Genius in Disguise Page 20

  A further testament to Ross’s editorial core and the magazine’s underlying stability was the fact that by this time it had rendered the Jesus, ostensibly the editor’s second-in-command, more or less superfluous. This was fortunate, for since Ingersoll’s withdrawal the Jesus Parade had become more like a stampede. The problem was that in his heart Ross, like his fellow Irishman Yeats, believed the center couldn’t hold. He had tried his best to impose “order,” with labyrinthine routings of manuscripts, Rube Goldberg pay structures, and increasingly complex editing fail-safes. (These forays at times achieved comic proportions: Once, a huge, color-coded bulletin board was erected to help an incoming Jesus keep track of the magazine’s many moving parts. Ross was crushed to learn that the new man was color-blind.) But the editor continued to insist that only an effective junior executive could give him true peace of mind.

  Of course the reality of the situation was that between Ross’s own firm direction and the quality control exerted by highly capable lieutenants like Mrs. White, Whitaker and Weekes, the Jesus position had become that of a glorified traffic cop. With a surpassing logic, one of Ross’s Jesus candidates in fact was a traffic cop, a man who in a previous life oversaw traffic control for the N.Y.P.D. His was an exceedingly short stay, New Yorker gridlock apparently proving even more intractable than Manhattan’s.

  Yet Ross persisted, his search as mystifying as it was relentless. At a party one night, Jane Grant overheard him talking nonsense to his latest genius. Afterward she asked him what he had been doing. “It built him up, made him think he was smarter than me,” Ross explained. “If he couldn’t see through what I was saying, he’s just a damned fool and I might as well know it first as last.”

  Ross auditioned friends and strangers; “he brings them back from lunch,” said Ingersoll; “he cables for them.” Some he liked well enough personally but fired anyway, but most he considered “horse’s rosettes.” In his desperation he even tried to push the job onto Gibbs, whose general opinion of the magazine’s managing editors was that they were “pinheads.” Over dinner Ross drank heavily, and Gibbs walked him home. “We got to Park Avenue and before I could stop him he weaved right out into the traffic. It was like one of those old Harold Lloyd movies, with cars practically snipping the buttons off his fly, and I never thought I’d see him alive again. We were both full of love and admiration because he’d offered me such a beautiful job and I’d had enough sense to decline it.”

  Others were caught less awares. According to New Yorker lore, when a naïve Ogden Nash accepted Ross’s offer near the end of 1930, he became the twenty-fifth Jesus in six years. There simply is no way of knowing if this count is accurate—for one thing, to be considered a Jesus one did not necessarily need to be the managing editor, merely the administrative point man of the moment—but it is undisputably true that by then Ross had churned through a lot of them. Nash was a decent, amiable young man who had recently sold The New Yorker a few poems, but Ross somehow got the impression that because Nash frequented speakeasies, he was just the kind of “sophisticate” the editor desired at the helm. It was a fiasco that lasted less than three months.

  At the time, Ross was still prone to jeremiads, and the resident Jesus usually got the full brunt. People who knew the editor well had come to intuit which of these hysterical outbursts were for effect and which were the genuine lamentations of a latter-day Sisyphus. A new Jesus, however, was likely to be bewildered, as Nash clearly was. In a letter to his girlfriend, later his wife, he described a typical Ross performance: “The day at the office was quiet enough, if you except Ross’s usual blow-up. Ross, who made The New Yorker what it is, and who really is a genius, is probably the strangest man in the world.… His expression is always that of a man who has just swallowed a bug.… Once a day at least he calls you into his office and says, ‘This magazine is going to hell.’ He never varies the phrase. Then he says, ‘We haven’t got any organization. I’m licked. We’ve got too many geniuses around and nobody to take any responsibility.’ He has smoked five cigarettes while saying that. Then he takes a drink of water, prowls up and down, cries ‘My God!’ loudly and rapidly, and you go out and try to do some work.”

  As he had with Thurber, Ross quickly freed Nash to pursue his true gift, which was splendid light verse, and on came the twenty-sixth Jesus, James M. Cain. He was not yet the acclaimed author of such period thrillers as The Postman Always Rings Twice and Double Indemnity; those were a few years off. In early 1931 he was an out-of-work editorial writer, The New York World having just been sold out from under him, and his buddy Morris Markey brought him to Ross’s attention.

