Genius in Disguise Page 28

  But at other times Ross followed his fixation for facts right out the window. E. J. Kahn told of an occasion during World War II when he cabled a dispatch on deadline from the South Pacific. The story had to do with how Japanese bombing raids were driving American troops into the jungle, where mosquitoes fed on them, so Kahn made a passing reference to the nefarious alliance between the “Japs and the mosquitoes.” Somehow in transmission “Japs” became “waps.” Kahn was incommunicado, so back in New York his editor decided “waps and mosquitoes” must be “wasps and mosquitoes.” Seeing this, Ross was thrown, though not for long. He had his fact checkers contact entomologists at the Museum of Natural History, who decided, based on the evidence, that Kahn had stumbled onto a rare strain of wasps long thought vanished. Not only did “wasps” make the magazine; so did several lines explaining their remarkable resurrection.

  ——

  In 1934, McKelway was writing what he intended to be a single-part Profile of dancer Bill Robinson, and in the course of the piece he made a glancing reference to Harlem. As Ross read the proof, something about the offhand mention struck him as inadequate; “What is Harlem?” he queried. As McKelway later explained, “Ross didn’t mean he didn’t know what Harlem was, or that anybody else didn’t know, but that an offhand reference to such an interesting place shouldn’t be made in such a piece.” His editor having cracked open the door, McKelway responded with an extended essay on Harlem, as well as what the neighborhood meant to Robinson, and he to the neighborhood. The result was that a one-part Profile became a much richer two-parter.

  Reading the Profile Ross was flabbergasted, though pleased, at what his small remark had wrought. Still, he couldn’t help himself from muttering in mock dismay, “Jesus Christ, two parts on a coon.” His attitudes toward race were no more or less contrary than any other aspect of his makeup. A product of the nineteenth-century West and a man of coarse language anyway, he casually used the pedestrian slurs of the day, especially for blacks and homosexuals. Yet his social conscience was strong, considerably more advanced than one might have expected from the son of a Colorado prospector.

  Whatever his views, they were of no real consequence to him or his magazine—which was, after all, still being put out by mostly middle-class whites for mostly middle- and upper-class whites—until 1942, when a highly charged letter, composed in haste and given scant thought, blew up in his face.

  In the fall of 1941, the state of Connecticut was proposing to create a public picnic area along the Merritt Parkway adjacent to Ross’s property. Ross and nearby homeowners took a dim view of the project, and when the neighborhood association decided to file a protest he was quick to do his part. He dashed off a letter to Governor Robert Hurley, addressing him “in a state of considerable panic and alarm” and describing the ramifications of the park in the kind of hysterical terms that his staff members knew well but that gave the uninitiated pause.

  Ross began by explaining that he and his neighbors had worked hard for their property, yet already had experienced many headaches—litter, petty theft, vandalism, and skinny-dipping strangers in the river—because of the parkway. If the proposed park was meant only for Stamford residents, Ross said, he might understand it, but opening it to all

  is just inviting Harlem and the Bronx, New York City, up to Stamford to spend the day. I do not mean to be undemocratic, but by God, you couldn’t choose a more alarming bunch of people anywhere in the world. The parkway has put Stamford within thirty or forty minutes of the northern sections of New York City, and Stamford is sitting on a keg of dynamite as it is.… Stamford is on the verge of becoming the playground of the Borough of the Bronx and the dark, mysterious, malodorous stretches of Harlem, without doing anything further, and why the State of Connecticut should gleefully go out of its way to complicate the situation, I don’t know.

  Ross strongly urged Hurley to reconsider, closing, “I write in sheer terror.”

