Man in Profile

by Thomas Kunkel

  Instead, Mitchell eventually shifted his thinking to building his story around a larger-than-life character, and here he had two potential leads in mind. He had known both from his earliest days in New York, more than four decades ago. And both, as it happened, could be stand-ins for Mitchell himself. As with his shorter stories, being so comfortable and empathetic with his characters’ personalities and motivations would make the formidable task more feasible.

  The first of these was Joe Cantalupo, the carter from the Fulton Fish Market. The Joes had remained close since Cantalupo first took the young newspaper reporter under his wing (and, frankly, his protection, as Mitchell insinuated himself into a shadowy world not all that fond of nosy outsiders). In fact, Cantalupo had already spent a number of years helping Mitchell with his research on the market. Together they had turned up copious historical materials, including vendor checks and transaction documents dating back almost to the Civil War, and on many occasions Cantalupo had been a willing accomplice when Mitchell went on scavenging hunts in derelict buildings in the neighborhood. He was “distinctly a New Yorker,” in Mitchell’s estimation. Cantalupo’s father had emigrated from Italy and begun the carting business near the end of the nineteenth century. The son would take it over and go on to run it himself for fifty years. In that time Cantalupo rose to be something of the “boss” of the market, a person of great influence because he knew everyone in the stalls, what they did there, and how they got there.

  Despite his common roots, the hauler of the market’s trash was worldly, well read, and thoughtful. He and Mitchell would sit over a meal at Sloppy Louie’s and talk for hours. Cantalupo combined the qualities Mitchell loved about so many of his recent characters—he had the constancy of Louie Morino, the historical perspective of George Hunter, the homespun philosophy of Ellery Thompson, and the lifelong connection to the water of Harry Lyons. Mitchell particularly respected how, as an outsider, Cantalupo had gradually conquered a world long dominated by Yankees, and he did so in such a sly, amiable way that they didn’t even realize it.

  Physically Cantalupo was a great, hulking presence, and he could be intimidatingly gruff, a combination that made him seem like an extra from a mob movie. But in truth he had a warm heart and a reputation around the Fulton area for integrity. And there was simply nothing he enjoyed more than eating. Friends tell of walking with Cantalupo to a luncheon meeting at a nice restaurant, only to have him stop along the way for a hot dog or a bowl of clams as a “warmup.” Kent Barwick, who worked closely with both Cantalupo and Mitchell for many years in various preservation efforts, recalls an afternoon in 1967 he spent with the two of them. It happened to be the last day of operation for the old Hoboken ferry, and they decided to honor the occasion by hopping the ferry, downing some clam steamers at a favorite seafood joint, then riding the boat back to Manhattan. Once back, Cantalupo allowed that it had been such an agreeable trip that they should do it again—which they immediately did. It was that sheer New York exuberance, so similar to Liebling’s, that perhaps most endeared Cantalupo to Mitchell.

  Credit 14.1

  Mitchell with his lifelong friend Joe Cantalupo, who for the writer was a boisterous symbol of a New York that was fading away.

  The importance of Cantalupo in Mitchell’s life, and as a prospective character for his book, is clear from one particular note the writer made about him: “What I must establish as quickly as possible…as early in the story as possible: Joe Cantalupo became my guide to the fish market; a way of looking at the world; and an example of rising above it.”

  Mitchell’s other narrative prospect was an equally close and venerable friend. Instead of being a prototypical New Yorker, however, this candidate was a classic New York émigré who, like Mitchell himself, had come to the city from the South and made it her own.

  From the moment Mitchell met Ann Honeycutt, not long after he hit New York, the two became fast friends; they would remain so for the rest of their lives. Over the years Honeycutt transitioned from being the person some called “the girlfriend of The New Yorker” to simply one part of the big, rolling cast of characters who were, officially or unofficially, connected to the magazine. Worldly and witty, she was always excellent company. For many years she and Mitchell had lunch every few months with an editor at the magazine, Robert MacMillan, and one of its best-known cartoonists, Charles Addams. On one such occasion, Honeycutt noted with concern that Mitchell hadn’t said much throughout the meal; he replied that he wasn’t feeling well and was about to see the doctor. “Well, take it easy and don’t let anything happen to you,” she said—then, almost as an afterthought: “I depend on you. You’re the one I call up when I have a hangover.”

