Genius in Disguise Read online

  So perhaps it was a touch of foreboding, or maybe sheer wistfulness, that Rovere detected in Ross as the glittering twenty-fifth anniversary gala moved into the small hours. He would write, twenty years later, “All that remains with me is a picture of Ross looking balefully over the ballroom, consulting his watch, and saying that it was one hell of an hour for his young daughter to be at the Ritz Hotel.”

  CHAPTER 1

  THE PETTED DARLING

  On the corner of Fifth and Bleeker streets in Aspen, Colorado, is a small frame house, utterly nondescript save for its pleasant color of pale rose. Its drab style is only underscored by the fanciful Victorians and neo-Victorians surrounding it in the West’s trendy capital of conspicuous consumption. Though the house has been added on to repeatedly through the years, in today’s real estate parlance it is a “tear-down,” the true value of the property being not in the structure but in the dirt beneath it. In 1991, Pitkin County’s appraisers reckoned the house was worth thirty-five thousand dollars—and the small lot $675,000.

  A century before, caught up in Aspen’s first real estate boom, a Scotch-Irish immigrant from Ulster named George Ross paid a tidy one thousand dollars for the squat little cottage at 601 West Bleeker, and was doubtless glad to have it. Like the homes around it, it was thrown up in a hurry in the late 1880s, made from rough-sawn Colorado spruce harvested from the lush mountains girdling the mining boomtown. The house was situated facing north, but it was scarcely equipped to take the bitter winter winds; the plank walls were insulated with oilcloth, wadded newspapers, and pages ripped from old mining magazines. The current owners, who have renovated the house extensively, have even come across the occasional playing card nailed up over a hole, a pitiful pasteboard barrier against the unremitting draft. It’s not hard to imagine George Ross awakening in the middle of the night and, seeing his breath, rising to rekindle the stoves that heated the few small rooms. On November 6, 1892, a boy was born in this house. His mother, Ida, christened him Harold, a name meaning “leader of men.”

  In temperament, Harold was very much his father’s son; in his upbringing, he was very much his mother’s.

  Like most of the nine thousand or so Aspen residents in 1892, George Ross was there in search of fortune, a very long way from home. He was born in 1851 in County Monaghan, on a farm that had been in the family for five generations. Eldest of three boys and seven girls, George as a young man was swept up in the great Irish emigration to America (in time a half dozen of his siblings, one by one, would follow him). George came by way of Canada. At various times in his life he was a carpenter, grocer, contractor, scrap dealer, and, it was said, supervisor of a mental hospital in Toronto. But according to his son, George Ross was always, at heart, a miner, and he drifted from boomtown to boomtown across the West. Judging from his résumé, the elder Ross was a handy and resourceful man, if not especially lucky where prospecting was concerned. Voluble and gregarious, with a sharp tongue and a gift for sarcasm, he liked a good joke almost as much as a good argument. But he was said to be so genial that even his forensic adversaries admired him.

  Sometime around 1885, George Ross’s wandering brought him to Aspen, where he worked the mines and eventually staked some claims. A few years later—no one is sure of the circumstances, whether he was traveling or she was—he encountered a school teacher from Kansas named Ida Martin. As Ida would recount to her daughter-in-law, Jane Grant, the courtship that ensued was an unorthodox one, even by the standards of nineteenth-century Colorado. Their brief meeting evidently left a much stronger impression on George than on Ida: a few weeks later he sent her a postcard pressing his suit and even proposing marriage, but her recollection of him was so dim that she had trouble making out the signature. Ida responded by offering to provide George some writing paper so that he might conduct a proper correspondence. He, in turn, mustered a charming apology. The epistolary courtship advanced through the school year and culminated with their marriage in June 1889 in Salina, Kansas, where Ida was then teaching. The groom was thirty-eight, his bride thirty-four. The formal announcement of their wedding concluded, “At Home, After June 25th, Aspen, Colorado.”

