Even so, Ross was desperately unhappy at Judge. He was frustrated by the low common denominator required of its humor, and the steady erosion of ads merely validated his views about national versus local advertising. When Ford walked in one day with a smart article on New York’s problem with snow removal, Ross had to say no because the subject was too parochial. Then he exploded at Ford as if it were his fault. “That’s the trouble with this goddamn magazine! If it went after a local audience, it would get local advertising.”
Ross walked away from Judge in August, after just five months. Right away he had attractive offers from Hearst’s Cosmopolitan and other publications, but by now he was determined to go out on his own. It was time to test his theories in the marketplace. Besides, he had decided that the only way to have a completely independent magazine was to start your own. He had seen how business-side pressures and advertiser complaints had led to Parker and Benchley’s departure from Vanity Fair, and of course he had had a full quota of interference himself at both the Weekly and Judge. At his own magazine, he vowed, there would be a wall between editorial and business as if between church and state.
Ross now set about finding an angel. He met with several New York “risk” capitalists but got no bites. Then one evening he and Jane attended a party given by Raoul and Ruth Fleischmann. During a lull in a bridge game Jane casually began chatting with Fleischmann about Ross’s idea for a New York magazine. For some reason—perhaps because he was so far removed from the publishing world—Ross and Jane had never considered Fleischmann a potential backer. But Raoul (pronounced like “growl”) hated the baking business, and Jane could see he was intrigued by the idea. He urged her to have her husband come by.
Ross went over the next day, but in what amounted to a last-minute failure of nerve, instead of pitching the New York weekly, he tried to sell Fleischmann on the shipping newspaper. Fleischmann, who knew and cared nothing about that subject, was baffled, and Jane was flabbergasted. For a week she badgered Ross to go back, and finally, sheepishly, he did.
Fleischmann listened, then asked how large a stake Ross required. Twenty-five thousand dollars should do it, Ross said, and he and Jane would put up a like amount. To Fleischmann, who then had a net worth of nearly a million dollars, this seemed reasonable enough. They shook hands.
Fleischmann could not have imagined how many hundreds of thousands of dollars were to follow before he ever got a cent back. As someone who knew virtually nothing about publishing, he had walked into the deal blithely. He regarded it as a lark, not unlike a wager—albeit a very heavy one—on one of his beloved Thoroughbreds at Saratoga. But as soon as word of his participation began circulating, Fleischmann was teased enough, and was asked enough questions he didn’t have answers for, to start worrying.
To placate his skittish new partner, Ross lined up an “advisory board” of ten celebrated friends, who presumably would lend the sophistication to this self-styled “magazine of sophistication.” The ten were Woollcott, Broun, Parker, Connelly, Kaufman, Ferber, Alice Miller, dramatist Laurence Stallings, and artists Ralph Barton and Rea Irvin. Ross badly needed their credibility, but he knew the board was at best a fanciful ruse, and at worst plain dishonest. “Some of them didn’t really work on the magazine, and others I had no expectation of getting actual help from,” Ross said years later. “It was one of the shoddiest things I have ever done. I have been ashamed of it ever since.”
In the late summer of 1924, Ross took a small office in a building owned by the Fleischmann family at 25 West Forty-fifth Street. By now he had everything he needed for his new magazine but a name. The Round Tablers proffered many suggestions, among them Manhattan, New York Life, and Our Town. But it was Toohey, the man who five years earlier had inadvertently begun the Round Table, who asked the obvious: Why not call it The New Yorker? With nothing of real value left to him, Ross compensated Toohey with a few shares of stock in the new magazine, a gesture the Vicious Circle found as hilarious as it was most assuredly empty. (None of them realized it then, but this was not the first time the name had been used. Horace Greeley published The New-Yorker, “a weekly journal of literature, politics and general intelligence,” from 1834 to 1841. Proof again, if any were needed, that there are no truly new ideas in publishing.)
