The 50s

by The New Yorker Magazine

  Lillian Ross

  MAY 13, 1950 (FROM “HOW DO YOU LIKE IT NOW, GENTLEMEN?”)

  RNEST HEMINGWAY, WHO may well be the greatest living American novelist and short-story writer, rarely comes to New York. He spends most of his time on a farm, the Finca Vigia, nine miles outside Havana, with his wife, a domestic staff of nine, fifty-two cats, sixteen dogs, a couple of hundred pigeons, and three cows. When he does come to New York, it is only because he has to pass through it on his way somewhere else. Not long ago, on his way to Europe, he stopped in New York for a few days. I had written to him asking if I might see him when he came to town, and he had sent me a typewritten letter saying that would be fine and suggesting that I meet his plane at the airport. “I don’t want to see anybody I don’t like, nor have publicity, nor be tied up all the time,” he went on. “Want to go to the Bronx Zoo, Metropolitan Museum, Museum of Modern Art, ditto of Natural History, and see a fight. Want to see the good Breughel at the Met, the one, no two, fine Goyas and Mr. El Greco’s Toledo. Don’t want to go to Toots Shor’s. Am going to try to get into town and out without having to shoot my mouth off. I want to give the joints a miss. Not seeing news people is not a pose. It is only to have time to see your friends.” In pencil, he added, “Time is the least thing we have of.”

  · · ·

  Time did not seem to be pressing Hemingway the day he flew in from Havana. He was to arrive at Idlewild late in the afternoon, and I went out to meet him. His plane had landed by the time I got there, and I found him standing at a gate waiting for his luggage and for his wife, who had gone to attend to it. He had one arm around a scuffed, dilapidated briefcase pasted up with travel stickers. He had the other around a wiry little man whose forehead was covered with enormous beads of perspiration. Hemingway was wearing a red plaid wool shirt, a figured wool necktie, a tan wool sweater-vest, a brown tweed jacket tight across the back and with sleeves too short for his arms, gray flannel slacks, Argyle socks, and loafers, and he looked bearish, cordial, and constricted. His hair, which was very long in back, was gray, except at the temples, where it was white; his mustache was white, and he had a ragged, half-inch full white beard. There was a bump about the size of a walnut over his left eye. He was wearing steel-rimmed spectacles, with a piece of paper under the nosepiece. He was in no hurry to get into Manhattan. He crooked the arm around the briefcase into a tight hug and said that it contained the unfinished manuscript of his new book, Across the River and into the Trees. He crooked the arm around the wiry little man into a tight hug and said he had been his seat companion on the flight. The man’s name, as I got it in a mumbled introduction, was Myers, and he was returning from a business trip to Cuba. Myers made a slight attempt to dislodge himself from the embrace, but Hemingway held on to him affectionately.

  “He read book all way up on plane,” Hemingway said. He spoke with a perceptible Midwestern accent, despite the Indian talk. “He like book, I think,” he added, giving Myers a little shake and beaming down at him.

  “Whew!” said Myers.

  “Book too much for him,” Hemingway said. “Book start slow, then increase in pace till it becomes impossible to stand. I bring emotion up to where you can’t stand it, then we level off, so we won’t have to provide oxygen tents for the readers. Book is like engine. We have to slack her off gradually.”

  “Whew!” said Myers.

  Hemingway released him. “Not trying for no-hit game in book,” he said. “Going to win maybe twelve to nothing or maybe twelve to eleven.”

  Myers looked puzzled.

  “She’s better book than Farewell,” Hemingway said. “I think this is best one, but you are always prejudiced, I guess. Especially if you want to be champion.” He shook Myers’ hand. “Much thanks for reading book,” he said.

  “Pleasure,” Myers said, and walked off unsteadily.

  Hemingway watched him go, and then turned to me. “After you finish a book, you know, you’re dead,” he said moodily. “But no one knows you’re dead. All they see is the irresponsibility that comes in after the terrible responsibility of writing.” He said he felt tired but was in good shape physically; he had brought his weight down to two hundred and eight, and his blood pressure was down too. He had considerable rewriting to do on his book, and he was determined to keep at it until he was absolutely satisfied. “They can’t yank novelist like they can pitcher,” he said. “Novelist has to go the full nine, even if it kills him.”

