. In such instances, he was known to employ an awkward grope, or a sudden and startling lunge d’amour, demonstrating all the suavity of an old Aspen prospector. A lady friend of Ingersoll’s said that once at dinner Ross even chased her around their table, until she collapsed into laughter at the absurdity of the situation.

  Indeed, in the magazine’s salad days, Ross’s various romantic misadventures made for reliable water-cooler fodder. Sally Benson, one of his favorite writers, described a particularly loopy evening when he escorted her to a party given by book publisher Bennett Cerf:

  Ross sent me a thing that was in the shape of a corsage, but it was two-and-a-half feet wide with ribbons dripping from it and forget-me-nots trailing from the ribbons. I couldn’t wear it, and it was heavy to carry. Every time I set it down, Ross would shout at me that I was supposed to wear it.

  There was a big heavy man, drunk, who kept asking everybody where Adam Gimbel was. And Ross pushed me forward and said, “Here’s Mrs. Adam Gimbel.” And the man threw me back on the couch—I was off center on account of the bouquet—and shook me. “Where’s Adam? Where is he? Where’s old Adam? Get him over here!”

  Then Ross crashed a party next door—a party of wholesalers. And he took me in to them and told them I was the greatest handkerchief designer in the world, and they offered me thirty thousand dollars a year, starting the next day, if I’d sign on with them. They wanted to know if I had any ideas … if I could just throw one at them … so they could see. I asked if anyone had ever thought of putting Mickey Mouse on a handkerchief and they lost interest in us.

  On a later occasion, when Ross was between his second and third marriages, St. Clair McKelway, then The New Yorker’s managing editor for Fact, dropped by his office to discuss an upcoming story by A. J. Liebling. McKelway couldn’t help noticing that Ross was fidgeting uncomfortably in his chair, and after a while he asked what was wrong. “They ought to have covers, wooden or metal covers of some kind, around the goddamn radiators,” Ross blurted. McKelway was confused by this. What radiators? he asked. Here? “Good God, no,” said Ross. “At the Ritz. I had this dame in bed and it got cold so I got up and walked over to the window to shut it. I had to lean over to shut the window and my you-know-what dangled down on this red-hot radiator. Feels like a second-degree burn, for Christ’s sake. Now this piece of Liebling’s here …”

  After his divorce, Ross wasted little time capitalizing on his freedom. Quite the bachelor, he became a fixture at Broadway openings, Park Avenue soirees, and glittery Saturday nights at the Mayfair Club. He was especially partial to actresses, not just for their beauty but for their glamour. No chorines for him; he squired leading ladies, such as Madge Kennedy, who was starring in his friend Noel Coward’s comedy Private Lives.

  The truth is, the Colorado miner’s son had always been stagestruck, and now he took full advantage of his proximity to the show business set. Ross could be counted on to dish the latest backstage gossip, and he moved comfortably in an ever-broader circle of celebrity friends: cocktails with good friend Beatrice Lillie, dinner at the Stork Club with Fred and Adele Astaire, the occasional game of softball (after croquet, surely his most taxing recreational pursuit) with Ed Sullivan, Billy Rose, and Harpo Marx. Weekends might be spent in Oyster Bay or the Hamptons. This was a side of their editor that his New Yorker associates seldom encountered. One sees it, however, in the child’s scrapbook that Ross’s daughter, Patricia, kept of her father. There, pasted onto black construction-paper pages beside the assorted letters, World War I memorabilia, and faded photographs of long-dead relatives, are snapshots of Ross and his marquee acquaintances—here having cake with Humphrey Bogart and the ravishing Priscilla Lane, there posing with Cagney (“From one pretty one to another. Jim,” the actor inscribed). There is a boyhood still of Clifton Webb (“Same to you”) and a note from Coward, dated February 1929, that begins playfully, “Yes, dear Ross. I always have been and always will be your Valentine.”

  Ross shares some cake with Humphrey Bogart, James Cagney and Paul Kelly, but judging from his inscription on the photo–“This is Priscilla Lane!!!”–it was the beautiful actress who made the biggest impression on him.

  (Courtesy of Patricia Ross Honcoop)

  In 1930 Ross moved out on his own, and up, to 277 Park Avenue. Ironically, several years later he would be sent packing for allegedly violating a lease provision against having “persons of the opposite sex” visiting overnight. But for now he was happy to be rubbing shoulders with his readership, and he spent five thousand dollars to have the apartment professionally decorated and furnished. At about this same time one of his favorite companions was a very young Ginger Rogers. That fall, at age nineteen, she landed the starring role in the Gershwins’ hit musical Girl Crazy. Ross already socialized with her mother, Lela, who had deftly steered her daughter’s career through vaudeville and a handful of small movie roles. Ross, now thirty-seven, came around more and more, and, as Ginger wrote in her memoirs, Lela soon realized that he “had a mighty big crush” on her daughter. Some of their mutual friends warned Lela that Ross’s intentions might be less than honorable, but she wasn’t worried. “Her instincts, as usual, were right,” Ginger said. “Harold always behaved properly. Whatever his inclinations really may have been, I had no romantic feelings about him whatsoever; he was my pal and I welcomed his company.”

