Cast of Characters

by Thomas Vinciguerra

  For most of 1923, he had a half-page Sunday column, “Credos and Curios,” a hodgepodge of anecdotes, observations, and literary allusions. But after the column was canceled, he became so discouraged that he quit to write unpublished short stories and an equally unsuccessful musical. In 1925 he retreated to Paris and jumped ahead of some twenty-five applicants for a job at that city’s edition of the Chicago Tribune by answering the interview question “By the way, what are you—a poet, a painter, or a novelist?” with the disarming response, “I’m a newspaperman.” Thurber filed some fine dispatches about the expatriate life and managed to connect with Isadora Duncan and Rudolph Valentino. But he lived beyond his means, especially when he joined the slim Riviera edition of the Trib.

  He came back to the United States in June 1926; nearly penniless, he moved into a basement flat in Horatio Street and got a job with the New-York Evening Post. He made a bad start: just as White botched his assignment to cover Senator Knox’s funeral, so Thurber screwed up covering a fire in Brooklyn by repeatedly taking the wrong subway, elevated trains, and streetcars to get there. Finally, “I stopped off for a minute and bought a Post and the story about the fire was all over the front page.” Switched from breaking news to features, he did somewhat better, scoring memorable interviews with Thomas Edison and Harry Houdini’s widow.

  By that time he had become aware of The New Yorker. He fired off pieces to the fledgling magazine that came back so quickly that he began to think that the place “must have a rejection machine.” He managed to place two short pieces of doggerel—“Street Song” and “Villanelle of Horatio Street, Manhattan”—in the issue of February 26, 1927. But these unremarkable jottings were hardly indicative of his strengths. His wife, Althea, suspecting he was spending too much time on his efforts, urged him to spend no more than forty-five minutes composing his pieces. Thurber did so and found his voice with “An American Romance,” about a nondescript man whose entrapment in the revolving door of a department store makes him an overnight sensation, in the pole-sitting and goldfish-swallowing mode of the day. Ross hired him not long afterward, thanks in large part to his passing acquaintance with White. By an extraordinary coincidence, Thurber had met White’s sister, Lillian, on his second passage to France. She had mentioned the early, tentative success of her brother with The New Yorker, and when Thurber later came calling at Ross’s ramshackle offices, it was White for whom he inquired. “I knew Ross was looking for new talent on the small staff,” White remembered. “Thurber was looking for another job, and so I arranged for him to meet Ross.”

  The impulsive editor hired Thurber on the spot, but as an editor, not a writer, a species he regarded as “a dime a dozen.” However—at least according to Thurber—it did not take Ross long to downgrade him to a writing position, after he determined where Thurber’s interests and strengths lay. “You’ve been writing,” Ross told him. “I don’t know how in hell you found time to write. I admit I didn’t want you to. I could hit a dozen writers from here with this ash tray. They’re undependable, no system, no self-discipline.” He finally declared, “All right then, if you’re a writer, write! Maybe you’ve got something to say.”

  He did indeed. So did Gibbs and White. And under the tutelage of Ross and Katharine, both of whom shared their “visceral abhorrence of anything that suggested the reflexively modish, the cornball or the clichéd,” they came to constitute the essence of The New Yorker.

  * Gibbs hated his first name so much that he never used it. As for his middle name, he complained that it had been misspelled so often—“Woolcott,” “Walcott,” “Wooloot,” “Wollcott,” and “Wilcot” were among the variants—that he wished “the signer for whom I was named had been called Button Gwinnett.”

  CHAPTER 2

  “INFATUATION WITH PINHEADS”

  “Ross gave us all a curious sense of destination,” White recalled of the start of The New Yorker. “The magazine seemed in motion and headed toward a place worth getting to.” Thurber, by contrast, said that Ross “was by no means absolutely sure where he was going in his tremulous flying machine.” In the interests of efficiency, the eccentric editor would order, then just as peremptorily scrap, the construction of partitions and phone systems, chains of command and paper flow. He tinkered endlessly with his format and formula, striving for just the right combination of casuals, factual pieces, criticism, and art, all somehow united in their tone and attitude.

