Theater and journalism were two Round Table pillars. The third was gambling. In their Village apartment, Ross and Winterich revived the old Nini’s Saturday-night poker game. Frank Adams, borrowing from Main Street, christened the gathering the Thanatopsis (meaning “contemplation of death”) Pleasure and Inside Straight Club. Other permutations included the Thanatopsis Literary and Inside Straight Club and the Thanatopsis Chowder and Marching Society, but to the players, sensibly enough, it was always just Thanatopsis. As the popularity of the game grew, it began to float from place to place. In fact, the first time Kaufman laid eyes on Ross he was shooting craps on the floor of Kaufman’s own apartment, having pulled the spread from the host’s bed to use as a playing surface. Harpo Marx also first encountered Ross at Thanatopsis, remembering that he looked for all the world like “a cowhand who’d lost his horse.”
In the beginning it was typical for big winners or losers to be up or down several hundred dollars at the end of an evening. But the stakes skyrocketed when some wealthier players, like Fleischmann, composer Jerome Kern, and World executive editor Herbert Bayard Swope, joined the game. Thousands of dollars began changing hands. Some, like Ross and Woollcott, unable or unwilling to play at this level, eventually left the Thanatopsis game for others. The mere mortals who stayed on played at their peril. Ross later recalled how Broun lost thirty thousand dollars one evening and had to sell his apartment.
The Round Table lasted twelve years, but Ross began pulling away from the group shortly after launching The New Yorker in 1925. He remained friends with the individuals, though, and a handful—but only a handful—were important to his magazine’s success. In general, however, their support for him was halfhearted at best, and he had his eyes opened. Beyond this, Ross came to abhor the logrolling and to see the Round Table’s dissolute lifestyle for what it was—an insidious cannibalizer of energy and talent. Perhaps this is one reason why the unlikely Ross, of all those in the circle, would leave the most profound and lasting cultural legacy.
——
For good and bad, life at 412 west forty-seventh inevitably began as an extension of the Round Table. Shortly after they married, Ross was abashed when Jane, who loved dancing, would step out for the evening just as he was getting ready for bed. But often she needed to go only as far as her living room. People showed up at 412 at all hours because they knew they could. There they found ready companionship and liquor, as at a favorite bar that never closed. Between the formal entertaining and the walk-in traffic, the array of guests was a New York Who’s Who. On any given night you were as apt to find Father Duffy, the storied World War I chaplain, as you were heavyweight champion Gene Tunney or nightclub owner Texas Guinan.
Jane enjoyed the folderol as much as anyone, but as the person responsible for keeping the household stocked in food and drink she found the revolving door a constant challenge. She once came home to twenty-eight unanticipated dinner guests. Another time she was cited for buying bootleg liquor (the charge was dropped after her boss at the Times intervened). Ross, who seldom drank to the point of stupefaction, was put off by those who did. He even suggested to Jane that they stop serving liquor. They didn’t, but the rowdier drunks were not invited back.
Jane and Ross at home at 412 West Forty-seventh Street. (Jane Grant Collection, University of Oregon)
Under the circumstances, no one at 412 stood on formality. Visitors got accustomed to being greeted by Woollcott in open robe and pajama bottoms. And Ross, as always, could be counted on to be himself “I remember having dinner there a couple of times in the communal dining room,” said Russel Crouse. “On each occasion when we got back to the living room Ross stretched out on the floor and went to sleep, ignoring the conversation even though the conversation didn’t ignore him.”
The entertaining grew more lavish. One reason is that shortly after they moved in, Woollcott jumped from the Times to the New York Herald, one of the underachieving newspapers owned by the oleaginous press lord and ex-greengrocer Frank Munsey, for a staggering increase in pay—from one hundred to five hundred dollars a week. The calculating Munsey wanted Woollcott for his insightful and popular theater column, but Ross later told Aleck’s friend and biographer, Samuel Hopkins Adams, that Munsey also had an ulterior motive, one not untypical in that very cozy period. “It was Anna Case, the opera singer, who nominated Woollcott for the Munsey job,” Ross wrote Adams. “Mr. M. was courting her at the time in a mammoth way. I think Anna did more than nominate; I think she insisted. Aleck is one of the few dramatic critics who ever got a job so his employer could get a piece of nookie.”
