Genius in Disguise Read online

  The Profile was in three parts; Woollcott, who had cooperated fully, was given Gibbs’s preliminary draft to review. As he would later in writing about Ralph Ingersoll and his peccadilloes, Gibbs focused more than he might have on Aleck’s grotesqueries and petulance, but on the whole the Profile was fair, somewhat flattering— there was much about Aleck’s philanthropy, for instance—and quite funny. Woollcott examined the draft carefully and pronounced himself satisfied. “With certain reservations,” he telegraphed Gibbs, “you have made me very happy.”

  Alexander Woollcott: The “Town Crier” would break with his longtime friend over a New Yorker Profile. (Brown Brothers)

  The “certain reservations” involved a handful of anecdotes that Woollcott hoped could, and doubtless would, be deleted from the final version. One related an embarrassing but harmless hoax played on Woollcott during his “Town Crier” radio career. The other was more serious. It involved a buddy of Ross’s and Woollcott’s from The Stars and Stripes, Seth Bailey. Bailey, called Sergeant Quirt in the Profile, was an amiable ne’er-do-well, and after the war he prevailed on the kindnesses of his old comrades, especially Aleck, who let him move in for a time and gave him pocket money. Bailey drifted west, only to land in San Quentin for having counterfeited traveler’s checks and Southern Pacific paychecks. A stunned Woollcott was so sure of Bailey’s innocence that he rashly pledged to redeem any check provably traceable to his friend. Confronted with fraudulent drafts totaling thousands of dollars, he had to withdraw his offer.

  Woollcott continued to aid Bailey after his release. By 1939, however, the wayward friend had reformed and landed a job, with Ross’s help, at the Chicago American. Woollcott saw no need to dredge up this tawdry business, believing it subjected an army pal to ridicule and, worse, might jeopardize Bailey’s job if it became known that he was the counterfeiter in the story. Ross and Gibbs, however, considered the anecdote revealing of Woollcott, and they were confident that their use of a pseudonym protected Bailey. Just to be certain, Ross contacted Bailey’s editor in Chicago, who knew the whole story, to determine what would happen were Bailey unmasked. “Nothing would happen,” the editor told Ross. “What is one more ex-convict on the Chicago American?” Woollcott was not appeased.

  When the Profile, with anecdotes intact, appeared in March and April of 1939, various Woollcott friends were outraged and suggested that he should be too. His earlier sunny opinion notwithstanding, Aleck now took grave offense. “To me you are no longer a faithless friend,” he wrote to Ross. “To me you are dead. Hoping and believing I will soon be the same, I remain, Your quondam crony, A. Woollcott.”

  To Woollcott, using the Bailey story amounted to a personal betrayal of the worst kind, and he always insisted that this was his sole provocation in breaking with his friend. Ross had his doubts—he thought that Woollcott actually was more embarrassed by having to relive the radio hoax—but he was never sure. Whatever the real reason behind the estrangement, it bruised and confused Ross, and he badly wanted to patch things up. Shortly after the blowup Frank Sullivan was with him at “21” when someone mentioned that Woollcott was upstairs playing cribbage with Moss Hart. Ross decided to try a reconciliation; Sullivan thought it a bad idea, especially given that Ross was well into his cups by then, but he tagged along. “He was rebuffed as man has never been rebuffed,” Sullivan reported to E. B. White. “It was embarrassing. Aleck refused to shake hands with him and asked him to leave before he really started to tear loose on him.”

  The standoff continued for three years until Woollcott, having taken ill and convinced he was near death, proffered a truce. From his sickbed in Vermont he sent along this vintage sweet-and-sour message to Ross:

  I’ve tried by tender and conscientious nursing to keep my grudge against you alive, but I find it has died on me. In the matter of that chuckle-headed pathetically unsuccessful lawbreaker Sergeant Bailey, I still think that you were incredibly cruel in intention and a liar after the event; but it dawns on me a little late that, like most people I know, I, too, have been both cruel and dishonest at one time or another in my life. Anyway, what of it?