  Ida Martin Ross came from old New England stock. She was born in Amesbury, Massachusetts, north of Boston, in 1855, but her father moved the family to Kansas and she was raised in McPherson, not far from Salina. She was the embodiment of the prairie schoolmarm: prim, thin, plain, a little austere, recipient of a normal-school education. She was also outspoken and clearly unintimidated by adventure. Before working in Salina, it was said, she taught for several years in the Oklahoma Indian territory. Writer friends of Harold Ross who met Ida in her old age in New York often described her as naïve, as she no doubt was in the ways of speakeasies and cocktail-party protocol. But the woman who emerges in a handful of her surviving letters, written to Jane Grant when Jane’s marriage to Ross was foundering, is anything but naïve. This is a concerned mother and compassionate mother-in-law, a sensible woman plainly familiar with marital tribulation and other hard ways of the world. Besides, if there ever was a naïve side to Ida Ross, frontier Aspen would have ground it away.

  George Ross and son Harold, around age nine. (Courtesy of Patricia Ross Honcoop)

  Aspen, situated on the Roaring Fork River and circumscribed by mountains, is a place of surpassing beauty. Yet for all its natural appeal, it owes its existence to brute commerce, the mining of silver. Aspen sprang up in 1879, when its potential attracted a dozen silver prospectors who had been crowded out of Leadville, the boomtown just across the Continental Divide. By the time newlyweds George and Ida Ross arrived, in the summer of 1889, Aspen not only was bustling but was beginning to make the transition from mining camp to civilized town, with some gaslights, the occasional stone building, even social clubs. But no amount of makeup could disguise the truth of it: with its smokestacks, dirty air, rutted avenues, and noisy, oreladen trains, Aspen was all about silver. Those establishments not in mining directly were in its service, from the new Hotel Jerome to the East End brothels.

  Ida Ross was the product of New England ancestry and prairie upbringing. (Courtesy of Patricia Ross Honcoop)

  In the cumbersome grantee books in the Pitkin County Courthouse in Aspen, one still finds George Ross’s claims on silver lodes with such romantic names as the Little Anney, the Sarah Jane, the Bartelett, the Bob Tail, and the Bonteet. There was nothing remotely romantic about the work, however, which was backbreaking and dangerous. Main shafts were dug hundreds of feet into the mountainsides, with short tunnels spurring off every so often, like the stubby teeth of a comb. Miners chiseled holes into the rock to set the charges, which generated tons of rubble that had to be cleared. Miners were completely at the mercy of mine owners, grantees, and supervisors for their hours, working conditions, and pay. Leases were arranged in various ways. For instance, George Ross’s 1891 leases on the Sarah Jane and Bartelett cost him twenty percent of the value of all ore he extracted. (He also agreed to work at least four miners per shift, to conduct eighty shifts a month, and to keep the three-and-a-half-feet-wide shafts clear of debris.) In 1892, leasing the Little Anney, he paid a flat five hundred dollars for rights, with no royalties.

  George Ross never found his fortune in the mines, though he did make enough to hold a small interest in some camp boardinghouses, as well as to buy the modest house on Bleeker. The couple took possession in August 1892, when Ida was six months pregnant. After all the hard work, after three years of living in rental property, and with their first child on the way, the Rosses might have been completely content had it not been for the pernicious rumor racing around Aspen about this time that the government was about to demonetarize silver. And in fact, with the economic panic of 1893, Aspenites’ worst fears were realized. Congress repealed the Sherman Silver Act, which for years had required the federal government to buy much more of the metal than it really needed. Aspen’s sole commodity plunged in value, and the town began a long, slow decline. Thousands were driven from t
he mines, including George Ross. Rather than leave town, as many did, the Rosses responded, in 1893, by opening a meat market and grocery. Still, a service establishment in a dying community is a dubious proposition in its own right, and there was no more income to be had from the boardinghouses. Within a few years, as Harold Ross himself would say later, “everybody in town was broke, including my father.”

