by Tom Wolfe
Nevertheless, I found my sources, and I managed to observe, from the wings, as it were, The New Yorker’s fortieth birthday celebration at the St. Regis Hotel. Then I started writing the parody, and I ran into something I hadn’t counted on. Wolcott Gibbs’s parody of Time back in 1936 had been hilarious precisely because it was a caricature of an original, lively, radical departure in journalistic writing, the already famous Timestyle. But a parody of a style as dull as The New Yorker’s could be funny for about half a page, which is to say, only until you got the joke. After that, due to parody’s law of hypertrophy, it would become literally duller than dull. The New Yorker style was one of leisurely meandering understatement, droll when in the humorous mode, tautological and litotical when in the serious mode, constantly amplified, qualified, adumbrated upon, nuanced and renuanced, until the magazine’s palegray pages became High Baroque triumphs of the relative clause and the appository modifier. The only solution, it seemed to me, was to turn all that upside down, shake it out, get rid of the dust, and come up with a counter-parody, a style that was everything The New Yorker wasn’t: urgent, insistent, exclamatory, overstated—and fun.
By the time I had finished it, it was so long it would have to run in two parts. Clay showed them to the Herald Tribune’s editor, Jim Bellows. Bellows read them, rubbed his palms together, and smacked his lips. Jim Bellows, although young, was a newspaperman of the old school. A month that went by without a good brawl was a pretty dull month. It so happened that the Sunday supplement, New York, was printed each Wednesday for insertion in the Sunday Trib four days later. So on Wednesday, as soon as my first installment was off the presses, Bellows had two copies delivered to Shawn at The New Yorker, whose offices were on West Forty-third Street, about four blocks from the Trib’s. The piece was entitled “Tiny Mummies! The True Story of the Ruler of 43rd Street’s Land of the Walking Dead.” With the two copies Bellows included a card on which he had written, “With my compliments.”
Shawn’s reaction was too good to be true. In his own minimomaniacal way—Malcolm Muggeridge once wrote that the world was full of megalomaniacs but that William Shawn was the only minimomaniac he had ever met—in his own way Shawn outdid Henry Luce of three decades earlier when it came to overreacting to a profile. Bango! He had a letter hand-delivered those same four blocks to the Trib.
The letter was not addressed to Bellows, however, much less to Clay Felker or to me. It was addressed to the Trib’s owner and publisher, Jock Whitney, who was not only a very rich man but also a very distinguished gentleman, lately, in fact, United States Ambassador to the Court of St. James’s. It was at the distinguished gentleman in Jock Whitney that Shawn’s letter seemed to be aimed. He called “Tiny Mummies” libelous, to be sure, but also worse than libelous. It was “murderous.” Not only that, this single reckless, heedless, needless collapse of judgment—the publication of this pointless article—would forever consign the Herald Tribune and its long and honorable heritage, dating back to the great Horace Greeley, to “the gutter” along with the worst yellow journalism of the 1920s. He beseeched Whitney to withhold it from publication, to keep the magazine out of the Herald Tribune on Sunday.
A stunned Jock Whitney brought the letter in to Bellows, whose office was right next door, and said, “What do we do, Jim?”
Bellows read the letter and chuckled and said, “I’ll show you what we do, Jock.”
With that, while Whitney stared, Bellows got on the telephone and called up Time and read them the letter. Then he called up Newsweek and read them the letter. “Tiny Mummies” was published, as scheduled, on Sunday. On Monday accounts of the article and Shawn’s letter were all over the Press sections of Time and Newsweek, and a perfect storm broke. It reached all the way into Lyndon Johnson’s White House.
Tiny Mummies! The True Story of the Ruler of 43rd Street’s Land of the Walking Dead!
Omertà! Sealed lips! Sealed lips, ladies and gentlemen! Our Thing! We are editing The New Yorker magazine, Harold Ross’s New Yorker. We are not running a panopticon. Not exactly! For weeks the editors of The New Yorker have been circulating a warning among their employees saying that someone is out to write an article about The New Yorker. This warning tells them, remember: Omertà. Your vow of silence—but New Yorker employees are not the only people in the world who have to take this vow. White House employees have to take it—none of this gratuitous libel, my G-6 lovelies, about how “I Saw What Lyndon Drinks for Dinner”—Buckingham Palace employees have to take it—those graceless alum-mouthed butlers and everything—everybody in the Mafia and at the G. & C. Merriam Co. of Springfield, Mass.—a lot of people. The G. & C. Merriam Co. puts out Webster’s Dictionary, and they don’t want a lot of flip anecdotes published about how, for example, they sit down to decide whether certain popular but … dusky words are going to get in the book this time around. Right?
