Genius in Disguise Page 30

  There was one curious postscript to the controversy. Not long after the uproar, a New Yorker story was reprinted in Reader’s Digest—Hersey’s piece about John Kennedy and the PT-109. Well aware of Ross’s antipathy toward the Digest, yet not privy to the story behind the story, Hersey assumed that Kennedy’s powerful father must somehow have muscled Ross into submission. The truth, as usual, was more involved.

  When the Navy became aware of the PT-109 story, it recognized its tremendous public-relations value and began pressing Ross to yield it up to a larger national magazine. Joseph Kennedy was also keen on seeing it appear specifically in the populist Digest, anticipating correctly how useful it would be in helping launch his son’s political career. The New Yorker, of course, wanted to keep the story for itself, not only because, as Ross contended, it “was morally ours,” but because William Shawn had made such a point of having the talented Hersey in the magazine. Still, Ross was definitely beginning to feel squeezed, and now there was the further complication that the Digest was offering to pay two thousand dollars more for the story than The New Yorker, with the extra money to go to the widow of one of the men in Kennedy’s crew. Under the circumstances, and after much anguished give-and-take on the nineteenth floor, the editor decided to violate his own decree, the ink still fresh on it, and permit the Digest to reprint the story—but only with an accompanying note saying that it did so at the Navy’s behest. Ross even offered to make good the widow’s two thousand dollars if the Digest backed out, which it didn’t. The compromise mollified everyone except perhaps Ross, and even he could take some comfort in knowing that Chasen’s would never run out of good Scotch.

  In 1945, Bainbridge produced for The New Yorker an unblinking five-part series on DeWitt Wallace’s pint-size dynamo, material that he subsequently turned into a book entitled Little Wonder, or the Reader’s Digest and How It Grew. Ross had played no part in originating or steering the series, Bainbridge said, but took undisguised pleasure in seeing the weekly discomfiture it caused the people up in Pleasantville. Afterward, he gave Bainbridge a five-thousand-dollar bonus.

  ——

  If there was one publication that pained Ross more than Reader’s Digest, it was Time. As in the former case, his gripe had less to do with the man behind the magazine, Henry Luce, than with the magazine itself. The New Yorker and Time, so antithetical in everything from editorial approach to corporate culture to audience, had been sniping at each other ever since their shared infancy on Forty-fifth Street, but this wasn’t why Ross so disliked Time. He was put off by its recklessness, its appetite for scandal, and its obvious biases, but most of all he deplored its repeated crimes against the mother tongue.

  Times house idiom, the phenomenon then known as Timestyle, has long since vanished from the publication, but in the Twenties and Thirties it was as much a part of the magazine as its red border. Timestyle was marked by tortured, attention-getting syntax and bizarre neologisms, usually formed by fusing two words into an awkward one; hence, in Time someone who worked for Luce would be a “Timeployee.” Cofounder Briton Hadden had devised the style to give the magazine some pizzazz when it did little more than regurgitate newspaper stories, but by now its peculiar conventions were as fixed and conspicuous as dandelions.

  The first major escalation in the feud was Fortune’s 1934 story on The New Yorker, which Ross considered something of a betrayal of confidences by Ralph Ingersoll. The editor rejected various proposed counterpunches until the fall of 1936, when the impending launch of another Luce enterprise, the picture-oriented Life, provided a handy pretext. The New Yorker assigned Gibbs to write a Profile of Luce that would, in the process, send up Time. To secure Luce’s cooperation, the great man was approached as if it were to be a straight Profile. Since Gibbs’s misanthropy was well known at Time Inc., his involvement was kept top secret; Luce and Ingersoll were informed that McKelway would be the lead reporter. The suspicious Ingersoll still advised Luce to decline, but his employer took the enlightened position that one journalist had an obligation to cooperate with another; besides, like Winchell four years later, the unsuspecting subject was flattered by the gesture. His only stipulation was that Ross extend to him the same courtesy that Ingersoll had extended to The New Yorker in 1934—the opportunity to look over a draft of the story in order to correct factual errors and discuss serious differences of opinion. Ross agreed.

  Since Gibbs was as yet unaccustomed to factual pieces, he was fed his information—from McKelway, who interviewed Luce several times, and from a small battalion of other reporters who were busy accumulating the kinds of details that, when piled up, lent chiaroscuro to a New Yorker portrait. Eugene Kinkead, for example, managed to wangle his way into Luce’s old apartment, then being sublet, to discover that it was not the modest four- or five-room dwelling Luce had described to McKelway but an immodest fifteen-room, five-bath palace.

