Cast of Characters

by Thomas Vinciguerra

  After three years at the Mail, McKelway returned to New York and the Herald Tribune. He wrote a number of crime stories, including one about the murder of Joseph “Spot” Leahey, a “valued gorilla” who was reportedly on Dutch Schultz’s payroll.

  At the Broadway Towers, where Leahey was registered as James S. Boyer, he had managed to keep his rowdy manner under subjection. He used his $50 a month room only for sleeping, according to attendants, and always came in alone.

  In his room detectives found only his wardrobe, consisting of several expensive suits, many white shirts and a few blue ones, all with collars attached, and other clothing.

  Leahey’s appearance was peculiarly suited to such a dual role. His countenance, puffy and fairly pink, was bland; he could maintain an immobility of expression even while enacting feats of cruelty. Speakeasy bartenders, who considered him one of the messiest men who ever stood at a bar, will never forget the terrifying[,] quiet way in which he would say “Oh, yeah?”—drawing out the syllables while he reached for a bottle and broke off the neck to a rhythmical motion that would end as the jagged edge was ground into the face of some luckless bar-fly who had insulted him.

  Such prose made him a natural for Ross’s shop, and after six months at the Herald Tribune, he transitioned to The New Yorker easily. “In a very short time,” he said, “I felt at home.” By this time as well, The New Yorker itself was wholly established. Its personnel no longer resembled White’s “floating poker game” but were, rather, a fully functioning team.

  * Pemberton said he later found out that Ross had fired him because he had published an unenthusiastic review of a gallery show by the wife of the magazine’s informal art director, Rea Irvin. The reason was more likely Pemberton’s own incompetence. Katharine White reported that he delivered “the worst copy we get so far as accuracy and diction go. His facts are unreliable, nearly all names are misspelled, and a good many dates are wrong. He appears quite unable to be accurate. He writes very ambiguously.” Gibbs also had low regard for Pemberton: “[H]e used to write the messiest copy we ever got. He used to blame all the mistakes, including the factual ones, on the fact that he used an electric typewriter, which sort of got going on its own.”

  CHAPTER 3

  “BOY, DO I LIKE TO HANDLE AUTHORS!”

  A high school student named Merritt Nelson once wrote to The New Yorker to ask, apropos of a homework assignment, “What is the purpose of your magazine?” He received a curt response: “We haven’t any purpose.”

  This, of course, was nonsense, as Ross’s original editorial manifesto had made abundantly clear. In fact, The New Yorker’s identity would become so well established that one of its periodic statements of editorial policy and purpose offered the following all-encompassing definition of self:

  In the minds of Harold Ross and his associates back in 1924, there existed a clear comprehension of one very basic fact. They recognized that a civilization had grown up in and around New York and other large cities which differed from that of a mass of the people.

  They recognized that there was a group of intelligent, discriminating, unprejudiced, cultured people whose outlook on life was broader and more tolerant, whose minds had greater understanding, whose desires and interests were more varied, and whose standard of living was much higher than that of other people. This group was limited in number but it was steadily increasing in size and importance. No magazine had ever before been edited solely for such people.

  It was believed that these people possessed an inner craving for finer things: that they were not content with the commonplace, the stereotyped, tinted reporting, comic strip humor, the Boy Meets Girl story, and the like: that they had matured in broad-mindedness and discernment to the point where they would not be offended by, but would enjoy a publication which sometimes satirized and ridiculed the foibles, the superstitions, and the stuffiness of our times.

  As John Crosby, television critic of the New York Herald Tribune observed upon the death of Ross, “An awful lot of malarkey disappeared from journalism in the twenty-five year history of The New Yorker.”