  Credit 14.2

  Ann Honeycutt in her late forties. Mitchell was one of the few men in her life she could count on.

  Mitchell had a certain gallant quality, and Honeycutt was not the only woman in his circle who counted on it. He played a similar role in the tragic later years of New Yorker writer Maeve Brennan (like Honeycutt herself, a former Mrs. St. Clair McKelway) and, more significantly, with Liebling’s widow, Jean Stafford. In the last decade of Stafford’s difficult life, the writer spiraled into a miasma of depression, alcoholism, and physical ailment. She might call Mitchell at any hour, mumbling in an alcoholic stupor or delivering a sharp rant. When she died, she named Mitchell executor of her estate.

  Outwardly, Mitchell characterized his relationship with Honeycutt in fairly chaste terms. “I got to be like the younger brother, that’s about the way it was,” he recalled in an interview near the end of his life. “She was just a few years older than I was. It was a funny relationship, because she was like an older sister, but [also] like an aunt—she was always telling me what to do.” But from the recollection of mutual friends and some of Mitchell’s cryptic journal notes, it seems clear Honeycutt’s feelings for him were about more than dependence, and Mitchell’s for her were more than filial. Though there is no evidence suggesting their relationship was ever a sexual one, Mitchell—especially as a younger man—was hardly immune to her beauty and the charms that beguiled so many of his New Yorker colleagues. She was an impossibly romantic figure to him, the embodiment of that fizzy and fast-receding time in New York’s history. “Listening to Joe talk about her,” said the magazine’s former deputy editor, Chip McGrath, “you could hear the tinkle of ice in her glass, see the blotch of red lipstick at the tip of her cigarette.” Indeed, one of the notes Mitchell made when he was gathering his thoughts about a prospective Profile of her suggested the depth of his feelings. Both of them implicitly understood they needed to keep things in check, he wrote. “We had without ever talking about it settled on a code of behavior. If either of us because of booze had overstepped this line, it would’ve been very embarrassing.”

  There was another thing that made Honeycutt irresistible to Mitchell, at least as a subject: She could tell a good story, and she had many to tell. One found in his notes underlines the point. After an evening out, Honeycutt invited her date back for coffee. She was in the kitchen getting the pot on and was about to rejoin the man in the living room—which in her apartment was accessed through her bedroom—when she found him lying in her bed, “strip stark naked.” As she told Mitchell, “I went back into the kitchen and got a carving knife, one of those long, black-handled German carving knives that chefs use, and I went into the bedroom and I said, ‘Do you see this knife? Take a look at this knife, and now I want you to get your clothes on and get out of here. I’m going into the kitchen to pour myself a cup of coffee and when I come back into this room if you’re still here, I’ll cut your balls off.’ When I came back, there was no sign of him.”

  Of course, the final reason Mitchell was drawn so strongly to Honeycutt’s story was that it paralleled his own: Southerner from the sticks makes her way to the big city between the wars to find fame, fortune, excitement, and—in her case, intermittently—love. Mitchell realized Honeycutt could provide him with an almost autobiograp
hical approach for telling the New York story without its actually having to be autobiographical.

  It’s easy enough to see why both Cantalupo and Honeycutt were appealing prospects for Mitchell’s prospective narrative, and, in fact, he never really let go of the idea of writing about either of them. Over the years he amassed an astonishing seven file drawers of resource materials about Honeycutt, consisting primarily of family history and legal files but also including caches of correspondence she maintained with Jean Stafford, Stanley Walker, and others in their mutual circles.

