Man in Profile

by Thomas Kunkel

  The New Yorker was Ross’s brainchild, and a more unlikely marriage of man and idea can scarcely be imagined. A roughneck and a high school dropout, Ross was born in Aspen, Colorado, and raised in Salt Lake City, Utah, when both were little more than frontier settlements, as wide open and woolly as Ross himself. He spent a number of years roaming the United States (and into Panama for a while, during the canal’s construction) as a “tramp” reporter for dozens of newspapers before enlisting in the Army with America’s entry into World War I. In France he became managing editor of the newly established Stars and Stripes service newspaper, and after the war he settled in New York City, intent on starting a magazine.

  Ross toyed with several ideas, but his main one envisioned a new kind of publication that would reflect the glamour and excitement of twenties Manhattan. To his numerous friends in the media, theater, and arts (he was a charter member of the Algonquin Round Table crowd), the notion of a rube like Ross as an arbiter of urbanity was preposterous. He looked like a blacksmith and he swore like one. He brushed his coarse black hair straight up into a kind of three-inch hedge. His clothes were rumpled and ill-fitting, and he wore highbutton shoes long after they ceased to be fashionable. His laugh, while infectious, was explosive and snorted, and it exposed a cavernous gap between his two front teeth. Chic he was not. Nevertheless, Ross was as stubborn as he was confident, and he persuaded the heir to a New York commercial-baking fortune, Raoul Fleischmann, to bankroll the enterprise.

  The New Yorker launched in February of 1925, and its early issues were so editorially infirm that the whole venture nearly died in the crib. Its few curious readers didn’t know what to make of it. Before it landed upon its famously aloof and amused tone, The New Yorker came across as clumsy and shrill and trying too hard. Editorial content was wildly uneven and error-ridden; aiming to be au courant, it simply was tripping over itself. About the only thing Ross got right from the outset was the artwork and cartoons—but that wasn’t enough to keep readership from atrophying throughout the spring and summer following its launch. Fortunately for Ross, Fleischmann was an inveterate gambler, and against his better judgment he kept infusing the start-up with cash.

  Finally, in the fall of 1925, with the arrival of a new cultural season and Ross securing stronger material, The New Yorker started to catch on. Through sheer force of will, Ross was conjuring the mix of wit, voice, and storytelling (both fact and fiction) that would prove to be a winning formula for readers of a certain means and discernment—and, even more important, for the advertisers who wanted to reach them.

  It’s true Ross was not a sophisticated person, but he had highly sophisticated editorial instincts, including an uncanny nose for talent. Indeed, his recruiting ability turned out to be the primary driver for The New Yorkers success. He relentlessly sought out creative people, be they editing lieutenants (Ralph Ingersoll, Katharine S. White, Stanley Walker, William Shawn); cartoonists and artists (Peter Arno, Helen Hokinson, Whitney Darrow, Jr., Rea Irvin); humorists (James Thurber, Robert Benchley, S. J. Perelman); critics (Wolcott Gibbs, Lewis Mumford, Clifton Fadiman); essayists (E. B. White); fiction writers (Clarence Day, John O’Hara, Sally Benson, John Cheever); or the journalists who made up the magazine’s so-called Fact staff (St. Clair McKelway, Janet Flanner, Meyer Berger, Alva Johnston). By the late thirties, The New Yorker was secure enough, and staffed-up enough, that Ross could have relaxed his recruiting efforts and let talent simply come to him. Instead, he accelerated his search, looking in particular to build up his reportorial staff to help the transformation of his onetime “comic paper” (as he always called, and fancied, his creation) into a kind of global journal. In time, Ross would assemble a stable of nonfiction talent that became synonymous with American literary journalism—A. J. Liebling, Philip Hamburger, E. J. Kahn, Jr., Lillian Ross, Brendan Gill, Geoffrey Hellman, Emily Hahn…and the man who was perhaps the most enduring of all: Joseph Mitchell.

  Credit 6.1

  When he hit New York in the early twenties, Harold Ross still looked like the Utah rube he was. By the time he hired Joseph Mitchell at The New Yorker, in 1938, Ross had cleaned up considerably.

