Cast of Characters

by Thomas Vinciguerra

  “I know him better than anybody,” Gibbs told Katharine White, “but that’s handicap more than anything else, I’m afraid.”

  Gibbs and O’Hara could be afforded their complicated mixture of admiration and animosity because they were genuine intimates. A different instance altogether was the tragic case of Russell Maloney. Gibbs barely knew him, and yet he ended up as Maloney’s sworn enemy. So did a few others.

  In addition to many stories, familiar essays, and casuals, Maloney published New Yorker Profiles of figures like Orson Welles, Leonard Lyons, and Alfred Hitchcock. His most famous fictional concoction was the wildly imaginative “Inflexible Logic,” about a hapless fellow who disastrously tests the old notion that six monkeys pounding on six typewriters for a million years will eventually type out every book in the British Museum. “Talk” was his special forte. In taking over the rewriting of the section largely from Thurber, Maloney turned out reams of copy; he boasted that he ultimately wrote more than two million words for the magazine, including “something like 2,600 perfect anecdotes.” He was, Geraghty said, “a cranky genius who could do anything around the place that could be done with a typewriter.”

  And yet he left the staff, embittered, in 1945, after only about a decade. Two years later he published a piece about The New Yorker in The Saturday Review that his former colleagues derided as inaccurate and mean-spirited. By Maloney’s sights, both Thurber and White had been “very bad reporters” before joining the magazine; he said that for Ross, “Perfection is not a goal or an ideal, but something that belongs to him, like his watch or his hat.” In response, Ross denounced him as “totally incompetent,” “never a good fact man,” someone who “wouldn’t know a reporter if he saw one,” and “a social suicide” to boot. Referring blithely to his “psychosis,” Katharine White said that Maloney had made his post–New Yorker living “mostly by abusing us.”

  The reasons for Maloney’s downfall were complex. Like his Profile subject Welles, he peaked early. Growing up in Newton Centre, Massachusetts, he was only about nine when his domineering mother insisted that he be issued an adult library card because he had already read all the books in the children’s section. Despite the prejudices of its Brahmin establishment against the Irish, Harvard admitted him; there he won the George B. Sohier Prize for the best thesis written by a student of English or modern literature. He began contributing cartoon ideas to The New Yorker for Peter Arno, Helen Hokinson, Thurber, Carl Rose, Mary Petty, Whitney Darrow, and others before he graduated in 1932; two years later Mrs. White invited him to join the staff.

  It was a rapid rise, but to Maloney’s mind, it led nowhere. After a few years of “Talk” rewrite and other comedic duties, he found himself bored. It didn’t help that like all “Talk” contributors, he toiled in anonymity. He was sensitive, too, and thus ill equipped for an office where prankish insults and put-downs were routine. Arguably underappreciated and certainly overworked, especially during the war, he felt himself capable of better things. In 1943, when Clifton Fadiman quit as the magazine’s chief book reviewer, Maloney lobbied for the job. When it went to Edmund Wilson, Maloney “went stomping in to Ross and told him that this time, positively, he had gone too far.”

  In short, Maloney felt that professional growth had eluded him. “As far as I can tell, I have managed to stand completely still,” he complained. “My first piece might have been my last, and my last my first, as far as any merit is concerned.” During the first half of the 1940s, he tried variously to wrest from Ross a substantial raise, an exclusive service contract, and more responsibility on his terms. He got nowhere.

  Ross valued Maloney, so much so that when the latter became convinced that the bottles in the office water coolers were being “filled by a Greek from a faucet in a mop closet” and were thus unsanitary, Ross wrote a two-page memo on the subject and paid a local chemist ten dollars to test the stuff. (It displayed “no evidence of bacterial pollution.”) But the extraordinary effort of getting out a magazine starved for both personnel and resources during wartime didn’t allow him to indulge the temperamental writer. He had his own explanation for why Maloney quit.