  Yet for reasons known only to Mitchell, in the end neither subject, despite their obvious qualifications, exactly suited his writerly purpose. It’s likely one of the hang-ups was simply that he knew both Cantalupo and Honeycutt too well; while that intimacy gave him special insight, it also made him more anxious than if he were writing about someone he wasn’t so close to. Then, too, his enthusiasms tended to wax and wane. Mitchell’s post-Gould pursuit of his next big project had only underscored the extent to which his New York was disappearing, and that in turn had the effect of stunting his ardor for the whole enterprise. As he wrote, “I began to be oppressed by a feeling that New York City had gone past me and that I didn’t belong here anymore….”

  And so it appears that by the late sixties, the writer settled upon an important decision: If his capstone opus was going to have a protagonist, it would be Mitchell himself. Without question, Cantalupo, Honeycutt, and other friends and acquaintances would still figure in the book—but as characters only. Mitchell would have to “use myself as the center,” he wrote in his journal.

  For the self-conscious Mitchell, this was no easy decision. He had never written overtly autobiographical material, never even been comfortable with the idea. The early Mitchell stories that drew most directly on his personal experiences and family history had always been protected by the scrim of fiction. But with the passing of his mother (and soon enough his father), and with the encouragement of his patron, Shawn, the idea of autobiography seemed less daunting than it had before.

  —

  Having made this difficult choice, Mitchell took to the idea with some zeal, at least early on. By spring of 1970 he had pulled together a prospective opening for the book, a uniquely Mitchellesque love letter to the city that was far enough along that he was willing to share it with his editor. Almost as quickly as he got the material, Shawn telephoned Mitchell at home to praise it. According to Mitchell’s note after their conversation, Shawn called it “some of the best writing about New York City I have ever read.”

  By this point in their lives, Mitchell and Shawn had a warm albeit complicated relationship. They were close, having worked together for Mitchell’s entire career. Shawn had joined the magazine in 1933, the same year Mitchell began his freelance contributions to it; Shawn quickly was put in charge of the magazine’s nonfiction writers, including Mitchell, until he succeeded Ross as editor. To each other they were Bill and Joe, but they were not intimate friends, as intimacy was not an emotion either man encouraged. Besides, Shawn was still the boss. His impeccable manners, legendary neurotic quirks (fear of elevators, bridges, and tunnels, to name but a few of pointed inconvenience to a resident of New York), and soft-spoken mien only punctuated the steely autonomy he exerted over every aspect of the magazine—including the professional and financial fortunes of its writing staff.

  Credit 14.3

  William Shawn displayed limitless patience waiting for the next Mitchell story, knowing it might never arrive.

  He had earned that authority. Back in 1952, when Ross’s highly successful magazine was bequeathed to his care, Shawn had nothing of his predecessor’s public profile. The outside world didn’t know what to expect of this quiet, introverted man. But Shawn quickly catapulted Ross’s “comic paper” into a journal of unparalleled cultural influence. The magazine’s reporting, always top-drawer, became broader, more openly political, and often personal. It was Shawn who sent political philosopher Hannah Arendt to Jerusalem for the Eichmann trial; who encouraged the sharp critical voices of Pauline Kael, Michael Arlen, Kenneth Tynan, and George Steiner; who published for his patrician audience James Baldwin’s anguished, angry “Letter from a Region of My Mind.” On the fiction side, Shawn cultivated stories that unmasked the desperation residing in the immaculate suburban homes of those same affluent customers. Readers responded, and so did advertisers. By the mid-sixties, the magazine was more profitable than it had ever been; The New Yorker was sometimes so fat with ads that it resembled a phone book. Shawn’s critics would say it often read like a phone book, with too much text and tedium and too little of the old humor. But there was no denying that the diminutive Shawn now cast a long shadow on American letters and culture.