  There the matter lay dormant, a private complaint between a citizen (albeit an influential one) and his governor, until the following spring. That May, The New Yorker published the Gibbs-written Profile of Ralph Ingersoll, who had moved on from Fortune to help midwife Life and, in 1940, founded the legendary New York newspaper PM. The Profile, flattering enough in Gibbs’s backhanded way, nonetheless gleefully needled Ingersoll for his hypochondria and his gift for overachievement (it was titled “A Very Active Type Man”), and allowed Ross to get in some anonymous digs at his former lieutenant. A few weeks later, PM acquired the ammunition with which to return fire. The Stamford newspaper had got hold of Ross’s letter to Hurley, and PM decided to reprint it. Ingersoll himself was preoccupied with his draft board at the time; better than most he understood Ross’s hyperbolic rhetoric, and he didn’t consider Ross in any way racist, but he also did not want to interfere with his editors (who may still have been smarting from Ross’s great line “PM is put out by a bunch of young fogies”). When the letter hit New York, to be reprised again in the other major papers and newsmagazines, all hell broke loose.

  Calling Ross a “grandee,” Bronx Borough President James J. Lyons suggested that the editor might get a better view of normal American life if he spent more time mingling with the good people of Harlem and the Bronx. “There are thousands of those who love and practice the democratic ideals that are now suffering in internment camps, while your ilk sit in Ivory Towers with a superiority complex.” Walter Winchell, who was feuding with The New Yorker anyway over an unflattering Profile, similarly castigated Ross in his NBC Radio broadcast. Letters poured in, some supporting Ross but most accusing him of prejudice against blacks and Jews.

  Ross publicly acknowledged that parts of his letter were thoughtless and overblown. He tried to explain, rather lamely, that he had not meant to slight the Jewish or black communities; his concern about the park was that it would draw crowds, period, and since the Bronx and Harlem are New York’s northernmost neighborhoods, he assumed this was where the crowds would come from. He told Lyons that “The New Yorker … if you’ll pardon my saying so, has an outstanding record for supporting democracy, decency, and tolerance, and even of tolerating such obstreperous phenomena of the age as flag-waving politicians.”

  Though outwardly defiant, Ross was stunned—and genuinely chastened—by the furor. “I was certainly indiscreet in my remarks,” he admitted privately to Frank Sullivan, “and I’ll never send another letter off without reading it carefully—to a governor.” He added that he certainly had nothing against Jews, but had written the letter “the day after I had a run-in with four carloads of flashy and slick coons, the bad boys, in sports clothes and yellow roadsters with convertible tops. But that was long before the war and the gasoline shortage, etc., and the matter would have been dead if it hadn’t been for my pals on PM.” (The park, by the way, was not built.)

  The charge of anti-Semitism can be dispensed with summarily, as it was simply untrue. From his brave coverage of the Leo Frank trial to his position on restricted resort ads to his protests of anti-Semitism in other publications, Ross’s convictions were strong and consistent. More to the point, consider Ross’s associations: the cofounder of The New Yorker was Jewish, as were dozens of Ross’s top staff writers and contributors and hundreds of his friends. He was even made an honorary member (Ross being a common Jewish surname) of a Jewish men’s club.

  Similarly, if Ross casually referred to homosexuals as “fairies” and “pansies,” the fact was that over the years he had dozens of gay and lesbian friends and staff members and, for his time, was rather sophisticated in his outlook on the subject. Their well-known sexual orientations, for instance, in no way eclipsed Ross’s respect and affection for John Mosher, an early film critic and longtime first reader for The New Yorker, or for Paris correspondent Janet Flanner.

  Much trickier to sort through are Ross’s personal attitudes toward blacks. From the few instances the subject even arises in his correspondence, one almost gets the sense that he regarded blacks (As
ians, too, for that matter) as less inferior to whites than simply different from them. If on the one hand he allowed that “coons are either funny or dangerous” or remarked that a certain person wrote “like an educated Negro,” elsewhere he observed that in his experience blacks were much more adept at new languages than whites. Indeed, it appears that Ross considered racial differences a fundamental fact of life, and he had little patience with those who, in his view, pretended otherwise. In a 1948 letter to Emily Hahn, he wrote, “I meet many modern Abraham Lincolns these days, who have freed the colored race all over again. Their activities consist mostly of entertaining the Negroes in their homes. That doesn’t convince me at all. The test comes when Negroes entertain the white folks in their homes, and the white folks go. Most of the activity seems to me straight, self-conscious patronization of the colored folk—or dangerously close to being simply that—and moreover, I think the colored folk feel it.”