  It was clear pretty much from the start that it was E. B. White who most singularly achieved this effect, with his offhand, slightly superior approach in “Comment.” His paragraphs might occasionally be frivolous. More often they would bring a smile and an understanding nod of recognition. “I can’t remember a piece by anyone but E. B. White that Ross ever really thought just right,” said Ingersoll. “White was the exception to prove his lack of faith in everyone else.” As Thurber put it, he offered “silver and crystal sentences which have a ring—like the ring of nobody else’s sentences in the world.” No matter how serious the subject, White could be relied on to bring it down to earth, as he did in this entry from the first days of the New Deal:

  We notice that the minute government entered into partnership with business, President Roosevelt put right to sea. As yet we haven’t discovered just what the government’s part will be in the business of getting out this magazine, but we hope for great things. We hope for more than a merely regulatory function: we want sympathetic advice and actual assistance. Let’s get this partnership idea started off on the right foot—we could use an article right now (about 1,500 words) by Mr. Roosevelt himself called “Rolling Down to Campobello,” or “Amberjack and No Work Makes What?,” or “Amberjackstraws in the Wind,” or “Two Weeks before the Mast.” And next month, when we will be cruising down in Maine ourself, we would appreciate it if Washington would assign one of its undersecretaries to write our stuff for a couple of weeks. That would be our idea of government working with industry.

  While White was dominating “Comment,” Thurber was focusing on its counterpart, “Talk,” not only writing original pieces but also running the work of many others through his typewriter to achieve an all-important consistency of tone. (This prompted White’s quip that most “Talk” pieces represented the labor of two contributors, the reporter and the rewrite man, “each as guilty as the other.”) Thurber was a natural at rewrite, said Gibbs, “since his mind worked on a queer secondary level, and while the facts were usually there, they had a way of suggesting something a little dramatic and deranged or supernatural about his subjects.”

  “I’m sure that Andy White would agree that it was Thurber, more than anyone else, who reached out, captured, and molded into reality Ross’s inchoate dream of what Talk should be,” said the art critic and short-story writer Robert M. Coates. “It wasn’t an easy task, I realize now. A good, crisp writing style, mingling the essayistic deceptively with the reportorial, was required, first of all. Jim had that.”

  From the start, Thurber made an even greater impression with his casuals and short stories. Pieces like “If Grant Had Been Drinking at Appomattox” reflected his ability to plausibly spin out wildly absurd scenarios. But inspired by authors ranging from Henry James to Lewis Carroll, he also brought an unexpected literary and psychological depth to much of what he wrote. A good example was “A Box to Hide In,” from 1931. On the surface, it was little more than a yarn about a beleaguered man’s quest for the object of the title. But the neurotic subtext (“ ‘It’s a form of escape,’ I told him, ‘hiding in a box. It circumscribes your worries and the range of your anguish. You don’t see people, either’ ”) was such that it made an immediate impression. According to Joel Sayre, the piece “brought mail in from dozens of psychiatrists who offered to feel Thurber’s noggin free of charge. He turned them all down.”

  As for Gibbs, he initially punctured “the foibles, the superstitions, and the stuffiness” of those days by pouring forth an abundance of casuals, many of them drawn and exaggerated from his own life. “Mars” was about his brief time in the Student Army Training Corps at the Hill School, laden with memories of his commanding officer (“a small red man, brisk as a fox terrier, with a loud voice and a simple vision of paradise as a boundless parade ground with all the cherubim in step”) and hand-grenade practice (“I can’t forget my horr
or, after I had pulled the pin, standing there with that deadly [and possibly defective] mechanism, waiting for the premature crash which would be my last memory this side of the grave”). He made light of his fiendish cigarette consumption in “Wit’s End,” wherein his character awakes in his hotel room to find himself surrounded by smoke and flames. While making numerous, unsuccessful attempts to complain to the management via telephone, he catches a chill—the first hint of the pneumonia that will ultimately kill him.

  The merit of these and myriad other kinds of pieces (Profiles, “Reporter at Large” articles, “Letters” from around the country and the world, serious short stories, criticism of all sorts) by a welter of contributors (S. J. Perelman, Janet Flanner, John Cheever, Lewis Mumford, Rebecca West, and Joseph Mitchell, to name a few) was not achieved by accident. It was the result of endless consideration and reconsideration by authors and editors alike. The Saturday Review critic John Mason Brown, a good friend of Gibbs’s, commented that the magazine’s “touch is so light that you are not aware of how much thought, effort and real brain sweat has gone into the sentence that comes out.” As it developed, that effort was not just a matter of producing a superior periodical. It turned out to be an essential factor in forming lasting friendships, occasional romances, and not infrequent enmities.