  Given all they had been through together, and given that the editor was a nonpareil judge of writing talent, no one better appreciated Joseph Mitchell and what he had meant to the rise of The New Yorker than Shawn. Along with Ross, Shawn had provided Mitchell with the encouragement and flexibility he needed to pursue untraditional subjects. At the same time, Shawn was editor of a commercial publication whose staff included a supremely gifted writer who hadn’t published anything since 1964. A decade on, one can readily imagine his patience privately fraying as year followed year with little true cause for hope. Even so, Shawn was “content to wait” on Mitchell, according to McGrath. Besides, as everyone knew, Shawn avoided confrontation as assiduously as he did confined spaces, and he would have considered it unseemly—this being The New Yorker, after all—to raise questions of productivity with Mitchell. But Mitchell knew full well his lack of production put Shawn in a difficult spot. “That was an embarrassment to me,” Mitchell would say later on. “I didn’t want people to think, ‘What was Shawn doing?’ ” At the same time, he added, “There was a kind of favoritism involved. We had a great respect for each other. We’d grown up here at a time when the wages were very small. He realized that and, in effect, he was making it up to me. Those are rather subtle things to explain to people.”

  Despite that implicit quid pro quo, Mitchell’s meager pay of late was increasingly preying on his mind. As his general outlook on life darkened and spiraling inflation ate into what little he took home, Mitchell had become obsessed to the point of bitterness about his compensation—not just in terms of what he was making at the time but over the course of his career. He wasn’t a fool; Mitchell knew well the role he played in The New Yorker’s popularity and profitability, especially through the forties and fifties. Yet after all that work and critical praise, his weekly pay in 1970 was only one hundred seventy dollars, of which he netted only one hundred thirty. Perhaps emboldened by Shawn’s positive response to the submission of his first original material in years, Mitchell decided to confront him about his salary. It wasn’t enough for him to live on, he told the editor. Mitchell was uncharacteristically upset—and explicit about what had happened to his standard of living.

  For instance, Mitchell said he was supposed to get medical checkups twice a year, including X-rays. But “that costs two hundred dollars each time I go and I can’t afford it,” he told Shawn, according to notes Mitchell made at the time. “I can’t afford to buy books. I go to the theater maybe once a year. I eat lunch in a restaurant no more than twice a week, the rest of the time in the automat.” He confided that Therese had recently gone to work to augment their income, but it still wasn’t enough for them to make ends meet. While in the past his farm income would have bridged any gap, that was no longer true, because the federal government was reducing tobacco allotments.

  Beyond the dollars-and-cents of the situation, Mitchell told Shawn, he no longer felt appreciated. When he was elected to the National Institute of Arts and Letters, he said, no one from the magazine’s top management even mentioned it to him. He had remained quiet when younger reporters talked to other publications about The New Yorker’s low pay or its growing reputation for editorial stodginess after two decades under Shawn. “My policy has
been to stay in my office and do my work and keep my mouth shut,” Mitchell said, “but now I am desperate. Young people who are imitating Profiles I wrote and which I can no longer do because I don’t want to do the same thing over and over are being paid many times the amounts I was paid and are being treated much better in many other ways,” such as in their retirement packages and profit participation. Though Mitchell’s agitation clearly had been building for years, it was a recent episode that had put him over the brink. A young writer at the magazine had sought his advice about whether to stay at The New Yorker because of its prestige or to jump to a rival and make more money. In the course of the conversation, he shared with Mitchell how much he was making—and it was a good bit more than Mitchell was. Mitchell was shocked by this, he told Shawn, and “I have been seething ever since.”

  By this point in his life, it was not that unusual for Mitchell to get worked up, but it was highly unusual for him—or any New Yorker employee, for that matter—to focus that ire directly on Shawn. Over the years, the editor had cultivated an aura of benevolent dictatorship at The New Yorker, exerting a courteous but unquestioned rule. The main lever of his control was his arbitrary but uniformly parsimonious pay scale. Shawn essentially held that it was a privilege to work for The New Yorker, and questions of appropriate remuneration were really no one’s business but his. As Mitchell suggested, however, the younger staffers, with less fealty to Shawn, were beginning to compare salaries—among themselves and with colleagues at other magazines—and they were pressuring him to pay them with more than prestige. Within several years, in fact, the Newspaper Guild would threaten to organize The New Yorker’s editorial staff, the most serious challenge to his authority Shawn had faced. He would weather it, but only after promising to improve the salary structure, which he did.