Genius in Disguise Read online

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  Harold Ross comes to work. he walks stooped forward, as if leaning into a strong wind. Slung over his shoulder is a manuscript stuffed bag looking rather like a mail pouch, a long leather strap laced to his wrist so as not to leave behind by accident his precious cargo in trains or taxis—which he once did when he carried a conventional briefcase. A Parliament is stuck to his lower lip (inevitably described as pendulous) as if he has glued it there. Shambling along in a loose-fitting topcoat, battered homburg pulled down on his head, he calls to mind not so much a savvy New York editor as Willy Loman. He passes his secretary, Harriet Walden, and his longtime assistant and aide-de-camp, Louis Forster. He does not say hello; he does not say anything. Ross was not a “Have a nice day” kind of person, and in any case there will be time enough later for conversation.

  Inside his large, airy office, tucked into a corner of the nineteenth floor, he drops his coat onto the dingy linoleum. Clearly at a magazine that has always maintained—insisted on—a full quota of eccentrics, the founding editor established the tone. (White remembered one particular elevator operator there, a nervous young man who had obtained the job through his sister, a New Yorker secretary. One day he confided to office manager Daise Terry that he continually heard little voices in his ear. “What do the voices say?” she asked. Said the elevator man, “They keep saying, ‘Drop the sons of bitches.’ ”)

  On a credenza in Ross’s office are some dictionaries, on his desk a few manuscripts and some freshly sharpened pencils—a clerk has replaced the chewed ones from the day before—as well as the glass of cream and ulcer medication, Amphojel, that Mrs. Walden has left for him. He drinks this unpleasant cocktail at regular intervals through the day, and if anyone is in the room at the time he is apt to raise the glass, grimace, and say, “To your health!” In places paint is peeling from the walls. By way of furnishings, there are some Thurber drawings, the bewigged head of Sterling Finny, and a large, ugly poster of an Oriental nude that Mrs. Walden would later throw out one day when she could no longer abide it. In his previous office, on Forty-fifth Street, Ross had displayed the opera hat that Rudolph Valentino was wearing the night in 1926 that he collapsed and died. (Charlie MacArthur is said to have pilfered it from a collector and presented it to Ross with much fanfare, but a few years later it was lost in one of Ross’s many domestic moves.)

  Sitting in an old-fashioned wood-and-leather steno chair of daintier issue than one would imagine for a man of Ross’s size, the editor begins his office routine. He dives into the waiting pile of correspondence and interoffice memos, reading them over quickly, now and then crumpling one and tossing it to the floor. At day’s end Mrs. Walden will sort through this detritus to retrieve those letters requiring action or filing. Then he moves on to letters and memos of his own, pounding at his black typewriter in the way he learned as a boy reporter, his two index fingers firing like pistons. Formal correspondence he usually drafts himself and then edits before having it retyped, but personal notes, such as the story compliments he lavished on writers, he is apt to pass on as written, X-outs and all. Since he tends not to look at his hands when he types, he has been known to compose a whole note having started off on the wrong keys, leaving Mrs. Walden to unscramble it like a cryptographer.

  After an hour or two of this, Ross might typically go on to a more enjoyable pursuit, reading manuscripts or galley proofs of stories. He will read and approve virtually everything that goes into the magazine, and as he reads he concentrates so intensely that he won’t notice a person entering the room. Lost in thought, he clucks his tongue through that signature gap in his front teeth.

  Ross is often on the telephone, though unless a call is from a friend the conversation will likely be a perfunctory one. (He didn’t like his time wasted, and didn’t suffer fools. Patricia Ross recalls once seeing her father trapped in a telephone conversation he clearly had no use for. After pacing for twenty minutes he put down the receiver and left the room. A few moments later he came back, picked up the phone and said, “Oh, are you still there? I had to go to the bathroom—I’ve got diarrhea.”)