  As promised, Gibbs’s caustic first draft was sent over to Time for review. The response was swift and hot. Luce, who had a humor deficiency anyway—Gibbs had noted this prominently in the story—was predictably unamused. Ingersoll, feeling suckered by his former playmates, was incensed. He rang up McKelway and pressed for an immediate meeting to thrash matters out. Ross already had dinner plans, it turned out, so he invited the Time men to come over to his apartment on East Thirty-sixth later that evening.

  Luce and Ingersoll arrived around eleven. Ross was seconded not by Gibbs but by McKelway. Coming into the living room, Luce spotted the dapper McKelway, walked straight over to him, and said in a thin whine, “It’s not true that I have no sense of humor.” Later McKelway would tell Thurber, “I thought it was one of the most humorless remarks I’d ever heard.”

  Ross broke out the liquor and the shouting started almost immediately. McKelway and Ingersoll grew so tipsy that they nearly came to blows. As for the principals, the furious Luce grappled with his stammer while Ross purpled the air with his profanity.

  At first Luce focused on the inaccuracy of this and that “fact” in the Profile, such as Gibbs’s claim that the average Timeployee took home $45.67802 a week. Ross reminded his counterpart that this was, after all, a parody, and that no one would take such a preposterous figure seriously (Gibbs had arrived at the meaningless figure by typing the numbers sequentially). Eventually it became clear that what most disturbed Luce was not the details but the virulent tone of the piece. At one point he muttered, “There’s not a single kind word about me in the whole Profile.”

  “That’s what you get for being a baby tycoon,” Ross answered.

  Later, still fighting his stammer, Luce yelled, “Goddammit, Ross, this whole goddamn piece is ma … ma … malicious, and you know it!”

  Ross hesitated for a long moment, then said, “You’ve put your finger on it, Luce. I believe in malice.”

  The carnival summit bumped along this way until three in the morning. In the end, Ross agreed only to review and evaluate Luce’s various concerns with Gibbs and his key editors, including the Whites. This he did the next day. Afterward, Gibbs made some slight adjustments, but for the most part the Profile was left intact. A few days later, having promised to report back to Luce, Ross composed a remarkable letter—five single-spaced pages—that as usual said as much about the writer as it did about the recipient:

  I assume it is up to me to make certain explanations; at any rate I do so, to clear my conscience, with which I always struggle to keep current.…

  I was astonished to realize the other night that you are apparently unconscious of the notorious reputation Time and Fortune have for crassness in description, for cruelty and scandal-monging and insult. I say frankly but really in a not unfriendly spirit, that you are in a hell of a position to ask anything.…

  Ross went on to explain, point by point, the group’s review of Luce’s complaints, and why they were leaving in such details as the fifteen rooms (“You are offering the place for rent as a fifteen-room apartment, a pretty state of affairs if it isn’t true”),
Ingersoll’s hypochondria (“One of our investigators reported that the second drawer on the left-hand side of Ingersoll’s desk contains twenty-eight bottles, phials, boxes, etc. of remedies”), and Luce’s purported political ambitions. Then he moved on to a cutting personal observation:

  After our talk the other night I asked at least ten people about Time and, to my amazement, found them bitter, in varying degrees, in their attitude. You are generally regarded as being mean as hell and frequently scurrilous. Two Jewish gentlemen were at dinner with me last night and, upon mention of Time, one of them charged that you are anti-Semitic, and asked the other if he didn’t think so too. The other fellow said he’d read Time a lot and he didn’t think you were anti-Semitic especially; you were just anti-everything, he said—anti-Semitic, anti-Italian, anti-Scandinavian, anti-black-widow spider. “It is just their pose,” he said.

  Still in high dudgeon, Ross closed the letter “Sincerely yours, Harold Wallace Ross—Small man … furious … mad … without taste”—all being adjectives that Luce publications had variously used to describe him through the years.

