Accounts of the quips and antics of the Algonquin crowd long ago passed into threadbare legend. Their actual contributions to The New Yorker varied in quality and quantity. But their brand of humor proved crucial in giving Ross an example to emulate. And several of them lent their names to an “advisory board” of editors that ran prominently as a masthead of sorts in the front of the new magazine, giving it some badly needed credibility. One was the Barnard College graduate Alice Duer Miller. Best remembered today for The White Cliffs, her best-selling wartime love letter to England, Miller was known not only for her books and magazine pieces for The Saturday Evening Post but for her determined feminism. A series of satirical poems that she published in the New York Tribune was collected in 1916 under the title Are Women People?, a rallying cry for the suffrage movement. With the passage in 1920 of the Nineteenth Amendment, granting women the right to vote, Miller was in her prime. So Ross agreed to consider her request for an editorial position for her cousin, a young and diffident newspaperman named Oliver Wolcott Gibbs.
Gibbs’s extended family was, he admitted, a model of “undeniable respectability, as represented by some three hundred years of comparative solvency, freedom from jail, and legitimacy of descent from one generation to the next.” But the clan held no hint of a literary future for him. What it did possess was an undercurrent of diminished fortunes and even tragedy.
He was descended from three remarkable branches. His great-great-great-grandfather, Oliver Wolcott, from whom he inherited his first and middle names, signed the Declaration of Independence and was governor of Connecticut.* Wolcott’s son, Oliver Wolcott, Jr.—also a Connecticut governor—served as John Adams’s secretary of the treasury and became wealthy by speculating on the early republic’s fledgling currency. Gibbs blood entered this political dynasty when George Gibbs III, a powerful shipping magnate, married Oliver Jr.’s daughter Laura. Among their seven children was Francis Sarason Gibbs, whose failed grain exporting business heralded a long family decline. “The Gibbses were always boys for thin chances,” observed their most literary-minded scion. “Grandfather Gibbs bought something like 1,000 acres of land out in New Jersey. He was wrong. They are kind of under water.”
Gibbs’s mother, Angelica Singleton Duer, was born in 1878 to a family that had been leaders of New York State since before the Revolution; her maternal grandfather was none other than Martin Van Buren. In 1901 she married Francis’s son, a Cornell-educated mechanical and electrical engineer named Lucius Tuckerman Gibbs. At various times Lucius worked for Otis Elevators, American Rheostat, and several mass-transit systems; he also patented heating systems, motors, and running gears. His son, Oliver Wolcott, arrived in 1902, on the Ides of March. Gibbs was born in Manhattan at a time when his father Lucius was moving all over the Northeast.
“I spent considerable segments of my childhood in the states of New York, Vermont, Maine, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Wisconsin, New Jersey, Connecticut, Rhode Island, and Massachusetts, not necessarily in that order,” he said. “The reason for all this gadding about was that my father was an inventor, always under the impression that the climate for invention would be a little more favorable in another town.”
Lucius’s passion was attempting to perfect the electric automobile; at one point he formed a namesake company to manufacture their motors. But amid increasing signs that gasoline, not electricity, would power the horseless carriage, the firm was petitioned into involuntary bankruptcy in 1904. Not long afterward Lucius packed up with Angelica and young Wolcott to take a position with the B&O Railroad in Baltimore. It was there that Gibbs’s sister, Angelica, was born in 1908. And it was there that Lucius died of lobar pneumonia on January 22, 1909, at the age of thirty-nine.
A second devastating blow developed: Angelica the mother was an alcoholic. The family whispered that she “went bad,” entertaining gentleman callers and otherwise acting in a way unbecoming a widow. And so her brother John and his wife, Aline, took the slender, blond Wolcott and his sister into their home in Altoona, Pennsylvania, a city so heavy with industry that young Angelica would always remember the curtains being filthy from the smoke. Gibbs was so scarred by his dislocation that he was rarely able to bring himself to talk about those painful days. When he attended the opening of Eugene O’Neill’s wrenching marathon drama Long Day’s Journey into Night, he twisted in his aisle seat and tried to face the back of the auditorium. He left abruptly during the second of the play’s four acts, curtly explaining later that O’Neill’s merciless examination of a family destroyed by a mother’s drug addiction and madness had “cut too close.”
