Man in Profile

by Thomas Kunkel

  “[A]nother visitor was Mickey Welch, who used to pitch for the old New York Giants years and years ago. As a matter of plain fact, he quit playing ball in 1892. I played against him many a time.

  “He brought up the story about the time I was scheduled to run a race with Arlie Latham—fastest man on the St. Louis team. I was the fastest man on the Chicago team, of course. Well, in the meantime I got converted at the Pacific Garden Mission, in Chicago.

  “So I was very put out, as a practicing Christian, when I heard they were going to hold this race on a Sunday afternoon. I went around to my manager and I said, ‘I’ve been converted and I can’t run in this race on a Sunday.’

  “And he said, ‘The hell you can’t. I got all my money on that race, and if you don’t win it I’ll have to eat snowballs for breakfast all winter.’ So I said, ‘The Lord wouldn’t like for me to run on a Sunday.’ Well, the manager looked at me and said, ‘You go ahead and run that race and fix it up with the Lord later.’ ”

  Credit 5.1

  The New York World-Telegram assigned the intrepid Mitchell to all manner of stories, as he seemed interested in everything.

  Besides celebrity profiles, Mitchell made a specialty of in-depth series. These typically appeared over four to six days, with all the pieces exploring a single subject in exhaustive detail. They covered a remarkably idiosyncratic range: the history of vaudeville, real estate auctions, the New York waterfront, Prohibition, and the 1933 Chicago World’s Fair (which Mitchell was sent to cover). Sometimes the topics came from deskbound editors; others were Mitchell’s own suggestions. Their significance in terms of a developing young writer far transcended the diverse subject matter, however. They show that Mitchell was turning out an astounding amount of copy in this first phase of his career. Each story in one of these series, for instance, typically ran to several thousand words, and the sheer amount of time invested in the interviewing and basic research was considerable. And it’s not as though Mitchell would disappear from the paper for months before one of these series was published; he was pulling them together in the “spare” time between the daily features and profiles he was writing as a matter of course. Then again, in these salad days Mitchell wrote quickly, and his acute mind allowed him to shape vast amounts of information into coherent narratives prior to sitting down at the typewriter.

  These early stories also reveal that from the outset Mitchell was a great and gifted listener, with a particularly refined ear for dialogue. Shy by nature, Mitchell quickly learned the reporter’s bag of tricks for getting interview subjects to open up. He realized that most people are uncomfortable with silence and will talk to fill the void, so he was not above simply shutting up to see what the interviewee volunteered. But more typically Mitchell coaxed his subjects with a great and animated enthusiasm, as if the secret to happiness or the meaning of life could be found in their sometimes-dreary monologues. Often, in fact, Mitchell was transfixed—but certainly not always. He was unimpressed with the bulk of the celebrities or politicians he was assigned to interview, and he considered most successful industrialists and financiers self-important windbags. “After painfully interviewing one of those gentlemen,” he would write, “you go down in the elevator and walk into the street and see the pretty girls, the pretty working girls, with their jolly breasts bouncing about under their dresses and you are relieved; you feel as if you had escaped from a tomb in which the worms were just beginning their work….” He far preferred the authenticity of everyday people, who were not working off some unseen script. “The best talk is artless,” he said, “the talk of people trying to reassure or comfort themselves, women in the sun, grouped around baby carriages, talking about their weeks in the hospital or the way meat has gone up, or men in saloons, talking to combat the loneliness everyone feels.”

