As it happened, the following day Frank Adams was getting married in Connecticut, and Ross and Fleischmann both were there. In this convivial atmosphere and plied with champagne, the two began to revisit their decision. If there was some way to get the magazine into the lucrative fall season, they believed, it might survive. They left the reception having agreed to talk further on Monday, and two days later they devised a plan to give the magazine one last try.
Years later, in a private history of the Fleischmann family, Raoul conceded that had his cousin Julius not died that February, he might not have permitted himself second thoughts about The New Yorker. “It is a pretty good chance that had he lived I would have spoken to him about the rough days we were going through by June of that year,” he wrote. “And if he had made any suggestion that I drop it and come into the Fleischmann Yeast Company, the chances are mighty good that I would have done so.”
But Julius wasn’t there, and Raoul’s only real alternative to publishing The New Yorker—a return to the bakery—was intolerable, so for very different reasons he was as motivated as Ross to find a way to keep the magazine going. Their plan was to limp along as best they could through the summer, operating as inexpensively as possible while husbanding their best material and cash for a big push in September. The press run would be kept low—with circulation eventually slipping below three thousand copies, this was not a big problem—and Ross would continue to hone the format. They also agreed to set aside sixty thousand dollars for Hanrahan’s promotional campaign.
Of course, still to be solved was the little problem of money. Fleischmann had continued to pour in more of his own, in exchange for a growing mound of the dubious F-R stock, but there was a limit to his personal largess. He couldn’t really turn to his family because they thought he had taken leave of his senses. However, his wife, Ruth, had wealth independent of Raoul’s, and now for the first time she put money into The New Yorker. Truax and his brother-in-law, the respected Wall Street attorney Lloyd Paul Stryker, came in with about fifteen thousand dollars between them. Meanwhile, the intrepid Jane had managed to secure promises of capital from a Texas oilman, and there was talk that financier Bernard Baruch, a friend of the Round Table, was prepared to throw a lifeline, too. By then, however, the reinvigorated Fleischmann had pulled together enough money to keep the magazine closely held.
Thus did The New Yorker teeter on the abyss, never again to be so near death.
Which is not to say the problems were over. It was, in fact, a hellish summer, and not only because New York was sweltering through one of its periodic heat waves. On a personal level, Ross was anxious for his father back in Salt Lake. George Ross had been gravely ill for months with cancer of the stomach, and in early June Ida telephoned to say that his death was near. Telling his staff, “Keep it going if you can,” Ross boarded a train for Utah and arrived on June 19, just hours after his father expired. George Ross, at seventy-four a relatively prosperous businessman and a respected member of the community, was laid to rest by his fellow Masons. Personal grief aside, the timing could hardly have been worse for Ross, with his magazine foundering two thousand miles away, but he stayed on for two weeks to comfort his mother and help settle the family’s affairs.
On his return, Ross found the coffers so low that the July 11, 1925, cover of the magazine, a satire on the Scopes trial, actually ran in black and white. Advertising had atrophied to practically nothing. Things reached such an embarrassing pass that many weeks the magazine couldn’t even sell its premium advertising positions, the back page and front and back inside covers. In a reverse of the customary procedure, it was often frantically calling agencies at the last minute, offering to run ads free of charge just to maintain appearances.
To help camouflage the dearth of advertising, Ross asked Corey Ford to come up with some promotional, or “house,” ads. Ford’s response was the “The Making of a Magazine” series, which not only represented some of the cleverest writing in the 1925 New Yorker but went a long way toward establishing the magazine’s droll, self-deprecating tone. The series, which began August 8 and ran in twenty issues, took readers on a tongue-in-cheek tour of “the vast organization of The New Yorker,” from the squid-tickling factory, where ink is collected, to the Emphasis Department, where italics are forged, to the punctuation farm, where commas, quotation marks, and semicolons are scrupulously cultivated under the watchful eye of “our Mr. Eustace Tilley, General Superintendent.” Each article was accompanied by a Johann Bull illustration featuring the ubiquitous Tilley, who was based on the Rea Irvin dandy. Ford had simply made up the moniker (“ ’Tilley’ was the name of a maiden aunt,” he explained, “and I chose ‘Eustace’ because it sounded euphonious”), and soon it came to be identified with Irvin’s monocled figure. Tilley began turning up by name in Talk items, and Ross listed him in the telephone directory.