The alienation that marked Gibbs’s childhood increased when, after attending New York City’s Horace Mann School and Riverdale Country Day School, he was shunted off to the Hill School in Pottstown, Pennsylvania. The idea was that he would become an engineer like Lucius and his uncle George Gibbs V, a planner and builder of major portions of Grand Central Terminal, Pennsylvania Station, and the New York City subway system. But a regimen of plane and solid geometry, trigonometry, and other loathsome forms of mathematics tormented him. His teachers found him “not industrious” and “erratic” and criticized his “tendency to dream.”
His grades ranged from good to dismal; with perverse pride, Gibbs claimed he once got 17½ out of a possible 100 on a geography test because he had mistakenly studied a text on geology. “It proved substantially impossible to teach me anything whatever,” he admitted. “As nearly as I can put it, I held strong and wayward opinions on practically every subject in the world, and when I found that they seldom coincided with those forced upon me by my instructors, I simply stopped listening.”
He responded with pranks and was eventually caught. “His particular activities,” read his 1919 expulsion letter, “consisted of smoking in Alumni Chapel, smoking in a near by [sic] cemetery, where very unworthy behavior was indulged in by his friends and himself, and his complicity in the persecution of younger and less quick-witted boys in his Form.” Still, George Gibbs refused to give up on his nephew and in 1920 enrolled him in the Roxbury School (today the Cheshire Academy) in Connecticut. It was, Gibbs said sourly, “beyond question the most efficient of the New England tutoring schools, the ultimate hothouse for forcing talents elsewhere abandoned as dead on the vine.” But Gibbs didn’t ripen. “I got fed up,” he admitted, “and didn’t pass those college board [sic] exams.”
At the age of eighteen, Gibbs had few prospects. He plugged away at a series of dead-end positions including timekeeper, chauffeur to an eighty-seven-year-old actor, and draftsman “morosely designing plumbing fixtures for the rich.” Realizing his aimlessness, his family put him to work on the bottom rung of the Long Island Rail Road, a division of the Pennsylvania (“Pennsy”), to which Uncle George and other relatives had ties.
Based at the Bay Ridge Interchange Yard in southern Brooklyn, Gibbs helped route freight carried on huge barges called car floats across the Upper Bay of New York Harbor, to and from the Pennsy complex at Greenville in southern Jersey City. With the title of brakeman, he worked with the engineers and train crews in coordinating the movement of the rolling stock. By night, they did so with the semaphorelike patterns of swinging lanterns. By day, they used hand signals to cover every possible movement and instruction. Gibbs might indicate “pull” by holding his arms straight out in front of his body. Two taps of his fingertips on each shoulder specified track four. To get someone to drop a load, Gibbs would pat the top of his head twice. So elaborate was all the maneuvering that the brakemen would sometimes put their whole bodies into it, practically jigging in place. Onlookers in adjacent Owl’s Head Park would watch these mysterious dances in fascination, occasionally applauding the performers as they went through their motions. Workers from other LIRR yards called Bay Ridge “The Nuthouse.”
It was repetitive, dirty work with periodic diversions—like the time a dead cow was found in a boxcar and the crew, unable to get anyone to take responsibility, disposed of it in the harbor. On a
nother occasion, Gibbs was sent to demolish an unused siding, a low-speed section of a main line used for loading and unloading, the storage of rolling stock, and similar nontransportation purposes. It adjoined the property of a local millionaire who kept a pond well stocked with trout. The road gang decided they were in a mood for fresh fish, so they lit a couple of blasting caps, tossed them in, and brought up their lunch. But all together, after four years on the job, Gibbs came to regard the LIRR as “a pretty comic kind of railroad” and the time he spent on it as “utterly wasted.”
Alice Duer Miller agreed. “It seemed to her,” Gibbs said, “that a member of our family, which is unquestionably one of the most extensive on the Eastern Seaboard, should certainly be more respectably employed than pushing freightcars around.” So on “one black afternoon” in 1925, she asked him, “How would you like to be a writer?”