  Cain’s Gethsemane, as he later called it, lasted all of nine months. A tall, serious man, he had several strikes against him: he was not a natural administrator, he had the daily newspaperman’s difficulty adjusting to the magazine’s long lead times, and he considered much of The New Yorker’s content overly frivolous. All these might have been overcome, however, but for the fact that he and Ross, like Ingersoll and Ross, were temperamentally unsuited. As a dinner companion, Cain found Ross delightful and gregarious, but as a boss he was vexing, inconsistent, and interfering. Ross constantly told him he wanted him to “organize” the place, but when Cain fired an incompetent secretary and hired another at thirteen more dollars a week, Ross was stupefied. He contravened his own rules by cutting special deals with certain writers, sometimes without telling Cain, and he resisted Cain’s efforts to make the magazine’s pay structure more logical and equitable. Eventually Cain was convinced that wittingly or no, Ross actually relished the administrative chaos he professed to hate. Within months Cain “was about as miserable a human being as I have ever encountered,” said Bernard Bergman. As it happened, Hollywood had been enticing him all along, and in November 1931 he yielded.

  In Cain’s estimation Ross was a great but flawed editor, and his admiration for both the man and the magazine grew through the years, especially as The New Yorker matured into a more serious and substantial journal. When he left, Cain framed and bequeathed to Bergman (number twenty-seven) a memo that Ross had hastily typed and clipped to a rejected manuscript; it read simply, “What is the signigifance of it all?” Bergman kept it for the rest of his life.

  James M. Cain. (Culver Pictures)

  Bergman would experience many of the same frustrations as his predecessor had, but he lasted a relative eternity: two years. He considered his greatest contribution persuading the gifted Alva Johnston to join the staff (though there were other major additions on his watch to the cultural and reporting staff, among them St. Clair McKelway, book critic Clifton Fadiman, and a quiet young Talk reporter, recently arrived from Chicago, named William Shawn). Bergman’s biggest regret by far was having to fire John O’Hara.

  This occurred in late 1931. Ross, at Gibbs’s urging and against his better judgment (he was forever uneasy about O’Hara, who he felt should stick to fiction), had agreed to try O’Hara as a Talk writer, on a “drawing account” of seventy-five dollars a week. This was in effect an advance against the purchase of pieces for the magazine; unfortunately for O’Hara, Ross killed every item he turned in. Bergman had approved the Talk items and thought them satisfactory, and Ross offered no explanations for his animus. After four weeks of this, the editor abruptly told Bergman, “O’Hara’s in us for three hundred dollars. He won’t do. Fire him before we’re in him for more.” Bergman tried to dissuade him, but, failing, finally had to break the bad news to O’Hara. For all his efforts on the writer’s behalf, it was Bergman, not Ross, against whom O’Hara nursed one of his famous grudges for years.

  What exactly brought Bergman and Ross to a parting of the ways in 1933 isn’t clear, although there are indications it involved office politics. Apparently Bergman had a dicey relationship with Mrs. White; he told her biographer, Linda H. Davis, that his counterpart for fiction could be duplicitous and had worked to undermine his position with Ross. Years after he left The New Yorker, Bergman wrote to Thurber, “You, I
believe, had warned me that Mrs. White was spreading the story that I had hired my mistress as my secretary. So silly I laughed it off. A big mistake to laugh Mrs. White off.” Whether or not Mrs. White spread such a rumor, or whether it had anything to do with Bergman’s leave-taking, is anyone’s guess, but it certainly was the case that the young magazine, like most small organizations, was a cauldron of rumor (a pot the mischievous Thurber especially enjoyed stirring) and petty politics, and Mrs. White could more than hold her own.

  Other nonentities drifted in and out until the arrival of the next major figure, Stanley Walker, whom Ross had wooed for years. He would prove to be one of the most influential figures in the early history of The New Yorker, although, ironically, not for anything he did while actually working at the magazine. In fact, the laconic Texan and the manic Coloradan never quite managed to get on the same wavelength—like Cain, Walker chafed at the bureaucracy of the place, “the endless memos, the buck-passing”—and he left the magazine, amicably and under his own power, after only a year. However, his groundbreaking work at the Herald Tribune, where Walker had championed a freer, more literary approach to news writing, had deeply impressed Ross and helped shape his own views. Beyond this, at the Herald Walker had cultivated the likes of Johnston, McKelway, Joseph Mitchell, Joel Sayre, John Lardner, and Sanderson Vanderbilt. All these men, in their turn, came to work for, and flourished at, The New Yorker.