  “He was frustrated in his desire to be a critic,” Ross told O’Hara, “which I would never let him be, because I didn’t think he had the balance, the judgment, and the character to be a critic. He’s influenced almost exclusively by personalities, as nearly as I can see, is a disgruntled soul, and a critic has got to have objectivity.” Certainly Maloney’s forays into criticism could be unfortunate, never more so than in 1939 when he slammed The Wizard of Oz as having “no trace of imagination, good taste, or ingenuity.” He called it a “stinkeroo.”

  Unable to accept that criticism was perhaps not his strong suit, he began to see conspiracies. One day he announced, “The Giants have come down from the hills!” Actually, it was only the Whites. “They were giants all right but no [sic] benign ones,” Geraghty mused. “Not to Maloney. To him they were ogres out to get him.”

  His greatest jealousy and hatred was of Gibbs. White vividly remembered Maloney during the war “in his gas mask and helmet, ready to save everybody in New York except Gibbs.” When Gibbs temporarily couldn’t continue as the main “Comment” writer because he had fallen down and broken two fingers, Maloney was elated. During contract negotiations with Ross, he pressed for such outlandish concessions as “a bonus of twice the difference between Gibbs’ yearly income and mine, if mine is smaller” and “a definite offer of the Theatre column when Gibbs goes too crazy to write it any more.” Dismissing Gibbs as “the current Eustace Tilley” shortly before Pearl Harbor, Maloney wrote the Whites that his nemesis was “trying to spit on the theatre and on current events at the same time, and he hasn’t enough spit.”

  Whence came this enmity? Gibbs suspected he had driven his colleague crazy through an act of “mistaken kindness”—namely, introducing Maloney to his future wife, Miriam Battista. “One night, when he first came to town,” Gibbs said, “he told me he didn’t know any girls, so I said ‘There is nothing easier’ and called up Miriam who was working in a show called Mulatto. I’m afraid I told him in effect that she was a sure lay. . . . A month or so later, I remembered to ask him how he made out and, of course, he never spoke to me again because they were married.”

  Gibbs personified everything Maloney wished to be: a witty man about town, a wearer of many editorial hats, an arbiter of taste. Actually, Maloney was already well established in that persona and, with a few more years of seasoning, might have achieved it entirely. But stymied in his early thirties, Maloney became convinced that Gibbs “was out to do away with me.” And so he determined to destroy him:

  I started reading Comment very carefully, every week. Whenever I found an error in judgment or grammar, a phrase or an idea that Gibbs was using too often, or something that was inconsistent with something he’d said before, I’d write duplicate memos to Ross and Shawn. . . . I did this for about a year. Then, one week, Gibbs had an ill-made little sentence about somebody or other being in his “customary dilemma.” I wrote a little memo that Fowler would have been proud of, pointing out that a dilemma is something you don’t get into voluntarily, and that Gibbs must have been trying to say “usual dilemma.” I remember I had several sentences illustrating proper uses of the different words, like “Gibbs had his customary dinner of eight Martinis, and next morning had his usual hangover,” and “Gibbs took his customary crack at Jed Harris’s latest play, because Harris once rejected a play he had written.” And I said that, even if I wasn’t considered enough of a stylist to write really important things, at least I’d never used words I didn’t understand. Two weeks later, Shawn was put in charge of Comment and I was asked to contribute, and, after about six months of my doing it in competition with Gibbs, he announced that he was sick and tired of doing that boresome [sic] drivel, and wanted to be an editor again.

  I wish I could put into words the satisfaction it gives me to think about this. It’s like lying on a feat
her bed and being massaged by angels.

  If Gibbs truly did want to get rid of Maloney, or if Maloney really did undermine Gibbs, the evidence is elusive. Gibbs himself said that he gave up “Comment” in the early 1940s because “getting out a weekly collection of trivia about Armageddon was absurdly beyond my talent or inclination.” But even if Maloney actually could have sabotaged Gibbs, surely no amount of revenge would have satisfied his need for self-realization. When Maloney quit The New Yorker, he did so ostensibly because at thirty-five he was too old to maintain his pace. Actually, he said, it was “to broaden my scope.”