“Not particularly,” he replied. After all, he was making a perfectly adequate seventy dollars a week. And except for a few short stories and poems in the Hill literary magazine, he had never published anything in his life. Gibbs thought that “writing was a ludicrous pastime, when I had either the time or energy to think about anything.” But Miller insisted and set him up with their wealthy cousin by marriage, Lloyd Carpenter Griscom. A former diplomat, Griscom had bought a couple of Long Island newspapers (why would “always be a secret between himself and his God”) and made Gibbs associate editor of one of them, the East Norwich Enterprise. “I had simply become a writer,” Gibbs realized, “very much against my saner judgment.”
The Enterprise was a dull, staid weekly that covered the 29,600 dull, staid inhabitants of the villages that made up the town of Oyster Bay on Long Island’s North Shore. It was “dedicated to the social activities of the community, which were repetitious, and the interests of the Republican party, which were corrupt beyond belief,” said its new associate editor. But Gibbs did well enough in reporting on the usual suburban mélange of minor politics, zoning meetings, accidents, social events, and break-ins that after a year or so, Griscom made him coeditor of the North Hempstead Record, responsible for Great Neck and Manhasset. Here he had greater power to print what he wanted, expressing his growing confidence in editorials that were often set off by pointed headlines like “If This Be Bias—” and “Oh, Nonsense!” Gibbs also introduced a new editorial-page feature that was literally entitled “Anybody Can Write a Column.” Though it was ostensibly open to any and all readers, it usually fell to Gibbs to fill the space himself. After a bout of appendicitis, he penned this observation:
A LITTLE MURDER NOW AND THEN
A week in bed and we have come to fancy ourselves as something of a connoisseur of detective stories. It is our perverse habit always to identify ourselves with the murderer and in a week we have done away with quite an imposing array of wealthy old ladies, retired majors and beautiful heiresses. There are of course one or two crimes that stand out pleasantly in our memory. There was the time we removed grandfather from any further participation in this troubled adventure by the rather unique device of spreading his razor with anthrax germs. Grandfather had been something of a gay dog, it appeared, and his hand was notoriously unsteady. And, of course, the time we disposed of our invalid wife by cleverly inserting a silenced .44 in our daughter’s camera and blandly snapping her into eternity. We utilized, we believe, practically everything except government alcohol.
Of course, we always get caught due to an unfortunate habit of leaving our fingerprints on things. Just the same it was lots of fun while it lasted.
The “we” locution of this and other columns that Gibbs wrote for the Record may well have been inspired by the collective voice of “Talk of the Town.” At the very least, he became aware of Ross some months hence when he conducted an interview with him (sans byline), undoubtedly at Miller’s behest. Describing his subject as “one of America’s distinguished literary lights,” he affected a tongue-in-cheek attitude:
And what excitement did you have as editor of the Stars and Stripes during the war?
He began with a merry twinkle in his eye which goes far to explain why these magazines have been so successful as witty warriors of human existence:
“In the Battle of Soissons, Alexander Wolcott [sic], now the play critic of the world, and I were forced to sleep in the back seat of an old Ford while the battle raged. Owing to the amount of space occupied by Mr. Wolcott, I was obliged to hang my legs over the side of the car. In the early dawn I was awakened by the sound of a clicking typewriter, (which seemed strange amid the roar of guns) and looking up I saw an officer’s automobile drawn up alongside our bus.
“An officer, evidently of high rank, was busily engaged in writing on a little Corona typewriter which rested on his knees. I immediately jumped up and saluted violently. He finally acknowledged my salute with a nod, and from an officer nearby I learned that this was the famous General Harbored, commander of the Second Division, writing his daily letter to his wife.”
Five days later, in Griscom’s newest newspaper, the Nassau Daily Star, Gibbs ran a front-page account of a huge Ku Klux Klan rally, complete with a hundred-foot-high burning cross, in the South Shore town of Freeport. Gibbs made sure to mention that a process server was present to confront Imperial Wizard Hiram Wesley Evans, who failed to show. It was around this time that Ross agreed to Miller’s suggestion that he be given a position. According to Gibbs, she “told Ross he better hire me if he wanted to get to any more parties at her house. So he did.”