  —

  Like all young reporters, Mitchell was intoxicated by the romance of newspapering in New York. He loved the fact that every day brought a new, unexpected assignment. He thrilled when the newspaper’s huge presses rumbled to life, shaking the building and tingling the nerves. He loved the camaraderie of the newsroom and of the smoky newspaper bars to which Mitchell and his colleagues reflexively retired after work, the greenhorns hanging on to the practiced stories of the veterans. It was a sign of the respect Mitchell was earning that, still in his twenties, he was elected chair of the World-Telegram local of the Newspaper Guild, the national union of professional reporters and editors. But also like many young reporters, Mitchell envisioned himself branching out into broader pieces for magazines, for the exposure and to augment his modest income. He kept an eye on various publications for prospects for his kind of work. One magazine he was reading especially closely was a relatively new title but one that was already developing a solid reputation in the New York journalistic community. The respect came in large part because the magazine was recruiting top local talent to its reporting and editing staffs. It was called The New Yorker, and its editors gave nonfiction writers rare license both in terms of subject matter and writing approach. Mitchell was well acquainted with one of the magazine’s most recent acquisitions, a fellow North Carolinian named Don Wharton, who had come to the Herald Tribune around the same time Mitchell did and who left in 1932 to become an editor at The New Yorker. It’s likely Wharton played a role in opening the magazine’s door to Mitchell.

  It appears Mitchell had at least a hand in a short Talk of the Town piece that appeared in The New Yorker in June of 1933. Talk pieces were short and typically droll dispatches from around the city, and the subject of this item was one of the nation’s few remaining manufacturers of silk top hats. Max Fluegelman had fashioned inaugural hats for both Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt, as well as for every U.S. president in between. For most of The New Yorker’s history, Talk contributions were not signed, although the magazine’s archive indicates that Mitchell was one of several contributors to this piece. It was common then for newspaper reporters to provide Talk ideas or even first drafts, which were then “run through the typewriter,” or polished, by sundry New Yorker editors (including founder Harold Ross) to achieve the Talk of the Town department’s desired tone of bemused detachment.

  Mitchell’s first substantive and undisputed contribution to The New Yorker appeared soon after, in November. This was a Reporter at Large article about Elkton, Maryland, a town just south of the Pennsylvania border, which had become somewhat notorious for providing quickie marriages for men and women desperately in need of them—a group that encompassed all types and classes of people, Mitchell wryly notes (“Persons whose names are in the Social Registers of two cities have waited patiently on the worn sofa in a marriage parlor while the minister finished mumbling the dreary service for a couple from a carnival”). Mitchell’s dispatch, while straightforward enough, is elevated by a sardonic perspective evident from the report’s opening paragraphs. Central to his story are the two elderly rival ministers who operate the town’s marriage parlors, the Rev. R. W. Moon and the Rev. Edward Minor. Observes Mitchell:

  The driver brings the couple to the parlor and calls for the minister. If it is the Rev. Moon, he comes shambling in, a gaunt, shining-eyed man. While he examines the permit, he talks to the groom. His voice is servile. “What part of the country are you from, brother?” he asks. If the bride, nervous, usually weeping, lights a cigarette, he regards her severely. “Sister,” he says, “I don’t like to see the ladies smoke. It withers their memories and makes their offspring puny.” If the bride, forlorn in the drab room, sobs when the ceremony is completed, he pats her on the shoulder and says, “Now, now, marriage is the most beautiful thing in a woman’s life.”

  Mitchell followed up this contribution quickly, producing a Profile of the popular singer Kate Smith, which appeared in March of 1934. At first glance this piece, entitled “Home Girl,” would appear to be just another celebrity portrait, not unlike the ones Mitchell was turning out for the World-Telegram. But Mitchell affects a tone that is different, and dar
ker, than that. For one thing, he telegraphs to the reader that he is not especially a fan of the singer’s sentimental oeuvre, which itself gets your attention and makes you wonder what kind of treatment the Profile subject is in for. But more remarkable is the story’s main theme, broached right at the outset, which is one of resentment—an emotion that has built up in the young woman after listening to countless vaudeville and radio comics make sport of her corpulence (in 1934, Kate Smith was just twenty-four years old and already two hundred twenty-six pounds). Mitchell devotes much of his allotted space to these slights, to the pain and anger they arouse in her, and to the image they have created of her in the public mind, one almost of a performing freak. Against this image he then juxtaposes the considerable (and largely unpublicized) efforts Smith devotes in her private life to helping the less fortunate. In this sense, the portrait can be seen as a forerunner of the more famous Profiles Mitchell soon would be writing of non-celebrity down-and-outers, which would explore so poignantly, and in much more depth, the theme of “otherness.” Mitchell closed the Profile by discussing how pleased Smith was to be invited by the Philadelphia Orchestra to be a soloist for a fundraiser.