Another piece of luck that hard summer was the sensational Scopes trial. If Ross still wasn’t sure exactly where the magazine stood in relation to New York society, lampooning the yokels down in Tennessee was a no-brainer. As with the cartoon digs at Bryan, most of the early efforts were clumsy and heavy-handed. Then, in that July 11 issue with the black-and-white cover, there was a breakthrough. Ross dispatched Marquis James to Tennessee to have a look at the Scopes hoopla for himself. The piece he produced was, in essence, The New Yorker’s first real “Letter” or “Reporter at Large,” though Ross had yet to invent those labels.
James’s account, titled simply “Dayton, Tennessee,” vividly described the carnival-like atmosphere surrounding the trial, and how the good citizens of Dayton had pressed a case against the unassuming biology teacher John T. Scopes—“twenty-four and young for his years”—more on a whim than out of any moral indignation. The story is noteworthy for many reasons, but primarily as a forerunner of the classic New Yorker fact tradition: it was well-written, detailed, understated, amusing, and serious without being sober. James achieved that New Yorker vantage point, a certain comfortable detachment, from which to make his observations. One can easily imagine this description of Dayton being written fifteen years later by A. J. Liebling or Joseph Mitchell:
This town differs from other east Tennessee towns because it is newer and more progressive. It was founded in the eighties when the railroad came through from Cincinnati. It belongs to the twentieth century. It ought to have a Rotary Club and Mr. Robinson, the hustling druggist, ought to be the president. Dayton took the county seat away from Washington, which is more than one hundred years old, but has no railroad, no hustling druggist and will never catch the eye of Rotary International. It is a restful Southern hamlet of character. You couldn’t get up an evolution test case there on a bet.
Gradually, pieces like this helped The New Yorker find its voice. Just as important, Ross was beginning to assert what was perhaps his greatest editorial gift—the instinctive ability to find talent, sometimes in the oddest places, and to cultivate it.
There is no greater example of Ross’s spotting raw potential than his hiring, that August, of a remarkable young woman, ostensibly to be a part-time reader of manuscripts. Katharine Sergeant Angell was a refined and darkly beautiful woman, born to a prominent Brookline, Massachusetts, family and educated at Bryn Mawr. In the summer of 1925 she was brought to Ross’s attention by Fillmore Hyde, who was the capable first writer of Notes and Comment and a summer neighbor of the Angells. The mother of two young children, Katharine Angell felt trapped in a deteriorating marriage, and she yearned to be back in the workplace. Her eclectic résumé included a job surveying all the disabled residents of Cleveland, Ohio, but her only real publishing experience was several articles and reviews for The New Republic, The Atlantic Monthly, and The Saturday Review of Literature. She was everything Ross was not: cultured, classically educated, stylish, well-spoken, but with a New England reserve that was often mistaken for aloofness. She might have been expected to be put off by Ross’s gruff, antic manner; instead, she was attracted by his energy,
humor, and sense of mission. She also shared his conviction that a literate journal of humor was not only doable but important. Against the advice of Saturday Review editor Henry Seidel Canby (his judgment was that The New Yorker was “nothing”), she jumped when Ross offered her the part-time job at twenty-five dollars a week. Almost immediately Ross made her full-time, doubled her salary, and broadened her role. She found herself “doing everything—as we all did at the start.” In her case, this included editing stories, working with artists, even contributing some of her own modest verse and casuals.
When Katharine Angell arrived, Talk of the Town was being conducted by another fortuitous recruit, a young Yale graduate, Ralph McAllister Ingersoll, whom Ross had hired only two months earlier. Though a plodding writer, Ingersoll was intelligent, ambitious, and, perhaps most of all, confident beyond his years. Trained as a mining engineer, he also had limited publishing experience—a smattering of reporting and a light-selling novel. But his lineage was impeccable: the McAllisters were among the New York Four Hundred. Ross thought that perhaps Ingersoll, who moved so easily in New York society, might lend a knowing and sophisticated air still badly missing in The New Yorker. Then, too, Ross had spilled ink all over Ingersoll’s newly purchased pale-gray suit during his first job interview, and this sealed it. As Ingersoll walked out of the editor’s office, he heard Ross growl, “Jesus Christ, I hire anybody!”
