* The book was never published because Addams, after reading Gibbs’s manuscript, decided against illustrating it. “I ended up feeling that it would be detrimental to the series and that it might end it for good,” he wrote. “I think that perhaps the house should be pictured but not written about.” Upset, Gibbs asked Ross for a second opinion. Ross, who admitted that he didn’t understand the text very well, agreed with the cartoonist. “I’m convinced that getting any more definite with the Addams haunted house characters that we have gone [sic] would destroy their romance and illustration, and mystery,” he told Gibbs. “This [is] the only piece of yours I’ve ever been stuch [sic] on, that I recall.”
CHAPTER 5
“SOME VERY FUNNY PEOPLE”
Because the prime movers of The New Yorker were so creative and productive, their raw energy created a superabundance of drama and comedy. Ordinary problems became magnified and fragile egos threatened to implode.
The pattern was set during the heady 1920s when the young staff, under Ross’s relentless direction, by necessity drove itself to extremes. “We thought nothing of working from early morning until nine or ten at night, with a sandwich for lunch at our desks,” wrote the author Marcia Davenport, daughter of the opera singer Alma Gluck. “Then after dinner break the proofs would start coming in. They had to be corrected and rewritten in whole or in part after Ross got his hooks into them, so it was the rule rather than the exception to work from eleven or twelve at night until dawn. Three or four hours’ sleep and we were at it again.”
Some of the frenetic atmosphere was engendered by the haphazard arrangement of the early New Yorker offices at 25 West 45th Street. (The headquarters moved to 25 West 43rd Street in 1935.) Their disarray was compounded by Ross’s ceaseless quest for an efficient layout. Lois Long would later satirize the physical setup of the place:
There was always the little game of trying to find your desk, for instance. The offices, such as they were, were distributed all over the unrented sections of the building and the greatest delight of our editor (he still retains this lovable characteristic) was to move the desks about prankishly in the dead of night. The result was that you could easily spend an entire morning which you might have spent—God forbid—in honest labor, running up and downstairs in the elevators looking for your office.
The crap game started at four-thirty, at which time it was the particular delight of the Talk of the Town editor, the Art editor, and your correspondent to send our movie critic home to the wife and kiddies without his weekly pay check [sic]. This being accomplished with astounding regularity, everybody went out arm in arm to dinner.
Long contributed to the informal tenor by working in her slip in hot weather and frequently misplacing the key to her cubbyhole. When that happened, “she used the doorknob as a footrest and propelled herself gracefully over the partitions.” As for the crap games she referenced, they were eventually supplanted by poker games. Don Mankiewicz, briefly on the staff, remembered different-colored routing slips being used as betting chips.
Chaos reigned, too, when it came to the material itself. Robert Benchley, for instance, refused to double-space his copy. “The single-spaced stuff drove the proof and checking departments crazy because they couldn’t write between the lines, which I’m sure was his object,” said Gibbs. “And the fact that it was not only single-spaced but also crowded off to one side of the page made it almost impossible to get a word count without actually counting the words. It always came out shorter than I thought it was going to, and it was hell working out last minute fillers.”
At least Benchley could be relied on to file. Not so the erratic Dorothy Parker. “[She] would tell me on Friday that her piece was all finished,” Gibbs said, “except for the final paragraph, and stall me along that way until late Sunday evening when she’d say she just tore the whole thing up because it was so terrible.” Once he dispatched her a telegram that read, SWELL JAM I’M IN STOP COMMITTING SUICIDE IF NO COPY FROM YOU TODAY.
Gradually, as the Depression set in and The New Yorker settled down to the serious business of staying afloat, the irresponsibility and horseplay tended to diminish. But befitting a magazine of metropolitan gaiety, its corridors still rocked with nonsense, never more so than when its personnel were simply endeavoring to carry on. In a poker-faced vein, Ross once asked Fleischmann to set up a new room for the art conference, which at that time was being “held very clumsily in Mrs. White’s outer office with the juggling of a lot of tables, doors, etc.” Ross rejected the idea of holding the meeting in the reception room: “Every word spoken in the corridor outside of Gibbs’, McKelway’s and Mrs. White’s offices can be heard over the partition. The other day Mr. Winney* was telling someone I was out when I was heard talking four feet away. This is terrifying to several of us down here.”