  Cagney’s note reads, “From one pretty one to another.”

  (Courtesy of Patricia Ross Honcoop)

  Those inclinations almost certainly were romantic, at least at first, said Ginger’s cousin Phyllis Cerf Wagner, who was also close to Ross. When he saw that romance wasn’t in the cards, however, he and Ginger fell into a comfortable friendship. They genuinely enjoyed each other’s company and were together often, whether at cocktail parties, where he introduced her to the day’s leading theatrical and literary names, or simply sitting around playing backgammon. Both of them had come from the heartland and were by nature down-to-earth, and Ginger found him gentlemanly, amusing, and unpredictable. One Sunday morning Ross called to invite her to the circus with him and Coward. After taking in the spectacle from front-row seats, they went backstage to feed the elephants. Ross had bought twelve bags of peanuts, and one of the more mischievous beasts grabbed his eyeglasses with her trunk and held them aloft for ransom.

  In the summer of 1931, Ross joined Lela and Ginger on a crosscountry train trip to California. He was taking a vacation and
eventually was to meet up with Woollcott, who was returning from a cruise, in San Francisco; Ginger was bound for Hollywood to resume her burgeoning movie career. Shortly after they got under way, Ross announced that two surprise guests would be joining them for dinner, Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne. The opportunity to meet the legendary Lunts thrilled Ginger, but also intimidated her. The conversation stuttered until Alfred allowed that he and his wife were heading west to shoot a movie for MGM. What little film the Lunts had done heretofore had been in the medium’s primitive infancy, and they were apprehensive about how it had changed. Ross piped up, “You know, Ginger is also on her way to make three films for Pathé.” Ginger was mortified at his implicit equation of the proletarian Pathé with the prestigious MGM, but Ross pressed on: “Ginger has made a number of films in New York City, so she’s really a movie veteran.” With this discovery, the Lunts began peppering her with questions—about directors, production techniques, how to be made up to best effect for the camera. The tables were turned—the acting novice was instructing the acting legends—and suddenly Ginger realized what her friend had been up to. “Harold knew what he was doing,” she wrote.

  Ginger Rogers in the early Thirties. (AP/Wide World)

  In Hollywood, Ross took Ginger to more parties, and made more introductions: to Charlie Chaplin, Douglas Fairbanks, Norma Talmadge, Zasu Pitts, Groucho Marx. Ross always professed a jaundiced view of the Golden State (“People in California live in a world of rumors, dreams, and superstition, because newspapers out there don’t print much news,” he once informed Rebecca West), and of Hollywood in particular. He considered the early motion pictures more gimmick than art form, so much so that, uncharacteristically for him, he goaded his reviewers to rough them up. One of these, John McCarten, became especially notorious in Hollywood, which only made Ross happier, for the studios were constantly seducing his most promising writers. It would take him a long time to accept the hypothesis that writers can be motivated by mammon as well as by art, and for years he regarded the studio moguls as the lowest rung on the food chain. (It perturbed him that Darryl F. Zanuck never seemed to remember who he was, so when he got the chance he always misspelled the producer’s name “Zanick.”)

  But in truth Ross loved California, especially since he had so many transplanted friends there, and he visited often. On one such occasion, Harpo Marx recalled, he was awakened at his apartment at the Garden of Allah in the wee hours by the sound of dice being shaken; it was Ross outside his window, backgammon cup in hand, ready to play. “We had quite a long session, and every hour or so he would bellow, ‘Where are all those Hollywood beauties I’ve heard so much about?’ ” Harpo later told Groucho. “Unbeknownst to him, I finally arranged with the local madam to send over three of her more presentables. But when they arrived, he furiously handed each girl twenty bucks and said, ‘Go home, girls, I’m on a triple blitz!’ ”

  As such high jinks make plain, Ross was enjoying the last great blowout of his life, playing as ferociously as a child racing nightfall. Having grown up far too fast, he stubbornly clung to a piece of the little boy within. To a great extent the responsibilities of marriage, and then starting a business, had caused him to repress his boyish impulses, but with bachelorhood, and with The New Yorker up and running, he was free to indulge them. To his ulcerous regret, he was drinking too hard and eating too well, and routinely staying out till the wee hours. His mother disapproved of this tomcat behavior, and when she stayed with him in New York, as she often did in the early Thirties, he was reduced to making preposterous excuses for his nocturnal comings and goings. After one party, when he found her waiting up, he explained that he was on his way out at ten-thirty when suddenly the host bolted the doors and declared, “Nobody is going to leave this house until one-thirty.”

