Genius in Disguise Read online

  Of course the advertising side picked its share of bones with Ross, too. If Lois Long trumpeted something at Macy’s, for instance, other stores were sure to howl. The same was true with apartments, cars, or any other goods Ross’s writers saw fit to discuss. If a dustup proved serious enough, as Cain recalled, “then at last there is a conference” at which Fleischmann, the business staff, Ross, and his current Jesus would huddle to talk it out.

  Cain paints a memorable picture of what happened next. “The front office boys, one by each, explain why it has to be done thus and such way, in words of one syllable, so Ross can get it through his notoriously thick head—or perhaps not thick head, as they see it, but wacky head, a head not born for the intricacies and subtleties and futilities of business. To all this Ross listens with obvious pain, but some sick imitation of a smile pasted on his face, for in spite of a notion to the contrary he does have some impulses toward courtesy, and doesn’t like to hurt feelings.” Ross patiently hears everyone out, after which there is a long, uncomfortable silence, so that Fleischmann and the others start to wonder if he has even been paying attention. Then, slowly, the editor begins to talk. “He announces, not in the like-to-speak-on-the-motion way the others have done, but in a flat, definitive tone, like a P.E. rector beginning ‘I am the Resurrection and the Life.’ Presently he says: ‘So this is the way we’re going to do it.’ He explains the way. He explains the reasons. They’re solid, cogent reasons, that take account of pesky business angles the businessmen don’t appear to have thought of. It’s wholly different from their way, but before he gets done all of them know it’s the right way and the only way. He finishes, then gets up and goes out, with no fare-thee-well of any kind: too preoccupied. All sit looking at each other, then somebody looks at his watch. Fleischmann looks relieved, as though at last it’s settled with less fuss than might have been expected, considering Ross. And yet there is a look on his face that makes you wonder how much fun he gets out of publishing this, what is supposed to be his magazine, but apparently is whatever Ross decrees it to be, after which it makes still more money.”

  ——

  After enough such scenes, the inevitable Ross stories, heretofore confined to the intramural Round Table–journalism-Broadway circles, began finding wider, but just as appreciative, audiences. A mythos about this vulgar, gat-toothed Merlin, the mad genius of Forty-fifth Street, was starting to build in earnest.

  Then in the summer of 1934, the world at large was introduced to Ross. A splashy eighteen-page article in Fortune magazine drew back the curtain, really for the first time, on The New Yorker operation. The effect of the piece, written anonymously by Ralph Ingersoll, was to partly explain and partly enhance the burgeoning Ross legend.

  Ross in the mid-Thirties: The legend of The New Yorker’s “mad genius” was starting to build. (Pach Bros./Bettmann Archive)

  By this time Ingersoll was managing editor of Fortune, the follow-up brainchild of Time founder Henry Luce. His agents had begun wooing Ingersoll in late 1929, offering to double his pay, and the following summer he opted to go. He delayed breaking the news to Ross for fear of another violent scene, or at the very least reproach. Instead Ross listened sullenly to Ingersoll’s reasons for leaving, not saying a word. At last Ingersoll asked, “Well?” Ross simply sighed and said, “Hell, Ingersoll, Fortune was invented for you to edit.” After another protracted pause, he added, “G’bye.”

  In the Fortune article Ingersoll discussed Ross’s background, personal quirks, unorthodox management style, and editorial acumen at great length, and detailed the contributions of Ross’s top editors, writers, and artists, as well as Fleischmann, John Hanrahan, and other key business executives. There were many facts and figures about the magazine’s rocky start-up and current balance sheet (this was, after all, Fortune), and an assessment of how it was weathering the Depression. Ingersoll gently chided the magazine for not being more egalitarian, but in general the article was flattering and positive.