  The gesture bucked up Ross considerably, and he would have liked nothing more than to accept Aleck’s invitation to Vermont. By then, however, the United States had entered World War II, which meant that he was frantically trying to keep The New Yorker going in the face of massive staff defections to the war effort. Then he himself was hospitalized for ulcer flare-ups. Eventually Woollcott effected a miraculous recovery—and promptly withdrew his peace offering.

  Ross and Aleck never saw each other again. In January 1943, Woollcott, star of an extraordinary and lifelong melodrama, managed one of the most theatrical exits in show-business history. Fifteen minutes into a live panel discussion on CBS Radio—the subject was “Is Germany Incurable?” and Woollcott had just allowed that Germany deserved Hitler the same way Chicago deserved the Chicago Tribune—Aleck scribbled a note to the moderator that he was feeling sick, then collapsed at his microphone of a massive heart attack. He died later that night.

  ——

  For the most part, only the old algonquin cognoscenti knew or cared about the Ross-Woollcott spat. All New York heard about a later incident, however, when The New Yorker gored Walter Winchell, and the powerful gossip columnist extracted his revenge on Ross.

  Ross was never dazzled by power the way he was by glamour. There were powerful people he admired, but only if he discerned character behind the clout. As a rule, he enjoyed keeping the mighty humble, as J. Edgar Hoover discovered one Friday evening at the Stork Club. There Ross was dining with Lela Rogers and her niece Phyllis Fraser before the three headed up to Stamford for the weekend. Suddenly in walked the FBI director and his sidekick, Clyde Tolson. Lela often accompanied Hoover when he was in New York, and seeing her, he walked over to inquire about getting together sometime that weekend. Lela said she couldn’t because she was going to be out of town. Hoover’s curiosity was piqued. Where? he asked. Before she could reply, Ross interjected, “You’re a flatfoot, find her.”

  Ross was not a crusading editor, really, yet let someone swell up with self-importance—whether Hoover, Henry Luce, Thomas Dewey, or even his old friend Woollcott—and he was compelled to put in the needle. Certainly he considered Walter Winchell’s ego ripe for pricking. He was especially intolerant of Winchell and his ilk because New York’s gossip columnists were wildly inaccurate and unconcerned whose reputations they sullied with their sniggering innuendo. In social settings Ross appreciated his gossip as much as the next person—some said more so—yet in general he tried to keep it out of The New Yorker. In any case, a writer was to stop at the subject’s bedroom door. “A man has a right to a private life,” Ross often held.

  So when McKelway, freshly liberated from the managing editor’s job, proposed a full-scale examination of Winchell and his modus operandi, Ross gave the go-ahead, though he couldn’t know at the time that the Profile would balloon into a six-part demolition of the Mirror’s popular and influential columnist.

  A longtime fan of The New Yorker, Winchell was so thrilled at the prospect of being a Profile subject that he not only cooperated fully with McKelway but made sure his friends did too. He anxiously awaited the series, which finally appeared in June and July of 1940.

  For McKelway, happy to be writing again instead of editing, the Profile was a masterwork; for Winchell it was a month-and-a-half-long root canal. The columnist was stunned at McKelway’s disdainful tone, and incensed at his characterization of Winchell as a vain ex-vaudevillian and not especially talented purveyor of dirt and innuendo.

  A young, recently arrived John Bainbridge had helped research the Profile and was responsible for its most devastating indictment. Winchell’s three-dot gossip column generated some nine thousand items a year; this staggering volume alone would have precluded Winchell from checking them for accuracy even if he had been so inclined, which he wasn’t. With the help of his wife, Bainbridge dissected the five Mon
day columns Winchell had written that April. His assignment was to check the veracity of as many of the items as was humanly possible. As McKelway had suspected, the arithmetic was more than unflattering; it was appalling. There were 239 specific items, of which 108 were “blind” and therefore unverifiable. Of the remaining 131 that could be checked, Bainbridge found that 54 were wholly inaccurate, 24 were partly inaccurate, and 53 were accurate. “In other words,” McKelway summed up, “Winchell was not quite half right in the month of April.”