Indeed, that reception room—the holding pen of the asylum, as it were—spawned its special brand of bedlam, as Gibbs recalled:
I saw some very funny people in the old reception room in the days when I was an editor of some kind: DeWitt Wallace whom I gave permission to print Talk in Reader’s Digest free, just because he struck me as such a pathetic hick; Maxwell Bodengiem, who came up with a bunch of poems but finally settled for a loan of fifty cents; a Mr. Zogbaum, who was Baird Leonard’s husband, and delivered her copy when she was reviewing books. It was usually just a drunken scrawl on the backs of a lot of bills and envelopes, and for quite a while I wrote Miss Leonard’s books [sic] reviews, as I did those signed by Nancy Hoyt and, once, one by Sally Benson’s sister, Agnes. In many ways, the Nyer’s [sic] debt to me is enormous.
Past the reception room was The New Yorker’s unique in-house web of intrigue—what White memorably called “a cesspool of loyalties.” He might well have added “disloyalties.” In its loves, hates, feuds, alliances, and similar dynamics, the cesspool was practically a culture unto itself.
And as was the case with editorial policy, Ross set the tone from the top down. The editor had many troubled relationships over his life, and the one he had with his publisher, Fleischmann, was as poisonous as any of them. The two were forever wrangling over expenses, equity, ownership, stock options, advertisements, promotions, and the like. More than once Ross threatened to quit. The famed New Yorker separation of church and state was as much a function of the two men’s mutual antipathy as it was Ross’s way of keeping the magazine’s content free from corrupting business influences. Ross, never particularly sensitive to the feelings of others, came to regard the gentlemanly Raoul Fleischmann as a meddling bankroller. In return, Fleischmann would regard Ross as impractically single-minded. Sometimes when the publisher would pass the editor in the corridors, he would sneer, “Pest.” And the editor would snarl, referring to the source of the family fortune, “Yeast.”
At the other extreme was the way Ross dealt with writers. He wanted to reward them as best he could, but for a long time, he couldn’t. Thurber was almost certainly exaggerating when he said, “The New Yorker did not begin paying its contributors real dough until it was nearly twenty years old.” Still, Ross acknowledged in the late 1930s that he was paying some of his top contributors “a ribbon clerk’s salary.” The lack of pay was the main reason such figures as Fitzgerald and Hemingway barely published anything in the magazine. As late as 1934, after they had more than proved their worth to Ross, White and Thurber were each receiving seventeen cents a word. Two years later Gibbs was getting half a penny less— hardly a windfall, even during the Depression.
If Ross could not make his people rich, he could at least make them feel they were needed. His letters to his favorites would be just as supportive as those of Katharine White, albeit more direct, such as WRITE SOME PIECES, DAMMIT! When not hard at work at his desk, he gregariously roamed the halls to drop by cubicles to jaw, wanting to be kept informed of progress and encouraging activity. Towering above the pack was White, the man he felt could do no wrong, the possessor of his own unique moral editorial compass. “There is only
one White,” Ross confided in him.
“Harold’s relationship with Andy was special in a way no one else’s was,” said Katharine. “Nine times out of ten when he arrived at the office and got out of the elevator on the 19th floor he would turn left, to look in on Andy if only to be sure he was there or discuss a newsbreak line or tell him a joke or kick things around, instead of turning right to his own office. It was the way he started the day. . . . Ross trusted a few of us implicitly and Andy was one in whom he had complete faith.”