  The “brain sweat” of which Brown spoke started at the top, with Ross. His oversight was total. “Ross is usually in a towering rage before passing the third paragraph,” Harper’s noted. “He pencils such outbursts as ‘What mean?’ and ‘Oh, my God’ furiously in the margins, and upon coming across a piece of slang with which he is not familiar he is likely to accuse the writer of making it up. If a piece of pertinent information, such as the subject’s birth date, is omitted, his indignation is boundless.” Ross’s “query sheets,” wherein he attacked imprecision, missing facts, or what he regarded as just plain nonsense, became infamous for their length and irascibility alike.

  Ross was by no means infallible. He had blind spots and hang-ups. When one writer proposed a series about reptiles, Katharine White cautioned that her boss had “a prejudice against writing about snakes. He thinks that so many people find snakes entirely repulsive that it is dubious to write about them. If anyone mentions snakes to him he always says ‘Talking about snakes gives women miscarriages!’ ” But more often than not, Ross’s editorial calls were on target. Moreover, his example was inspiring. As time went on, his staff became as critical as he was, eyeing manuscripts as if they were guilty before being presumed innocent.

  The fiercest reader of all was Mosher. His letters to aspiring authors were peppered with terse comments like “Not these,” “This just isn’t for us,” “Slight,” “Not this time,” “I’m afraid this won’t do,” and so forth. His disdain for much of what crossed his desk was immortalized in an in-house mock rejection slip:

  Sorry, this isn’t quite right for us,

  We find that it’s rather slight for us,

  A shade—just a shade—too light for us,

  And, of course, just a trifle thin,

  Although you sound like a jerk to us,

  And reading your stuff is an irk to us,

  Please send more of your work to us,

  We like to have oodles come in

  “One of the most dangerous things in our dangerous history was the selection of the great and wonderful John Mosher as first reader,” Thurber told White. “God knows what gems of purest ray serene we lost because of his unique and forever evident taste.” His ruthless efficiency had its drawbacks; Katharine White recalled that Sally Benson, author of the stories that later became Meet Me in St. Louis, had to be enlisted to second-guess his discards, “just to catch any love stories etc.” that he had too readily dismissed.

  Gibbs was no slouch in the rejection department himself. After serving briefly as a copyreader, he was installed as Katharine White’s right-hand man, a position in which a flood of submissions flowed through his hands. Many were subpar at best, and he made no bones about saying so. He once offered this critique of a Profile of Janet Lord Roper, the Seaman Church Institute’s house mother, by Djuna Barnes. Barnes had a solid reputation in bohemian literary circles but to Gibbs, she came across as a “lunatic”:

  I have never seen so many facts so insanely assembled, I guess. (I have always thought Miss Barnes was cracked, though Mosher loves her.) Anyway, I don’t see how on earth you’re going to bring anything out of all this confusion. It would have to be completely rearranged—the series of flash-backs [sic] in the first half is enough to drive you crazy—the romantic and literary note would have to be removed; almost every sentence fixed for clarity or just foolishness. Principally I doubt whether there is a story under all this hysteria.

  “Bad writing was an affront to him,” recalled Gardner Botsford, “and he could be cruel, almost vindictive, in his reaction to it.” Gibbs even corrected his son’s letters sent home from prep school. But he was as hard on himself as on any of his writers. He would revise his own pieces several times in an Eagle number-one pencil until they were nearly indecipherable.