——
Ralph Ingersoll first encountered Harold Ross through mutual friends just before The New Yorker’s launch. He was unimpressed with the new magazine and gave it little more thought—until that June, when he was still unimpressed but more desperate to secure work. He went to see Ross, but during their conversation Ingersoll was preoccupied—he was in the clutch of some romantic entanglements—and Ross, misreading Ingersoll’s distraction for lack of interest, observed, “You look a little vague about it.” The editor’s candor impressed Ingersoll enough that he made a note of it in his diary.
In their various discussions Ross focused on the weak Talk section, and Ingersoll agreed to do some sample pieces for it. Soon after, he was hired—at twenty-five dollars a week, half what he had asked for—with the specific aim of resuscitating this department.
Ingersoll arrived in the middle of Ross’s personal calvary. It was in The New Yorker’s first year that Ross’s now mythic reputation as a wild, erratic manager took root—and not without some reason. In previous jobs he had always demanded as much from his staff as he did of himself, but even allowing for his eccentricities, he was considered a fair and reasonable boss. Now, however, with his own money and reputation at stake, he was more driven and single-minded than ever. Like most entrepreneurs, he believed the product was everything, and he cared not a whit about what people thought of him or his methods. Natural tics—flailing his arms, running a hand throughout his unkempt hair, jingling the coins in his pants pocket—became more pronounced. Friends who casually asked how he was doing got back a litany of despair. His patience, never a long suit anyway, evaporated, and as his exasperation mounted he gave full rein to his anger. His criticisms tended to be intemperate and laced with sarcasm, and he sometimes kept mistakes tacked up over his desk to remind himself to chew out the miscreants. This Ross represented the unflattering marriage of perfectionism and panic.
Ralph Ingersoll just prior to joining The New Yorker. (Ralph Ingersoll Collection, Boston University)
There were other factors, too. A man trying to invent a new magazine form, Ross wasn’t sure how to achieve it, much less articulate it to others. Even if he had known exactly what he wanted, in those early days and months he certainly didn’t have the staff talent to pull it off. For reasons of sentiment and economy, he at first turned to many old newspaper friends and castoffs, then let them go as they proved too alcoholic or prosaic to advance his cause. He also dug up some genuine eccentrics, which was to become as much a New Yorker tradition as Eustace Tilley. One writer was said to have the shakes so bad that an office boy had to roll the paper into his typewriter. Old-timers especially liked to recall the otherwise normal young woman, never identified, who at the same time each day removed her jewelry and wristwatch, walked to another office, telephoned her husband, and gave him a brutal tongue-lashing. She then calmly put her jewelry back on and returned to work. “The cast of characters in those early days,” E. B. White would write, “was as shifty as the characters in a floating poker game.”
Then there was the problem of copy. There was never enough of it, it was never good enough, and yet there was never enough time to fix it. A pernicious cycle developed: the shortage of ads left too much editorial space to fill, which meant too many weak stories were published, which further alienated readers, which caused more advertisers to drop out, which created more space.… Ross found himself in the uncomfortable position of running almost every borderline piece he received. One reason why he (and more notoriously, his successor, William Shawn) came to develop such a huge backlog of material—more than the magazine could ever use—is that in those desperate days, the editor, like a profane Scarlett O’Hara, vowed he would never go hungry again.