  This was not how it was construed in the New Yorker rabbit warrens, where there was great consternation. Apparently the magazine that made an art form out of poking into other people’s business was itself rather thin-skinned. Ross had to deal with the fallout for weeks. For instance, he had to hose off an incensed Gluyas Williams, who, the article said (inaccurately), generated none of his own cartoon ideas. Far more upsetting to the staff, however, were Ingersoll’s printed guesses, generally high, about their annual salaries. Ross himself was compelled to post a note saying, “It is not true that I get $40,000 a year.” In the following week’s Comment, White wrote this single line, “The editor of Fortune gets $30-a-week and carfare,” an observation that surely baffled countless New Yorker readers. There was much talk of retaliation, such as a full-blown parody of Fortune or Time. Ross rejected these but ultimately did authorize a Profile of Luce, which, when it appeared in November 1936, drew the first serious blood in the escalating feud between Time and The New Yorker.

  For the moment, however, Ross had more serious things to worry about than trading spitballs with Harry Luce. For one thing, his mother had recently died. The previous November Ida Ross had broken her leg in a fall, and she never really recovered. At the time she was living in the small town of Hillsdale, New York, a few hours north of the city, looked after by her dead husband’s relatives. Ross saw his mother often in her last years, usually stopping on his way to or from the Saratoga area, where he liked to relax with his cousin and boyhood friend Wesley Gilson, now an executive with the Niagara Mohawk electric utility, or with Frank Sullivan. After his father’s death in 1925, he had tried to board his mother with relatives, knowing how much she hated New York, but Ida proved to be difficult and bossy, and she moved around quite a bit until settling down in Hillsdale a year or two before her death. She was buried there in a small country cemetery, which Ross visited every year.

  Fortunately there were happier diversions in 1934 as well. Early that year Ross was introduced to a beautiful and mysterious Frenchwoman half his age. Her name was Marie Françoise Elie, but Ross always called her Frances.

  Born in southern France in 1911, Frances came to Canada when she was nine to live with an aunt in Montreal. She took a trip to New York in June 1932, and that September married a man named William Pierce Clark. The young couple moved about a great deal, living in New Mexico and Florida before returning to New York, but after little more than a year they were divorced.

  Mutual acquaintances introduced Frances to Ross. She knew very little English when they met, but being stylish and French, she was a vision to a confirmed Francophile like Ross, and he was captivated instantly. For her part, the young woman apparently was charmed by the solicitous affections of this successful older man.

  In other words, the two had practically nothing in common, as they would later discover to their regret. But as Patricia Ross points out, in that more innocent time something as trivial as incompatibility seldom kept people from the altar. After a whirlwind courtship, they were secretly wed on May 16.

  Frances Ross. (New Yorker Collection, New York Public Library)

  Hard as Ross had fallen, romance hadn’t swept him away entirely: continuing to feel the financial headaches of his divorce from Jane, he had Frances sign a prenuptial agreement. Still, there was every indication that by now Ross was more than ready to exchange a singing cop for une demoiselle charmante.

  CHAPTER 8

  FLEISCHMANN

  Raoul Herbert Fleischmann was born in August 1885 in the spa resort of Ischl, in the Austrian Alps. He was the sixth and last child of Louis Fleischmann, a career army officer, and his high-spirited Viennese wife, Wilhelmine. The Fleischmanns had resettled in America a decade earlier; Raoul’s rather dramatic arrival came as the family was on summer holiday in the homeland. Still, there was something fitting about Raoul’s being born on the Continent, for he would grow up to become a gentleman very much in the Old World European manner: genteel, immaculately groomed and tailored, well-spoken, f
luent in three languages, and with an ease about money that can come only from growing up with it. Raoul Fleischmann didn’t drive; he motored. Had his family never left Vienna, he might have been an accomplished boulevardier.

  But after much persuading Louis did leave, the last in the large Fleischmann clan to do so. Two brothers, Max and Carl, had blazed the trail for the rest, having come to America shortly after the Civil War to exploit a specific business opportunity. The brothers owned the foreign rights to an Austrian patent for making compressed yeast, and they knew that much of the yeast produced across the United States was unreliable. They set up a manufacturing business in Brooklyn, then aggressively and methodically expanded west, buying out or undercutting the smaller domestic yeast-makers. Their consolidation efforts were so successful that by the turn of the century Fleischmann’s Yeast Company, now based in Cincinnati, was the top producer in America, well on its way to spawning several generations of millionaires.