  Editors drift in and out through the day. (After one unsatisfying conference, Ross stared into the distance and said with a sigh, “I’m surrounded by a bunch of ‘no’ men.”) If it is Tuesday, his entire afternoon will be given over to the art meeting, where cartoons and cover illustrations are examined and culled. If it’s Thursday, he will work late into the night while the editors start buttoning up the next issue. If it’s Friday, he will sit down with Forster and go over all the sundry management matters that require his attention. (In contrast to Ross’s personal life, at work his follow-up was unrelenting, and he relied on Forster to keep him organized. At the time Forster was not only Ross’s executive assistant but his “A issue” editor—that is, the magazine’s chief scheduler and production traffic cop—and also assumed many of the administrative duties that Shuman had handled. As such, he was one of those unseen but indispensable people, like Hobart Weekes and Eleanor Gould Packard, The New Yorker’s chief copy editor for nearly fifty years, who kept the magazine steaming along week after week.)

  Otherwise, toward day’s end Ross might decide to roam the eighteenth floor, where staff writers could be found stuffed into cubbies with just enough room for two average-size human beings, one beat-up sofa, and some secondhand desks. Ross would be drawn by the siren sound of typing; finding a writer at home, he would poke his head in to exchange jokes, kick around story ideas, or simply to “let people in on things,” as one veteran staffer put it (pointedly contrasting this to Shawn’s close-to-the-vest style). He practiced “management by walking around” long before anyone thought to call it that.

  For the most part, however, writers encountered Ross in the “proofs.” Galley proofs are typeset, working versions of stories that a magazine intends to publish. Once a manuscript had been deemed far enough along at The New Yorker, it would be typeset in long, one-column galleys. Copies of these proofs then were distributed around the office so that the serious editing might commence.

  Armed with his proof, Ross set about to construct what was known as his query sheet. This was his primary weapon in the never-ending battle for clarity, as well as the source of countless anecdotes about him. His query sheet was a long, amazing list, sometimes two pages, sometimes eight or more, of questions, comments, sermonettes, and flights of fancy that came to him as he read a story. Each entry was numbered to correspond to his marked-up proof. His queries delighted some writers and outraged a few, but in any event they reveal, perhaps better than anything beyond the actual 1,399 issues of The New Yorker that he produced, his editing mind at work. (See Appendix III, this page.)

  When going over these long proofs, which Ross at times described as “coiling up around me like hissing snakes,” he reacted to the material in a manner opposite that of most casual readers: on a literal level first and then on an emotional level. Things needed to make sense to him. He was the kind of man who, while enjoying E. B. White’s children’s classic Stuart Little, could complain to the author that he should have had the protagonist adopted rather than “born” into the Little family, since everyone knows a human couple cannot conceive a mouse. He didn’t like to be surprised, which is one reason he couldn’t abide what New Yorker editors called “indirection.” That is, as Shawn once explained, it bothered Ross to have a character remove his hat if it had not already been established that he was wearing a hat. And to the extent possible, he liked to have everyday verities observed. Going over a John Cheever story that unfolded over the course of a long day, he suggested that the characters had better be sitting down to a meal soon.

  This, then, was the Ross that writers found in their proofs. There were almost audible snorts when he came to a far-fetched passage: “Bushwah,” he might write, or “Nuts.” Other times he could be painfully dry. Bainbridge says that about the worst thing one could incur on a proof was the dreaded “Oh”; this might happen when a writer had r
eached for what he considered a supremely subtle irony or artful flourish, only to elicit from Ross “Oh.” It was in the proofs that writers bumped up against his linguistic preferences and prejudices, such as his campaign against the use of words like “pretty” and “little” as limp adverbs—she was “pretty tired,” he was “a little perplexed”—rather than as the perfectly good adjectives that God and Ida Ross intended them to be.

  Often a query conveyed equal measures of inspiration and exasperation. When reading over John Hersey’s account of John F. Kennedy and the wreck of the PT-109, Ross stopped when Hersey said Kennedy managed to get a coconut to some natives, on which he “wrote a message.” “With what, for God’s sakes?” Ross demanded. “Blood?” Or if a writer dropped a surprise character into a story, deus ex machina, Ross was famously known to wonder, “Who he?”