  ——

  Harold Wallace Ross would always relish playing the role of the country boy abroad in the big city. But it was just that—an act— and Ross got a little testy whenever someone bought it too well, as if the turnip truck had made no stops on the trip from Bleeker Street to Park Avenue. “I may well have been the boy from Aspen, all right,” he told his friend the writer Margaret Case Harriman, “but I point out that I left at the age of six and thereafter lived in cities—Salt Lake City, Denver, San Francisco, Panama, New Orleans, New York, and Paris, more or less in the order named. I was really just the petted darling of world capitals.” It is inarguably true that by the time he came to start his own magazine, the well-traveled Ross had attained a kind of careworn worldliness that most New Yorkers, as parochial then as now, could only imagine. But it is just as true that Ross was, and would always be, a child of the frontier.

  The Rosses outside their home in Aspen, Colorado. (Courtesy of Patricia Ross Honcoop)

  His first years were full of privations, though of course young Harold didn’t realize they were hardships at the time because everyone he knew lived the same way he did. There was no indoor plumbing, and water had to be drawn and hauled daily. The house was cold and drafty. When Ross was three his mother gave birth to a second son, Robert, but the child died on his first birthday. (Ross later said one of his earliest memories was of his brother’s tiny white coffin in the parlor.) There was little money and provisions were thin. Ross would remember his mother as an unaccomplished cook but add that she “didn’t have much of a chance, because of the limited provender of the mountains.” Ida Ross, like all frontier wives, developed of necessity a steely frugality that, in later life, even prosperity couldn’t dent. In the Thirties, when she visited her son in New York and he put her up in the better hotels, Ida refused to pay the shocking prices they charged for meals. Instead, she would sneak a hotplate into her room to cook her own. She was always found out and a few times even asked to leave, to the mortification of the editor of The New Yorker.

  The young Harold (he was almost always Harold; never Harry, and seldom Hal) adored Aspen. He enjoyed fishing the creeks and mountain lakes with his father and exploring the endless hillsides. If his mother was overly protective—she wouldn’t let him run barefoot, even in summer, and refused to let him swim lest he drown— out of her sight he indulged his more mischievous impulses. Harold and his best friend and cousin, Wesley Gilson, who was two years older, liked to go into the countryside and pepper the sides of barns with their shotguns (at other times they fired small snakes stuffed down the barrel). Once, while visiting his favorite uncle, John Ross, who lived near Denver, Harold captured an eagle, but Uncle John made him set it free.

  In school Harold did well, scoring high grades in every subject except, notably, deportment. But his education scarcely stopped at the classroom door. As soon as he was old enough to be of help, he ran errands for his father’s grocery. So at ages six and eight, he and Wesley found themselves hauling buckets of beer to the town’s saloons, careful not to spill any lest they get their ears cuffed by thirsty patrons. Harold also toted groceries to the brothels in Aspen’s red-light district. He liked the prostitutes right off because they invited him in to warm up on cold days, gave him candy, and invariably tipped better than the churchgoers across town. This exposure marked the beginning of Ross’s lifelong fraternal fascination with prostitutes and their lot. Years later he would tell the story of how, as a boy, he once overheard his mother and her friends buzzing over the scandalous news that a prominent politician was about to wed a local madam. How were they expected to respond, the ladies asked themselves, when they encountered the newlyweds on the street? As he told it, the young Ross found their perplexity amusing but their hypocrisy troubling.

  Even so, Ida Ross, a proper woman with proper friends, was merely being true to her values, which were firm and strongly held. She doted on her only child and worked hard transferring her views to him. If not everything took hold, much did. For instance, she imprinted on Ross a puritanical strain that was remarked on as a quaint, albeit sometimes annoying, trait all his adult life. Just as passionately the former schoolteacher drilled into her son a love of reading and language. He was taught to read at a young age, and Ida regularly exposed him to books that would have been well over the heads of his classmates. She took pains that Harold respect not just the ideas therein but the words themselves. In grammar as in life, she believed, there were firm rules to be followed. She augmented Harold’s schoolwork with grammar lessons at home, making him parse sentences until their fundamental structure became second nature. This builder’s approach to language appealed to Harold’s logical mind and would become a signature of his professional editing style.

