Genius in Disguise Page 33
Eventually a low-key but distinct friction would arise between Lobrano and Mrs. White. This was the perhaps inevitable consequence of her on-again, off-again presence at the magazine (not only mutually frustrating but, it should be remembered, Andy’s doing), and her continued special relationship with Ross, which, for all the editor’s respect for Lobrano, no one could possibly supplant. For the moment, however, Lobrano was glad to be there, and Mrs. White was glad to have him.
If their temperaments and styles differed, the magazine’s various fiction editors were together in one respect; they shared Ross’s reverence for the written word, and his respect for writers. In his autobiography, Praying for Rain, Jerome Weidman recalled his maiden New Yorker editorial conference, with Gibbs, after the magazine had purchased his first story, which Weidman had titled “Chutzbah.” At the top of Gibbs’s long list of discussion points was a question about the title.
Gustave S. Lobrano. (By Ray Shorr for Mademoiselle: © 1952, 1980 by Condé Nast Publications, Inc. Courtesy of Dorothy Lobrano Guth)
“The copy department feels it should be spelled with a p,” Gibbs said.
“They’re wrong,” insisted the nervous young author.
Gibbs asked how he could be so sure of the pronunciation. Because that’s the way his mother pronounced it, Weidman replied.
When they had worked their way through the rest of Gibbs’s list, all that was left was the business of the title. “The copy department gets a bit sticky about these things,” Gibbs said. “Is there any chance you might change your mind?”
“No,” Weidman said. “My mother would disapprove.”
Gibbs gave him a sharp look, then smiled and extended his hand. “Nice meeting you,” he said. “Come in again soon.”
——
Perhaps what Harold Ross missed most about the old stars and stripes days was that he never lost a minute’s sleep over how much to pay writers. Corporals got corporal’s pay, doughboys got satisfaction for their doggerel, and it was all decided by the War Department anyway. At The New Yorker, on the other hand, he never spent a day that wasn’t somehow darkened by the vulgar subject of money.
This being so, there was a wisp of irony in the fact that of all his writers at The New Yorker, Ross was probably closest socially to Geoffrey Hellman, who was the single most persistent staffer in ragging Ross for money. However incidental a meeting, however trivial a memo, Hellman couldn’t resist injecting a plea or a harangue. He was not without cause; he had started at the magazine back when Ross was still paying out mostly in promises and sermons, and Hellman feared he might never earn a respectable salary if he stayed there. One night in 1936, he cornered Fleischmann at a party and raised his favorite subject. The publisher looked at him evenly and told him that as much as his editors thought of him, sometimes they considered him a tiresome nuisance—“a horse’s ass,” in fact.
This was all the confirmation Hellman needed, if any, that his future lay elsewhere, and he jumped to Luce’s new baby, Life, the picture magazine endlessly patronized by Ross and The New Yorker, for a handsome increase in pay. Though acutely aware that for Hellman the core issue was money, Ross was never told of the catalyzing conversation with Fleischmann. He and Hellman remained on friendly terms; Hellman even sent over some of Time’s distinctive, powder-blue memo pads, which Ross delighted in using to communicate with his wayward friend (and thereby perpetuate their little joke on Luce). Besides, they both knew that Life was no place for a writer, especially one of Hellman’s metropolitan interests and nuanced style, and within two years Ross happily welcomed him back.
Twenty years later Hellman and Fleischmann were attending another party, this time a banquet at the Waldorf. As they chatted amiably over their martinis, Fleischmann suddenly mentioned that he had always regretted something he had said to Hellman many years before. Hellman stopped him short and told him to think no more about it.
Beyond their pride in being a part of The New Yorker, about the only thing the magazine’s fiction and nonfiction writers had in common, at least for the first fifteen or twenty years, was dissatisfaction with their pay, which ranged from the merely inadequate to the execrable. In its later years The New Yorker’s rates would become among the highest in the business, but through adolescence its penury was almost a point of pride. As John Bainbridge said, “People [were] working for what I should say was about eighty percent kudos and twenty percent cash.”
In the beginning the men who ran The New Yorker were cheap because they had to be. Later on they were cheap because they just were. Revered as he might be on the editorial floors for his intellect and bonhomie, Hawley Truax was a notorious tightwad. (A legendary but true story is told of the time a panhandler asked Truax to spare some change for a meal. Suspecting what the man really wanted was a drink, Truax gave him no money but reached into his pocket and handed over the wrapped sandwich he had planned to eat for lunch.) Fleischmann, who could be so generous to business-side employees—certain key people were even given low-interest company loans to buy their homes—thought that the sheer privilege of being published in The New Yorker should satisfy the editorial side. And for years Ross was impulsively cheap, too. “Ross … would no more have thought of offering a writer money than of offering a horse an ice-cream soda,” Liebling would write. The editor’s attitude derived partly from the exigencies of the magazine’s early years, partly from his own meager upbringing, and partly from his honest conviction that a touch of hunger was not a bad thing for a contributor.
But unlike the other New Yorker principals, Ross eventually underwent a Saul-like conversion on the question of pay, admitting to Thurber in 1945, “I have been a party to robbing [writers], for I unquestionably sat around this joint for years and didn’t see that authors were done right by.” Perhaps it was the years of being beaten on by Hellman and Thurber (and O’Hara and Ingersoll and Benson and Cain and Cheever and Liebling and Gill and …) that sparked his conscience. Perhaps it was his own personal money woes, or the high-priced Hollywood competition. Or perhaps he saw it merely as another way to unnerve his nemesis on the seventeenth floor. (“The magazine is having a slight boom now,” Ross told White in the spring of 1943, “and I’d rather have contributors getting it than Fleischmann, who would just lose it at the races.”) Whatever his motivations—and no doubt they included all of the foregoing—by the late Thirties Ross had upgraded editorial pay considerably, and in the mid-Forties, when the profits really started rolling in, he fought incessantly to push much of it to the writers, in higher drawing accounts, better piece rates, and bonuses. He also took the progressive view of insisting on regular cost-of-living adjustments for writers to help protect what pay they did get.
But in the bad old days, The New Yorker was so cheap that it refused to advance a hundred dollars to Sally Benson, one of its most popular writers and so prolific that she used a pseudonym, Esther Evarts, for lesser, back-of-the-book stories. Hers was scarcely the first or last complaint on this score. O’Hara, so strapped in his salad days that even the most token gestures elated him (“A dollar bonus on each casual—nice!” he wrote Ross in 1934), eventually came to develop what one staff member described as “an endless sense of grievance” against the magazine—the chief grievance, naturally, being money. In 1948, during one of his spells of feeling unloved and taken for granted (with some justification; Ross tended to be more suspicious than appreciative of O’Hara, whose characters were always toying with the magazine’s morality code), the writer abruptly demanded that The New Yorker should pay him several hundred dollars for any submission, whether it was accepted for publication or not. Even had Ross been inclined to agree to that extraordinary arrangement, which he wasn’t, it would have presented an expensive dilemma, for O’Hara could bat out a workmanlike short story in an afternoon. Instead, the editor sent O’Hara an inexpensive gold watch, picked up at a Third Avenue pawnshop, on which he had had inscribed, “For John O’Hara from The New Yorker 25 West 43rd Street BR 9–8200, With Lo
ve and Admiration.”
Forever linked as he was with The New Yorker—he would sell Ross more than two hundred stories—O’Hara did not work for the magazine. Like all fiction writers he was a contributor, an independent agent, living from sale to sale. This can be the most nervous kind of existence, not just for young writers of unmade reputations but also for established names with growing children and onerous mortgages. John Cheever and some of The New Yorker’s other fiction stars came to resent the fact that their journalistic counterparts were considered employees and received those reassuring weekly checks. A few even pushed Ross, unsuccessfully, for their own version of a drawing account.
The Fact writers, of course, would have begged Cheever’s pardon; since that draw represented not salary but rather an ever-mounting, open-ended debt, it was anything but reassuring. Here is how the account worked. Say a New Yorker staff reporter was drawing $125 a week, which would have been common in the late Thirties or early Forties. He might sell Ross a Profile for $1,000 and a handful of Talk items for $250, which theoretically wiped out ten weeks of obligation. Ross had devised the system in the early days of the magazine as a way to spur productivity while trying to mitigate a writer’s financial insecurity. As usual with his pay systems, however, it had the opposite effect. Most reporters considered the draw insidious and anxiety-inducing, a form of indentured servitude. (Richard Rovere said it took him six years to get into the black with Ross.) To stay afloat, a writer not only had to maintain steady productivity but to continue generating ideas that touched Ross’s fancy—neither circumstance being one of life’s sure shots. A New Yorker writer staring at a blank sheet of paper in his typewriter might appear to be concentrating, but he really was listening to that insistent meter in his head ticking away.
John O’Hara wanted payment for every story he submitted. He got a used watch instead. (Culver Pictures)
On the fiction side, contributors generally signed a “first-reading agreement” under which, in exchange for one hundred dollars a year, The New Yorker got first crack at any of their stories. Pay was based on length but also on quality: acquiring editors were supposed to “grade” the stories for relative merit: A, A–, B, C, and so on (though Maxwell, for one, says he nearly always graded a story A, and nobody ever complained).
Ross was constantly tinkering with pay rates to motivate and steer writers. His main goal was restraining length—he despaired watching his once-beloved casuals gradually interred by ever-longer “short” stories. But he also paid to encourage productivity, such as offering a twenty-five percent bonus to writers who sold the magazine six stories in a given year. He even used inducements to modulate the tone of the magazine. For instance, for years he was in the habit of paying more for so-called “highlife” stories than “lowlife” ones, but the work of Liebling and Mitchell defied such facile classification. Mitchell once recalled how the editor went about reconciling the Mazie Profile. “Ross said, ‘I’ll tell you what we’ll do. You’ve got Fannie Hurst in [the piece]. She’s highlife. That makes it a “high-life lowlife.” ’ And then he put another classification in, that if it was ‘humorous highlife’ it got a certain amount, but if it was a ‘humorous highlife lowlife,’ that was as high as you could get.”
Calculations like this explain why New Yorker writers through the years have invariably characterized their compensation as “byzantine.” Staffers could scarcely understand their own pay, much less anyone else’s—which was another, albeit ulterior, goal of the system, since Ross was petrified that employees might actually compare paychecks.
This sheepish “explanatory” letter to Frank Sullivan, apparently from the mid-Thirties, suggests the typical convolution of a new Ross system, as well as the sorry track record of its many forerunners:
I must write you in connection with this check, which you probably will see instantly is not as big as you have been getting, although the story is of a very unusual degree of excellence. It’s one of the best by anyone in a long while, in fact. We have a new and revolutionary scheme for payments, an explanation of which is now being mimeographed.… Briefly, the plan is to pay somewhat more per word (in your case twenty cents) than we have been paying for all pieces under 1,200 words in length and for the first 1,200 words of pieces that run longer than that. Then, after 1,200, [we] pay half the word rate. This, we hope, will accomplish several things, one of which is to make it profitable for writers to do quite short pieces—a few hundred words—or to encourage them to do it anyway. The flat word rate didn’t encourage them. The flat price per piece didn’t. The fact is that both discouraged them.…
Although, perhaps unfortunately, your first check under the new system is a little smaller than your flat price check would have been (this piece being a short one—just over 1,200 words), an average (of the past) sized piece would have been as much, or greater. We have gone over all our writers, and especially you, I will say, and found that there would have been no suffering of loss except in a few cases of long-winded persons that ought to be choked off anyhow, probably. You won’t lose, on the basis of past performance, and if you write some short pieces, goddammit, you’ll profit to a considerable extent and can buy more Pennsylvania R.R. stock. For instance, you’d get eighty dollars for four hundred words, the length of some of the best things you used to do in your good old newspaper days, and haven’t done since. One hundred dollars for five hundred words. Think of it!
As usual, this particular scheme was doomed. Writers being writers, they disregarded the “brevity premium” and simply wrote longer stories to compensate for what they had lost vis-à-vis the old system. When he wasn’t on the warpath himself over pay, Thurber tended to regard Ross’s elaborate formulas with bemusement, and as just one more incarnation of his fixation on systems. “It’s Ross’s old wall-tearing-down urge taking a new form,” he told Katharine White in 1938 after the editor had unveiled his latest calculus. “It’s a variant of the old red and green tab system, it makes up for there being no more Greta Palmers to fire, no Ingersoll to harry, no Talk passing system to bother about. Remember the famous ‘White passes to Levick who passes to Bergman who passes to Ross who passes to Hellman, second down and fifteen to go’?”
——
Payment classifications didn’t stop with the writers. for a while Ross tried them with the artists too. His original intention toward establishing a relative pay scale was to rank artists as either A, B, or C, but such judgments quickly got out of hand. According to one hierarchical rating sheet—undated, but from the Forties—Ross considered two of his finest, Charles Addams and Mary Petty, “AAA.” At “AA” were Thurber, George Price, Whitney Darrow, and many others. “A” artists were Carl Rose, Sam Cobean, Otto Soglow, etc. There were a handful of “B” names, a “C,” and even a few luckless souls who were deemed by Ross to be “D” artists, whatever this meant.
Then there was a “special” category that Ross reserved for a trio of his franchise artists, implying that they were above ranking. These three, whom Ross tried to have represented somehow in every issue, were Helen Hokinson, Gluyas Williams, and Peter Arno. In September 1936, Arno published one of his most memorable cartoons, in which he depicted two elderly, affluent couples beckoning some friends to join them at the movies. The caption read, “Come along. We’re going to the Trans-Lux to hiss Roosevelt.”
Whenever readers have encountered New Yorker editors through the years, whether in Ross’s time or today, more often than not they ask about the cartoons and the artists. What is Steinberg like? (A brilliant recluse.) Was Addams as mischievous as his delectably macabre cartoons suggest? (Yes.) But mostly what people want to know is, how do New Yorker artists come up with their clever ideas?
In the case of the Arno drawing, the cartoon actually began with a man named Richard McCallister and an evening at the movies. He had just settled into his seat when the customary newsreel began to roll and the jut-jawed image of FDR flickered across the screen. Suddenly McCallister heard a hissing sound. At fi
rst he thought it must be a radiator, but as he looked about he was appalled to see that the hissing actually was coming from some well-dressed patrons. McCallister sent in the idea to the New Yorker’s art editors, who passed it on to Arno, who realized it perfectly.
(“Trans-Lux” was one of more than five thousand cartoon ideas that McCallister sold The New Yorker in more than fifty years, enough to provide him a very handsome living.)
Especially in the beginning, The New Yorker relied on writers and gagmen for the great bulk of its cartoon ideas. Ross then turned to his stable of extraordinary draftsmen and -women—classically trained artists like Rea Irvin, Ralph Barton, Alice Harvey, and Perry Barlow—to bring the ideas to life. After they were done, editors like the Whites, Thurber and Gibbs (and later Lobrano and James Geraghty) would look over the marriage of word and picture to see if it could be sharper yet. The process was always intended to be collaborative. In 1934, when Ingersoll’s Fortune piece suggested that Gluyas Williams drew no original ideas, the bruised artist informed Mrs. White that henceforth he would draw none but his own. Panicked by this, Ross told Williams, “This magazine is run on ideas.… My God, a very large percentage of the contents of The New Yorker, drawings and text, are based on the ideas originating with the staff and suggested to writers.… The one thing that has made The New Yorker successful is that it is a collaborative effort, switching ideas back and forth to find the man best adapted to doing them, and I hope to high heaven that you aren’t going to be discouraged into not being willing to work collaboratively.”