  In his anger and embarrassment, Winchell immediately set out to get even. He exhumed and printed any goofy tale that he could find out about McKelway or Ross. He reported to Mirror readers that Ross didn’t wear undershorts. Seeing this, Ross immediately removed the pair he had on and mailed them to Winchell. On another occasion, the columnist repeated what he had told a waiter who asked where he might find the editor of The New Yorker: “He always sits with his back to the check.”

  Then in September, Ross, who, it will be remembered, had brokered the romance in the first place, attended an engagement party for Bennett Cerf and Phyllis Fraser at the Stork Club. The nightclub’s proprietor was Sherman Billingsley, but its king was Winchell, who used it as his de facto office. The party was in full swing when Winchell spotted Ross and demanded that he be bounced. The next day the editor posted this note on The New Yorker bulletin board:

  In the interests of avoiding possible embarrassment, I would report that I was kicked out of the Stork Club last night, or asked not to come in again (suavely), because the sight of me causes distress to Mr. Billingsley, the proprietor—something I’m doing my best to take in my stride. It’s because of the Winchell pieces. I don’t know to what extent Mr. Billingsley’s aversion extends into this organization, but it certainly includes McKelway.

  After the Fall: Stage magazine’s rendering of Walter Winchell expelling Ross from the Stork Club. (By Willi Noell)

  The spat amused more than it annoyed Ross. Winchell, on the contrary, never forgave or forgot. His wrath extended even to Ross’s associates; he once went so far as to try to have Mayor O’Dwyer banned from the Stork Club. He continued to print random digs at Ross until the editor’s death, and even beyond. When the city’s other newspapers reported that upwards of a thousand people had attended Ross’s funeral, Winchell questioned the estimate, allowing as how there weren’t half that many people in New York sad to see the editor go.

  ——

  When moved by righteous indignation, Ross could summon the fire of an Old Testament prophet, a trait to which virtually every book publisher in New York could attest from unhappy experience. Many, like Random House’s Cerf, were old friends of his, but as a magazine editor Ross deplored what he regarded as their chiseling attitude toward writers, not to mention their habit of cherry-picking new talent that The New Yorker had gone to the time and expense of cultivating. Ross’s files are full of incendiary examples. When Brendan Gill was uncomplimentary about John O’Hara’s A Rage to Live in a New Yorker review, O’Hara, mortified at being roughed up in his own magazine, coerced Cerf into demanding Gill’s dismissal. Ross’s reply began, “Dear Bennett: You are incapable of ratiocination,” and concluded, “You are my natural enemy.” In a wide-ranging squabble with Viking’s Marshall Best, Ross said, “I herewith swear a small oath to make a junior crusade of doing what I can to protect our rights and those of our authors, who in my mature opinion have in quite a number of instances been subject to unholy gypping and exploitation by you book publishers.” Ross conceded that his passion sprang partly from guilt over The New Yorker’s notoriously low pay in its first ten or fifteen years, but it also reflected his genuine outrage that a monolithic industry was taking unfair advantage of his writers. So persistent was he that his efforts were formally recognized by the Authors Guild.

  Yet Ross hardly restricted his professional animus to book publishers. The two other magazine men who in the Twenties, along with Ross, revolutionized the industry, DeWitt Wallace of Reader’s Digest and Henry Luce of Time, came in for their licks too, if for quite different reasons.

  Ross had a certain grudging admiration for Wallace, whose little “digest” of reprinted and condensed articles, started out of his garage apartment in 1922, became one of the all-time American success stories. But he despised the Digest and its many clones (“They have a selection of all stuff written for all time, whereas poor bastards getting out a magazine like The New Yorker have to run what’s written that week,” Ross told Thurber), disliked their amputative approach to literature, and was dismayed that Wallace’s largess had wooed away Woollcott.

  Moreover, Ross was positively acrimonious upon discovering in 1936 that The New Yorker had been virtually giving away its reprint rights, at least compared with other magazines. Up to then, the Digest had been reprinting a great deal of the magazine’s material, especially its humor and Talk pieces, for only eighteen hundred dollars a year. Shortly after Ik Shuman arrived at the magazine, he learned that other publications, while contributing far less to the Digest than The New Yorker, were nonetheless getting fifteen or twenty thousand dollars a year for their reprint rights. An angry Ross immediately instructed Shuman to renegotiate The New Yorker’s deal, so he invited Wallace to come down for a chat.