Beyond the revolving door, inevitable personality conflicts kept 412 in an uproar. Even something as simple as the dinner menu became a source of irritation. Both Ross and Truax already had developed bad stomachs, and they required bland diets. For the gluttonous Woollcott, however, no food was too rich, and the mere presentation of broth at the table would send him storming out. But when he came back, he often was of a mind to play, no matter what the hour. If he saw Ross and Jane’s lights burning—the bedroom of their apartment faced the street—he’d barge in and drag Ross away for cribbage.
The ménage staggered along this way for four years, but nerves were fraying, sleep becoming scarce, and space cramped. “We adored Aleck, you know,” Jane told Margaret Case Harriman. “He was perfectly fine in almost every way. He didn’t drink, to speak of, and he was meticulous about money matters, and God knows he was entertaining. I don’t know why there always came a time with Aleck when you couldn’t stand it anymore.” For Jane, Ross and Truax, that time arrived in the summer of 1926, when Ross had given over body and soul to keep his new magazine alive. Ross, who didn’t mind a philosophical fight but was constitutionally incapable of confronting intimates, asked Jane to ask Aleck to leave.
Woollcott took it well enough at first, but when the question of settling up finances and household furnishings arose, compounded by a bollixed dinner between Ross and Woollcott, he turned characteristically splenetic. He fired off a letter to Ross that began, “I agree with you that the fewer dealings one has with you and the fewer debts one permits you to incur, the less chance there is to be subjected to your discourtesy. I have enjoyed your company so much that I have been one of the last to make this simple discovery.” Then he slapped Ross for his behavior after the bobbled dinner. “And your subsequent paroxysms of mirth made me a little sick. Any tyro in psychology recognizes that urchin defense mechanism, but the person who jeers at me when there is a good audience and waits for privacy to apologize is manifesting a kind of poltroonery I find hard to deal with.” He closed, “I think your slogan ‘Liberty or Death’ is splendid and whichever one you finally decide upon will be all right with me.”
Alexander Woollcott at 412: “I don’t know why there always came a time with Aleck when you couldn’t stand it anymore,” said Jane Grant. (Jane Grant Collection, University of Oregon)
Such a bilious epistle would have been the last word in most relationships, but it was just another blip between the two men. Within a few years, Woollcott would be writing “Shouts and Murmurs,” one of the most popular features in Ross’s New Yorker.
——
When they wed, Ross and Jane agreed to live on her salary and salt away his against that dream publication, whatever it turned out to be. Overwhelmed by the expenses of 412 but determined to hold up her end of the bargain, Jane sought out other moneymaking opportunities. In addition to her Times job, she began to write syndicated features, then magazine pieces, in time becoming a contributor to the high-paying Saturday Evening Post. All the while she encouraged Ross in his entrepreneurial aspirations, even as he slogged away at the Weekly.
That Ross cared deeply about the veterans of World War I there is no doubt. He spoke out at Legion meetings and wrote impassioned letters to New York newspapers in their behalf. The Weekly thumped for the highly controversial veterans’ bonus and published two flinty series, written by Marquis James (who would twice
win the Pulitzer Prize for biography), about American war profiteers. But Ross was becoming increasingly disillusioned with the Legion itself, which was turning more political, and editing its magazine had become a thoroughly unsatisfying grind.