  After Walker came Ik (pronounced Ike) Shuman, a man with a head for business but whose editorial capabilities were widely suspect. Ross was true to form: “In the beginning, he kept on saying ‘Shuman knows how to handle that,’ ” Gibbs recalled, “and before you knew it, he was saying ‘Let’s see how he fucks this one up.’ ” Though a short-lived Jesus, Shuman remained an important figure at The New Yorker for eight years, as an administrator and the editorial side’s liaison with the business office. He even sat for a while on the company’s board of directors before Ross essentially shoved him off the train.

  Shuman’s chief crime was becoming too cozy with his business-side counterparts, which was the surest way to kindle Ross’s suspicions—and once you were suspect, you were on borrowed time. (Conversely, once you had his trust, you had it forever.) Over the years, the editor had nurtured a heartfelt disdain for the commercial side of the operation. It was more than an outgrowth of his antipathy to Fleischmann. Ross resented the business side’s necessity, and he questioned its efficiency. To illustrate the latter point, he liked to tell a story from the magazine’s earliest days. Ross had become friendly with department store magnate Bernard Gimbel and elicited from him a lucrative advertising contract from Saks. Not long after, he and Gimbel were at the Ritz when they spotted the Saks advertising manager and The New Yorker’s advertising director, Ray Bowen, across the room having lunch. “We laughed about which one was picking up the check,” Ross said, “but also about what in Christ’s name they had to talk about. The whole goddamn thing had been settled and signed without either of them knowing anything about it. They [Bowen and his salesmen] are nothing but a bunch of messenger boys.”

  The plain fact is that Ross simply disliked advertising and anything associated with it. He hated to be beholden to anything or anyone, whether Philip Morris, Helena Rubinstein, or Raoul Fleischmann. His World War I experience at The Stars and Stripes had spoiled him. There, because of a unique set of circumstances (army sponsorship, captive readership, and finite advertising space), the paper literally rationed ads. It limited not only their size and number but their claims, and certain categories—liquor, patent medicines, political material—were rejected outright. For Ross, if a publication had to run ads at all, it should at least be as discretionary as The Stars and Stripes. It galled him that in its first few years The New Yorker of necessity had to accept virtually anything that came along.

  Ross was also disturbed at his lack of control where contributors were concerned. Advertisers could and did ring up New Yorker artists for illustrations. Likewise, some of his better-known contributing writers, most notably Woollcott, were making lucrative endorsements for products that turned around and advertised in The New Yorker.

  But on a more fundamental level, Ross despised advertising because he considered most of it inherently dishonest, and he no more wanted dishonest or shabby advertising in The New Yorker than he wanted dishonest or error-ridden editorial copy. He realized this level of integrity was not entirely possible, but the magazine might at least sift out the ads whose claims were demonstrably untrue. Unfortunately, his was an age when ad claims were even more brazen than they are today; Lucky Strikes boasted they were easy on your throat, Camels helped your digestion, and Viceroys kept your teeth “pearly white.” A particularly egregious offender, it seemed to Ross, was Fleischmann’s Yeast, whose tacky advertisements, unsurprisingly, had been a New Yorker staple from the beginning. Its ads featured testimonials from real people about the many salutary health benefits (more energy, cleaner skin, happier intestines) they derived from regular digestion of yeast. Ross was dubious of these health claims and was repulsed by the ads, which sometimes featured diagrams of the alimentary tract. (He was so squeamish that he hated references to any bodily function in his magazine.) When feeling particularly frisky, Ross liked to call up society matrons, posing as a representative of Fleischmann’s Yeast. He would inquire whether they used his product, and if so, he would ask whether they would be willing to endorse it for one thousand dollars. If they agreed, he would say, “Fine. We ask you only to declare that before using our yeast your face was a mass of blotches and unseemly pimples.” This usually ended the conversation.