  Assuming that an author could get a manuscript past the front door, the hard work had just begun. “An average Profile-writer gets from twenty to thirty editors’ queries,” remembered Margaret Case Harriman, the daughter of Frank Case, the owner of the Algonquin and herself a quite skilled practitioner of the form. “Practically perfect writers like Wolcott Gibbs and St. Clair McKelway seldom get more than five or six.” Harriman recalled with considerable humiliation that a twelve-page Profile she submitted was returned “with six pages of editors’ queries—sixty-one queries in all, meaning that the editors had found it obscure or intolerable about every forty-nine words. This was before the checkers had even had wind of it.” Similarly, when Geoffrey T. Hellman got back his first proofs on a three-part series about the Metropolitan Museum, there were 147 numbered queries, and even Hellman didn’t think that was a record.

  Gibbs was probably second only to Ross in his ability to massage a piece to its fullest realization. His 1935 query sheet regarding a Profile of an investigator for the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers reads uncannily like any of Ross’s many no-nonsense, even crabby, written demands for clarity and basic information:

  Good enough subject, but a pretty dispirited treatment generally. Routine approach, flat anecdotes, and I’m still curious legitimately about a lot of details that he doesn’t explain. They’re covered in my notes. Also another piece that I take to be a composite, and Malloy a made-up name, but I don’t know and that bothers me too. I think on the whole subject would get by, if author could be persuaded to go over it meekly with somebody, and then if it were edited pretty severely here.

  1. Well, what are the terms? What do these places pay on an average? Does it mean you get the right to play all music controlled by ASPAC [sic] or do the contracts vary? He must fill this out.

  2. Where is up here? The indirect approach. He tells later, but it stops you here.

  3. Also something about the mechanism of this somewhere.

  4. To be divided among how many? And how divided? Berlin for instance get [sic] same as author of one song? How is all this figured out? All part of the story, I think.

  5. Thought he worked out of town. And not so damn memorable. Typical example of how his anecdotes let you down.

  6. The high whine of a reporter at large.

  7. In what percentage of cases do they sue? How many suits on an average? How many places subject to ASPAC [sic]. Vaguest piece I’ve read in years.

  8. Can they collect at both ends of the radio? Also how manufacturer of a victrola or pano [sic] liable for what’s played on it? Manufacturers of records and rolls perhaps, I don’t know/ [sic]

  9. But it seems he didn’t find Washington Hollow. See below.

  10. It has not been a matter of volition in my life.

  11. Sounds like a demotion.

  12. Gets Ny in what capacity. Might also go int
o the organization of this thing, too. Needs half again as many facts before we’re going to get anywhere, I think.

  If a piece was particularly long and convoluted, Gibbs would book a hotel suite, lay out the article page by page on the floor, cut it into paragraphs with a scissors, rearrange them, write transitions, and then line-edit the result from beginning to end. A single word, not quite properly used, would raise eyebrows. “Being slow in paying debts doesn’t really imply dishonesty, does it?” Gibbs wrote to one contributor. “In this case more like poverty, I think.” Among Harriman’s most tortuous experiences was a Profile of Helen Hayes; she made the mistake of offhandedly describing the actress as “not beautiful in the classic sense.” Ross, who admired Hayes as much as Harriman did, roared, “Helen Hayes is a beautiful woman, and any reporter who says she isn’t is a goddam bad reporter.” It took a solid week and three separate conferences with three separate editors—McKelway, Gibbs, and Sanderson Vanderbilt—“before Ross and I could be brought to a meeting of minds about Miss Hayes’s looks,” Harriman said. As printed, the compromise locution was, “She is not strikingly beautiful.”

  Such fights were waged over matters of opinion. Altogether different was the exhaustive process of fighting to confirm certain facts. An ex-newspaperman, Ross was consumed with their veracity. Reportedly, he was inspired to create the magazine’s fact-checking department after a 1927 Profile of Edna St. Vincent Millay appeared that was so filled with errors—for example, that her father was not in fact a stevedore—that he was forced to run a two-column letter from the poet’s mother in a subsequent issue. This mortification apparently registered so profoundly with Ross that all manuscripts eventually went through the verification process—with Freddie Packard in sure command and a battery of checkers under him.