  Ross similarly tinkered with his charges. “The cast of characters in those early days,” White recalled, “was as shifty as the characters in a floating poker game. People drifted in and drifted out.” Considering the editor’s obsession with clarity, accuracy, and other cardinal tenets of journalism, he was a model of caprice and intuition when it came to assembling a staff. As the examples of Gibbs and Thurber in particular had shown, Ross’s approach was haphazard at best. “Hell, I hire anybody!” he was often heard to exclaim.

  Gibbs agreed. For a while, he said, Ross had an “absolute infatuation with pinheads.” The very first “Talk of the Town” writer/editor, an Irish-born sportswriter named James Kevin McGuinness, lasted only a few months before lighting out for Hollywood, to end up in relative obscurity except for such infrequent triumphs as co-writing Rio Grande and providing the scenario for A Night at the Opera. Ross’s first de facto managing editor, Joseph Moncure March, seems to have been brought on board more by virtue of being the son of General John Pershing’s chief of staff than for his qualifications—which in any event consisted only of having edited the New York Telephone Company’s house organ. One of March’s successors, Scudder Middleton, eventually stopped coming to the office after lunch, phoning in from the Players on Gramercy Park with such nonsensical explanations as “I won’t be back this afternoon because I have to buy my little boy a chemistry set.” His tenure ended when, in his cups at the club with Ross, he suddenly announced, “You can’t fire me”—whereupon Ross did. Ross ended up going through so many disappointing underlings that he learned to refine his dismissal succinctly: “I am firing you because you are not a genius.” Sometimes he would not go even that far. Murdock Pemberton, the magazine’s first art critic, recalled, “I got a sad letter saying that he thought writing about art was no career and good-bye. He wouldn’t explain.”*

  Such techniques may have been ruthless. But through them, Ross got the qualified stable he wanted. A number of them would remain with and define the magazine for the rest of their careers.

  There was Hobart Godfrey “Hobie” Weekes, a grammar fetishist and eventual chief of copy, known as “Comma King” for his command of punctuation. Later he would become A-issue editor, reading the entire magazine before it went to press to check for glaring inconsistencies. The wealthy son of a prominent architect, Weekes attended the Hill School (where he loaned Gibbs copies of the works of the droll Canadian humorist Stephen Leacock), Princeton, and Oxford but refused to succumb to any Social Register tendencies. Instead, he became “an incandescent liberal.” In his person he was rubicund and jolly-faced; upon meeting you in the corridors of the magazine, he would raise his eyebrows and form his mouth into a surprised O. Weekes was an anglophile and exceptionally well tailored; four years after graduating the Hill, he would design its blue-and-gray-striped tie. Naturally he was a clubman, a member of the Century and the University but especially the Coffee House. There, upon his death, it turned out that he had made arrangements for his friends to have a drink on his posthumous dime in lieu of a memorial service. He was so affected in his deportment that some suspected him of being gay. Actually, it was generally understood that he was a habitué of prostitutes.

  There was the makeup chief, Rogers E. M. Whitaker, known because of his prematurely gray hair as “Popsy” and, in “Talk” columns, as “The Old Curmudgeon.” Like Weekes, he was a grammarian. Like Weekes, he took care with his dress, wearing expensively tailored trousers that rose almost to his armpits. Unlike Weekes, he was sharp and abrasive; colleagues who felt his tongue-lash
ing called him “The Assassin.” Physically and sartorially he looked “like a cross between Winston Churchill and W. C. Fields.” His particular affectation was railroads. In his eighty-one years, he traveled more than two and a half million miles by train, writing of his journeys under the strange pseudonym “E. M. Frimbo.” So much did he hate automobiles that he called them “a rolling sneeze” and “a little slice of selfishness.” And so much did he love the iron horse that he stuffed his warrenlike New Yorker office with railroading magazines, to the point that they threatened to immure him.