  Richard Rovere ran into the same sentiment in Ross’s comments on an early Letter from Washington. As Rovere recalled in his book Arrivals and Departures, the letter’s subject was a report on segregation in the District of Columbia, and Rovere obviously was sympathetic to the idea that it should be eradicated. In going over the piece with a nervous William Shawn, he spotted Ross’s queries nearby and asked if he might see them. In the notes the editor maintained that the race issue was much more complex than Rovere realized, and that the writer “plainly doesn’t know what he’s talking about.… This is damned foolish stuff, and altogether too much of it is getting into the magazine. I don’t know about the rest of you, but I’m saying right now that if the Oak Room [of the Algonquin] goes black, I’m clearing out. I suppose we’ve got to print this, but I hereby file a protest. I don’t see why this magazine has to draw every Abraham Lincoln in New York.”

  The tirade had so abashed Shawn that he hadn’t wanted to show Rovere these notes. Haltingly, he tried to explain: for all Ross’s fine qualities, he told Rovere, the man had some blind spots, and “on the Negro question … he did not share the enlightened view.” In the meantime, Ross himself had thought better of the remarks; he was waiting for Rovere as the writer left Shawn’s office, and he apologized. “Jesus, I’ve got nothing against Negroes,” he said. “I guess your piece was all right, Rovere. Just hit me at a bad moment. I hope you don’t mind my talking this way.”

  Rovere told Ross, as he had Shawn, that there was nothing to apologize for, because what the writer had fixed on was Ross’s remark, “I suppose we’ve got to print this.” At that moment, Rovere would recall,

  my admiration for Ross was … almost limitless. The man clearly despised what I had written for his magazine. He thought it was nonsense. To a degree, he regarded me as an enemy of his values. Yet the article was factually accurate, reasonably well written, and a serious piece of reporting by a man he had asked to cover Washington, and that, for Ross, was that.

  Therein, as always, resides the heart of the Ross paradox: He might say or feel one thing, but what did he do in the magazine? And there, whether it was a Rovere Letter or a Dorothy Parker short story (such as “Arrangement in Black and White”) or a forceful E. B. White Comment on a black boardinghouse, New Yorker writers could attack intolerance because they were New Yorker writers. It is significant that with the exception of John Hersey’s “Hiroshima,” probably the Fact story Ross was proudest of printing was Rebecca West’s powerful account of the Greenville lynching. He was pleased that so many Southern newspapers had excerpted or otherwise used it to examine the despicable practice, and he was quick to credit her upon learning that in 1947—West’s story had appeared that spring— there was only one reported lynching in all the South. “I think probably your piece was a strong influence against lynchings,” he told her. “I think the South has got self-conscious about them and that it has gained a certain amount of enlightenment—or anyhow, restraint.”

  Rebecca West became one of Ross’s favorite reporters and a good friend. (UPI/Bettmann)

  Those people who saw Ross up close and knew him best—Shawn, Sullivan, the Whites—were well acquainted with his imperfections. Yet they also knew that as an editor, invariably he rose above them. During the Cold War, when this conservative man found himself publishing a magazine with a decidedly liberal, even leftish, cast to it, he wasn’t always happy about it. But he believed his loyalty was to his people, not to his own ideologies. “He was a man following a dream,” Andy White once said of Ross’s single-mindedness and integrity, “and that was good enough for me.”

  CHAPTER 10

  SKIRMISHES

  Printing the truth has its costs, and sometimes these include personal relationships. Sooner or later anyone who ever came to work for Harold Ross heard him declare that a journalist cannot afford to have friends. No doubt this must have struck some of his recruits as disingenuous, for Ross seemed to know more people than anyone else in New York. While it was true that his acquaintanceship was vast, probably in the thousands, it was just as true that he had very few intimates, and through the years New Yorker articles had indeed whittled at that trifling number. A man whose nature was to shy away from confrontations came to find them an inescapable part of his job.