  All New Yorker writers quickly became accustomed to Ross’s sharpshooting. Most appreciated it, regarding it as an inimitable expression of his care and concern for their work—and by extension, for them. During the editing of her story “The Groves of Academe,” Mary McCarthy told Katharine White, “I think Ross is wonderful.… I hated to concede it, but, as I say in the note, he is really right about the peppermint—you can hold it in your mouth but not properly suck it.” Others were less benign. A. J. Liebling, for one, never quite became reconciled to such microscopic examination, considering most—though certainly not all—of Ross’s questions trivial or beside the point. After one especially difficult tussle over a proof, Liebling found a sign painter to paint WHO HE? in gold letters on the glass portion of his office door. According to Liebling’s close friend Joseph Mitchell, “A few days later one of the elevator operators said that another tenant on that floor had asked him what in the name of God kind of product did the Who He? company put out.”

  Of course, at times an author’s ire was justified. Some of Ross’s queries were trivial, some were non sequiturs, and some were just plain odd. Every writer had favorite Rossisms. Emily Hahn wrote a story in which two characters were chatting beside a fireplace. Inquired Ross, “Which side of the fireplace?” A more widely circulated example was his response to an S. J. Perelman line about “the woman taken in adultery.” Asked the editor, “What woman?”

  William Maxwell, who sifted through hundreds of Ross’s query sheets as a writer and fiction editor, speculates that one reason for Ross’s more oddball questions was that he simply read too many proofs too fast. When he read a manuscript—say of a short story that the fiction editors were keen to buy—he invariably raised five or six solid questions that went to the heart of the piece’s quality or credibility. But when he was reading proofs, Maxwell says, compiling those query sheets in his stream-of-consciousness fashion, he was of necessity in a rush. Considering that under Ross The New Yorker typically ran over one hundred pages a week, and at times upwards of two hundred, the proofs amounted to a bottomless well; a fat issue might present the editor with two thousand column inches to read. Maxwell explained that it was not uncommon for Ross in his haste to misconstrue a statement early in a story, and based on this misstep string along a series of erroneous queries. He once spent hours marking up a Profile as woefully sketchy before realizing he was reading the second part of a two-part piece. Eleanor Gould Packard concurred that Ross would sometimes moan and groan in his queries, then catch himself and type, “Oh, I misread it!” Part of his charm, not to mention his successful management style, was that he would leave the comment there for all to see.

  At heart, Ross’s queries were a means to an end—his way of insisting that everything in The New Yorker be as clear and accurate as possible, that shortcuts be resisted and lazy work discouraged. His editors always knew which of his queries to disregard, which to finesse, and which to take seriously. Besides, in his twenty- or thirty-odd comments on a story, one or two usually would highlight some overlooked problem or otherwise improve the piece. His suggestions might be matters of nuance—altering “we can use a few dollars” to “we can use a few bucks” in Cheever’s “The Enormous Radio,” for instance, a change the author called “absolutely perfect”—or fact, such as pointing out that a writer really meant “birdshot” when he said “buckshot.” And who but Ross would have thought to ask, “Were the Nabokovs a one-nutcracker family?” These might seem small matters, but he subscribed strongly to the theory that God, if he existed, was in the details. Yet the big picture was seldom far from view. Hundreds of times, halfway into a story, the editor would pose the awful question that writers are so fearful of asking themselves: “Is this interesting?”

  Fortunately for them, Ross was interested in almost everything. He was always scribbling notes on cocktail napkins, menus, or those blank checks he carried around, with last night’s anecdote from Toots Shor’s or a gee-whiz fact just gleaned from his barber. Not surprisingly, much that piqued his interest found its way into The New Yorker, often only after this self-styled “hunch man” had paired up a certain writer with a certain idea. In early 1947 he persuaded his friend Rebecca West to come to the United States to do some pieces; once she was here, he dispatched her to Greenville, South Carolina, where some taxi drivers were accused of breaking into a jail and lynching a black man. In only a few weeks’ time West turned out a masterly and widely remarked-on series about the town, the trial, and grisly Southern justice.

