Genius in Disguise

by Thomas Kunkel

  Ross’s first coup was to persuade the gifted Irvin, formerly of Life, to be his art editor. Irvin was not so much an employee as a permanent consultant: for seventy-five dollars a week and stock, he came in every Tuesday to adjudicate the week’s art submissions and generally lend his expertise where it was needed. Other charter members of the editorial staff included Tyler (Tip) Bliss, a gag writer and utility man who had worked with Ross at The Stars and Stripes and The Home Sector; Helen Mears, Ross’s first secretary and later a contributor to the magazine; and Gladys Unger, a receptionist/switchboard operator—surely unnecessary in so small an office but for Ross’s compulsive rearranging of the magazine’s few phone lines, an early manifestation of his obsession with “systems” of every kind. In time Ross would hire The New Yorker’s first de facto managing editor, Joseph Moncure March, a poet and unaccomplished artist whose only experience was editing a house publication for the New York Telephone Company. But he was the son of General Pershing’s chief of staff, which was good enough for Ross. His first Talk of the Town writer and editor was James Kevin McGuinness, a temperamental young sportswriter and humorist who, Ross presently discovered, intensely disliked Joseph Moncure March. And though she was still at the Times, Jane Grant spent every spare moment at the magazine, lending Ross a hand with copy and trying to put a circulation department on its feet.

  Just as Ross had badly underestimated The New Yorker’s financial requirements, so too was he naïve about the editorial demands—though it may have been less naïveté than the brand of wishful thinking that an empty pocketbook can induce. For instance, he had hoped an inexpensive source of material would be back-of-the-note-book items from the city’s army of newspaper reporters, and he posted solicitations in newsrooms all over town. But this reaped little of use. He was also still counting on his Algonquin friends to lend a hand; if they wouldn’t invest in the magazine, they might at least write for it. There were problems here, too, however. Besides their continuing skepticism over the project, by 1925 the Round Tablers were genuinely preoccupied with their own busy careers, and some, like Broun, were contractually precluded from associating with what amounted to a competitor. By the magazine’s launch the ten advisory editors had dwindled to seven; gone were Broun, Ferber and Stallings.

  Some have maintained that the Round Table completely abandoned Ross in his hour of greatest need, but this is not quite fair. True, he certainly was made to understand that he couldn’t build the magazine on his famous friends—which in the long run was a blessing since it forced The New Yorker to find fresh voices of its own. On the other hand, the Round Tablers did pitch in here and there, turning up just often enough in the nascent magazine for it to maintain a shred of credibility with the reading public. Dorothy Parker supplied about the only readable material there was in the first two issues: droll theater reviews under the pseudonym Last Night (“It is the sort of well-mannered piece that ought to have Bruce McRae in it, and, oddly enough, always does have him”), a poem (“Cassandra Drops into Verse”), and a satiric thrust at the superficial life of a clubwoman. Woollcott anonymously (a wise move, given its obsequiousness) profiled his old boss Carr Van Anda in issue three, and a few months later sketched penny-books tycoon Emanuel Haldeman-Julius. Humorist and lifelong Ross friend Frank Sullivan sparked the sixth number with a whimsical look at convoluted cab fares. Ben Hecht got over his abashment to contribute a casual in issue nine. Murdock Pemberton was there almost from the start, recruited by Jane as the first art critic. Ferber profiled editor William Allen White in issue fifteen, and Benchley’s first humorous essay, “Sex Is Out,” appeared in the last number of 1925. Herman Mankiewicz was also present at the creation, cranking out everything from funny promotional ads to theater criticism, as was Marc Connelly. He was an especially diligent handmaiden to Ross, writing anonymous pieces, editing, even mediating. One day as he was taking a pencil to a piece Ross had written, Jane walked up and asked if he intended to trim it back. Connelly said yes. “I told Ross to cut it,” she replied, “but that man is wife-deaf.”