By contrast, it took White a while to acquire faith in others, including his colleagues. After all, it had taken all of Ross’s and Katharine’s combined powers of persuasion to get him to join the staff. He was very much a loner. “White’s customary practice in those days,” said Thurber, “if he couldn’t place a caller’s name, was to slip moodily out of the building by way of the fire escape and hide in the coolness of Schrafft’s until the visitor went away.” The two may have shared an office at the beginning, but when Thurber first asked him to lunch, White replied curtly, “I always eat alone.” Before long, though, the two were friends, spurring each other on. “We got on fine together,” said White. Early in 1929, when White found himself despondent enough to consider quitting his job and leaving town, the mere thought of a funny Thurber drawing revived him sufficiently that he determined to stick around. But there was more to Thurber’s tonic than his art. “[O]ne of the persons I like best in the world is Thurber,” White said. “Just being around him is something.” At the end of his life, White had on his bookshelf a ceramic rendering of a comic Thurber scene.
Still, the White-Thurber axis was troublesome. “To know Thurber and have him as a friend was a pleasure, but it was also a challenge—sometimes almost a full-time job,” White told Lillian Hellman long after Thurber died. “I discovered this early on, and I’m still at it. . . . I had to give up Thurber, after a few years, the way you give up coffee or cigarettes or whiskey. He became too strong for my constitution.”
Thurber’s force of will was frequently on display when, fortified by drink, he began acting up. “With Thurber, the scene was always in the offing,” said one witness. “He’d soften you up and then spring like a rattlesnake, but without the warning. He attacked both men and women; your sex was no protection. He could pick on you in a feline, catty kind of way.” Katharine White agreed. “We Whites were in such a difficult position about him because we loved him dearly up to a certain point—the point where he began to attack all women, including me.” As Maxwell put it, he had “a talent for the unforgivable.”
Beneath Thurber’s friendship with White ran an undercurrent of jealousy and envy. He was beholden to White as a writer, a pose that White found baffling. “I’ve never known, and will never know, how much Jim was influenced by my stuff,” he confessed. “It has always seemed to me that the whole thing was exaggerated. Jim himself exaggerated it, as he exaggerated other matters and events. . . . My memory of those early days was that Jim was writing very well indeed and needed no help from me or anyone else.” Yet in his insecurity he couldn’t help measuring himself against White. The self-imagined competition was often absurd. Early on, White told Katharine, Thurber began “discussing his bowels and comparing them to mine, claiming that his are better than mine, adding that of course he is older and taller than I am.”
Gibbs, a standoffish figure in the White mold, albeit more misanthropic, did his best to avoid friendships and rivalries alike. Much of his time in the office was spent kept to himself. “He had the semi-hangdog air of someone who drank a lot,” said the “Talk” reporter Jim Munves. By contrast, the assistant art editor Frank Modell remembered Gibbs as so dapper that he reminded him of Fred Astaire. Modell vividly recalled Gibbs pacing in the hallway, apparently composing a piece in his head. “I can almost hear his leather heels clicking on the floor and see the intensity on his face. It was a very impressive act.”
Gibbs did not make for mixing. In the New Yorker corridors, Edmund Wilson recalled, he “glided past like a ghost. His eyes always seemed to be closed.” Truman Capote went so far as to call him a “sourpuss.” “I never saw him smile,” said Modell. “The few times I saw him in the hall, I could just tell from his attitude that he didn’t want to be talked to,” said Ross’s private secretary, William Walden.
But try though he might, Gibbs could not avoid entanglements. Some were salutary. He set great store, for instance, by his closeness with Benchley. Benchley was not merely, as White said, a man whose “high spirits are those of a retired reformer, who got all his good deeds behind him safely in his twenties.” At his core was considerable kindness and sensitivity; he had a knack for setting the neurotic Gibbs’s mind and soul at ease. “When you were with him,” Gibbs recalled, “in the wonderful junk shop he operated at the Royalton in ‘21,’ or in less fashionable saloons which had the simple merit of staying open all night, you had a very warm and encouraging feeling that the things you said sounded quite a lot better than they really were and, such was the miracle of his sympathy and courteous hope, they often actually were pretty good. He wanted his guests to feel that they were succeeding socially and he did the best he could to make it easy for them.”