  There was a “gentle, venomous, red-eyed” editor named Clifford “Kip” Orr, whose horn-rimmed glasses accentuated his owlish countenance. Educated at Dartmouth, he was almost as full of acid as was Gibbs. Assigned the task of answering readers’ letters, he would sometimes respond, “If you don’t like us, read something else.” He would creep about the corridors on crepe-soled shoes, imparting gossip into the ears of unsuspecting passersby. “One Easter, when I thought I was alone in the office,” recalled the journalist Margaret Parton, “I heard soft footsteps outside the door. In a moment, Kip’s deadpan face peered in at me. ‘Christ has risen and seen his shadow,’ he whispered. ‘We’ll have forty more days of rain.’ ” Orr, a hopeless alcoholic, himself endured only fifty-one years of life.

  There was also Frederick Packard, another Hill cohort of Gibbs’s and the head of the magazine’s storied fact-checking department for more than a quarter of a century. Hired in 1929, Packard had a bushy black mustache that somehow made him look like “a beef-eating Englishman,” and his authority matched his appearance. “Facts were sacred to him,” said a colleague, “and woe betide the writer who chose to be approximate rather than precise!” To his job Packard brought not only exactitude but a keen literary sensibility, having been a member of Philolexian, the eminent Columbia University speaking and dramatic society. He would contribute an abundance of pieces to The New Yorker, many of them concerned with the finer and more obscure points of language and letters. He reveled in nominative absurdities, larding the “Incidental Intelligence” section of “Talk” with gems like “The Penna Wine Company puts out a California Chianti bottled in New York” and “Solar pawnbrokers, at Fifty-Sixth Street and Eighth Avenue, has changed its name to 116th Street Pawnbrokers.” He loved poring over reference works, especially when he could catch them in error. “If for any reason, you look up ‘table d’hôte’ in ‘The Reader’s Encyclopedia,’ you are advised to find out about it under ‘à la carte,’ ” he cautioned, only to discover that “[t]here is no entry for ‘à la carte.’ ”

  That particular example was near his heart. Packard was a francophile whose love of the French extended to his disdain for Americans who dropped their words indiscriminately and snootily into everyday conversation. To that end he composed a mock letter describing a visit to a resort on the Bay of Biscay:

  The pavés were very étroits, and one had to keep stepping off them and risking écrasement by the autos. To sit at a terrasse was to have one’s pieds stepped on tout le temps. To go bathing was to share the surfless and shallow water with the same bébès, viellairds, and mamans, plus maîtres, nageurs, canots, pédalos, rubber rafts, balls, and small Coast Guard bateaux. It was not agréable. We finally found the nicest café in the ville, far away from la plage, and though parfait in every façon, it had almost no customer except nous autres, ma femme et moi.

  “He wasn’t funny at all—he came out funny,” said assistant art director Frank Modell. “Everybody said, ‘Whenever you see Freddie Packard, don’t use the cliché “How are you, Freddie?” because he’ll keep you there for 30 minutes.’ ” One day Modell encountered Packard vigorously scratching himself. “And, I, the non-listening person that I am, said, ‘How are you doing, Freddie?’ And he said, ‘I’ve got this terrible itch and the doctor says if I don’t stop scratching it, it’s going to get infected.’ So I said, ‘Well, you shouldn’t be scratching it now!’ ” Gesturing desperately, Packard responded, “No, it’s not here, it’s back here!” The routine, as Modell had been warned, went on for some time.

  And there was a moon-faced misanthrope named John Chapin Mosher whose many duties included being first reader of unsolicited manuscripts. This “delightful deviant” once summed up his career before joining The New Yorker thusly: “Newspaper man—cook—dishwasher—pleasure seeker—idler—zealot—martyr—victim—wage earner—addressing employees—explorer—literary man—bohemian—artist—hack writer—invalid—nervous wreck—tourist—salesman (nails my specialty).”

  Hailing from Albany, Mosher graduated from Williams College in 1914 and worked first at Every Week magazine under Bruce Barton, then briefly at Leslie’s Weekly. He had the distinction of having two of his one-act plays—Sauce for the Emperor and Bored—staged during the first New York season of the Provincetown Players in late 1916 and early 1917, sharing the bill with works by Floyd Dell and Eugene O’Neill. Enlisting in World War I (“By help of ‘pull’ became Private First Class! Summary court martial—but considered generally inoffensive and good tempered”), he served in the shell shock ward of a U.S. hospital in Portsmouth, England. When the conflict was over, he had what he called “some years of general confusion” and became part of Hemingway’s Lost Generation, ending up in Paris in 1922. There he fell in with Virgil Thomson, who found him so fascinating that the composer painted his musical portrait in a series of namesake waltzes.