  No surprise given his itinerant reporting history, Ross was a newspaper addict. He read the boisterous New York City newspapers the way a major-league scout watches high school baseball games, looking for prodigies. As such, in the early thirties he took note of a newcomer at the World-Telegram who was regularly producing the most compellingly told stories in the paper. This Joseph Mitchell could turn a phrase, had an eye for detail, and saw stories where few others did. More important, the young man seemed to share Ross’s appreciation for the comic possibilities of the human carnival. So it was that their courtship began.

  This is where things stood five years later when Mitchell, in the spring and summer of 1938, submitted two final freelance contributions to The New Yorker. The first, “The Kind Old Blonde,” was a slight fiction sketch that appeared in June, and a bit of a backslide toward the kind of boozy tale he ostensibly now eschewed. In it, a woman—a “big, sound, well-dressed blonde” with a fondness for Old-Fashioneds—and her companion are in a bar, where she is trying to dissuade him from suddenly giving up drinking, which a bad medical report inclines him to do. (When the waiter brings her order of littleneck clams, she sounds rather like Mitchell himself talking: “If you don’t mind, these clams are mighty small. I’d like to have the cherrystones. If you don’t mind.”) His second, considerably more substantial submission, that July, was a Reporter at Large entitled “Hit on the Head with a Cow” (the curious title derives from a mishap during Mitchell’s childhood, told in the story’s opening, in which he was knocked unconscious while helping hoist a cow for butchering). It’s actually the story of Captain Charley’s Private Museum for Intelligent People, an astoundingly indiscriminate collection of Egyptian mummies, stuffed animals, Chinese coins, snakeskins, the parasol of an infamous New Orleans madam, and so much more, all housed in the basement of a brownstone tenement near Columbus Circle. The lone criterion for something to be added to the collection was whether the proprietor, Charley Cassell, considered it interesting. Mitchell’s account of visiting Captain Charley’s museum helped cement what was quickly becoming the writer’s specialty for The New Yorker—finding characters of such bold hues, they were nearly off the color wheel. In a note accepting the story for publication, McKelway told Mitchell that Ross had gone out of his way to compliment the piece, something “very unusual” for the editor to do. The piece appeared in the magazine in August, and the same month Ross and McKelway summoned Mitchell to a luncheon meeting.

  Mitchell had a strong inkling Ross was going to offer him a full-time job at The New Yorker, and he went in a state of high anticipation. Yet as they sat at their table at the Blue Ribbon, a staff haunt near the magazine’s offices, it seemed that all Ross wanted to do was talk shop about the World-Telegram and the city’s other newspapers. Ross was animated in the discussion, Mitchell remembered, which didn’t especially surprise him, given that the newspaper industry had been such a formative influence on Ross, as it had been for Mitchell. Eventually Ross segued to another topic he and Mitchell shared—growing up in small towns. Mitchell was enjoying the conversation, but as the time passed, the meal finished, and they were departing the restaurant, he wondered if he had misread the purpose of the meeting. Then, as they made their way up the street and were about to part company, Ross abruptly stopped and turned to the writer. “Look, Mitchell,” he said, “if you’d like to come up here, it’s a hell of a place to work. Do you think you’d like it?” Mitchell, relieved, simply smiled for a moment. “Oh, yes,” he said.

  Ross made Mitchell’s hiring official with a letter outlining the terms. The original contract was for twenty-six weeks, renewable for a second twenty-six weeks if both parties were agreeable; in other words, there was to be a kind of probationary period. (Ross had confidence in Mitchell but had found that, sometimes, even the most talented daily journalist never really
got the hang of a magazine’s pace and writing with a more subjective point of view.) He would be paid one hundred dollars a week, a small increase from what he was making at the World-Telegram. Once the particulars of the position were laid out, Ross concluded the letter on a more personal note, and with a prediction: “This formality being over, I would report that I am exceedingly glad to hear of your decision [to join the magazine staff] and think that good things will come of it.”

  —

  On September 26, 1938, Joseph Mitchell, having only recently turned thirty years old, reported for his first day of work at The New Yorker. The one extraordinary aspect about his otherwise-straightforward employment was that Mitchell would be paid a conventional weekly salary. A man flummoxed by numbers wanted no part of the byzantine, much-reviled compensation system Ross had devised for other writers at his magazine—one that left many of them owing their soul to “the company store” like beaten-down miners.

