Genius in Disguise Read online

  Sometimes the experiences Ross did wish to share were just as confounding. According to Patricia, her mother was flummoxed, as most wives would be, when her husband invited her along to chat with some local prostitutes. Ross was intrigued by what made people tick—hence his fixation with detective magazines—and over his years of roving he had come to know hundreds of what he called “fallen women.” He was genuinely more curious about their lives than their wares, but Frances neither shared nor understood the compulsion.

  Before long Ross’s second marriage was going the way of the first, a reality that by late 1938 and early 1939 was obvious, if not surprising, to friends. The tension was compounded by a swirl of rumors regarding Frances’s pre-Ross pedigree and alleged affairs; doubtless these were spawned, at least in part, by her foreign birth, by the age differential, and by the fact that Frances’s brief, mysterious first marriage was not supposed to be common knowledge. A prime source of this upsetting gossip, it turned out, was Woollcott, who never liked Frances—the feeling definitely was mutual—and who was on the outs with Ross early in 1939 after The New Yorker published a bittersweet three-part Profile of him (title: “Big Nemo”) written by Gibbs.

  Quite young at this time, Patricia recalls no pivotal arguments or hysterical scenes between her mother and father. She remembers only how one summer day in 1939 they simply disappeared, not to return for some time. Later she learned that they had gone to Reno to obtain a divorce. Even in Nevada at that time grounds had to be proven, so Frances’s complaint accused Ross of “extreme cruelty,” alleging that he often stayed out late drinking, and on other occasions was rude to her friends, all of which caused her emotional distress. No doubt there was some truth in the charges, but again—as in Ross’s divorce from Jane—everyone knew how to play his or her part. The divorce was decreed on August 26, a Saturday morning. Ross’s prenuptial agreement with Frances was annulled, but it didn’t matter. That afternoon, Frances drove to Carson City—to get married.

  The groom was another Harold—Harold Wilkinson, though he was known to one and all as Tim. An Englishman, Wilkinson was a genial, wealthy Shell Oil executive. He and Ross got on famously from the start, which made the shared custody of Patty much more amicable than it might have been. “He is a man of substance,” Ross told Rebecca West, “and it was a thousand to one that she would marry a bum.”

  ——

  Just before their marriage began unraveling, in the summer of 1938, Ross took Frances back to Europe for an extended vacation. This was to be something of the grand tour, with stops in England, Scotland, France, and Switzerland. He was most keen to show Frances the World War I battlefields and the Paris of his Stars and Stripes years, but anticipating this, she thwarted him. As Frank Sullivan recalled it, “The second they got into the Gare du Nord, or whatever, she popped into Mainbochers with [traveling companion] Sophie Gimbel and didn’t come out until four days later, just in time to take the train to Cherbourg. So poor Ross had to go see Noter [sic] Dame alone.”

  Since he was to be away two months, Ross signed over the power of attorney for his securities to his private secretary, Harold Winney. It was merely a precaution, against the chance that one of his various accounts or trusts would require emergency attention. He already relied on Winney to administer his personal banking and checking anyway, so after he signed the papers he promptly forgot about it. It was the costliest mistake—financially speaking, at least—of his life.

  Quiet and mousy, Harold Winney was the very incarnation, some thought, of the Thurber Man. He was also efficient and, most of all, discreet. He had come to The New Yorker in 1930 and for half a dozen years had served Ross well and faithfully, not only with his personal finances but in the most sensitive kinds of office matters. As mentioned earlier, it was no easy thing to earn Ross’s trust, but once a person had it, he had it for keeps.

  Unbeknownst to Ross, Winney had already started his defalcations, albeit on a small scale. Once the timid secretary discovered how little attention his boss paid to bank statements and the like, it was all too easy for him to forge the distinctive “H. W. Ross” scrawl and write himself several checks for cash. As these involved only a few hundred dollars here and there, Ross never noticed. He wrote such checks himself all the time.