  Ross spoke constantly, almost mantra-like, of hitting on the right “formula”—that magical mix of words, pictures, and attitude that gives a magazine its identity. It is an alchemy difficult for any magazine to achieve, much less a new one with groundbreaking aspirations. Even so, one cannot help but be struck by how many of the now-familiar elements were in place from the start. Rough as it was, that first number is immediately recognizable as The New Yorker. Beyond the distinct “look” of Irvin’s typography and text-driven design, one finds Talk of the Town; cartoons and comic illustration; cultural reviews and notes; the “Goings On” calendar of events; light verse; very brief (albeit thoroughly aimless) casuals; and Profiles, which in the beginning truly were what that name implies—subjects sketched quickly, in outline. (It is said that McGuinness first suggested the name “Profiles” to Ross, who rather reluctantly concurred. Later he became so proprietary about the name that The New Yorker copyrighted it and fought its appropriation by other publications—though in time, of course, “profile” as a literary form simply passed into the lexicon.)

  Ross nonetheless juggled the magazine’s disparate parts like so many china plates, and more than a few crashed to the floor. Many early departments that had seemed indistinguishable either were sharpened (Talk of the Town, Of All Things), or pitched out (“Behind the News,” “And They Do Say,” “New York, Etc.”). Columns were named and renamed; page headings constantly metamorphosed. For nearly a year Ross lumped together the cultural reviews under a single rubric, “Critique,” before separating them again. The Story of Manhattankind and In Our Midst mercifully died quick deaths. With each departure came an addition, and usually it was an improvement in the formula. In July the first letter from overseas, “From Paris,” arrived (though not from Janet Flanner), and in mid-August “Notes and Comment” showed up for the first time, forever after to lead Talk of the Town. A general sports column debuted early, as did “The Sky-Line,” an innovative commentary on building design and its impact on the cityscape.

  One crucial and telltale entry appeared in the eighth number. “When Nights Are Bold” was a witty and genuinely informative assessment of the nightclub and speakeasy scene, and The New Yorker’s first real lurch toward its true, nouveau-society audience. Signed by “Top Hat,” the column was conducted by the debonair Charles Baskerville, who also provided the accompanying sleek drawings under his real name.

  Baskerville, Ross and Jane Grant had come to know one another socially in New York after the war. Ross was not a dancer or a habitué of the better clubs (he was known in some of the rougher speakeasies), but he was aware that Baskerville was a genuine man-about-town and asked the young artist if he would cover the clubs for his new magazine. The decision marked Ross’s first real effort to link The New Yorker to the Jazz Age milieu, and he clearly hoped some of its excitement and illicit glamour would rub off on the magazine.

  Ross paid Baskerville little and gave him the most cursory instructions. “He never told me anything except just to go out and ‘report what you think would be amusing,’ ” the artist recalled. He happily complied, dropping off his copy at the magazine each week and seeing it come out more or less the way he had written it. Later that year Baskerville headed back to Europe, and the column was taken over by a recruit from Vanity Fair, the glamorous Lois Long, who wrote under the pseudonym Lipstick. Soon after the column was renamed “Tables for Two.”

  So Ross’s problem was not so much The New Yorker’s format, which was slowly gelling, but its execution, which wasn’t. It wasn’t that he didn’t know what he wanted. He dreamed of toppling conventions. He envisioned news and comment and a dash of gossip, delivered with cheek. He wanted The New Yorker to be informed but offhand (“We were on our way to the Winter Garden when we overheard …”), and humorous throughout. And he wanted it all bent to his own peculiar notion of a sophisticate’s world. “Ross had a map in his mind of the things The New Yorker should
be covering,” explained the writer William Maxwell, a longtime fiction editor for the magazine. “Florida, the West Indies, California and Europe were on it, but Illinois and Canada were not.”

  All this would have been a very tall order in the best of circumstances, but for a handful of undercapitalized, underexperienced newcomers, conjuring the New Yorker of Ross’s glib prospectus would require something closer to prestidigitation. But magic, alas, was in short supply.