  At The New Yorker, even full-time staff writers were paid by the piece; but, unlike freelancers, staffers collected a weekly “draw” against future stories in lieu of a salary. The amount collected weekly often exceeded what writers were credited with for their work. It was a system the magazine had developed over time, an effort by Ross—an unreconstructed tinkerer, who put great store by “systems”—to motivate editorial production while also providing staffers a modicum of financial security. His pay system also took into account story length and overall productivity, but along the way it got so complicated that few writers actually understood it. “Half the people here were always in debt,” Mitchell recalled years later. “I mean even Thurber and [Wolcott] Gibbs. McKelway was always in debt. That’s why they made him managing editor—to give him a regular income.”

  McKelway recalled that offering Mitchell a straight salary as opposed to the usual drawing account proved to be key in dislodging him from the security of the World-Telegram. The idea of a draw “terrified” Mitchell, McKelway said. And it was not hard to see why, once you examined the underlying logic of the draw, which wanted to treat editorial output as if it were a smooth-running assembly line rather than the fit-and-start product of neurotic, temperamental, and often alcoholic human beings. Internal memos written five years after Mitchell came to The New Yorker provide some hints as to the complexity of the compensation there. In 1943, William Shawn, then heading up the Fact writers, proposed that Mitchell receive a ten-dollar weekly raise. While this would seem a simple enough proposition, The New Yorker’s business executives were so notoriously tightfisted that such a thing required courtlike briefs. Shawn made his case:

  Mitchell, who has been working for us since 1938, has always been on a salary rather than a drawing-account arrangement. However, books have been kept on him [as if he had been on a regular drawing account] and he shows a bookkeeping deficit of over $6,000. This figure is deceptive, I hold. We have paid him in salary a total of $16,630. Deducting $1,705 in credits for seven casuals (paid for at prevailing rates), we are left with $15,925 [sic] to be accounted for. Altogether, we have accepted nine Profiles and twelve Reporters [at Large] in the period in question. Mitchell’s pieces, as we are probably agreed, cannot be evaluated in any ordinary way. The value of the individual piece is extremely high, and there is an additional value in the very fact that a man of his caliber is willing to devote all his time to writing for us (making a bare living) and in the complementary fact that we are wise enough to keep him around (at an apparent loss); serves as some kind of inspiration to the other writers and to the editors. All right, to get back from inspiration to dough, if we figure that each of his nine Profiles was worth $1,000 and each of his Reporters was worth $577.90, we balance the books.

  Actually, in the late thirties and early forties—when the average American earned less than two thousand dollars a year and the newly established federal minimum wage was twenty-five cents an hour—one hundred dollars a week afforded a Manhattan resident a passable standard of living. A Broadway ticket or a meal at a decent restaurant could be had for a few dollars, one of Mitchell’s sharp double-breasted suits for twenty-five. Even allowing for this reasonable quality of life and the stability of his guaranteed salary, Mitchell constantly fretted about money—as he would for the rest of his days. Part of this was an organic impulse in the writer, who was a chronic worrier, anyway; part of it was the memory of his summary dismissal from the Herald Tribune; and part of it was due to the parlous times he was living in. Whatever the root cause, Mitchell’s anxiety over compensation would evolve into a smoldering bitterness over the years, as he saw The New Yorker enjoy lavish profitability, thanks largely to the high-quality content he and other longtime staffers had provided at bargain-basement rates.

  Ironically, by insisting on being paid by the week instead of by the word, Mitchell may have shortchanged himself in his first several years at the magazine. That’s because his initial output was nothing short of Olympian. Perhaps it was his background working for newspapers, where writing two or three substantive stories a day was routine. Perhaps it was the probationary language in his first two six-month contracts. But Mitchell got off to a roaring start at The New Yorker. Four of the pieces he would eventually include in his 1943 book-length collection of stories, McSorley’s Wonderful Saloon, appeared in the magazine within the first three months of his arrival there. More astonishing, in 1939 The New Yorker would publish no fewer than thirteen Mitchell pieces, plus several smaller Talk of the Town contributions. (One of these stories prompted a droll “protest” from New Yorker contributor and Ross friend H. L. Mencken. In a Reporter at Large about a purveyor of diamondback terrapin, Mitchell asserted that Maryland-style terrapin stew contains cream. The Sage of Baltimore was aghast. “Tell Mr. Mitchell that someone has misled him into a gross libel,” Mencken wrote to McKelway. “It is the inborn and ineradicable conviction of all Marylanders above the level of Y.M.C.A. secretaries that to put cream in terrapin is exactly on all fours with peeing in the piano.” Mitchell replied that while Mencken was entitled to his view, cooking authority Sheila Hibben’s recipe for Maryland terrapin stew included cream. “All the terrapin experts I consulted listed cream as well as sherry in their recipes for terrapin stew Maryland,” Mitchell told McKelway. “However, I don’t want to get in an argument about this; thousands of men have lost their lives in arguments over tomatoes in clam chowder, cream in terrapin stew, etc.” Mencken conceded the point. “Tell Mr. Mitchell that I forgive him, though I don’t also forgive Mrs. Hibben. She should know better.”)