  Louis Fleischmann was not directly involved in the yeast business, though a small stake in it provided him a very handsome income, about sixty thousand dollars a year as Raoul was growing up. To promote its product, the family established the Fleischmann Vienna Model Bakery at the 1876 Centennial in Philadelphia. The restaurant proved such a success that it was transplanted to Tenth Street and Broadway in New York, and the family prevailed on Louis to run it. Though the café was popular, Louis was unhappy and eventually gave it up, but not before leaving a small mark on American culture. To underscore the fresh-baked quality of his bread, each evening Louis gave away the restaurant’s unused loaves to passersby. Word of these handouts got around, and thus was born the concept of the “breadline.”

  Louis went on to establish a bakery at Eighty-first Street and East End Avenue. It wasn’t a huge success, but it provided an adequate income—which was fortunate, for around this time a family feud over control of Fleischmann’s Yeast resulted in the severing of Louis’s financial ties to the company. As a boy Raoul was more interested in the old livery horses stabled at the bakery than in the business itself, but after college (one year at Princeton, three at Williams) he dutifully went into the family operation. By 1910 he was running the place, and in 1911 he merged the company with eighteen other New York bakeries to form the General Baking Company, whose first real success came with the introduction of Bond Bread. The twenty-six-year-old Fleischmann managed General’s two plants, making a comfortable ten thousand dollars a year at a job that he considered important, if somewhat tedious. In later life, after he had made his own fortune in publishing, he enjoyed referring to himself as “the honest baker.”

  For all the privilege in his upbringing, and as much as he loved his family, Raoul grew up with strong feelings of disconnection. He and his siblings were not intimate; one older brother was remote, another killed himself, and his sisters, it seemed, were always in Europe. He was probably closest to his flamboyant cousin Julius, Carl’s son, who came to run Fleischmann’s Yeast and whose death in 1925 so unsettled Raoul. A more fundamental rootlessness, and one that tormented him all his life, involved his heritage. The Fleischmanns were Jews, but Raoul’s parents went to great lengths to camouflage this fact, if not expunge it altogether, even to the point of baptizing Raoul and his brothers and sisters as Catholics. “We never went to Sunday school; we never went to church; we certainly never went to any temple, and I did not know what I was,” Fleischmann would write near the end of his life in his private history of the family. “Why they gave up the Jewish religion, I have no idea, and they did it in the most sloppy, unworthy way. They just let the whole subject of religion drop out of their lives, and we children were presumably required to make up our own minds.”

  This denial of heritage by a prosperous family might be understood in light of Austria’s virulent anti-Semitism, yet in the family, and within Raoul himself, it caused no end of confusion and conflict. As he acknowledged, “This whole subject is a mess in my life … and is one of the few facts that reflects very little credit upon my parents.” His emotional discomfort with his Jewishness at times verged on disdain, it seems; on more than one occasion acquaintances were taken aback to hear the usually gracious Fleischmann utter an anti-Semitic slur. When Ross approached the publisher about stopping advertisements in The New Yorker by restricted hotels and resorts, Fleischmann, whose extended family had built so many summer homes in one part of the Catskills that a nearby village was renamed Fleischmann, is reported to have replied that the ads were actually a service “because then the Jewish clientele knows forthrightly where they are not made comfortable.” Eventually he relented, and in 1942 all restricted advertising was banned from the magazine.