Gibbs was also devoted to the self-confident, frequently womanizing Addams, who could draw him out of his shell. In the 1930s they would make the rounds of the local watering holes, sometimes with Thurber, riding in a car down Third Avenue with “Gilbert Seldes hanging on the running board.” Addams “was a really dependable, almost miraculously dependable, friend,” said Gibbs’s son, Tony. “If there was a crisis, Addams would suddenly appear.”
But such confidences, for Gibbs, were rare. More often he retreated from emotional contact. He tooled down Third Avenue with Thurber, but as time went by, he relished such experiences with the high-strung humorist less and less. “They were not pals,” said Katharine White. In fact, Thurber would periodically and gratuitously tell Gibbs, “You think you can be as good a writer as Andy White but you never will be.”
Rather more vexing and problematic was the Gibbs-O’Hara connection. “Don’t think I am any less misanthropic than Gibbs is,” O’Hara confessed. “It’s just that I sputter and Gibbs is beautifully articulate.” By the same token, Gibbs had high regard for O’Hara as a writer; he once compared Appointment in Samarra to The Great Gatsby. (Gibbs, in turn, personally reminded O’Hara of Fitzgerald.) “If,” Gibbs predicted early on, “he can contrive to write about the things he authentically hates—waste and hypocrisy and the sadness of potentially valuable lives failing, but not without some dignity, because they were not born quite strong enough for the circumstances they had to meet—and if he can write about them with the honesty and understanding which he possesses in as great a measure as anyone writing today, then he will certainly be one of our most important novelists.”
For his part, O’Hara characterized Gibbs as “a kindly man whose days as an employe [sic] of the Long Island Rail Road have left him intolerant of cruelty.” Gibbs, he thought, was possessed of his own brand of worldliness, one that he came to appreciate as the years went by. “The conversation was animated, brilliant, and as might be expected of two men who have known each other for twenty-six years, classified material,” O’Hara wrote following one of their many lunches in the early 1950s. “I may say, however, that following our custom, we re-examined certain human frailties, such as the nocturnal, the fiscal and so on. After one of these lunches, a kind of euphoria takes hold—at least in my case—because in all the world there are only two men who are so free of pomposity, gallant but not silly in their relations with the opposite sex, gifted writers but not competitors, figures of consequence in Upper Middle Bohemia, men of experience without being dwellers in the past.” He once sent Gibbs a case of whiskey at Christmastime, with Gibbs reportedly returning it because he could not accept so extravagant a gift. “Gibbs and John were real intimates,” said Katharine White.
Still, O’Hara could be utterly exasperating. E
gotistical and insecure, famously known as the master of the fancied slight, he was forever picking fights, especially when he had been drinking. “I have no arguments with anything said about John O’Hara as a gifted, and subsequently mistakenly overlooked American author,” said Peter Kriendler, the operator of “21,” where O’Hara enjoyed being seen. “But as a man I remember him as a pain in the ass.” Once, for reasons now unknown, O’Hara ordered a glass of brandy for the express purpose of tossing it in Gibbs’s face. When asked why he would do such a thing, he pouted, “But it was the best brandy.”
Another time, when O’Hara was “putting wrestling holds on ladies and otherwise acting churlish,” Benchley tried to put a stop to it. O’Hara responded by knocking Benchley’s cigar out of his mouth. The next morning he called to apologize.
“Look, John, please don’t apologize to me,” Benchley told him. “You’re a shit and everyone knows you’re a shit, and people ask you out in spite of it. It’s nothing to apologize about.”
“Do you mean that?” asked an astonished O’Hara.
“Of course I mean it, John. You were born a shit just as some people were born with blue eyes, but that’s no reason to go around apologizing for it. People take you for what you are.” Benchley’s bracing honesty and acceptance, spoken with the utmost gentility, reduced O’Hara to tears.
Cast of Characters Page 12