  As for the Profile itself, which appeared November 28, 1936, it is probably Gibbs’s single best-known piece of work, and with good reason. Gibbs was a parodist without contemporary peer, and six decades after the fact, the Luce Profile remains a supreme example of the parodist’s art, pointed and hilarious, if a tad more wicked than it really needed to be. It is laced with sardonic little touches (Gibbs’s footnote comment on one of Time’s rare disappointing financial years: “Hmm”), and the dead-on send-up of Timestyle convolutions is merciless. An example:

  “Great word! Great word!” would crow Hadden, coming upon “snaggle-toothed,” “pig-faced.” Appearing already were such maddening coagulations as “cinemaddict,” “radiorator.” Appearing also were first gratuitous invasions of privacy. Always mentioned as William Randolph Hearst’s “great & good friend” was Cinemactress Marion Davies, stressed was the bastardy of Ramsay MacDonald, the “cozy hospitality” of Mae West. Backward ran sentences until reeled the mind.

  After Gibbs touched on Luce’s empire-building ambitions and supposed interest in the White House, he concluded the Profile this way:

  Certainly to be taken with seriousness is Luce at thirty-nine, his fellowmen already informed up to their ears, the shadow of his enterprises long across the land, his future plans impossible to imagine, staggering to contemplate. Where it all will end, knows God!

  Of course Luce survived the spoof, though Gibbs’s thrust proved fatal to Timestyle, which began to recede almost immediately. “Nobody over there could go on writing in that style after reading [Gibbs’s] piece,” McKelway noted. Certainly the Profile added a few years’ worth of fuel, were any needed, to the sometimes funny, sometimes silly feud between Time and Tilley.

  Indeed, in 1938 Ingersoll slipped the name of Eustace Tilley into Time’s masthead, apparently with the intention of dropping it later and announcing that the old gent had been fired. He withdrew the name when Corey Ford, who had invented Tilley in The New Yorker’s 1925 “Making of a Magazine” series, threatened to sue. For its part, The New Yorker never tired of lampooning Life. Just before the war, in a play on the popular “Life Goes to a Party” feature, The New Yorker produced “Life Goes to the Collapse of Western Civilization.” In 1938, The New Yorker answered Life’s much-talked-about “The Birth of a Baby” photo feature with E. B. White’s cartoon send-up, “The Birth of an Adult.” One aspect of Life that Ross especially hated was the great length the erstwhile family magazine would go to print cheesecake photos. In the summer of 1951, while he was literally preoccupied with the matter of his own life and death, he was nonetheless exasperated enough to scribble this note to White: “Life does story on the placid and historic Thames and finds nude sunbathers on its banks. This must be the fifty-eighth way of working in naked women.”

  It must be said that long before then Life had given Ross a reason for maintaining a grudge. In August 1937, less than a year after the Luce Profile, Life published a series of “photo-doodles” in which, with only a few deft strokes of the brush, the great caricaturist Al Hirschfeld transformed certain famous people into other famous people. He doodled Winston Churchill into W. C. Fields, Gertrude Stein into Albert Einstein … and Harold Ross into a very credible Joseph Stalin. The juxtaposition was very funny, but this time it was Ross who was caught without his sense of humor. However, recalling the episode more than half a century later, Hirschfeld still laughed about it. The nonpareil illustrator of Broadway greats would seem to have been a natural contributor for The New Yorker, but after the Stalin doodle he learned from friends at the magazine that “Ross was so furious he said I’d never be in The New Yorker.” And at least while Ross was alive, he never was.

  With a few deft strokes, artist Al Hirschfeld “doodled” Ross into Joseph Stalin for Life magazine in 1937. The editor was not amused. (© Al Hirschfeld; The Margo Feiden Galleries Ltd., New York)

  The Time–New Yorker feud limped along in this intramural way for years, finally expiring of its own pointlessness. The memories, though, remained vivid. Years after he was abraded in The New Yorker, Luce was at Rollins College in Florida to make a speech, and while there he dropped in on a class in contemporary biography. The students were discussing Henry Luce, and their text was the Gibbs Profile. It was all too maddening for the once-baby tycoon. He turned to a traveling companion and exploded, “Is this thing going to be engraved on my tombstone?”

  The answer, after a fashion, was yes.

  CHAPTER 11

  WORDS AND PICTURES

  An ironic aspect of the Luce profile was that even as early as 1936, if there was an American magazine as ripe for parody as Time it was The New Yorker. Its characteristic mannerisms and voice were becoming so familiar and successful that eventually Ross’s magazine would be more widely copied—and parodied—than any other periodical in the world. By the late Thirties, The New Yorker had managed to metamorphose from an unprepossessing comic sheet into an articulate diary of a great city, just as in the postwar period it would become something of a diary for the nation (and in time, with William Shawn at the height of his power, for the world).