  By 1930, there was so much advertising coming into The New Yorker that Ross felt confident enough to lecture the business side about ad standards. That March, he fired off a remarkable and incendiary memo to general manager Eugene Spaulding, although the real target undoubtedly was Fleischmann. Ross had been provoked by the appearance of yet another Woollcott endorsement, this one in collaboration with artist John Held, Jr. Ralph Ingersoll, who cited the memo as one of the inspirations for his ad-less newspaper PM, called it “the most succinct and accurate statement of Ross’s attitude toward business in general and advertising in particular” that he ever saw. It is revealing not just for its obvious principle and passion, but for the moral terms Ross invokes to make his case. Misleading ads are “lies” and “palpable lies”; the magazine has “offended” in the past, but “it is never too late to reform.” New Yorker integrity, it seems, was about as close as Ross ever came to a religious conviction:

  Well, I am as bitter as ever about some of the advertising we have been carrying, and since the situation has recently led to embarrassing complications, I think we ought to do something definite about it. I propose as follows: That we establish a rule that we will not use any endorsement advertising containing a palpable lie, or a statement we are morally certain is a lie.

  The Fleischmann Yeast advertising is certainly hocus-pocus. I haven’t read it much lately, but I assume that the statements made therein are more or less true—certainly they are such as cannot be, without pretty thorough investigation, branded as untrue. I don’t like the tone of these advertisements, but would say (speaking offhandedly) that we should continue to use them. Such advertisements as those run by the Lux people are, however, palpable lies. So are the Simmons Beds. The recent endorsement of coffee by the Messrs. Held and Woollcott, both contributors to this magazine, are also lies.

  We were very much embarrassed by the appearance of the Held and Woollcott endorsement. We have been rather severe with the newer and less widely known contributors, being strict with them even in the matter of the use of their drawings in advertisements appearing in the magazine. This is possible with the newer people because they are inclined to trust us and accept our advice, and have grown up with us in an atmosphere which has inculcated in them some sense of truth, honesty, dignity and integrity. Our viewpoint has not been so readily impressed upon certain money-grabbing write
rs and artists who were established before The New Yorker was started. A few recent examples, such as the Lux stuff and the Held-Woollcott endorsement, have seriously embarrassed our policy.

  Obviously, the thing for us to do is to attack the matter at its roots, by making it a rule not to print advertising which we know of our own knowledge to be untrue, or which we are morally certain is untrue. That would be a simple, clear-cut rule. I urge that we adopt it. If it is not adopted we will, editorially, have to deal in our own way with contributors who offend, but we haven’t much face left if our own management isn’t with us.

  I urge this policy not as an idealistic measure in any way. I may be idealistic in it, but I would point out also that it is not good business to print palpable lies. It is not bright to do so. Our readers, or the readers we hope to hold and to get for The New Yorker, are intelligent enough to know that this stuff is the bunk. We are being shortsighted in running it. We have an opportunity to live honestly. We have also the great privilege now of being in a position to lead the advertising industry. For Christ’s sake let us no longer pussyfoot. Let us be really honest, and not just slick. I think that in our present prosperous condition we could afford to suffer even a temporary small loss in revenue to keep our own conscience clear. Moreover, it is never too late to reform. We have offended often in the past, but that is no reason why we shouldn’t institute a reform now. We can at least stop being cheap.

  P.S. I am not certain about this, but I am of the opinion that the New York Times—a great monument to simple integrity—will not run this stuff.

  It would take several more years before Ross was able to stamp out all the endorsements by his own contributors, and he never ceased crusading against ads that he considered tasteless, misleading, or merely “inappropriate” to The New Yorker. Over the decades, the magazine would cause more commotion on Madison Avenue for ads it wouldn’t print—for deodorants, laxatives, vitamins, mortuaries, and most famously, beginning in the mid-Sixties, cigarettes—than for the ones it did. Indeed, the story was perpetuated that Ross, and later Shawn, had a veto power over ads. Like so many New Yorker stories, this was somewhat fanciful. Both editors insisted on screening suspect ads, and neither was bashful about raising objections. However, neither had an outright veto; what they did wield, rather, was the ultimate club: the implicit (or sometimes in Ross’s case explicit) threat of resigning if their wishes were ignored. For this reason—and, it must be added, out of genuine deference to Ross and Shawn’s sensibilities—the business side always weighed seriously editorial objections to ads, and usually agreed. Usually, but not invariably. The New Yorker ran many ads Ross didn’t like, and he waged the fight until the day he died.