  Berton Roueché

  AUGUST 5, 1950 (“UNFRAMED SPACE”)

  E IMPROVED A shining weekend on eastern Long Island by paying a call on Jackson Pollock—an uncommonly abstract abstractionist and one of seven American painters whose work was tapped for inclusion in the Twenty-fifth International Biennial Exhibition of Figurative Arts, now triumphantly under way in Venice—at his home, a big, gaunt, white clapboard, Ulysses S. Grant–period structure in the fishing hamlet of The Springs. Pollock, a bald, rugged, somewhat puzzled-looking man of thirty-eight, received us in the kitchen, where he was breakfasting on a cigarette and a cup of coffee and drowsily watching his wife, the former Lee Krasner, a slim, auburn-haired young woman who also is an artist, as she bent over a hot stove, making currant jelly. Waving us to a chair in the shade of a huge potted palm, he remarked with satisfaction that he had been up and about for almost half an hour. It was then around 11:30 A.M. “I’ve got the old Eighth Street habit of sleeping all day and working all night pretty well licked,” he said. “So has Lee. We had to, or lose the respect of the neighbors. I can’t deny, though, that it’s taken a little while. When’d we come out here, Lee?” Mrs. Pollock laughed merrily. “Just a little while ago,” she replied. “In the fall of 1945.”

  “It’s marvellous the way Lee’s adjusted herself,” Pollock said. “She’s a native New Yorker, but she’s turned into a hell of a good gardener, and she’s always up by nine. Ten at the latest. I’m way behind her in orientation. And the funny thing is I grew up in the country. Real country—Wyoming, Arizona, northern and southern California. I was born in Wyoming. My father had a farm near Cody. By the time I was fourteen, I was milking a dozen cows twice a day.” “Jackson’s work is full of the West,” Mrs. Pollock said. “That’s what gives it that feeling of spaciousness. It’s what makes it so American.” Pollock confirmed this with a reflective scowl, and went on to say that at seventeen, an aptitude for painting having suddenly revealed itself to him in a Los Angeles high school, he at once wound up his academic affairs there and headed East. “I spent two years at the Art Students League,” he said. “Tom Benton was teaching there then, and he did a lot for me. He gave me the only formal instruction I ever had, he introduced me to Renaissance art, and he got me a job in the League cafeteria. I’m damn grateful to Tom. He drove his kind of realism at me so hard I bounced right into non-objective painting. I’m also grateful to the W.P.A., for keeping me alive during the thirties, and to Peggy Guggenheim. Peggy gave me my first show, in 1943. She gave me two more, and then she took off for Europe, and Lee and I came out here. We wanted to get away from the wear and tear. Besides, I had an underneath confidence that I could begin to live on my painting. I’d had some wonderful notices. Also, somebody had bought one of my pictures. We lived a year on that picture, and a few clams I dug out of the bay with my toes. Since then things have been a little easier.” Mrs. Pollock smiled. “Quite a little,” she said. “Jackson showed thirty pictures last fall and sold all but five. And his collectors are nibbling at those.” Pollock grunted. “Be nice if it lasts,” he said.

  We asked Pollock for a peep at his work. He shrugged, rose, and led us into a twenty-five-by-fifty-foot living room furnished with massive Italianate tables and chairs and hung with spacious pictures, all of which bore an offhand resemblance to tangles of multicolored ribbon. “Help yourself,” he said, halting at a safe distance from an abstraction that occupied most of an end wall. It was a handsome, arresting job—a rust-red background laced with skeins of white, black, and yellow—and we said s
o. “What’s it called?” we asked. “I’ve forgotten,” he said, and glanced inquiringly at his wife, who had followed us in. “Number Two, 1949, I think,” she said. “Jackson used to give his pictures conventional titles—Eyes in the Heat and The Blue Unconscious and so on—but now he simply numbers them. Numbers are neutral. They make people look at a picture for what it is—pure painting.” “I decided to stop adding to the confusion,” Pollock said. “Abstract painting is abstract. It confronts you. There was a reviewer a while back who wrote that my pictures didn’t have any beginning or any end. He didn’t mean it as a compliment, but it was. It was a fine compliment. Only he didn’t know it.” “That’s exactly what Jackson’s work is,” Mrs. Pollock said. “Sort of unframed space.”