Presently all that remained was for Ross to write a prospectus, a mission statement cum sales pitch for the embryonic publication. What he produced, in fits and starts, would become the most famous magazine prospectus in history. (See Appendix I, this page.) It represented the first and only time Ross articulated his goals for The New Yorker in detail. When the prospectus is referred to these days, the passage usually singled out—invariably out of context—is the one dealing with that famous reader Ross was not interested in, “the old lady in Dubuque.” (He went on to explain, “This is not meant in disrespect, but The New Yorker is a magazine avowedly published for a metropolitan audience and thereby will escape an influence which hampers most national publications.”) Much more pertinent was his lead: “The New Yorker will be a reflection in word and picture of metropolitan life. It will be human. Its general tenor will be one of gaiety, wit and satire, but it will be more than a jester. It will not be what is commonly called radical or highbrow. It will be what is commonly called sophisticated, in that it will assume a reasonable degree of enlightenment on the part of its readers. It will hate bunk.” The New Yorker, Ross went on to brashly pledge, would be “so entertaining and informative as to be a necessity for the person who knows his way about or wants to.”
At the bottom of the prospectus were listed the ten advisors, most of whom were well known to the public, and “H. W. Ross, Editor,” who wasn’t.
Fleischmann had been considerably bucked up by the advisory board. Like casual readers of the prospectus, no doubt he believed they would have a lot to do with fulfilling the document’s bright promise. Nonetheless, he continued to hear from assorted second-guessers and tongue-cluckers. One friend who knew something about publishing gave Fleischmann this piece of advice: Get a satchel, fill it with your twenty-five thousand dollars, board a ferry, and throw the bag over the side. This will be quicker, he said, and ultimately much less painful.
CHAPTER 5
LABOR PAINS
Pop: A man who thinks he can make it in par.
Johnny: What is an optimist, pop?
The joke was lame even before it was upended, which was the point, really, and so it appeared, in just this way, on page twenty of the first issue of The New Yorker. The transposition was not a mistake, as some have suggested, but was Ross’s way of tweaking what was still passing for humor in Life and Judge, implicitly proclaiming that in his New Yorker readers could expect such a stale convention to be stood on its head. The idea was amusing, even passing clever, done once. But Ross thought it so precious that he repeated the upside-down joke in twenty-six straight issues, until someone—possibly an appalled Katharine S. Angell, who, though just arrived, knew a subcollegiate gesture when she saw it—persuaded him to stop.
On one level the case of the optimist joke is little more than a trifling footnote, but on another it represents something significant about the excruciating birth of The New Yorker—a year of good intentions gone wildly, very nearly fatally, amok. In 1925, even when Ross hit on a good idea, he didn’t always know what to do with it.
The pallid, labored first issues of The New Yorker failed the magazine’s prospectus in every conceivable way. However, the most misleading aspect of that document wasn’t any individual promise but its underlying tone of confidence—because now it is clear that while H. W. Ross, Editor, may have had a grand cosmic vision, what he didn’t have was a game plan. He was of necessity making up The New Yorker as he went along, week by week, story by story, sentence by sentence.
The first issue hit the newsstands on Tuesday, February 17, 1925, dated the following Saturday. Traffic did not stop, crowds did not gather, attention generally was not paid. What immediate reaction there was from passers
by was surely puzzlement. Though Ross and Jane had hurriedly gotten out some promotional placards, and though a few advance notices had appeared in the newspapers, now The New Yorker was on the streets—and really, what was it?
Beyond the name of the magazine itself, the only element on the glossy cover was a curious illustration of a Regency fop examining a butterfly through his monocle. No headlines or promotional blurbs hinted at what lay inside. Ross had toyed with various concepts for this crucial first cover, and he asked several artists to work up sketches on what amounted to a dreadful visual cliché, a curtain going up on Manhattan. What he got back was predictably static and maddeningly literal. At the very last moment Ross prevailed on his art editor, Rea Irvin, to come up with something—anything—that might suggest sophistication and gaiety. Irvin responded with the high-collared character who a few months later would be christened Eustace Tilley, the elegant model of insouciance who thereafter appeared on The New Yorker’s anniversary numbers. (Irvin studied pictures of historical dandies for inspiration, and Tilley bears a remarkably strong resemblance to an 1834 caricature of the French Comte d’Orsay. Irvin added the monocle and butterfly.)