One wouldn’t even have known about the warning going around the New Yorker except that they put it in writing, in memos. They have a compulsion in the New Yorker offices, at 25 West Forty-third Street, to put everything in writing. They have boys over there on the nineteenth and twentieth floors, the editorial offices, practically caroming off each other—bonk old bison heads!—at the blind turns in the hallways because of the fantastic traffic in memos. They just call them boys. “Boy, will you take this, please …” Actually, a lot of them are old men with starched white collars with the points curling up a little, “big lunch” ties, button-up sweaters, and black basket-weave sack coats, and they are all over the place transporting these thousands of messages with their kindly old elder bison shuffles shoop-shooping along. They were boys when they started the job, but the thing is, The New Yorker is forty years old—four decades, even, of The New Yorker!—and they all have seniority, like Pennsylvania Railroad conductors.
The paper the thousands of messages are on is terrific rag-fiber paper. It comes in pads gum-bound up at the top, but it is the best possible paper. It is like the problem with dollar bills wearing out with use. If there is this fantastic traffic in memos and things all day long, one has to have paper that will hold up. There are different colors for different “unit tasks.” Manuscripts are typed on maize-yellow bond, bud-green is for blah-blah-blah, fuchsia demure is for blah-blah-blah, Newsboy blue is for blah-blah-blah, and this great cerise, a kind of mild cherry red, is for urgent messages, immediate attention and everything. So here are these old elder bison messengers batting off each other in the halls, hustling cerise memos around about some story somebody is doing.
Well—all I can say is that it is a great system they have going up there—but—nevertheless—people talked. These … people talked! They talked about things like William Shawn and the Leopold and Loeb case, Shawn being editor of The New Yorker, and about auto-lobotomy, many fascinating things.
But! These people were … thinking out loud. People do that a lot at The New Yorker and wonder what is going on. They get that way, for example, because a guy gets hired one day and some whispery guy in old worsteds shows him to a cubicle and he sits down at his desk in there and for the next two months he never meets anybody. Everybody is in other cubicles with the doors shut. Whole days go by. He just sits there, and every now and then Old Messenger comes in and hands him a communique, in maize-yellow, fuchsia demure, bud-green, hello-outthere beige, hello-help-help canary, kiss-me-somebody cerise, please-I-love-you-anybody cerise—until he goes stir crazy and starts prowling the halls and opens a door, and he sees these … women with their backs arched over desks in this … unusual place, the Transferring Room; or he hits this weird zone in the back corner of the nineteenth floor, the Whisper Zone, all this sibilance up there.
Eventually he finds that all these things, the Whisper Zone, the Transferring Room, the memos, the System, omertà, everything, leads back to one man—Shawn. William Shawn—editor of one of the most powerful magazines in America. The Man. Nobody Knows.
That is why they bring up things like this business of Shaw
n and the Leopold-Loeb case. They, themselves, want an … explanation. In this story, one of the stories told repeatedly, it is May 21, 1924, and Richard Loeb is crouching in the weeds with Nathan Leopold, and he says, “Nathan, look! How about William Shawn—” William Shawn is such a quiet, bright little kid, neat—you know?—no trouble, secretary of his class at the Harvard School for Boys, you know the class-secretary kind. His father is “Jackknife Ben.” They live in a big place at 4355 Vincennes. Easy ransom!
Only they don’t tell it too well. In the first place, Loeb didn’t call Leopold “Nathan.” He called him “Babe,” or something like that. And they would have never squatted in the grass. They had these great clothes on, they were social, one understands?