  John Bainbridge

  NOVEMBER 11, 1950 (FROM “TOOTS’S WORLD”)

  OOTS SHOR, THE burly, impudent, hard-working, high-spirited, sentimental proprietor of the restaurant at 51 West Fifty-first Street that bears his name, is the possessor of a great talent for making friends and enemies. Most of the people who are acquainted with Shor do not simply like him or dislike him; they love him or loathe him. He is capable of making a mild impression on practically nobody. In the eyes of his admirers, Shor is as kind as Saint Francis of Assisi, as generous as Santa Claus, as worldly wise as Bernard Baruch, and as understanding as Dorothy Dix. “I doubt if the world will ever know his true greatness, because so many of his good deeds are sub rosa,” Pat O’Brien, the film actor, wrote recently in a letter to a friend. “I call Toots on the phone several times a month. I call him because I’m lonely or to seek advice. As to the lonely reference, Tootsie will always be synonymous with New York, the Manhattan I love and miss, the Gotham close to my ticker. When I say advice, I mean getting his opinion on contracts and stories or a rundown on what goes on in life. It might seem strange that I seek business advice from Toots, but through the years it has paid off. His ideas are always propounded with the mental strength I could never get from other sources. With all his rough exterior, he is gentle and kindly, his friends are legion and loyal, and they will never leave him in the stretch. You can always bet the field when you go to the Shor window, provided you level with him and don’t crowd him on the rail. He has more on the ball than Hubbell and more in his heart than just a tick. If he doesn’t insult you, he doesn’t love you, and if he doesn’t love you, you have missed a chunk of life.” Shor’s detractors are equally vehement. “There’s nothing the matter with Toots except that he is an egotistical jughead and as phony as a three-dollar bill,” an opinionated man who used to be loved by Shor but who is now, without regret, missing a chunk of life has said. “He’s a slob with delusions of grandeur—he wants to be a snob. When his friends are batting three-fifty, Toots can’t do enough for them. Then they’re real, solid-gold crumb bums. But when they start hitting two hundred, something happens to Toots’s eyesight—he can’t see the old pals so good any more. He’s a guy with the instincts of a bum and the mental outlook of an elephant. He’s exactly the kind of guy he’d throw out of his own place.” Shor, who has never held himself up as a model of moderation, is neither surprised nor noticeably disturbed by the fact that other people hold immoderate opinions of him. “I have an expression—‘Never criticize a guy for something you do yourself,’ ” he remarked the other day when in a philosophical state of mind. “I’m not like Will Rogers. I’ve met plenty of guys I didn’t like. If I don’t like a guy, I wouldn’t do nothin’ for him. If I like him, there’s nothin’ I wouldn’t do. That’s the way it is. Anything I do, I do to excess.”

  As a host, Shor is, by design, excessively brash. He has acquired the reputation, which he has no trouble living up to, of being a proprietor who ingratiates himself with his customers by being banteringly rude to them. One evening, Louis B. Mayer arrived with a group of friends at Shor’s restaurant and, since it was crowded, had to wait fifteen minutes for a table. As his party was being ushered to a table, Mayer passed Shor and said, “I hope we’ll find the food has been worth all that waiting.” “It’ll be better than some of your pictures I’ve waited in line to see,” Shor replied. Charles Chaplin came in for dinner on another busy evening. “You’ll have to wait twenty minutes, Charlie,” Shor said. “Have a drink and be funny for the people.” When Harry Truman was Vice-President, he came to New York to see a prizefight and had dinner beforehand at Shor’s, where, during his days as a senator, he had eaten a few times and become friendly with the proprietor. Somewhat awed, Shor began addressing his guest as Mr. Vice-President. Truman smiled and said, “I’m still Harry to my friends.” “Jimminy crickets!” Shor said. “Here I was tryin’ to give you a buildup.” A couple of dapper-looking foreigners, escorting a pair of beautiful domestic blondes, walked into the restaurant one evening and started snapping their fingers for service. Since Shor is rather chauvinistic, holding that American blondes are for Americans, and since he didn’t like the way the men were acting, he instructed his headwaiter to take his time seating the party. After they had been kept waiting a short while, one of the men stepped over to the bar, where Shor was having a drink with some friends. “This waiting, this treatment, it is an imposition,” the man said. “Yeah?” Shor growled. “Who sent for ya?” Shor takes the position that he is running a restaurant primarily for his friends and that while he doesn’t mind letting strangers in, he expects them to appreciate the privilege. “I’ve been standing here for forty-five minutes while a dozen people who came in after me have been seated,” a stranger who hadn’t made a reservation complained one night to Shor. “I’m leaving, and I’m never coming back, and furthermore I’m going to tell all my friends.” “Go on,” Shor said. “Tell him.”