  Crossing swords was never more painful for Ross than in the case of a friend and colleague he once described as being “built like the first joint of your thumb,” Alexander Woollcott. The decades have dimmed Woollcott’s star considerably, in large part because he was really less an author than a raconteur, albeit a good one. His single great creation, in fact, was Alexander Woollcott, and between the wars this was one of the most influential and omnipresent characters in American culture. In that primeval age before television or celebrity magazines, he was one of the great gatekeepers of fame, hard to miss and even harder to ignore.

  And hard to take. Many people simply dismissed Woollcott as a blowhard and bully, with a mean streak as wide as his cummerbund. Even friends suffered his derision. “Hello, repulsive,” he might greet a colleague dropping by his East Side apartment-cum-salon, known everywhere as Wit’s End. Yet hundreds did like him—loved him, in fact. “You know, I was Aleck’s dearest friend,” the actress Ruth Gordon told a startled audience of five hundred at Woollcott’s memorial service, then added, “And so, I suspect, were all of you.” These were the ones who ignored Woollcott’s defense-mechanism arrogance, treasured his wit, shared his many enthusiasms, and found that beneath the wattles lurked a man of surprising sentiment and compassion, to whom personal loyalty was the paramount virtue.

  The editor of The New Yorker was well acquainted with both Woollcotts. “He was a friend,” Ross recalled, “who demanded much and would pull you apart if you didn’t watch out.” For Ross, as for so many others, the Woollcottian trials were worth his bracing company, and for years he was as close to Aleck as he was to anyone—including, perhaps, Jane Grant. After all, his debt to Woollcott was incalculable. In France Aleck had been one of the first to detect greatness in the tumbledown private. In New York he was something of a mentor, seeing to it that the reticent Ross met the right people. He introduced the editor to his future wife, and he helped hatch the idea for what would become The New Yorker. Then for nearly six years he provided one of the magazine’s most popular columns, Shouts and Murmurs, the kind of feature that helped the magazine cement its bond with discerning readers. To Ross these obligations more than offset Aleck’s occasional insults and tantrums. Besides, loyalty was as important to Ross as it was to Woollcott, so when Aleck unilaterally severed their friendship after he was profiled in The New Yorker, as much as Ross tried to pretend it didn’t hurt, it did.

  Woollcott had stopped writing Shouts and Murmurs by a sort of mutual consent at the end of 1934. Both he and Ross had wearied of the wrangling over the off-color and tired nature of the column, not to mention the fact that Woollcott continued to endorse almost any product that would meet his price. Woollcott was also interested in pursuing other careers—including, remarkably for a former drama crit
ic, an acting career. “All the time [Woollcott] wrote for us he was a trial—something of a nuisance and an embarrassment,” Ross told Samuel Hopkins Adams. “That was just at the time he was getting drunk with power. He did the page for us, radio broadcasts, pages for other magazines, personal appearances, and Christ knows what.” Even so, both men took it for granted that at some point Woollcott would resume the column, and they went so far as to negotiate a pay raise and other matters. In the meantime, however, Woollcott simply became too busy and too big, less a journalist than a celebrity whose opinion on the best current reading was sought out by Franklin Roosevelt. Rather than return to The New Yorker, he instead began a regular page with the much larger Reader’s Digest, and his fame spread wider still.

  It was this ubiquitous Woollcott that Gibbs, in late 1938, suggested profiling. Ross was reluctant. The subject was uncomfortably close to him, and he could well imagine the sting of Woollcott’s retribution if the story was even remotely complete. On the other hand, he felt Woollcott had gotten too big for even his roomy britches, and there was no denying that he was an obvious Profile candidate. Not that Gibbs set out with the intention of carving up Woollcott. He had a certain respect for Aleck’s malicious charm and genius for self-promotion; it would be a challenge to capture in print so complex a beast. Ross at last acceded, and the resulting Profile leaned heavily on his many (unattributed) stories about Aleck.