What the records show, actually, in the Cook County (Chicago) Criminal Court and at the Harvard School, now the Harvard—St. George School, is the following: Shawn—then called Chon—and Bobby Franks were classmates at the Harvard School for Boys that year. Shawn was a junior, sixteen years old, one of the brightest students in the school, and Bobby Franks was fourteen years old, a couple of years behind him. Leopold and Loeb were very methodical. They had a whole set of specifications. They wanted a small and therefore manageable teenage boy, from the Harvard School, with wealthy parents who would pay up fast on the ransom. They went over six names, the first one of which was “William.” The court records do not give the last name. Shawn’s father, Benjamin W. “Jackknife Ben” Chon, had made a lot of money by opening a shop, The Jack Knife Shop, at 838 Exchange Avenue in the aromatic, full-bodied Union Stock Yards on Chicago’s South Side, in 1889, and selling 150 different kinds of jackknives. Great jackknife country! Wealthy parents! And judging by the Harvard School yearbook for 1924, William Chon was a small, quiet teenage boy. In fact, even in 1940, the year of the school’s seventy-fifth anniversary, everybody from the Harvard School still remembered him that way. Billy Chon was senior class president, and the 1925 yearbook, The Review, had said, “‘Bill’ is certain to succeed in life, and will always remain the pride of the Class of 1925”—but still, the way they remembered him in the seventy-fifth anniversary book was “Who would have ever thought that little Billy Chon would have become one of the big shots on the editorial staff of The New Yorker magazine?” But so what? Not just Billy Chon but every small quiet boy in the Harvard School that year—who blames them!—must have felt as if the intellectual murderers, Leopold and Loeb, had fixed their clinical eyes upon him at some point. They dropped the idea of “William” only because they had a personal grudge against him and somebody might remember that. They gave up on three or four others because they knew them too well or because their fathers were too tight with the money and might refuse to pay a good ransom. Intellectual crime! How could anybody in God’s world be safe if there were people like Leopold and Loeb going around killing people just for the … aesthetics of the perfect crime.
The whole story, and others about Shawn, supposedly help explain why Shawn is so … retiring, why he won’t allow interviews, why he won’t let his picture be taken, why it pains him to ride elevators, go through tunnels, get cooped up—why he remains anonymous, as they say, and slips The New Yorker out each week from behind a barricade of … pure fin de siècle back-parlor horsehair stuffing.
Incredible! Shawn attended the University of Michigan, 1925-’27, married Cecille Lyon in 1928, worked on two newspapers, then in 1933 joined The New Yorker’s “Talk of the Town” department as a reporter. At some point he dropped Chon for Shawn. Shawn took over as editor when Harold Ross died in 1951. Thereby he became one of the most prominent and powerful editors in the country. By World War II, The New Yorker was already the most prestigeful “quality lit” magazine in America. And since World War II, largely under Shawn’s stewardship, it has become—new honors!—the most successful suburban women’s magazine in the country. Mountains of prestige. Yet from that day to this, the outside world has learned practically nothing of William Shawn. Nobody seems to know him except for a few “inties”—intimates—at The New Yorker, like Lillian Ross.
Elusive pimpernel! The Shawn legends! The one of how he tries to time it in the morning so he can go straight up to his office on the nineteenth floor, by himself on the elevator, and carries a hatchet in his attaché case so he can chop his way out if it gets stuck between floors—crazy stories like that!
Shawn is a very quiet man. He has a soft, somewhat high voice. He seems to whisper all the time. The whole … zone around his office, a kind of horsehair-stuffing atmosphere of old carpeting, framed New Yorker covers, quiet cubicles, and happy-shabby, baked-apple gentility, is a Whisper Zone. One gets within forty feet of it and everybody … is whispering, all the secretaries and everybody. The Shawn whisper; the whisper zone radiates out from Shawn himself. Shawn in the hallway slips along as soundlessly as humanly possible and—chooooo—he meets somebody right there in the hall. The nodding! The whispering! Shawn is fifty-seven years old but still has a boyish face. He is a small, plump man, round in the cheeks. He always seems to have on about twenty layers of clothes, about three button-up sweaters, four vests, a couple of shirts, two ties, it looks that way, a dark shapeless suit over the whole ensemble, and white cotton socks. Here he is in the hall, and he lowers his head and puts out his hand.
“Hello—Mr.”—he begins nodding—“Taylor—how—are—you,” with his head down, nodding down, down, down, down, “—it’s—nice”—his head is down and he rolls his eyes up and looks out from under his own forehead—“to—see—you”—and then edges back with his hand out, his head nodding, eyes rolled up, back foot edging back, back, back, back—“very—good—to—see—you”—nodding, smiling—infectious! Good for one! One does the same, whispering, nodding, getting the old head down, nodding down, down, smiling, edging back, rolling the eyeballs up the precipice of the forehead. One becomes quiet, gentle, genteelly, magnificently, numbly, so—
All right. Let’s deal by note, memo, or telephone at The New Yorker. But—embarrassment! Shawn calls up—and even the secretary down where Lillian Ross is—and he calls up Lillian Ross all the time—and even this secretary does it again:
“Hello, may I speak to Miss Ross?”