  By signing over power of attorney for his securities, however, Ross practically invited an escalation of the thefts. Beginning in 1939, Winney grew ever more bold, dipping in and out of Ross’s accounts, selling some stock here, transferring some there to keep things outwardly in balance to the editor’s unwary eye. A secret gambler, Winney lost much of the money at the track. A homosexual, he lavished increasingly expensive presents on his men friends. Upon Roosevelt’s reelection in 1940, Winney threw a champagne party at a suite in the Astor Hotel. Later Ross remarked that he had been by the Astor several times that night. “I was hit on the head by my own champagne corks,” he complained in amazement.

  Then in 1941 Winney tapped a new source: he began drawing advances on Ross’s salary. He could pull off this audacious trick because it was not uncommon for his boss to take advances, and because Ross had his checks deposited directly into the Guaranty Trust Company, where he banked. Of course he also relied on Winney to keep track of these accounts.

  As it was, only a chance conversation finally unmasked Winney. That July, just before Ik Shuman was to leave town on vacation, Fleischmann pulled him aside and casually inquired whether Ross was hard up for cash. Shuman was taken aback by the question; he didn’t think Ross was particularly pressed, and he asked why Fleischmann thought he was. The publisher replied that the editor had already drawn his salary through that December.

  Shuman reported back to Ross, who said no, he believed he was extended only a few months. He called in Winney for an explanation, and the secretary assured him that the advance was only through September. This satisfied Ross, but a few weeks later, when Shuman returned from his vacation, he had Ross’s payroll records pulled. Fleischmann had been right; the editor was withdrawn through the end of the year.

  Again Ross summoned Winney. Under questioning his secretary admitted that December was correct after all, then launched into an obfuscatory “explanation.” A baffled Ross finally waved him off and said the hell with it, he’d stop by the bank tomorrow and find out for himself what was going on.

  With that Winney left the office for his Brooklyn apartment. There he scribbled a note, went into the kitchen, turned on the four gas jets on the stove, lay down on the floor, and died. He was thirty-seven.

  Friends and colleagues were astounded that Ross could be so thoroughly swindled by his own secretary, but everything about the situation played into Winney’s thieving hands. Ross’s finances were tremendously complicated, yet he didn’t want to be bothered by them. Unexpected revenue was beginning to stream in from the restaurant that he had underwritten for his friend Dave Chasen, and yet there were always gambling losses going out. Moreover, because of his position, Winney was able to intercept any correspondence that might have tipped off his boss. Mostly, however, Winney’s crimes were possible because Ross was capable of spectacular inattention. Several years later the editor tried to explain this phenomenon to Stryker: “As I have said, and as few people understand, I get so engrossed in my editorial duties that I slip up in personal matters and, in effect, need a guardian. Anybody—Winney included—can take advantage of me when my eye is off the ball as it necessarily is here.” Even in this calamity he managed to make The New Yorker culpable.

  The money meant less to Ross than the egregious breach of trust, and his initial response to Winney’s death was pity. Sitting in the Ritz bar that afternoon with Sullivan, a dazed Ross kept muttering, “The little bastard, why didn’t he say something to me about it? I wouldn’t have thrown him into jail.” The next day he told McKelway, “The poor son of a bitch. Christ, if I’d known he was in the hole I could have helped him out.” (He couldn’t help adding, “Of course he was always at opening nights with a friend—I mig
ht have known.”)

  For days detectives buzzed about the office, trying to make sure Winney’s death was really a suicide (it was) and to piece together exactly what had happened. Meanwhile, Ross asked one of his own sleuths, reporter Eugene Kinkead, to assess the full monetary damage. Right away it became clear that the embezzlement was much greater than first believed, and the editor’s sympathy turned to anger.

  In his mortification, Ross initially insisted that the swindle was only in the ten-thousand-dollar range. Later, New Yorker staffers were told it was more like seventeen thousand. Ross’s damage control was so effective that for years, whenever people brought up the strange case of Harold Winney, these were the numbers they cited. But the truth was that over six years, Harold Winney actually stole more than seventy thousand dollars.