  As he was being led to Shuman’s office, Wallace looked about him with just a touch of awe. “This is the first time I’ve ever been in The New Yorker,” he said. “I’ve always dealt with a young lady [Daise Terry] in the hall.” After agreeing to raise his rates to a more appropriate level, he volunteered that he would gladly have done so sooner “but nobody seemed interested in talking to me.”

  Shuman and Wallace became quite friendly, and one day the latter asked if he might meet the elusive Mr. Ross. Shuman said certainly, and a lunch was arranged at the Ritz. When Ross walked in he greeted Wallace with his limp handshake and said, “Well, boss, how do you like our work for you? Are we working hard enough?”

  The renegotiated contract placated Ross for a while; besides, the Digest’s handsome fees augmented the earnings of many New Yorker writers, so he was under substantial pressure to continue the arrangement. Throughout, however, he was very troubled by a development that was common knowledge in publishing circles but otherwise a secret. Beginning in the early Thirties, the Digest had gotten into the habit of planting stories in other magazines in order to reprint them later. The way it worked was that the Digest covered a magazine’s fee and the writer’s expenses for an agreed-upon story. In effect the magazine got a free story, and the Digest, increasingly influential and ambitious, got to print material more to its liking. This under-the-table practice had become so accepted and widespread that by the early Forties fully half or more of the Digest’s contents were stories of its own origination.

  To Ross, the practice was both dangerous—one magazine should not be setting so wide an agenda—and dishonest. The New Yorker was one of the few major magazines that would not permit the plants. But neither did it protest them—at least in public.

  In 1943, however, the Digest committed what, to Ross, was mortal sin: it made a serious play for E. B. White. That spring, in the wake of Woollcott’s death, Wallace opened his checkbook in hopes of convincing White to take over Aleck’s popular feature in the Digest. As if this weren’t galling enough, it came just as Ross was desperately trying to persuade Andy to return to The New Yorker after his five-year hiatus with Harper’s. As it turned out, Ross needn’t have worried; White thought as little of the Digest as the editor did, and he agreed to come back and resume Comment. Ross’s relief was as palpable as his delight in seeing a writer actually turn his back on Digest money. “You are a man who should not be digested,” he told White; “hydrochloric acid should never be applied.”

  Perhaps it was White’s act of defiance that gave Ross the courage to do what he had long contemplated: make a complete break with Reader’s Digest. The decision was not made lightly; he knew how upsetting and costly it would be for some contributors, pa
rticularly the prolific Thurber, whose only serious disagreements with Ross invariably were about money. Nonetheless, that December he notified the Digest privately that it could no longer reprint New Yorker articles. Then he enlisted White’s help in drafting a letter of explanation to the staff and contributors, which was dated February 9, 1944, and was widely reprinted in newspapers and magazines a few days later.

  The letter detailed and decried the Digest’s practice of planting articles. “The effect of this (apart from spreading a lot of money around) is that the Digest is beginning to generate a considerable fraction of the contents of American magazines. This gives us the creeps, as does any centralization of genius.” If it desires to publish original articles, the letter said, the Digest should do so openly. “The New Yorker, furthermore, has never been particularly impressed with the Digest’s capsule theory of life and its assumption that any piece of writing can be improved by extracting every seventh word, like a tooth.… Mostly, however, we object to the Digest’s indirect creative function, which is a threat to the free flow of ideas and to the independent spirit.” The letter was signed simply, “The Editors.”

  The New Yorker’s declaration of independence from the Digest, as well as its exposure of what Ross termed the “reprint myth,” sparked a furor within the publishing community, as well as a great deal of publicity that painted Ross as something of a publishing paragon and Wallace as rather less so. The Digest offered no apologies for planting stories, but the practice died out as its client magazines, like remorseful alcoholics, swore off.