  Bad alibis notwithstanding, these relatively carefree days were among Ross’s happiest. Never again would he have quite the same freedom, much less the stamina, to prowl the city however he wished. Consider the memorable evening he spent in the company of his friend Stanley Walker, storied city editor of The New York Herald Tribune, and the New York Police Department vice squad. Over dinner Walker casually mentioned that in a few hours he would be riding along when the cops raided a notorious clip joint. “Instantly he was on the alert, the smell of battle smoke in his nostrils,” Walker wrote. Ross invited himself along, and sometime after three in the morning they drove up to their destination, a basement dive on West Forty-sixth not far from Ross’s old co-op. “The detectives and I went first, crashing the door,” Walker said, “and then the detectives gave the half-dozen thugs and pimps a terrible going over, and then wrecked the joint and threw all the furniture into the street. It was a horrible and bloody sight, and Ross was tickled. He laughed through most of the festivities.” Since it was too late for Walker to catch a train home to Great Neck, he went back to Ross’s apartment. “Of course, Ross and I … and the cops had been drinking steadily (my booze) all night, and we were pretty fagged out. It was a good night’s work for society, and it had all made Ross very happy.”

  ——

  Busy sowing these last wild oats, Ross was slow to notice that for almost everyone else the party was over. For millions of Americans, the Depression meant anything from discomfiture to destitution, but he was not among them. He never would be faced with the prospect of selling pencils on street corners, and neither, by and large, would his readers. Had they been more profoundly touched, doubtless The New Yorker would have been quicker to recognize the hard times. As it was, the magazine would be criticized, and not without cause, for more or less sitting out the Depression. Especially through the early Thirties, it tended to treat hard times as more a nuisance—an inconvenience, really, on a par with balky automobiles or feckless valets—than the catastrophe it was. The magazine wielded its blasé attitude like a shield. Just after the stock-market crash, this was how Benchley began a Wayward Press column: “There was a slight benefit accruing to the stock-market unpleasantness of last week—oh, very well, then, there wasn’t. You don’t have to get so sore.”

  In fairness, it must be said that the harshest criticism of The New Yorker’s stance was not contemporaneous but came long after the fact—that is, from the perspective of what The New Yorker became rather than what it was at the time. A few critics even imputed to Ross a measure of personal callousness that, on reflection, seems unwarranted. He came to see the pain around him and was not without compassion; time and again in his professional life he demonstrated genuine concern for the common man, and in a fight his instinct was always to side with the underdog. But there were editorial reasons, right or wrong, behind his reluctance to confront the bad times in the pages of The New Yorker.

  For starters, the Depression, of all the century’s now-familiar shocks, was the first to occur on The New Yorker’s watch. The magazine, not yet five years old when Wall Street collapsed and only just out of the red, still lacked confidence, most especially where grave matters were concerned. Neither Ross nor anyone on his staff had any grasp of global economics; it was bound to be the case that for a while the magazine would be at least as naïve as the Hoover administration.

  More significant, Ross was determined to keep politics out of his magazine. He might profile political personalities and monitor the shifting political tides, but he was adamant that The New Yorker proffer no agenda of its own. It was first and foremost a humor magazine, and in its early years he was fond of saying, with a trace of condescension (to him “important” was a euphemism for “dull”), “Let’s let the other magazines be important.” At this juncture, virtually nothing in the magazine was really serious; the cultural and press criticism was far more whimsical than analytical, and what sober matters Markey and Ross’s other journalists took up were still being treated casually and ironically. Later Talk veteran Russell Maloney would write that until the Hitler menace became too ominous to ignore, the magazine’s editorial stand “was simple and, theoretically, not impossible to put into ac
tion. The New Yorker was on record as being against the use of poisonous spray on fruit, and against the trend in automobile design which narrows the driver’s field of vision by lowering the front seat.”

  In other words, it wasn’t merely the Depression that was largely ignored, but the New Deal, the Spanish Civil War, racial upheavals, and most other major developments of the day. William Shawn, who joined The New Yorker in the early years of the Depression, explained the then-prevailing attitude this way: “In our inattention [to the Depression] we were being completely true to ourselves at that time—in those days the people who worked for the magazine were actually proud of being apolitical and socially detached.”

  As Ross had conceived it, this wasn’t his job. The whole point of The New Yorker was to give people a laugh and a lift, and in the Thirties this seemed more important than ever. He had worked hard to gather about him the best cartoonists, as well as the greatest collection of humorists in the land—White, Thurber, Gibbs, Benchley, Parker, Frank Sullivan, S. J. Perelman, and Clarence Day, not to mention such specialists as Ring Lardner, who for the last year of his life, while bedridden with illness, produced a delightful radio column for the magazine. It was their work that in the first half of the Thirties formed its bread and butter, and in fact The New Yorker of that vintage probably hewed closer to Ross’s 1924 prospectus and initial vision than any other incarnation. He was thrilled and honored to be able to publish talent of that caliber.

  Besides, Ross was always confident that where society at large was concerned, the magazine’s conscience, White, would say anything that needed saying. And indeed, as White looked about him, increasingly his conscience was troubled. His commentaries on the national despair became more frequent, and more bold, especially as the crisis deepened and Herbert Hoover’s policies revealed themselves to be ineffectual. In early 1932, for instance, White was moved to write: