Genius in Disguise Page 34
(By Peter Arno; © 1936, 1964 The New Yorker Magazine, Inc.)
A well-known example of Ross’s philosophy in action was the occasion when Carl Rose drew a cartoon of a fencer taking off his opponent’s head, with a caption reading “Touché!” Ross loved the concept but found Rose’s rendering, with its lifelike figures, disturbing. He asked if Thurber might try the same idea. “Thurber’s people have no blood,” he said. “You can put their heads back on and they’re as good as new.” Thurber turned it into one of his best-known drawings.
(For the most part Thurber, whose first cartoons appeared in The New Yorker in early 1932, worked from his own ideas. Rea Irvin deplored his drawings, offended by the amateurish quality that helped make them so appealing to nonartists. Indeed, it took Ross himself several years to be won over; to him, seeing Thurber acclaimed as an artist was akin to finding out that the dim lad next door was a chess prodigy. Once convinced, though, he became Thurber’s biggest champion, to the point where he tried to recycle the artist’s old cartoons when blindness halted his drawing. Even so, he constantly needled Thurber about how his artistic popularity was a fad perpetuated mainly by the British. “Well, if it’s a fad it’s lasted quite a while,” Thurber once snapped back. “Don’t be impatient,” Ross replied, “give it time.”)
Most of the early New Yorker’s top artists collaborated to some extent. Arno relied almost exclusively on outside ideas, and Hokinson did much of her best work after teaming up with writer James Reid Parker. Still, dealing with creative egos was a touchy business, and friction was not uncommon—especially in cases when, as sometimes happened, artists learned that the editors had farmed out the same idea to several of them in a kind of underhanded contest. Inevitably, many of the magazine’s artists became as self-conscious as Williams and began to rely more and more on their own ideas for drawings. While some critics have argued—Ross among them, at times—that this trend resulted in less-funny ideas and less-satisfying pictures, it also inspired many artists whose work was uniquely and inextricably influenced by their personalities, like Addams, Steig and Steinberg.
Arno, whose drawings of lecherous old men and lascivious young women were marked by bold lines and a wicked sense of humor, was almost certainly the best-known artist of the Ross era. He was also one of the most self-centered. Albert Hubbell, who during World War II acted briefly as the magazine’s art editor, remembered taking some cartoon ideas over to Arno’s Park Avenue apartment early one afternoon. A creature of the night, the artist was still in his silk dressing gown. He went into the kitchen to fix himself a thick hamburger—without offering Hubbell one—then settled down to hear the ideas. One that Hubbell liked and pitched hard involved a billiard table, but in no time Arno was frowning. It turned out that Ross paid him a substantial bonus for full-page cartoons, which presupposed vertical concepts, so a billiard table was altogether too lateral to even consider. “Wait a minute, Hubb, wait a minute,” Arno said. “Let’s go for those pages.”
Whether the drawings were vertical or horizontal, the ideas self-generated or supplied, all of them went through the same rigorous development process, which culminated in the Tuesday afternoon art meeting, a venerable New Yorker tradition. The purpose of the meeting was to cull proposed cover illustrations, judge hundreds of cartoon ideas and works in progress, okay anything ready to run, and come up with suggestions for those pictures still in need of fixing. The meeting began promptly at two o’clock—Ross encouraged lunchtime sobriety on Tuesdays—and took place in a small conference room. Usually there were six participants: Ross; Daise Terry, who recorded approvals, rejections and suggestions; Rea Irvin; Geraghty, who came aboard as art editor in 1939; Mrs. White (later replaced by Lobrano, as the broad “fiction” bailiwick traditionally included art); and an art clerk. The clerk, usually a young man, had the job of organizing the art to be presented, preparing the room (everyone had pencil and pad, an ashtray, and knitting needles, which the editors used to point out details on the drawings without smudging them), and displaying the cartoons during the meeting. Otherwise he was to be as unobtrusive as the furniture. A conspicuous exception was Truman Capote, who as a teenager worked for several years as a New Yorker clerk. He was known to hide drawings he didn’t like or cluck his tongue when he disagreed with the group, at least until Ross insisted he keep his tart views to himself.
Curiously, for fifteen years The New Yorker’s art director virtually never worked directly with the artists. Ross believed they might resent a colleague’s telling them how to draw, so from the outset Irvin was more consultant than manager. A nonartist—first Gibbs, then Maxwell—had always sat in on the art meeting, with the thankless task of reporting back the group’s criticisms to the artists. Upon his arrival as art editor, Geraghty—another nonartist—changed this, becoming the cartoonists’ and cover artists’ direct liaison to the magazine.
Even if James Geraghty had known nothing whatever about art, Ross would have been predisposed to like him. Not only did he share Ross’s Irish wit and temperament, but he came from the West—born in Washington state—and had even worked in the lead mines of Idaho. But Geraghty did know art. His passion for fine drawing was complemented by a perfectionist streak and a strong intuitive sense of what worked—qualities that New Yorker artists immediately recognized and respected. He was also a whiz with captions. It was his writing ability, in fact, that got him to The New Yorker in the first place, albeit through the back door. In New York he had been a radio gag writer and for several years had successfully submitted cartoon ideas to Arno. It was Maxwell who brought him to the attention of Ross, who hired Geraghty in spite of his thin résumé. Years later Geraghty asked Maxwell what he had seen in him. “You looked like a gentleman,” Maxwell said, “and I wanted to leave.”
Though not an artist himself, James Geraghty had a highly developed aesthetic sense. (Courtesy of Mrs. James Geraghty)
Geraghty would have to prove himself to the artists, certainly, but perhaps his most daunting challenge was winning over the formidable Daise Terry. In addition to being the office manager, Miss Terry functioned as the secretary of the art department, and she had firm ideas about how it should be run. After he had hired Geraghty, Ross took the new man around to see her. “Miss Terry, I want you to meet James Geraghty, who will be taking over the artists,” Ross said. “Mr. Geraghty, meet Miss Terry.” Then throwing his hands high in the air, like a referee kicking off a boxing match, the editor exclaimed, “And may the best man win!”
If Geraghty’s good taste and discerning eye were apparent right away, he had some management shortcomings to overcome. In his early years he could be abrupt and abrasive with some of the artists, who felt he rode roughshod over them. However, his tenor mellowed as his confidence increased, and many of those same bruised artists became his devoted, lifelong friends. Geraghty helped his cause by being a fierce, passionate advocate for the artists, something they had never had at the magazine before. They saw he could often make Ross come around to his way of thinking; they also appreciated his creativity and hard work on captions, and his enthusiasm for their aesthetic. He was known to approve some ideas simply because he knew they would make elegant drawings. Recalled Dana Fradon, “He would come back and say, ‘Dana, now make it beautiful.’ ”
Sadly, there was one artist Geraghty would never convert. His relationship with Rea Irvin would always be his most ticklish problem, for by the time Geraghty arrived at The New Yorker, Ross had little use for the older man. He was routinely rejecting Irvin’s drawings, a situation the artist only exacerbated by circumventing the routine and not bothering to get his ideas approved before he drew them up. Irvin still came in every Tuesday, yet he often dozed through the art meetings, rousing only if something by Gluyas Williams turned up on the board. He was feeling eased out, his turf traduced; yet as a New Yorker founding father he was to be accorded respect. Even though Irvin’s real complaint lay with Ross, to his mind the villain was Geraghty, and the tension between the two n
ever completely dissipated.
This friction notwithstanding, lovers of New Yorker cartoons might consider sitting in on the art meeting a dream job. But with hundreds of submissions to plow through each week, including partially formed (and some deformed) ideas, it was much more business than pleasure. It took a cold eye and, given that the meetings could last three hours or more, an iron posterior. The editors moved through the drawings quickly and deliberately, pausing only over those that were particularly good or that showed promise. Ross would dispatch inferior submissions by the wave of his hand, by growling “Get it out of here!” or even “Cut your throat!” if he deemed a picture especially offensive. An obvious joke might be dismissed with the comment “Bird rock”—art-meeting shorthand since the day a drawing turned up that showed a seagull on a rock, and one man telling another, “They call it ‘Bird Rock.’ ”
Ross was attentive to every detail. He brought to the art the same sharpshooting instincts he did to stories, and the same kinds of eccentricities. Though they were cartoons, verisimilitude mattered. As Geraghty noted, “Ross approached drawings in the mood of those quasi-educational drawings that appeared in the Book of Knowledge. ‘What is wrong with this picture? The artist has made twenty mistakes. See if you can find them.’ ” In Ross’s cartoon universe, houses were supposed to face the road; doors theoretically had to be able to swing unobstructed; lamps were expected to have cords (though some of Ross’s favorite artists had dispensation to conceal them beneath a rug). He became notorious for insisting that it be clear which character in a cartoon was speaking, especially if they were animals. If the artists took these quibbles and crotchets seriously—and they did—some also teased him about them. Once when he was peeved at Ross, Clarence Day, who also drew cartoons, sent the editor a drawing of a naked man with a conspicuously flaccid penis. Ross drew an arrow to the offending appendage and scribbled a note: “Delete.” Day returned it with a note of his own: “Delete what?”
As much as Ross prized cartoons, he spent little time with the artists themselves because the few he had known well tended to lead even more complicated lives than the writers. In 1931, he was overcome with sadness and guilt when one of The New Yorker’s charter artists, Ralph Barton, killed himself (his wife, Carlotta, had left him for Eugene O’Neill). Ross was sad because Barton was a good friend and talented contributor; he was guilty because Barton had told him he intended to kill himself, and Ross didn’t believe him.
Like the fiction writers, the artists were not employees per se but contributors, and most worked out of their homes (eventually forming something of a ghetto in western Connecticut). When Ross had lunch at the Algonquin with some artists one day in 1942, it was the first time he had ever met Charles Addams, even though the artist had been contributing since 1933. William Steig seldom saw Ross; Mischa Richter met him once. Arthur Getz, who began appearing in The New Yorker in 1935, never did meet him. If Ross occasionally interjected himself into important matters of state—say, those times when Arno stopped drawing in pique over his pay—for the most part he was content to let Geraghty run his own shop.
The dark genius of Charles Addams, one of Ross’s favorite artists, is evident in this cartoon from 1941. (By Chas. Addams; © 1941, 1969 The New Yorker Magazine, Inc.)
But once in a while Ross did involve himself in special art projects, and on these occasions his enthusiasm crackled through his correspondence. For instance, he was swept away by Thurber’s classic “Our New Natural History” series of 1945 and 1946, a catalogue of flora and fauna that could exist only in the creator’s fervid imagination. As Thurber biographer Burton Bernstein has pointed out, Ross was so caught up in the series that when Thurber’s store of usable puns and clichés ran low, he was quick to suggest entries of his own, such as the Lazy Susan and the Blue Funk. Before the series even began appearing, however, the editor was well into the spirit of it:
The checking of the names in your Natural History series has revealed that only one name is a real name, the one Rea Irvin happened to know about: there is an actual fish called the pout.
You have a bird called a shriek. In real life there is a bird called a shriker and also one called a shrike. I should think the approximation here does not matter.
There is a bee called a lapidary, but you have drawn an animal.
You have a clock tick. There is, of course, a tick. No matter, I say. There is a bird called a ragamuffin. You have drawn a ragamuffin plant. No real conflict.
In similar spirit Ross conducted a long “covert” correspondence with Gluyas Williams leading up to the publication of his splendid “Wedding” portfolio in June of 1948. (The actual title of the twelve-page spread was “Mr. and Mrs. Melvin Davison Watts Request the Honour of …”) Williams was the artistic equivalent of E. B. White, in that to Ross (and to thousands of fans) he simply could do no wrong. He drew with immaculate line and infinite detail, qualities displayed to maximum advantage in his large panels for “The Wedding” and other notable projects, like his “Industrial Crises” series. Williams could pack dozens of characters into these drawings, each with his own expression of bemusement, confusion, or ennui. Once Ross decided to run the sixteen “Wedding” drawings in a single issue, he determined to keep the whole project a secret, and thereby jumped into it like an enthusiastic child with a new decoder ring. As Williams himself said later, these clandestine letters not only reveal how much Ross cared about art, but suggest how much fun the artists had working for him, “and how much constant stimulation one got from him.”
Ross loved the “Wedding” drawings from the first day he saw them. As with all things he loved, his first impulse was to engage in a little sharpshooting:
You don’t think the father looks too old in two or three of the drawings, do you? You might take a look at that. I had a fleeting impression he looked older in some than in others. The biggest laugh for me in the series so far is the bride’s father. He’s a wonder. All the characters are pretty wonderful, though. The bridegroom runs the father a close second.
Eventually Ross decided it would dilute the impact of the “Wedding” series to break it up. He also believed running it as a package would give readers a nice lift in advance of what he correctly anticipated would be an anxious and heated season of politics:
I am writing this at home, in a conspiratorial manner. We held a solemn session—three or four of us—the other day and decided that—what the hell?—the only thing to do with the wedding series is run it all at once, and this we will do unless you disapprove.… The more we have looked at the pictures, the more wonderful they have seemed, and the greater has seemed the crime of separating them.
Please let me know whether or not you approve of our plan.… But do not write me at the office, for we want to keep this project secret, if we can. The columnists are always telling what we are going to print, and with considerable accuracy, and we’d just as soon they didn’t take the edge off this surprise.
The editors managed to keep the project under wraps, and with days left before publication, the only remaining snag was Williams’s insistence on calling the post-wedding reception a “breakfast.” This baffled Ross—the wedding, after all, was an afternoon affair—but he was not a man for jumping to conclusions. For a ruling the magazine prevailed on Emily Post, a Ross acquaintance ever since the evening he found himself beside her at a formal dinner, palpably anxious in anticipation of reaching for the wrong fork or committing some other gaffe. He relaxed when he noticed America’s arbiter of decorum sweeping the crumbs from her dinner roll into her hand, then popping them into her mouth—just the way he always had. In this letter Ross explains their fact-checking methodology, then prevails on Williams to keep their secret just a while longer:
A panel from Gluyas Williams’s “Wedding” portfolio. (By Gluyas Williams; © 1948, 1916 The New Yorker Magazine, Inc.)
I don’t know what the hell to make of the gulf between Emily Post and the Boston caterer in the matter of what you call the post
-wedding function. We got out Emily’s books (or anyhow, one of her books, which was right on a shelf in the checking room) and found that she discusses wedding breakfasts at considerable length but that she doesn’t name any hour at which a wedding breakfast ceases to be that. We did that before we called her up. Then, she is quoted to me as having said that she just never heard of such a thing in her life. “Reception” is a better word, doubtless, anyhow, for whatever the caterer says, and whatever Emily might have said, everybody in this office was astonished at the use of “breakfast,” and we have a Harvard man and an Oxford man here, too.
Operative KX12 didn’t slip up in mailing those proofs from the office. I said nothing whatever in my note that would reveal our fell plan. I assumed that my secretary (whom I recently acquired and, to tell the truth, do not trust completely) and whoever else saw the communication would think I was just lining up a normal series—if they thought anything.… Anyhow, I couldn’t bring the batch of proofs home here and mail them, for lack of facilities. The strain of finding a stamp in the rat-nest of my wife’s top dressing-table drawer, addressing an ordinary envelope, and slipping out through the kitchen to the mail chute, propping the kitchen door open so that I am not locked out on the landing, is as much as I can take. I would never make a spy. I’d tip over the invisible ink.
From here on I will be completely underground and you won’t hear from me unless there is a crisis of some kind, in which case I will probably endeavor to telephone you. If you get a call from Ulysses S. Grant, talking in a low, husky voice, you will know who it is.