  And broaden it he did, both before and after leaving. He published in Life, Collier’s, The Atlantic Monthly, and The New York Times Book Review. He doctored plays, did a new version of the book of Die Fledermaus for the Philadelphia Opera Company, and wrote for Orson Welles, Billie Burke, and Fred Allen. Though he never succeeded Fadiman, he reviewed books for the Chicago Sun and on Thursday nights hosted a CBS radio program called Of Men and Books.

  What should have been his crowning triumph was his original musical comedy Sleepy Hollow, based on the legend of Ichabod Crane, which opened on Broadway in June 1948 and starred Miriam. Unfortunately, it ran for only twelve performances.† The show’s collapse destroyed what was left of Maloney’s already precarious finances. (His last New Yorker casual, printed in 1944, had been a darkly humorous take on bankruptcy.) Less than three months after Sleepy Hollow closed, its author succumbed to a stroke at age thirty-eight; he had suffered from severe idiopathic hypertension all his life and had long predicted he would die young. In addition to Miriam, Maloney left a three-year-old daughter, Amelia, and more than ten thousand dollars in debts. Many years later, invoking the considerable contributions that her late husband had made to The New Yorker, Miriam would appeal to the magazine for financial assistance, in vain.

  In its youthful heyday, the New Yorker crowd was a rowdy bunch. At the magazine’s tenth anniversary party in 1935, when Morris Markey saw McKelway accompanied by Stanley Walker, the former city editor of the Herald Tribune, he quipped, “Ah, here’s Mac, surrounded by beauty as usual.” McKelway flailed but failed to connect; Markey hit his opponent in the chest, sending him backward over a table. The very next day at Gibbs’s apartment, when Thurber beheld Elinor Gibbs quite pregnant with Tony, he sneered, “You ungainly creature, you.” This so infuriated Gibbs that he bloodied Thurber’s nose and mouth.

  From the beginning of his enterprise, Ross was determined to circumvent at least one form of internal mingling and mangling. “I am going to keep sex out of this office,” he vowed. He was not always successful. Early on, in fact, he undermined himself by setting up a salon in a Fleischmann-owned property on 45th Street. “He thought if the magazine had its own speakeasy it would be safer for us and that the same general decorum could be kept that Mrs. White inspired at the office,” said Lois Long. “Then Ingersoll came in one morning and found Arno and me stretched out on the sofa nude and Ross closed the place down. I think he was afraid Mrs. White would hear about it. Arno and I may have been married to one another by then; I can’t remember. Maybe we began drinking and forgot that we were married and had an apartment to go to.”

  Long and Arno would likely have gotten into trouble on their own even without Ross’s inadvertent assistance. In fact, they were The New Yorker’s poster children for intramural love gone sour. Their marriage in 1927 was perhaps as inevitable as their divorce three years later. Both of them—Long, comely and flirtatious; Arno, well built and square-jawed—were after-hours embodiments of the Jazz Age. Arno, slightly younger than Long, had been born Curtis Arnoux Peters, the son of a New York State Supreme Court justice. A graduate of the Hotchkiss School, he played the banjo in a band at Yale and was later in a group whose members included Rudy Vallee. He changed his name to Arno, he told friends, because he wanted to separate his identity from that of his respectable family. He was right to do so; his first drawings in The New Yorker, which appeared shortly after its 1925 debut, were defined by their sardonic take on Manhattan’s booze-laden, libidinous speakeasy culture.

  “I’ve always rebelled against the social order, if you get what I mean,” he griped. “At least, some aspects of it. As I grew up I became dissatisfied with the life around me.” He was determined to expose the “fatuous” crowd he himself ran with. “I had a really hot impulse to go and exaggerate their ridiculous aspects. That anger, if you like, gave my stuff punch and made it live. I mean, I don’t know anything better to call it than anger.” Arno especially despised “vain little girls with more alcohol in their brains than sense.”