The optimist joke notwithstanding, that first New Yorker was distressingly derivative of Judge and Life. It led off with “Of All Things,” a weak potpourri of anecdote and josh signed by “The New Yorker,” followed by “The Talk of the Town,” an even longer potpourri of anecdote and josh signed by “Van Bibber III,” a character appropriated from Richard Harding Davis. “The Story of Manhattankind” was a satiric thrust that missed. The first “Profile,” of Metropolitan Opera impresario Giulio Gatti-Casazza, was trailed by “The Hour Glass,” which offered thumbnail sketches of the likes of runner Paavo Nurmi and mayor-to-be Jimmy Walker. There were peeks at the latest theater, books, and “moving pictures,” as well as light verse, scattered anecdotes, and Round Table travel notes under the heading “In Our Midst.” A few sharp illustrations were offset by some dumb jokes of the “he-she” and tipsy-Irishman variety. What signed contributions there were were signed at the end of a piece, usually with pseudonyms. Ross employed the pseudonyms for several reasons: because they focused attention on the work rather than the writers; because he thought them sophisticated; and because some of the contributors didn’t want to be, or couldn’t be, named. Likewise, there was no staff box or other identification of the perpetrators. This, Ross explained, was because “there were no proven editors” and because “I wanted to avoid a great mass of mail coming in here personally addressed to me.”
This “he-she” cartoon from The New Yorker’s first issue would have been right at home in Judge or Life. (By Ethel Plummer, ©1925, 1953 The New Yorker Magazine, Inc.)
The New Yorker contained some interesting bits, but on the whole it was a confused and confusing jumble. There was no meat to it—or, for that matter, raison d’être. It was an ominous sign that Ross felt compelled to apologize, in “Of All Things,” for what he knew was a marginal beginning: “The New Yorker asks consideration for its first number. It recognizes certain shortcomings and realizes that it is impossible for a magazine fully to establish its character in one number.”
All of which was true but surely didn’t mollify anyone who had shelled out fifteen cents, particularly those who had expected better. George Horace Lorimer, editor of The Saturday Evening Post, bluntly told his contributor Jane Grant, “I threw it across the room in disgust.” Vanity Fair’s Crowninshield paged through the issue with one of his writers, Margaret Case Harriman, and declared, “Well, Margaret, I think we have nothing to fear.” Even F.P.A., who could usually be counted on to find an encouraging word where his friends were concerned, dismissed The New Yorker as “too frothy for my liking,” and his true disdain may be inferred from the fact that for the next year or more the magazine never resurfaces in his diary.
The sharpest rebuke to The New Yorker’s first number arose from within the very same building. Ross’s office was one floor above that of two other magazine dreamers, Briton Hadden and Henry Luce, who were nursing along the two-year-old Time. The precocious Yalies were considerably further along than Ross, and Hadden especially had taken exception to the snobbish tone of Ross’s prospectus. He handed the first issue to one of Time’s best writers, his cousin Niven Busch, instructing him to work it over. Consider what the old lady in Dubuque would think of it, Hadden goaded.
Busch’s vivisection was as artful as it was thorough. Summing up, he purported to speak for dowager Iowans everywhere: “I, and my associates here, have never subscribed to the view that bad taste is any the less offensive because it is metropolitan taste. To me, urbanity is the ability to offend without being offensive, to startle composure and to deride without ribaldry. The editors of [The New Yorker] are, I understand, members of a literary clique. They should learn that there is no provincialism so blatant as that of the metropolitan who lacks urbanity.”
Ross appreciated the writer’s way with the lash, even if he was the one being flayed; before long he would be hiring away Busch to work for The New Yorker. But the criticism hurt, all the more for being so true.
Then there was perhaps the most telling reaction, that of Ross’s already nervous partner. Fleischmann didn’t merely hate the first issue; he was terrified by it. What he had undertaken as a lark was looking more and more like a very expensive fool’s errand. He was in a gray frame of mind anyway because, just as The New Yorker was preparing to launch, his cousin and close friend, Julius Fleischmann, fell from his polo pony, dead, in Miami Beach. The colorful Julius, former president of Fleischmann’s Yeast Company and twice mayor of Cincinnati, was fifteen years older than Raoul but had been something of a mentor and big brother to him all his life. Raoul was shaken badly by Julius’s death, and his personal despair made his mounting disillusionment with The New Yorker that much harder to take.