The job interview was unconventional, to say the least. Following their desultory conversation, Ross agreed to take Gibbs on, “to superimpose grammar as far as possible on genius.” Then as they were finishing up, Ross told him, “I don’t give a damn what else you do, but for God’s sake don’t fuck the contributors.”
Gibbs’s arrival at The New Yorker completed the first major phase of Ross’s largely gut-driven search for talent and ensured that the magazine would survive. It had been a near thing. The New Yorker, White said much later, was “lousy the first year or two,” filled with uninspired, warmed-over humor and offering little to differentiate it from the competition that Ross had set out to best. Even toward the end of his life, Ross would cringe at his early, awkward efforts. “You don’t want to read that stuff,” he told an assistant, Dan Pinck, when he found him browsing through the issues of 1925. “That stuff gives me the shakes whenever I even think about it.” Fleischmann was so unhappy with the magazine’s lack of subscriptions and overwhelmingly indifferent reception that he came within a hair’s breadth of pulling out.
By most accounts, matters began to turn around nine months after the magazine first hit the stands, with the publication in the November 28 issue of “Why We Go to Cabarets: A Post-Debutante Explains.” The piece (and its sequel, published two weeks later) was no masterpiece; it was a flip, sassy repudiation of boring debutante balls and their pimply, stiff Social Register escorts, in favor of the forbidden pleasures of speakeasies and night spots. What really brought the article, and The New Yorker, to public attention was its author: Ellin Mackay, the daughter of the socially prominent multimillionaire Clarence Mackay (as well as the niece of Alice Duer Miller). In an unforgivable repudiation of her father’s station, she had been seen publicly succumbing to the charms of Irving Berlin, whose songwriting fame could not disguise his Jewish origins as Israel Beilin from tsarist Russia. For Mackay to not only be linked to Berlin, but to proclaim her rejection of her background in the pages of an upstart magazine, proved to be delicious front-page fodder.
In the wake of this cause célèbre, it didn’t take long for Ross to acquire a mass of warm bodies who could provide the magazine with its necessary supply of weekly material. Morris Markey, a graceful writer late of the Daily News and the World, established the “Reporter at Large” genre, publishing in rapid succession a series of deft pieces about such quintessentially New York subjects as Earl Carroll’s bathtub scandal, Tammany Hall politics, and the Tombs. A striking Vass
ar graduate named Lois Long wrote two columns that captured the smart but not smart-alecky tone that Ross envisioned. “On and Off the Avenue” constituted the first serious fashion criticism in the magazine industry, while “Tables for Two,” cheekily signed “Lipstick,” was a flapper’s-eye take on the myriad speakeasies and nightclubs that defined Prohibition-era Manhattan. Robert Benchley’s nonsense stories and Dorothy Parker’s savage book reviews and toxic poetry helped attract an audience. So did Alexander Woollcott’s “Shouts and Murmurs” page of racy gossip and anecdotage.
Still, something was missing. What Ross wanted most fundamentally to pull The New Yorker together was an all-encompassing voice that would be informed yet curious, searching yet self-assured, tapping into the heart of the metropolis and, as need be, the wider world. He found that voice with Elwyn Brooks White, his “great path-finder.”
White’s father, Samuel, was a sometime songwriter and the eventual president of Horace Waters & Co., a Harlem-based piano factory. His mother, Jessie, was concerned mainly with the rearing of her six children in the comfortable Westchester suburb of Mount Vernon. It was there that Elwyn, the youngest, was born on July 11, 1899. “If an unhappy childhood is indispensable for a writer, I am ill-equipped,” he wrote. “I missed out on all that and was neither deprived nor unloved.” Still, he confessed to “the normal fears and worries of every child”—schoolwork, dark corners, and so on. As the baby of a large family, too, “I was usually in a crowd but often felt lonely and removed.” Therefore, “I took to writing early, to assuage my uneasiness and collect my thoughts, and I was a busy writer long before I went into long pants.” At the age of eight, young Elwyn began keeping a journal. By the time he was fourteen, he had won one literary prize from the Woman’s Home Companion and two from St. Nicholas magazine. At Mount Vernon High School he was editor of the literary magazine The Oracle.
Cast of Characters Page 3