  Faced with so staggering a loss, Ross transferred his rage from the dead man to Guaranty Trust, “which recently allowed me to be forged out of all my worldly cash and securities.” He retained Stryker to press the bank for restitution, but expected nothing to come of it. For its part, the Guaranty searched for ways it might legally reimburse Ross, a valued client; yet because he had allowed himself to be victimized, there was nothing to be done.

  No matter; Ross never forgave the bank, and in fact conducted something of a one-man vendetta against it. A few years after the Winney swindle, Ross’s then-secretary, Harriet Walden, caught the bank in a one-cent discrepancy in his checking statement. She was inclined to overlook the penny, but Ross seized on it. He taunted the bank for weeks about its carelessness and demanded a written apology. The day he got it, he was as happy as she had ever seen him, Mrs. Walden said.

  It took more than two years to unsnarl the insurance and estate questions that resulted from Winney’s crimes and suicide. Ross did finally receive one reimbursement check—for $3,705.15.

  ——

  “Any American can be taken for seventeen thousand or twenty thousand dollars,” Thurber duly noted, “but it takes a really great eccentric to be robbed of seventy-one thousand dollars right under his busy nose.” Ross’s financial eccentricity transcended mere myopia to include some unorthodox investments, made with eyes wide open. A Colorado relative got him to sink money into an unproductive gold mine, for instance, and he lost thousands of dollars speculating in a company that produced an automatic spray painting gun—a good idea that, sadly, outpaced the technology.

  Harold Ross was the kind of man who could argue for hours against paying a certain writer an extra twenty bucks, on principle, for a Profile, then turn around and give the man a hundred dollars from his own pocket if he happened to be down on his luck. His personal generosity was expansive and legendary. Perhaps it was simple justice, then, that with all his bad financial tidings, he would realize a windfall where he never expected it, from a personal loan to a hard pressed friend.

  Ross came to know the personable Dave Chasen through the comedian’s partner, Joe Cook, who was a great friend and fellow prankster (thanks to Cook’s wide travels, Ross amassed one of America’s great collections of Gideon Bibles). In the Twenties Cook and Chasen were one of the most popular comedy teams in vaudeville, the red-mopped, Ukraine-born Chasen playing foil to the rollicking Cook. Performing was Chasen’s first love; his second was cooking. He regularly put on lavish backstage feeds—his specialties were barbecued spareribs and chili—for cast members and lucky guests. For years friends urged him to start his own restaurant; Ross went further, pledging his financial support if Chasen ever became serious about the idea.

  When the talkies killed vaudeville and Parkinson’s disease ended Cook’s career, the orphaned Chasen headed for Hollywood in the vain hope of breaking into motion pictures. Ross was so worried about him that he quietly encouraged some producers to hire Chasen, but it didn’t help. Nearly broke and utterly discouraged, his career languishing, Chasen started thinking again about that restaurant and wired Ross.

  Ross responded with $3,500 and got another friend, stockbroker Daniel Silberberg, to pitch in a smaller amount. It was enough for Chasen to acquire a plain stucco building on Beverly Boulevard in Beverly Hills—where the restaurant still stands today—and start pulling together his new business. There, in December 1936, he opened Chasen’s Southern Barbecue. The menu wasn’t auspicious—chili, barbecue and burgers were virtually the only offerings—and neither were the surroundings. Six tables and a chili counter were crammed into the tiny dining room. Chasen was so strapped that a friend, the director Frank Capra, brought his own silverware from home for the place settings, and the proprietor did everything, from the cooking to the dishwashing.

  Still, the good food, cheap prices, and celebrity clientele—charter regulars included Capra, Cagney, Benchley, W. C. Fields, Frank Morgan, and Pat O’Brien—were customer magnets. Chasen’s took off almost from the start. The Hollywood crowd made the little chili parlor a kind of boys’ club; hanging out in the back room, they could get a massage, play cards, or guzzle Dave’s thirty-five-cent drinks. The indefatigable Chasen fired off increasingly rosy progress reports to his benefactor. Ross was delighted but dispatched his old pal McNamara to keep an eye on matters anyway.