  She decided to sing “My Heart at Thy Sweet Voice,” and, when she arrived at the concert hall, frightened Leopold Stokowski by going over to him and saying sharply, “When you come to this note, hold it! See?” Each day she grows prouder of her infinitely sentimental contralto, and once she told an interviewer, “I’m big and I’m fat and I’m not a prize beauty, but I have a voice, and when I sing, boy, I sing all over.”

  Here was another indication that Mitchell was no daily hack but a thoughtful writer who was bringing irony, intentionality, even contrariness, to his narratives. As Mitchell knew long before the rest of the public did, even celebrities bruise.

  More significant than the content of these early contributions, however, was that they put Mitchell firmly on the radar of The New Yorker’s editors. The magazine was keen to get even more Joseph Mitchell into its pages. But the editors of the World-Telegram knew they had something special in Mitchell, too. And they were working him, hard. He was writing literally every day, sometimes several stories per day. Even for a New York–based general-assignment reporter, the range of his interests and assignments was astonishing.

  In June of 1934, for instance, Mitchell witnessed serial executions at Sing Sing penitentiary, as New York put to death three men convicted of methodically poisoning a drunken derelict whose life they had first insured, with themselves as beneficiaries. Every aspect of their tale—the perpetrators, the victim, the plot—was tawdry. But Mitchell’s account of their execution is anything but, the scene’s horror only reinforced by the understatement of his observations. “The relatives were waiting to claim the bodies of the three men who helped kill a barfly for $1,290. It took them a long time to kill Malloy. It took the State only sixteen minutes to kill them.”

  Then in July, during a particularly oppressive heat wave that had the city in its grip, Mitchell produced a string of almost impressionist pieces about it. Weather stories are the bane of every newspaper reporter, as it’s challenging to find new or inventive ways to say, “It’s hot (or cold, or rainy, or icy) out there.” Mitchell solved the problem by taking a novelistic approach to the assignment, turning the journalistic trope on its head and making the heat palpable to his readers. “It takes ten beers to quench one’s thirst,” he writes. “The damp, insistent heat has placed blue lines beneath the eyes of subway passengers. The flags on the skyscrapers are slack; there is no breeze.” A little later he lets the proprietor of a Romanian restaurant on the Lower East Side recount a “revealing” story, in his distinct patois.

  “It is hot and humidity all day down here, yes, but at night you sleep on the roof,” [says Haimowitz]. “Nothing better at all. We lay blankets down in the dark and go to sleep, everybody, all the families. The other night something terrible happened on a roof in Hester Street. There is a fat guy, so big as me almost, a butcher. He has too much to drink. He goes home and takes off his clothes. He knows his wife is up on the roof. He goes stumbling up there and he lifts up a blanket. It is the wrong blanket, but he does not know it. It is some other lady, not his wife. He goes right to sleep and snores very big. The lady wakes up and takes a look at him. She screams and she yells. She flees away in a hurry and almost falls off the roof. Then his right wife she gets out from under her blanket and sees him. She gives a scream. She gives him a kick, but it is no good. He snores. They call a cop, and they pull him away to his own blanket. He does not wake up. He just dreams and snores. The whole neighborhood wakes up, but not him. It is good to sleep on roof. So cool. Better yet than any shore.”