  A successful manufacturer who is a fairly frequent patron of Shor’s has conjectured that the restaurant would double its business (which is already capacity) if the proprietor would change some of his ways. “I like Toots and I like his food,” the manufacturer has said, “but sometimes, when you’ve had a nervous day, you don’t feel like going in there and being called a bald-headed bastard and getting swatted on the back and poked in the stomach, even if you know it’s a compliment. You just want a quiet meal. Toots is thick. He doesn’t understand that. And the way he treats some of the people who come in there, it makes me embarrassed.” During lunchtime one day recently, Shor was standing near the bar in his restaurant chatting with a friend from out of town. A man wearing black-rimmed glasses, who had been sitting at the bar, walked over and said, “Excuse me, Mr. Shor. I don’t know whether you remember me.” He extended his hand. Not taking it, Shor said, “No, I don’t remember you.” “Well,” the man, a doctor from Newark, said, “I was in about three or four weeks ago, and we talked baseball. I used to play, years ago, on the Coast.” He stepped back a couple of paces, to afford a better view of himself for identification. Shor looked at him in silence. “I thought you might remember,” the Doctor said, taking off his glasses. “I was sitting over there, and we talked for a little while. Not very long.” “No, I don’t remember,” Shor said. “I just thought you might,” the Doctor said uneasily. “But I guess you don’t.” Shor said nothing. The Doctor waited hopefully a moment or two, and then said, “Well, please pardon the interruption. My wife is waiting for me. Excuse me.” He walked back to the bar. After he had gone, Shor said, “Those bums. What do they expect me to do—give ’em a lot of soft soap? If I spent two minutes with every one of those guys, I wouldn’t have time for nothin’ else.” Earl Wilson, who visits Shor’s twice a day to pick up items for his column, came in and joined Shor and his friend. While they were talking, a ruddy-faced man walked out of the dining room and approached the group. “Hello, Earl,” he said to Wilson. “Remember me? I’m from Remington Rand. You did a column about our convention.” Wilson acknowledged that he had some recollection of the piece. “Say, Earl, I’ve been wanting to meet the big boy, here,” the Remington Rand man said, indicating Shor with his thumb. “Will you tell him it’s all right to say hello to me?”
Wilson mumbled something, and his acquaintance continued, “Toots, I’ve been coming in here for a long time but I never had a chance to meet you. You don’t know me, of course, but you probably use some of our machines. I’m with Remington Rand.” “The hell with Remington Rand,” Shor replied, turning his back. “How do you like that?” he said to his out-of-town friend. “Two creeps in ten minutes.” He disappeared into the dining room. The Remington Rand man picked up his hat at the checkroom.

  E. B. White

  DECEMBER 15, 1951 (“H. W. ROSS”)

  OSS DIED IN Boston, unexpectedly, on the night of December 6th, and we are writing this in New York (unexpectedly) on the morning of December 7th. This is known, in these offices that Ross was so fond of, as a jam. Ross always knew when we were in a jam and usually got on the phone to offer advice and comfort and support. When our phone rang just now, and in that split second before the mind focusses, we thought, “Good! Here it comes!” But this old connection is broken beyond fixing. The phone has lost its power to explode at the right moment and in the right way.

  Actually, things are not going as badly as they might; the sheet of copy paper in the machine is not as hard to face as we feared. Sometimes a love letter writes itself, and we love Ross so, and bear him such respect, that these quick notes, which purport to record the sorrow that runs through here and dissolves so many people, cannot possibly seem overstated or silly. Ross, even on this terrible day, is a hard man to keep quiet; he obtrudes—his face, his voice, his manner, even his amused interest in the critical proceedings. If he were accorded the questionable privilege of stopping by here for a few minutes, he would gorge himself on the minor technical problems that a magazine faces when it must do something in a hurry and against some sort of odds—in this case, emotional ones of almost overpowering weight. He would be far more interested in the grinding of the machinery than in what was being said about him.