  While it was common knowledge that Ross had staked Chasen, few people knew the extent of his enthusiasm and personal involvement. The reverse of his inattentive side was the astonishing zeal he mustered when he became interested in something, and he was intensely interested in helping make Chasen’s a success. He bought out Silberberg and kept sending Chasen money for expansion. The man who James M. Cain marveled was treated like “the king of England” at “21” had firm opinions about eating and eateries. Chasen welcomed Ross’s input on literally every aspect of the restaurant, from his assessment of glassware breakage to his critique of the menu (entrées and typos). Ross looked for prospective headwaiters. He sent instructions for the proper way to smoke a turkey (“take a fresh turkey and soak it in brine for three days …”) and to mix an intoxicating drink from his San Francisco days, a pisco punch. When World War II made good Scotch almost impossible to get, it was Ross who pulled strings with Joseph Kennedy to take care of Chasen’s.

  In those first years Ross put some twenty thousand dollars into the operation, and he watched with paternal pride as Chasen, with hard work, splendid food, and showmanship, turned it into one of the great restaurants of the world, a favorite of movie stars and presidents. Magazine editors liked it too, and whenever Ross was in California he held court there with his friends from the old days—Benchley, Mankiewicz, Nunnally Johnson, Dorothy Parker, the Marx boys. At Chasen’s, he was treated less like a king than like a god.

  When visiting California Ross often held court at Dave Chasen’s restaurant. Here he is joined by Chasen, left, and Nunnally Johnson. (Courtesy of Chasen’s)

  For his faith and perseverance, Ross got back more than ten times his investment in Chasen’s. He made so much money, in fact, that it started to bother him. He began to think he was taking advantage of Chasen the way that he perceived Fleischmann had taken advantage of him. Thus in the late Forties he and Chasen worked out an arrangement wherein Ross began to back out of the enterprise; by 1953, ownership of the restaurant was to revert entirely to the people who had made it a success, Chasen and his family. As it happened, Ross’s death in 1951 hastened that transition.

  To this day, upstairs at Chasen’s can be found The New Yorker Room, an intimate space used for private parties and special occasions. The walls are paneled in rich, dark wood and decorated with Manhattan scenes and original Thurber drawings. Hanging prominently at the head of the room is an oil portrait of Harold Ross, looking for all the world like a man who can’t believe his luck.

  CHAPTER 9

  LIFE ON A LIMB

  In more than fifty-five years at The New Yorker, the versatile Philip Hamburger has performed many duties, and for a brief while he was even part-time movie critic. One day he saw Gloria Swanson in Sunset Boulevard and was not exactly moved to superlatives. As he recalled, “I wrote, �
�This is a pretentious slice of Roquefort,’ and I turned in the review.”

  A short while later, an anxious Ross came by, running his hands through his hair in customary distress, the very picture of the man who always said that when he wrote his autobiography he would call it My Life on a Limb. “Goddammit, Hamburger, what are you trying to do to me? This is a movie everyone is raving about. They say it’s going to win the Academy Award. And you call it Roquefort!”

  Now it was Hamburger’s turn to be anxious, but he had an intuition. “Have you seen it?” he asked the editor.

  “Yeah, I saw it,” Ross replied. “It was a piece of shit.”

  The review ran, with cheese.

  It’s a hard thing to say what an editor is, much less explain what makes one great. In the narrowest sense, editors lay twitchy hands on someone else’s work, fixing it, patching it, polishing it, and generally trying to keep it upright. In the broadest sense, however, they set the agenda, standards, and tone for a publication. They hire and fire; they pick stories, and the writers to go with them. They must have enough ego to confidently steer talented people, but the will to subordinate it. They must assuage prima donnas, compel laggards, and sober up drunks. Equal parts shaman and showman, they must have an unwavering vision for their publication, convey it to a staff, and then sell it to the great yawning public. For these reasons and many others, editing a magazine is not a job suited to the faint or uncertain, and it is enormously difficult to do well. Harold Ross arguably did it better than anyone who went before him, and not a few people would say anyone since.