  For one thing, Ross was unsure of his audience—was he supposed to be courting established society or mocking it?—and therefore uncertain what he wanted to say, or even how to say it. The tone of the early issues was less informed and offhand than smug or shrill. The magazine trafficked endlessly in Round Table notes and journalistic inside baseball, and wasted entirely too much buckshot on obvious or dull targets like Mayor John F. Hylan. Profiles, while a good idea, were uneven, fawning (except for yet another trashing of Jack Dempsey in issue four), and predictable (Alice Roosevelt Longworth, Giants manager John McGraw, Charlie Chaplin). The magazine also exhibited virtually no modulation in tone. Pieces meant to be subtle were so understated as to be baffling. Yet when Ross wanted to draw blood, subtlety went out the window. Thus William Jennings Bryan, creationist symbol of the Scopes trial then unfolding in Tennessee, wasn’t nicked in a single cartoon but harpooned in four in the same issue. Ross, a man who spent a career counseling writers to “use the rapier rather than the bludgeon,” had yet to grasp this lesson himself.

  The only major piece of the formula that worked almost from the start was “art”—then and now The New Yorker’s term for cartoons, covers, and illustrations. Likewise, these important contributors were never the “cartoonists” or the “illustrators,” but the “artists.” This respect, then rare in the magazine world, owes much to Ross, but it is also one of the many important legacies of Rea Irvin.

  Irvin was a large but soft-spoken man, with a twinkling sense of humor. A onetime actor, he had a theatrical presence that he enhanced with a flamboyant wardrobe. He was eleven years older than the editor and came from San Francisco, so Ross listened to him where often he wouldn’t to others. Like some other important early contributors who stayed too long at the magazine, Irvin in time came to an unhappy parting with it. Doubtless this is one reason he has never been given his full due in various accounts of its history.

  Rea Irvin contributed four crucial things to Ross, without any one of which The New Yorker would have been diminished. First, of course, was that inaugural cover. Tilley not only effortlessly conveyed everything Ross wanted his magazine to be—smart, enigmatic, relaxed, observant, amusing, yet somehow detached—but in time literally came to embody The New Yorker, a familiar icon to this day. Second, Irvin designed the unique, casually elegant headline type (still known as “Irvin” type), and created the magazine’s clean design, down to its squiggly column rules, against which the cartoons and high-priced advertising could pop out in crisp relief. Third, he spent much of his time in the early years teaching Ross about art. Philip Wylie, who sat in on the first one hundred or so of those weekly art meetings, attests that Irvin “rubbed most of the uncouthness and corn-love out of Ross’s mind in the all-afternoon Tuesday conferences.” Ross was a very quick student, and his own taste in comic art would become superior, but the fact remains he had a patient, expert teacher.

  Irvin’s fourth contribution, of course, was the art itself. From the beginning, the art in The New Yorker was much closer to Ross’s elusive aims than the prose. “Irvin always knew what he wanted Ross to want,” Ralph Ingersoll observed, “which was why The New Yorker’s art took off first.” The primordial New Yorker is full of the best comic artists of the day—among them Ralph Barton, Al Freuh, Miguel Covarrubias, and John Held, Jr. By the summer of 1925 they were joined by the likes of Gardner Rea, Garrett Price, and Johann Bull, as well as such promising newcomers as Peter Arno, Helen Hokinson, Carl Rose, and Alice Harvey. It’s a good thing for Ross they were there, for the delightful covers and witty cartoons made the magazine worth perusing even in those instances when there was little in it to read.

  Rea Irvin. (Keystone)

  Though many of these artists had worked with Ross prior to The New Yorker, it was Irvin who had the credibility to pull them into this experimental, low-paying magazine, and who, just as important, pointed them in the right direction. Almost immediately the artists demonstrated a willingness to depart from orthodoxy that their writing counterparts couldn’t muster. For instance, when Held drew for the magazine, Ross and Irvin eschewed his overexposed flappers, instead publishing his contemporary twists on the Gay Nineties woodcuts Ross had loved as a boy. Under the guidance of Ross and Irvin, New Yorker cartoonists would abandon the standard two-line joke in favor of the single-line caption; suddenly the drawing was intrinsic to the gag, not just an illustration of it. Also in that first year, the artists reflected the permissive times by celebrating the female form in surprisingly risqué illustrations—surprising given the reputation for prudery, both in word and picture, that Ross earned in later years. All the while, Irvin was practicing what he preached. He produced some of the best New Yorker cartoons of 1925, such as his delightful “Social Errors” series that featured the classic “The Young Man Who Asked for a Pack of Camels in Dunhill’s.”