  Curiously, one book Ross was not exposed to, at least in any depth, was the Bible. Though George and Ida Ross both came from Presbyterian backgrounds, it seems the family practiced no formal religion, and for his entire life Ross, despite his strong moral ethic, never belonged to any denomination. George, who enjoyed referring to himself as a “blackmouth Presbyterian,” was familiar enough with the Bible to argue with his Catholic friends about their dogma and, after the family had moved to Salt Lake City, with Mormon friends about theirs. Harold delighted in listening to his father in these contentious sessions—George Ross was a “violent anti-Mormon,” his son said—and grew up with the idea that a person’s convictions were more important than his affiliations, be they religious, political, social, or otherwise. Remembering Ross years after his death, Rebecca West, who never knew Ross’s parents but who from time to time heard him hold forth on matters spiritual and even theological, said, “At some time an impressive nineteenth-century rationalist, of the sort not rare in the West, must have had the shaping of him, for he knew nothing about the Bible and an emotional block prevented him from repairing this lack in his later life. He could not pronounce phrases such as ‘the cherubim and seraphim’ without stammering, and he never recognized the most familiar texts.”

  His father was not the only contrarian influence on the young Ross. Religious skepticism, not to say mischief, ran in the family. This is clear from an amusing and telling encounter that New Yorker writer Joseph Mitchell had in 1940 with Bishop Alma White, founder of the Pillar of Fire sect. At the time, the Pillar of Fire had forty-three temples in the United States, Canada, and England, broadcasting and publishing holdings, and two colleges. The movement had originated in Colorado but was then based in New Jersey, and Mitchell decided to write a Profile of Bishop Alma. When, after some negotiation, Mitchell was introduced to the cleric, he found a woman in her late seventies and rather infirm, “a buxom old Roman emperor … lying in bed, propped up on pillows.” Bishop Alma invited Mitchell to sit down, then asked him directly, “Did Harold W. Ross send you out here?”

  Mitchell was taken back. “Not exactly,” he said, endeavoring to explain how someone at The New Yorker must have approved his Profile idea, but that person was not necessarily Ross.

  “That’s a sorry paper,” Bishop Alma continued. “Somebody from Colorado told me that Harold W. Ross was associated with it, and I bought a copy, and I was certainly disappointed. There’s nothing about the Lord in that paper. The reading matter is on a very low level, and the ads are worse than the reading matter. Every page you turn there’s a big bottle of whiskey staring you in the face. Harold W. Ross came from one of the finest families in Colorado, a good old Scotch-Irish family, but looking at The New Yorker you’d never know it.”

  Mitchell asked the bishop if she knew Ross.

  “I do not, but I knew an uncle of his, Mr.
John Ross, out in Morrison, Colorado, and I owe a great debt of gratitude to him. If it wasn’t for him and his help, I might not be here today and the Pillar of Fire might not be in existence.” John Ross was the second-born of his family, one year younger than George. He had come to Denver as a miner and had prospered. He moved to Mount Morrison, west of Denver, where he developed an extensive logging operation, accumulated vast landholdings—he sold the city of Denver the acreage for what became the Park of the Red Rocks—and became one of the community’s leading merchants. Bishop Alma went on to explain to Mitchell that before the advent of the Pillar of Fire movement, she and her husband, a Methodist minister, were sent to a church in Morrison for her health. Once there, a bitter fight arose within the congregation over a proposed church festival, replete with dancing and gaming, that was intended to raise money for the pastor’s salary. The Whites so vigorously protested this sinful enterprise that the majority of the congregation not only turned against them but threatened to cut off the pastor’s support altogether. Salvation, she said, arrived in the person of John Ross. “I don’t think he had ever made any profession of Christianity whatsoever,” said Bishop Alma, “but he called my husband into his store and put a twenty-dollar gold piece in his hand, and encouraged him, and said that as long as he had a store we shouldn’t want for anything. He continued to give liberally to our support, and we weathered the winter, and I went on from there to found the Pillar of Fire.” The bishop then handed Mitchell a copy of her autobiography, Looking Back from Beulah, in which she recounts the benefaction of John Ross. “I want you to take it to Harold W. Ross. Take it to him, and tell him it’s from me. Tell him to read it, and study it, and think on it. And tell him I’ll pray for him.”