Unlike The Home Sector, which reflected an independent editorial judgment and creativity, the Weekly was clearly an institutional mouthpiece. Its single greatest concern, judging from the insistent cover reminders, was that Legion members pay their dues. Here and there were nice flourishes, like contributions from Ross’s old friend John Held, Jr., but on the whole the magazine was uninspired. The doughboy humor, collected in “Bursts and Duds,” was mostly the latter, and the topical material was often a reach (“Didn’t Uncle Sam Hand Out Some Promises Four Years Ago About Farms for Soldiers?”). Vain Legion executives began to send Ross speeches to print, many of which he found so dull or wrongheaded that he read them aloud sarcastically to friends. He wearied of finding new ways to say the same things. His desperation was evident when, nearly five years after the armistice, the Weekly was soliciting readers for “your most thrilling experience” from the war.
Increasingly Ross pondered his options. Besides the New York weekly idea, he had considered publishing a shipping-news journal, an ad-free newspaper (that would carry an advertising insert), or inexpensive paperback books. He even toyed with the idea of a syndicated comic strip. That he considered so many ideas bespeaks his uncertainty of mind. He pleaded with Jane to help him decide—or really, she felt, to tell him what to do.
She thought Ross’s most promising concept by far was the metropolitan weekly, and in his heart so did he. Though the broad outline of the idea reached back to wartime Paris, Ross’s experience in New York only reinforced its soundness. No single magazine spoke directly to him or his generation. The more he looked about him, the more he was persuaded that a magazine managing to tap into this new energy, and reflect it back, couldn’t help but find a receptive audience.
Ross also was well aware that fortunes were being made in the magazine industry. For one hundred and fifty years, American magazines had been limited by cost and other obstacles to small curiosities. But by the early Twenties, favorable postal rates and a wave of technological innovation, including fast rotary printing presses, conveyor systems, and multicolor picture reproduction, had paved the way for the great national magazines such as the Post, Collier’s, Liberty, and McCall’s. By 1926, there were twenty-five domestic magazines with circulations exceeding one million. With commercial radio in its infancy and television a futuristic fantasy, magazines represented the lone true national medium, the only efficient way for major advertisers to reach audiences from coast to coast. For magazine publishers, this combination caused an explosion of prosperity. But to Ross, it presented an obvious opportunity. Why would an upscale New York department store or other retailer want to reach readers in Duluth and Denver? he asked. This was what happened when they advertised in national magazines. Even if they advertised in the New York newspapers, they still bought primarily “waste” circulation, because most newspaper readers couldn’t afford their goods. The magazine he had in mind—glossy, intelligent, and cheeky—could deliver quality New York merchandise to a quality New York audience.
Ross was just as dissatisfied with most magazine content, which he found overly sentimental and often subliterate. He considered the two big surviving humor magazines, Life and Judge, tubercular. H. L. Mencken and George Jean Nathan’s Smart Set and its successor, the American Mercury, certainly were sassy and provocative, and Crowninshield’s Vanity Fair glittered, of course, but these again were national magazines.
Jane ran Ross’s idea by the brilliant managing editor of the Times, Carr Van Anda. He saw a certain shrewdness in the plan but pronounced it prohibitively expensive; it would take five million dollars, he estimated, just to break into the black. Since Ross and Jane were hoping to start with one one-hundredth that amount, this news was discouraging.
But apparently not so discouraging as working at the Weekly, for by the summer of 1923 Ross clearly was more focused on his magazine dream than on his magazine reality. That July, Alice Duer Miller steered her cousin Edward Weeks—then fresh out of Cambridge, in later life editor of The Atlantic Monthly—to Ross to discuss job prospects. Ross was cordial and told Weeks that he would be starting his own magazine in the near future, but he added that he was only just beginning to put together a dummy of it. In the meantime, he was working up a business plan and refining his concept. Copies of Life, Judge, American Mercury, and Smart Set, as well as Punch (a major influence) and other foreign humor magazines, were strewn about his apartment at 412. He and Jane were reading everything they could find on the subject of magazine publishing. They forged ahead, agreeing that fifty thousand dollars, while probably inadequate, would have to do.