  There was good reason why, in those early days, Ross was often heard to mutter, “We need to get the words like the art!”

  ——

  The Art notwithstanding, by the spring of 1925, New Yorkers were not reading The New Yorker in droves.

  In retrospect, an early slide in circulation might have been predicted. Even had the magazine offered sturdier fare from the very beginning, it clearly meant to be something new, and therefore an acquired taste.

  True to form, Ross and Fleischmann hadn’t permitted themselves to consider the worst, but after ten or so issues they were staring at it. The press run, which had started out at fifteen thousand, was down to eight thousand and falling. Unpurchased copies piled up. Advertisements grew scarce and were not always collectible in any case. The book shrank to an anemic twenty-four pages. The magazine’s initial capital was long gone, and Ross was presenting Fleischmann with bills of five thousand dollars a week and more.

  Late one evening Marquis James was having a drink with Ross. As they parted well after midnight Ross casually said, “Have to dig up a thousand dollars before breakfast.”

  The next morning James found Ross back at his desk. “I got it,” he said. He had sold a complete bound set of The Stars and Stripes—which the artist LeRoy Baldridge suggested that Ross had pilfered from him after the war—to his old friend Theodore Roosevelt, Jr., founder of the American Legion.

  Still, the pressure to find new money built in inverse proportion to readership. Finally Ross’s desperation led him to a disastrous evening of cards at the home of Herbert Bayard Swope. It was Swope’s custom to entertain lavishly on weekends, and on this Sunday evening Ross and Jane were among a number of couples there, including the Fleischmanns. As usual, a high-stakes poker game began. By now, Ross generally had given up the richer games, but this night, with The New Yorker hanging in the balance, he believed he was gambling on the side of the angels.

  And in fact, Ross was ahead when Jane indicated she was ready to leave. He rose to go, but after the other players challenged his manhood, not to mention his poker etiquette, he sat back down and Jane left alone. The game wore on through the night, past dawn, and into Monday morning. Ross finally stumbled home, drunk, at noon. As he slept it off, a horrified Jane fished IOUs out of his coat and pants pockets that totaled nearly thirty thousand dollars.

  “This added debt gave me a feeling of utter despair,” she wrote. “We were disgraced. I could think of nothing left for us to do but commit suicide.” When her husband awoke they contemplated the grisly solution, but fortunately as he sobered up their conversation turned instead to how they might reconcile the debt.

  Having watched it all, Fleischma
nn was angry—not so much at Ross but at those players he believed had callously taken advantage of his partner’s financial plight and drunken state. He managed to get some of Ross’s debts absolved, repaid others himself, and then arranged with Ross to square the remainder between themselves. Ross was relieved, obviously, but also ashamed and embarrassed. More ominously, it began to dawn on him that suddenly, after a lifetime of independence, he owed his entire existence to this man Fleischmann. The perverse resentment of his partner deepened.

  For his part, the Swope debacle may well have been the last straw for Fleischmann. On Friday, May 8, he called together Ross, Hanrahan and Truax, one of the magazine’s directors, for a meeting at the Princeton Club. (Ironically, this occurred just as the magazine was publishing the first major contribution by a promising young humorist, E. B. White, called “Defense of the Bronx River.”) The four men chewed over their limited options, including suspending publication through the dog days of summer, but nothing seemed plausible. With great reluctance, they agreed to kill The New Yorker.

  On their desultory walk back to the office, Fleischmann overheard Hanrahan say to either Ross or Truax, “I can’t blame Raoul for a moment for refusing to go on, but it’s like killing something that’s alive.” The remark sent a shudder through him, but he walked on in silence.