  Mosher returned stateside in 1923 to teach English for two years at Northwestern University and joined The New Yorker a year after it was founded. Thurber regarded him as “an editor whose prejudices were a mile high and who had only a few enthusiasms.” One of those enthusiasms was turning down other people’s work. Often he would declare, following lunch, “I must get back to the office and reject.” In the space of a morning, “working in complete silence save for an occasional ejaculation of disgust when he found himself reading an exceptionally bad manuscript,” he could get through as many as one hundred submissions.

  When not busy breaking would-be contributors’ hearts, he had by 1928 become the magazine’s first regular film critic. His aesthetic tastes were so refined, and his demand for excellence so exacting, that he once prompted Howard Dietz, the head of MGM publicity, to explode, “Jesus, what a review. Do your technical considerations always outweigh the emotional impact of a film? . . . [T]he office vote was overwhelmingly against your sanity. It was something you ate no doubt.” The producer Walter Wanger called Mosher “that God damned old woman” for reasons that probably had as much to do with Mosher’s personal life as with his critical eye. Mosher was unreservedly gay (improbably, a 1940 collection of his pieces was titled Celibate at Twilight), and even in a creative environment that usually shrugged off such predilections, his behavior made some people uncomfortable. At one point Katharine White told him that she and Ross would much prefer if he could somehow be less obvious. The tip-off, Gibbs said, was a Mosher review of Mädchen in Uniform, “in which he explained that it was high time Americans realized that there was more than one kind of sexual love. This piece was blown up to about eight feet by three and displayed in front of the theatre and it caused Ross acute embarrassment.”

  In nominal control of these and other fabled oddballs was Ross, perhaps the biggest oddball of them all. Among the most arresting portraits captured of him was this, by one of his innumerable office boys, Dan Pinck:

  Mr. Ross usually showed up in the office around eleven. Often he would call just before he left his apartment on Park Avenue, and I would go across the street to a drug-store and purchase a half-pint of cream [for Ross’s ulcers] and a five-cent package of cheese crackers. I would time my entrance with the food to coincide with his arrival. As soon as he took off his battered old hat and hung up his battered old coat, he would sit down at his desk and open his briefcase. Then I would pour his cream into a glass. “I wish I were running a newspaper,” he would moan, gruffly rhetorical. “Out West.” Then he would drink the crea
m and make a face of utter disgust. “Goddam.” I would take a look at his pencils. “Why did I ever start this magazine?” I would open the cheese crackers and put them on a plate on his desk. “At least somebody does something around here. Son, you sharpen pencils good.” He was all set.

  As is often the case in large organizations, it was a small cog that kept day-to-day operations running. At The New Yorker, this indispensable person was office manager Daise E. Terry, a native Kansan who had left her home state in 1918 to join the International Red Cross, serving as a stenographer in Italy after World War I. Though no more than five feet tall, she conveyed authority with her “piercing blue eyes” and determined demeanor. Her standard incantation to new typists was, “We want ladylike clothing and ladylike behavior at all times.” To this “short, fierce, dignified woman who always wore a hat” fell myriad minor but essential tasks, everything from ordering supplies to adjusting the temperature in individual cubicles.

  “Her job was to hire and subsequently tyrannize the half-dozen young women who constituted the typing pool,” remembered the cartoonist James Stevenson. “Inevitably, the pressure would become too great—a legal document would be misspelled—and the typist would fly from the room in tears.”

  In retrospect Terry comes across as a frustrated spinster with a soft side. “She was not popular among the secretaries because she was a hard taskmaster and did not approve of romance or marriage, and was very upset when they went out with editors for lunch or anything of the sort,” said Katharine White. “I remember a girl coming in once to me just after she had been hired. She was in tears, and asked me ‘What shall I do? Miss Terry has just called me “a silly ass.”’ I consoled the girl and assured her that Miss Terry’s bark was worse than her bite—and it sure was.”