Once Ross produced the mock edition, he peddled it among his circle but found no enthusiasm remotely approaching his own. Few were willing even to concede Ross’s market assumptions, much less invest their own money in his enterprise. “He carried a dummy of the magazine for two years, everywhere, and I’m afraid he was rather a bore with it,” Kaufman wrote later. Even Woollcott, who was so close to the concept and who could be counted on to vouch for Ross’s editorial acumen even if the two men didn’t happen to be speaking, was skeptical. He refused to introduce Ross to the influential publisher Condé Nast.
No one questioned Ross’s inherent editorial abilities. He was known to be good with a pencil, efficient, hardworking, and a fair judge of talent. If you needed someone with a grasp of military issues or shipping news, there was none better. No, his skill wasn’t the question. This was: “How the hell could a man who looked like a resident of the Ozarks and talked like a saloon brawler set himself up as pilot of a sophisticated, elegant periodical?” This was how playwright Ben Hecht put it, adding, “It was bounderism of the worst sort.” Hecht and sidekick Charlie MacArthur (they would later write The Front Page) felt so strongly about the matter that they spent a boozy, three A.M. session on a Broadway curb in front of an all-night drugstore trying to dissuade the delusional Ross.
The skepticism was everywhere. Though outwardly Ross parried it, inwardly it fed his own mounting insecurity. After all, he, otherwise so sure of his editorial capabilities, was smart enough to know that a high-school dropout from Colorado who still referred to romance as “spooning” had a lot to learn about urbanity. How could he presume to tell New York about sophistication?
Just then an opportunity arose which looked to obviate the need for Ross to start his own magazine. The same company that printed the Weekly took a financial interest in the lately shaky Judge and asked Ross to be coeditor. (There are some indications that he considered buying the magazine himself, with investors, but this is unclear.) He was well known to the people at Judge because its offices and the Weekly’s were in the same building. He had good reason to be wary: Judge embodied everything he found wanting in American humor. It was wheezy and out of step, with its Krazy Kracks and cartoons that were mere appendages to stale “he-she” gags. It spoke to Middle America, not Manhattan. Yet it was a venerable, respected title, and Ross thought some of his fresh ideas might help resuscitate it. Beyond that, he was so desperate to make a change that he couldn’t resist. In March 1924, the faithful Winterich took over the Weekly, and Ross moved down the hall to Judge.
Almost immediately he realized it was a terrible mistake. He fought constantly with coeditor Norman Anthony, as well as with the new owner, both of whom had little use for his newfangled ideas about humor. Ross, that rare editor who was always solicitous of his contributors, was appalled to find that at Judge they had to camp out in the lobby to get paid. He complained that originality was treated like a disease.
He made a valiant try, but the pre-Ross/post-Ross schizophrenia in Judge is plain. After his arrival, the humor tries to move from the turn-of-the-century to the more topical. He leans heavily on some of the contributors who would help define the early Ne
w Yorker, such as humorists Corey Ford and Howard Dietz and artists Held, Ralph Barton, Perry Barlow, and Gardner Rea. (At Woollcott’s urging, he also tried to persuade an up-and-coming vaudeville cowboy, Will Rogers, to write for him, but the droll young man went to Life instead.) There are elements that Ross would appropriate for, or refine in, The New Yorker: casuals, “Newsbreaks” (those column-ending tweaks of newspaper mistakes), movie reviews, celebrity news. On the other hand, the magazine retained plenty of the dreadful standbys, like “Funnybones,” which were jokes literally printed inside a drawing of a bone (“A red nose indicates a horn of plenty these days!”).
One of Ross’s boldest strokes at Judge was an issue given over to satirizing the Ku Klux Klan; it appeared one week after he left but undoubtedly was produced on his watch. The racist organization is lampooned on the cover and in cartoons, jokes, and stories. From the content, and in view of Ross’s background, one senses that the spoof derived less from any personal outrage over Klan persecution of blacks, Jews and Catholics than from the inherent silliness and comic possibilities of a hate group in bed linen. Nonetheless, it was a powerful statement in 1924 and tends to mitigate, again, later suggestions that Ross himself was racially intolerant.
Genius in Disguise Page 9