  Raoul Fleischmann and son Peter, circa 1930. (Walter Scottshinn)

  Raoul Fleischmann was a short man, elegant, good company, with twinkling blue eyes and a touch of noblesse oblige. He was a person of habit. His lunchtime regime, for instance, seldom varied: two Beefeater martinis straight up, a dozen oysters on the half shell, and ice cream. He never lost his love of gambling and horses, interests that neatly converged in his passion for Thoroughbred racing. As a businessman he was neither a screamer nor a backslapper. He was firm but effectively low key with the business-side people, who genuinely liked and respected him. His office door literally was always open to them, and anyone dropping by could count on finding him in his suit coat, never in shirtsleeves. If he was not as creative as Ross, he was intelligent and, more important, shrewd. Where Ross was a doubtful poker player because his face forever betrayed his hand, Fleischmann was a good one because he was unflappable. He also tended to keep his own counsel. At the outset of The New Yorker, when he knew nothing about magazine publishing, he never let on; instead, he learned as he went. And the more he learned, the more he relished this life he had fallen into, a business about as far away from the predictable, prosaic world of baking as could be imagined. He was always as proud of The New Yorker as Ross was, if not more so.

  Certainly Fleischmann had earned the right. Having been lulled into the enterprise back in 1924 on the understanding that his total contribution would be twenty-five thousand dollars, Fleischmann actually spent over the next three years the better part of his total net worth, some seven hundred thousand dollars. (Of that total, a hundred thousand came from his wife, Ruth, who had considerable independent means.) Week after week he wrote personal checks to cover the magazine’s bills. At first he took back more stock in exchange, but when his stake reached fifty percent—Ross’s never exceeded his original ten percent—Fleischmann stopped increasing his equity, and the last half of his investment amounted to loans that he prayed his magazine might one day be in a position to repay. It was never Fleischmann’s intention to accumulate a huge personal stake in The New Yorker—with subsequent splits he let his share fall back to thirty-five percent—and over the years he was fairly liberal in bestowing stock on business-side executives. (A handful of key editorial employees—but only a handful, such as the Whites—received stock too.)

  How was it, then, that this affable man, who was either too foolish or too sentimental to let The New Yorker die, came to earn the “mortal antipathy” of his partner, Harold Ross, the kind of gut-level disdain that Fleischmann himself described as “a hatred which is almost an obsession”? In the beginning, certainly, anyone could see that the shaggy Ross and the suave Fleischmann were unlikely associates, but how did it happen that they wound up like two antagonists in a knife fight, lashed together at the wrist against their will? That they could go without speaking for years, referring to one another as “that son of a bitch”? That twenty years after they began, Ross would protest being “robbed” by “Fleischmann et al., [who] hogged everything they could hog, which was practically everything there was”?

  Looking back on it, their relationship can be charted like a plunging trendline, with several especially nasty clashes serving as the plot points. In general, though, their differences could always be reduced to one question: Where should the mone
y go? According to Peter Fleischmann, who succeeded Raoul as publisher of The New Yorker, “My father used to say that he and Ross always got along well until they began making money, and that’s when the trouble started.”

  ——

  A New Yorker hallmark, from the magazine’s earliest days, has been the extraordinary separation of business from editorial—what staffers on both sides have always called church and state. The concept transcended editorial independence to include physical separation: in their first home and their second (in 1935 The New Yorker moved to its better-known address, 25 West Forty-third Street), the business and editorial employees were on different floors, kept apart, with fraternizing regarded more like trespassing. This philosophy dates from the beginning, that brief but crucial time when the two men were truly “equal” partners, even financially. Of course Ross would have insisted on complete editorial freedom, and Fleischmann, not yet knowing the ways of meddling publishers, would have concurred. Rather quickly they established “the ground rules,” as William Shawn explained it years later: “The publisher was to have the overall responsibility for the business, and the editor was to have the responsibility for the magazine,” a neat and not insignificant distinction. The editor had full control of the editorial product, staff, and operation—that is to say, what the magazine was—without interference from the business side. The publisher’s job was to find the revenue and pay the bills. Should he become dissatisfied with the performance of the editor, as part of his “overall responsibility” the publisher theoretically could remove him. Of course, at The New Yorker this would always prove to be a little trickier in practice than in theory.