By now most of Fleischmann’s initial stake was gone; worse, he knew that if the magazine was to stand any chance at all, he would have to pump in a good deal more. It was also clear that Ross, as technically capable and occasionally charming as he might be, either had been dreaming about how much capital would be required, or had flat-out misled him. And now that the first issue was out, Fleischmann knew one other thing: if The New Yorker didn’t get any better than this, it wouldn’t survive.
With these sobering thoughts in mind, Fleischmann immediately rang up a man named John Hanrahan, who had been referred to him as a “publisher’s counsel” but who really was one of the first magazine doctors. In exchange for a ten percent stake in The New Yorker, Hanrahan, a wiry business-side veteran of various newspapers and magazines, agreed to help dig the F-R Publishing Corporation out of this hole. The R, Ross, was president, and he was none too pleased at what he regarded as a rash and unilateral move by F, the vice president and publisher. But being in no real position to squawk, he responded the only way he knew how: by taking an instant dislike to Hanrahan.
Immediately Hanrahan found a handful of capable managers to shore up the magazine’s advertising and circulation departments (till then Fleischmann had been concentrating on negotiating the important printing contract, as well as soliciting ads). Hanrahan even had the temerity to offer editorial advice, which only made Ross angrier. In time his antipathy for Hanrahan would develop into full-blown hatred, but for now he stayed out of the savvy Irishman’s way.
Hanrahan’s other major contribution to The New Yorker was a promotional campaign that, nakedly and unapologetically, welded the magazine to a discerning, monied readership. The expensive campaign, launched that fall, succeeded in persuading the city’s high-end advertisers that The New Yorker was uniquely positioned to help them. If Hanrahan’s copy was less subtle than the editor might have liked, his message was precisely what Ross himself had been preaching for years. In spite of this, Ross would later declare, “My personal opinion of our promotion is that it was terrible and probably gave unobservant people the notion that we were frivolous.” Whether he hated the
promotion or just the promoter, the overriding point is that before The New Yorker was one week old, the first crack had appeared in the relationship between Ross and Fleischmann.
——
The shaky launch of The New Yorker surprised no one who had been watching the countdown, which was erratic enough to discourage Horatio Alger himself. Certainly it had unsettled Fleischmann. “I am free to admit I didn’t think for a moment we’d make a go of it,” he wrote in a private memoir near the end of his life. “I wasn’t at all impressed with Ross’s knowledge of publishing. I had no reason to doubt his skill as an editor, nor any reason to believe in it. I had merely got into something I couldn’t get out of gracefully, and Ross was so hell-bent on going ahead—and we were very friendly—that I was in, and that’s all there was to it.”
Ross and Fleischmann each had taken ten percent of the company’s stock, leaving the remaining eighty percent to distribute later as necessary. But as 1924 had drawn to a close, Ross and Jane had been able to scrape together only twenty thousand of the twenty-five thousand dollars they had pledged, so Ross agreed to draw just one-third of his three-hundred-dollar-a-week salary and put the rest into the magazine. There wasn’t really adequate time for the February launch, but there also wasn’t enough money to push it back. Ross was broadcasting all over town for help, but with little money to spend and mostly part-time positions to offer, he was able to gather about him only a motley and overmatched staff. One young man, Philip Wylie, later a popular novelist but at the time a down-on-his-luck publicist (he had been unjustly tarred in a paternity scandal), even offered to work free on a trial basis for three weeks. The sympathetic Ross took him on and was immediately impressed when Wylie arranged for the first copy of The New Yorker to be delivered to Governor Al Smith. “This feat slightly stunned Ross,” Wylie said later, “though any press agent … could have pulled it off, as I did, with a phone call.” Within days, Ross put him on the modest payroll, and before long Wylie was responsible for coordinating the magazine’s illustrations and running the weekly art meeting.
Genius in Disguise Page 10