  Mitchell’s work during this stretch showed him to be a kind of journalistic prodigy; in essence still a post-apprentice, he could scarcely have been expected to be capable of such emotional nuance and writerly craft. Yet he was shrewd enough, too, to be aware that he and a number of other young practitioners were gradually elevating what New York daily journalism was capable of. Newspapering in this Front Page era was as clamorous and frenetic as New York itself, a kind of contact sport. In 1920 there were fourteen daily papers operating in the city; the competition was so fierce that the strong were on the verge of swallowing the weak in a wave of mergers or buyouts. Radio was fast emerging as yet another threat. For publishers keen to unload their two- and three-cent papers on as many readers as possible, speed often trumped accuracy, and titillation was more alluring than public-affairs news. With the exception of the staid Times, the more venturesome Herald Tribune, and a handful of other “serious” papers, this was a tabloid age. Partisan politics suffused much of what passed for news content, and scant attention was paid to genuine social ills. In the Depression environment, editors figured readers wanted distractions from their troubles. So columnists purveyed gossip and rumor and their own colorful nocturnal activities. The average reporter, who learned on the job, had little incentive to attempt true storytelling or focus on real people. Mitchell and a younger generation of newspaper journalists wanted to change this unsatisfying state of affairs. Later in life, Mitchell talked about that desire and the hubris it engendered in them. “There was a peculiar journalistic world—Lucius Beebe and [Walter] Winchell—but we were above that,” he would say self-effacingly. “We were superior to other reporters and the Daily News, but we weren’t arrogant. We were observers, kind of Olympian—when really we were ignorant young people trying to act like we knew everything.”

  Proud as he was of what he had accomplished in a few short years in New York, Mitchell nonetheless clung to his North Carolina tether. Back home, the Mitchell family not only was weathering the Depression, but A.N. actually profited by acquiring a number of farms that his neighbors couldn’t keep up with. The enterprise was becoming more challenging to manage by himself, though. Joseph and Therese returned to Fairmont at least once a year, usually in summer, and if anything the growing family business only increased the continuing, if largely unspoken, pressure on the eldest son to come back home for good once he got the New York adventure out of his system. In reality, the visits were persuading Mitchell that he was becoming a kind of “exile,” a man emotionally torn between two worlds. This was a theme he would explore for the rest of his life, as he grappled with the guilt of leaving home and spurning his father’s wishes. Yet each trip to Fairmont underscored for Mitchell how much he had come to love New York, how much he missed its action and sensory bombardment when he was away. Invariably, the minute he arrived in North Carolina he started longing again for New York. It was a dichotomy Mitchell never really reconciled.

  —

  After more than three years of nonstop features, major series, and oddball miscellany, Mitchell got a “reprieve” of sorts at the beginning of 1935, when the World-Telegram included him on the team it dispatched to cover the “trial of the century.”

  At a courthouse in Flemington, New Jersey, about fifty miles west of New York, a German �
�migré named Bruno Hauptmann was to be tried for extortion and murder in the kidnapping and death of the infant son of Charles Lindbergh, who eight years earlier had flown solo across the Atlantic to become America’s hero and an international sensation. The child was taken from the Lindbergh home in Hopewell, New Jersey, in March of 1932; a ransom was demanded and paid, but Charles Jr.’s remains were discovered that May. The nation breathlessly followed the tragic story. It would be another two years before Hauptmann was arrested and charged with the crime.

  Credit 5.2

  Mitchell at the out-of-the-way New Jersey inn that became a second home during Bruno Hauptmann’s “trial of the century.”

  In September and October of 1934, after Hauptmann’s arrest, Mitchell was one of the legions of reporters on the case, writing the occasional news update—for instance, when Lindbergh showed up to testify at the grand jury for Hauptmann, or when Hauptmann was transferred to Flemington to await trial. But with the trial’s start on January 2, 1935, the New York media swept into Flemington like a military invasion. The World-Telegram mounted a team of ten journalists on the scene to cover the trial, and Mitchell would say that “compared with our competitors we were understaffed.”