It was unsurprising, then, that Ross constantly badgered the few capable contributors he did have. After her initial flurry of pieces, Dorothy Parker, despite her assurances to Ross, fell out of the magazine for months. In an exchange that passed instantly into New Yorker lore, when Ross ran into her one day and inquired why she hadn’t been by the office, Parker replied, “Someone was using the pencil.” The remark was hardly the exaggeration most people assume. In the first New Yorker office, space and supplies were nearly as scarce as cash. There were only a handful of typewriters, and one was kept in reserve for those contributors who did stumble in and felt disposed to bat something out. One day, after he’d become managing editor, Ingersoll arrived to find this still-smoking note, in Ross’s distinctive scrawl, on his desk: “Ingersoll, the typewriter and stand are gone again from the end room, God damn it!!!”
Such was the office environment—desperation with an overlay of loopiness—that Ingersoll encountered that hot, unpromising summer. Notes he recorded in his sporadic diary of 1925 provide a glimpse of the pressures and anxiety.
Ross still hoped to make Talk of the Town the signature of The New Yorker; indeed, throughout his entire career he would devote more personal attention to it than to any other portion of the magazine. He was distressed that under McGuinness Talk had gotten off to such a choppy start, and for days he, Ingersoll and March discussed what might be done about it. Ingersoll was anxious. He wasn’t exactly certain what Ross wanted; besides, how was he supposed to insinuate himself into Talk without alienating McGuinness? More broadly, the whole magazine had so far to go. In talking over The New Yorker with his family just after he’d started there, Ingersoll had to concur with their assessment that the magazine not only wasn’t smart but betrayed the staff’s “too-recent escape from Middle Westernness.”
Micromanagement: a Ross memo to Ingersoll, probably from 1926. (Ralph Ingersoll Collection, Boston University)
Because it was supposed to be the “newsiest” and most topical department, Talk was always one of the last pieces of the magazine to close, at week’s end, before it went to the printers. After a few weeks Ingersoll was contributing Talk items along with McGuinness; Mankiewicz did some rewriting, and Ross edited it all himself. On July 3, a Friday morning, just as everyone was looking forward to a sorely needed holiday, Ross “read Talk, went in the air and ordered the whole thing done over again.” This was bad enough, Ingersoll continued, “but then he took McGuinness and March and me ‘in conference’ and for six hours talked—not on this week’s issue but on policy—vague and anecdotally-flavored until my head went round—and still no this week’s Talk.”
That Sunday Ross and March were back in the office, “at it hammer and tongs.” Then on Monday Ingersoll noted: “This last week marked the definite failure of my attempt to swing Talk. The last of [this week’s department] went in w
ith McGuinness, Mankiewicz and Ross all in a frenzy of contribution, driven by the last. At that it was about half my stuff—but Lord what a mess. When it was over I went out to lunch alone, immensely relieved and dizzy. Why the hell they don’t fire me, I don’t know.”
Despite those occasional bouts of self-doubt, Ingersoll persisted, generating his own Talk items and working over McGuinness’s. The latter’s irritation with the situation is evident in this complaint to Ross over a clumsy change that Ingersoll had made:
Memorandum from McGuinness.
To all concerned, from the Hon. Ross down.
In re: editing.
1. In this week’s Talk of the Town, under heading Rabelaisian, in paragraph containing comment by Mr. David H. Wallace, I wrote “will be valuable as source material only,” etc.
2. I note this has been changed to read “as a source of material only, etc.”
3. I meant “will be valuable as source material,” etc.
4. “Source material” means, in the jargon of the literary profession, if such, original sources to which writers repair for material. In other words, the origins consulted (old documents, histories, etc.) are “source material.”
5. The change makes the phrase high schoolish instead of informed.
6. For the love of Mike.
McGuinness stewed over this unhappy state of affairs for weeks until one day he exploded. “Goddammit, every bit of my copy for a month has been rewritten,” he snapped. “I don’t consider Ingersoll competent to rewrite my stuff.” Rising to Ingersoll’s defense, March looked as if he might hit “his old enemy” McGuinness. The confrontation dissolved into a spate of grumbling, and that night Ross tried to patch things up by taking both Ingersoll and McGuinness to his house for drinks. After McGuinness left, however, Ross expressed his support for Ingersoll—who was to note later, “The more I see of Ross the more I like him and want to work for him.” Not long after, McGuinness absconded for the saner and more financially rewarding life of a Hollywood writer.
Genius in Disguise Page 12