  At about the same time, Ross prevailed on S. N. Behrman to return to London, where he had written some memorable stories during the war. “But Ross,” Behrman protested, “I’ve been. I’ve done it.” Ross persisted. “Write me a cold piece on London,” he said. Finally yielding, Behrman would recall, “I went. London was indeed cold. The resulting piece was called ‘It’s Cold at Lady Windermere’s.’ It was a singular mission: to register frigidity. Ross’s instinct was sound.”

  This same instinct was at work when Berton Roueché stumbled onto a genre that he would make his own, the medical detective story. Roueché had come to The New Yorker from St. Louis in 1944, and began work as a Talk reporter. Eventually he was assigned to write a story about the outbreak of a mysterious illness in Queens. Ross was pleased with the result, saying, “You know, this is kind of like Sherlock Holmes—like a detective story.” He suggested that Roueché follow it up with some similar pieces. These ran under a heading Ross devised, “Annals of Medicine,” and ultimately Roueché would write more than forty of them.

  A 1945 memo to Joseph Mitchell, not untypical of those Ross wrote every day, began by complimenting the writer on a recent triumph, then quickly veered off onto a pigeon tangent:

  I herewith pass the idea [for a story on the pigeons of New York] along for what it is worth, with some sympathy for the idea. I was in the Post Graduate hospital once for a week and all I could do was look out the window at East Side roofs and the pigeon activity was tremendous; gents were always waving fishing poles around scaring the pigeons into the air. I assume this was for exercise, for the pigeons returned as soon as the brandishing was over. [Lawton] Mackall says these fellows are mostly pigeon fanciers, rather than commercial raisers of pigeons, and that some New York pigeons are worth $1,200 for breeding purposes.… I suspect that Mackall is getting homing pigeons mixed up with common eating pigeons, but it may be that all the privately owned pigeons in New York are homing pigeons (otherwise, why would they stay home all the time?). Maybe homing pigeons are as good eating pigeons as any others.

  Lynchings, the cold in London, medical mysteries, pigeon pedigree: facts of all kinds not only intrigued Ross but moved him ever ahead as he consumed them, like a lumbering farm combine. It was no accident that the journalistic portions of the magazine (Talk, Profiles, Letters, Reporter at Large pieces, reviews, etc.) were termed Fact; they predominated, and clearly were Ross’s passion. In his heart, he never stopped being a newspaperman. He strove to make The New Yorker as current as possible, and he dreaded the few days between the magazine’s close and its appearance on the newsstand for fear that the interim might make it seem stale.
Indeed, Friday was his favorite day of the workweek because this was when Talk, the timeliest department of the magazine, was put together. While he read everything that went into the magazine, he took a personal interest in Talk, doing much of the hands-on editing and rewrite work himself.

  It was not merely the department’s currency that made Talk Ross’s favorite. Probably more than any other part of the magazine, it embodied what Ross was trying to achieve with The New Yorker generally. The stories were brief; they were anonymous and were propelled by their factual content; they lent themselves to humor; and at their best, just for a moment they pulled back the curtain on some hitherto little-known aspect or colorful denizen of metropolitan New York. They were, in a word, distillations, which took the very best kind of reporting and writing. Philip Hamburger, a Talk writer for many years, remembers happily sitting down with the editor to go over material line by line, occasionally to hear Ross utter a useful piece of advice, such as the time he said, “Never go cosmic on me, Hamburger.”

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  Since he usually found himself in front of old typewriters, Berton Roueché was in the habit of putting an apostrophe where the accent is supposed to go in his last name, so that it looked like this: Roueche’. After about a year of seeing this, Ross suddenly turned up one day at the writer’s door. “I’m getting sick and tired of this apostrophe after your name,” he said. “I’m sending in a typewriter man to put an accent key on your typewriter.” And he did. Though everyone understood that the apostrophe was nothing more than a typographical accommodation, to Ross “Roueche’ ” was patently incorrect, and he could no more abide it than he would a pebble in his shoe.