“Whom should I say is calling?”
Whum, dramatic, grammatic pause—whisper—“Mr. Shawn.”
Zonk! Mr. Shawn! She has flaked it again. He slipped in under the tympanic membrane with the whisper. One of the four or five most prominent men in Communications! Unrecognized in his own office. But does Shawn himself care? Shawn doesn’t care; he has a passion for anonymity. Always he has this passion. Except—well, such as the times some writer or somebody, a young novelist, goes to a party in Shawn’s apartment on Fifth Avenue. It is on the first floor and looks out on Central Park. It is a very full view. One can see who is coming from all directions. Nothing but trees across the street, no peering windows, no elevators, nothing like that. Philip Hamburger is at the party. Philip Hamburger has written a feature in The New Yorker called “Notes for a Gazetteer” fifty-two times. Hamburger and a lot of people from The New Yorker are there. It is a “very nice” party. Shawn puts on some records from his jazz collection: Jelly Roll, Bix, Bunny Berrigan, Willie the Lion, Fats, Art. We were all very hippie along the Mississippi in naughty naughty oughty-eight. And Young Novelist writes a note the next day thanking him, addressing it to “Mr. Ted Shawn.” One means, well, everybody knows Shawn is editor of The New Yorker and everything, but he is … so quiet, so passionately anonymous, so these names get mixed up. Ted Shawn is a famous dancer. And the next day a call comes and it is Mrs. Shawn saying, “Thank you so much for your nice note, and by the way—
“Mr. Shawn’s name is William, not … Ted. Mr. Shawn prefers to be anonymous but not … quite that anonymous.”
All the same! He is Shawn of The New Yorker. Many New Yorker writers are devoted to him. They have dedicated at least six books to him. He is self-effacing, kind, quiet, diligent, an efficient man, courtly, refined, considerate, hum
ble, and—Shawn uses this quiet business like a maestro. He has the quiet moxie to walk through the snow at 3 a.m. to the apartment of somebody who owes him a story—the magazine is at the absolute deadline, and this writer is revising and revising and won’t turn loose of the story, so Shawn just turns up at the door with snow caked all over his boots, boots with clackety buckles, and layers of clothes, and he knocks on the door, and the poor guy’s wife, who is asleep on the couch in the living room, gets up and answers the door, and Shawn says:
“Hello—Mrs.—Taylor”—he is nodding and smiling—“is—your—husband—in?”—nodding, smiling, rolling his eyeballs up and down his forehead, edging in—“uh—I’m afraid—I’m—going—to—have—to”—
“Good evening, Mr. Shawn,” or something, she says. “I mean, he’s in the bedroom, he’s working—”
“—take—a—manuscript—from—your—husband—how—have—you—been—Mrs.—Taylor?”—edging, nodding, sliding the old booty feet, ever nodding back, nod, smile—“your—lovely—daughters?”— edge, edge, eye-roll, right over to the bedroom, and he opens the door and walks in, nod, smile, peeking eye: “Oh—good—evening—Mr.—Taylor—yes—I’ll—have—to—take—this—now—thank—yon—very—much—how—is”—he pulls the story up out of the typewriter and off the desk, with Taylor falling back in his wooden chair like a burntout cigarette filter—“Mrs. Taylor?—you-are-very-kind—yes—thank—you—very—much”—he edges back toward the door, nods his head down, down, down, smiles, rolls his eyes up from under his forehead, edges back, the booty buckles clackle—“goodbye—Mrs.—Taylor—thank—you—how—is—”
Floonk, the door closes. Quiet! Shawn wins.
Yes! And suddenly, after forty years, it all adds up. Whispering, inconspicuous—but courtly—formal, efficient—but sympathetic—perfection! —what are those but, precisely! the perfect qualifications for a museum custodian, an undertaker, a mortuary scientist. But of course! Thirteen years ago, upon the death of Harold Ross, precisely, that difficult task befell William Shawn: to be the museum curator, the mummifier, the preserve-in-amber, the smiling embalmer … for Harold Ross’s New Yorker magazine.