  More than prolific, Mitchell represented a refreshing departure in the magazine. He was introducing cultured New Yorker readers to places they would never visit in person (at least on purpose) and to people they would have no reason to know. These were places like Dick’s Bar and Grill, or Captain Charley’s Private Museum, or My Blue Heaven Italian restaurant in Hoboken—a ferry ride away but where the risotto and calamari are worth the trip, even as a disquieting little drama unfolds at the next table over. These early Mitchell pieces were thin slices of life—the weightless, shapeless, hard-to-categorize “casuals” Ross championed in The New Yorker’s first years and much terser than the accounts of skyscraper-raising Mohawks and eccentric street historians that would later establish Mitchell’s reputation. If they lack the heft of his later work, the shorter pieces are no less keenly observed by the young writer with a gift for the telling detail.

  Consider “I Couldn’t Dope It Out,” which appeared in December of 1938. Here the reader finds Charlie, his blue serge suit too tight, bullying other diners in My Blue Heaven and belittling his companion, a woman in her late forties, “small and red-haired and quite good-looking in a scrawny, slapdash way.” Charlie’s treatment of the woman—who responds with strained smiles, nervous laughter, and, finally, tears—drapes the dining room in tense silence. It’s a most uncomfortable lunch. Then later, Mitchell writes, on the ride back to Manhattan:

  Credit 6.2

  Mitchell working intently at his
typewriter. The act of writing did not come easily to him.

  While the ferry was moving out of the slip the man and woman walked out on the deck, arm in arm. They walked up and put their elbows on the rail. The woman stood right beside me. They were talking. He said something to the woman that I didn’t hear, and she laughed and said, “You wouldn’t kid me, would you?” I didn’t hear his answer. Then the woman, laughing happily, said, “I bet you tell that to all the girls.” They were talking that way, laughing and talking, all the way across the river. I couldn’t dope it out.

  That kind of behavioral study had always appealed to Mitchell, and there was still a big part of him that aspired to be a writer of fiction. At this time it was still possible for a New Yorker writer to work both sides of the aisle—turning out Fact pieces one month and fictional ones the next. Indeed, fully half of Mitchell’s pieces that first year were short stories. Many of these, such as “The Downfall of Fascism,” his darkly comic account of the aborted Klan raid of his youth, were set in Black Ankle County, the fictional version of Mitchell’s home.

  —

  Having dual outlets allowed Mitchell to give voice to the dual allegiances—old home versus new home—that weighed on his conscience. His short stories helped him stay connected to small-town North Carolina. But his reporting celebrated his new home, of which he was enamored. With his artful journalism, Mitchell threw a spotlight on the largely ignored and taken-for-granted underclass of the world’s greatest city. He was starting to utilize the time and space and freedom offered writers at The New Yorker to serve up entertaining reports enlivened by detail, dialogue, and droll humor. A standout appeared in April of 1939. “All You Can Hold for Five Bucks” is Mitchell’s evocation of the traditional New York steak dinner, or beefsteak: “a form of gluttony as stylized and regional as the riverbank fish fry, the hot-rock clambake, or the Texas barbecue,” he wrote. It’s a story so visceral that the reader can almost smell the roasting meat and hear the grease dripping onto the hot coals. In its sophistication and the mastery of the material—and in representing the kind of surprising story no New Yorker reader would have seen coming—it also amounted to an announcement that a major new voice had arrived on the scene.