  Haul down one of the fat bound volumes from those years and flip to any issue; the formula is as recognizable as it is reassuring. Here is February 26, 1938: A charming Hokinson cover depicts two wealthy tykes under the reproachful eye of their chauffeur pulling pies from little windowed cubbyholes at the Automat. Inside are cartoons from Thurber, Arno, Whitney Darrow, Jr., Sydney Hoff, Garrett Price, Barbara Shermund, and Gardner Rea. A Talk story on the New York Badminton Club indulges two Ross passions at once, facts and nostalgia (oldest organization of its kind in the world; gentlemen competitors are expected to remove their hats but not their coats). The critics were in a rare uniform good mood: Benchley praised T. S. Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral, Fadiman was enchanted by Thomas Mann’s Joseph in Egypt, Mumford acclaimed the thoughtful, progressive design of new housing projects in Harlem and Williamsburg, and Robert A. Simon commended the week’s offerings at the Met. There were dispatches on racing from Hialeah and fashion from Paris. There was a Kay Boyle short story and humor from Frank Sullivan. The Profile was an A. J. Liebling classic called “Tummler,” about a small-time hustler, Hymie Katz, who is addicted to opening nightclubs. Beyond its irresistible subject, the story celebrates the New York patois that always captivated Liebling. (“ ’Hymie is a tummler,’ the boys at the I. & Y. say. ‘Hymie is a man what knows to get a dollar.’ ”) The full-page ads are for Tiffany, Henri Bendel, Guerlain, Lincoln automobiles, and the Bermuda tourist board.

  One also finds a handful of E. B. White’s Newsbreaks and their still-familiar headings, such as “Raised Eyebrow Department,” “Wind on Capitol Hill,” and “How’s That Again? Department.” In fact, about the only thing that the February 26 issue didn’t have going for it was White himself. Having tired of New York and The New Yorker, requiring new challenges of him
self, White had forsaken Comment in August 1937, and in early 1938 decided to move full-time to Maine, where he and Katharine had summered for years. He also kicked off a new monthly column for Harper’s, called “One Man’s Meat.” Unlike Comment, “Meat” was a signed personal essay, which meant that White could deal more forthrightly with the sober issues of the day than was possible in The New Yorker. Just losing White’s services was enough to depress Ross, but making it incalculably worse was that Andy had had the temerity to take his wife with him. The move to Maine amounted to an incredible sacrifice on Katharine’s part; unlike Andy, she loved her job and loved New York, or at least their tranquil, sunny apartment in Turtle Bay Gardens, a unique collection of brownstone homes on Forty-eighth and Forty-ninth streets between Second and Third avenues, with a vast common courtyard. Andy, however, was determined to go, and though he sometimes might wonder about Katharine’s priorities as she lay in bed engulfed by manuscripts and New Yorker proofs, her loyalty to her husband would always transcend that to her boss.

  For Ross, getting out The New Yorker without the Whites was like trying to walk deprived of legs. To keep her own sanity and to help Ross keep his, Katharine agreed to continue editing fiction part-time, and to perform sundry other duties, such as reading and critiquing the just-published issue. Ross, however, had come to rely on both Whites so intimately—which is to say, in person—over a dozen years that continuing the association by mail was a genuine hardship. For her part, Katharine was intent on doing a thorough job even at her long remove, and she missed the gossip, the give-and-take of the office, and the comforting sense of being in on things. So to stay informed, she did what came naturally—she relied on Ross. But as he was already feeling overwhelmed, this new demand was too much, and he made no effort to hide his irritation. “As to your sharpshooting of the issues … I say do it your way,” he wrote to Katharine in 1939. “I deplore your way, but since you can’t do it another way, I’ll settle on it. One of the earliest and most distressing discoveries I have made in administering an office (after my fashion) is that a piece of paper won’t go two ways. Your report has to go twenty-four ways, including back to you in instances where you ask outright questions. I make one exception to swallowing your method. I won’t be responsible for answering personal questions asked by you in the body of a report. These are so preposterously unfair that I’ll stand on that. If you want to know who P.W.W., the author of the Court Games Dept., is, it’s up to you to put the question on a separate piece of paper and send it in here not personally addressed to me. It is unfair to bother me with such things.… (P.W.W. is [Philip W.] Wrenn, but that’s the last time I tell you.)”