  Lois Long had more sense than alcohol in her brains. But Arno, who was convinced that “at no time in the history of the world have there been so many damned morons gathered together in one place as here in New York right now,” somehow saw in her an embodiment of the social whirl he enjoyed attacking. When he spoke of his anger, he was not exaggerating; Long was sometimes his target. “Occasionally she would come into the office with a bruise or black eye and reply if sympathetically asked what had happened, ‘Oh, I ran into a door in the dark,’ or ‘I was in a taxi accident,’ ” said Marcia Davenport. Years after her divorce from Arno, their acrimony continued unabated, with Arno failing to provide agreed-upon alimony and child support payments. At one point, he owed her over fourteen thousand dollars yet lived in a ten-room penthouse and “was busy buying champagne and brandy all over the place.”

  It was typical behavior for Arno, who often lived as if Prohibition had never been repealed. Outwardly a cheerful soul, singing as he drew and painted, he had a mean and arrogant streak. He paid the artist Arthur Getz fifty dollars for a cover design and then, after minor revisions, pretty much passed it off as his own, losing the original rough in the process. Another time, when two of his cartoon captions were changed without his permission, he insisted that if anything like that ever happened again, the magazine would have to pay him five hundred dollars. His love life was the stuff of comic books: Cornelius Vanderbilt, Jr., once chased him down the street, brandishing a revolver, after Arno had embraced Mrs. Vanderbilt. He carried on a well-publicized affair with the debutante Brenda Diana Duff Frazier and, during a late-night row, gave her a shiner.

  And yet, as Arno had accurately assessed, his anger provided important fuel for his artistry. At one point he telephoned Geraghty to announce, after three years of psychoanalysis: “Jim, congratulate me. I’ve lost my arrogance.” Geraghty replied, “Peter you should lose your drawing arm first.” Arno eventually became something of a gun nut, with “quite an armament, licensed and otherwise,” and although he remarried and continued cartooning for The New Yorker up to his death in 1968, he eventually settled into a “seething reclusivity.”

  Other New Yorker unions were more successful. One was that of William Walden and his wife, Harriet, aka “Tippy”; she succeeded him as Ross’s private secretary when he joined the army during the war. Another was that of Freddie Packard and Eleanor Gould; her microscopic dissection of syntax, vocabulary, punctuation, and similar myriad details for fifty-four years perfectly mirrored her husband’s obsession with facts. She would often write in the margins of passages that baffled her, “Have we completely lost our mind?”

  But for the sheer communion of souls, no New Yorker marriage could surpass the long and happy merging of E. B. White and Katharine Angell. At first glance, their joining was unlikely. White was a relative novice in the romance department; he had had a couple of girlfriends, most notably a Cornell compatriot named Alice Burchfield. But he was awkward and chaste; his letters to her from the early 1920s were never signed “fondly” or “affectionately,” let alone “love,” but “sincerely” or with nothing other than his name. Early on at The New Yorker, White also had a brief dalliance with one of its young secretaries, Rosanne Magdol. Although he considered marrying her, she remembered that they mainly went for walks.

  Katharine, meanwhile, was in the last throes of her marriage to Ernest.
The first seven years, she said, had been happy. But by 1922 it was clear that the union was untenable. Ernest had a terrible temper; awful arguments became commonplace. Perhaps worst of all, he was a philanderer. As Katharine remembered it, at one point he even lived with “a much older woman all his working week” and returned to his family only on weekends.

  Finding kinship in their gentility, their appreciation of fine prose, and their close working relationship, White and Katharine were drawn together. But the process was neither easy nor straightforward. Katharine, almost seven years older than White and technically higher on the masthead, was still married. White was both shy and conflicted. However their mutual interest began, it was in full swing by June 1928. By that time, when Katharine, Ernest, and the children went for a month to Paris, she and White contrived to meet each other there on the sly. They even managed to slip away to St. Tropez and Corsica. However, upon their return to New York, both Katharine (blocked by her devotion to her children) and White (reluctant as always to be tied down personally or professionally) decided to end the affair. For some months they maintained a miserably inconclusive friendship. Then, in February 1929, possibly having learned of the affair, Ernest knocked Katharine to the floor. In May she took up residence in Nevada preparatory to obtaining a divorce. “I went to Reno with no idea that Andy and I would be married,” she wrote later. “I had been hurt too much & saw no future in a marriage with a man nearly 7 years younger than I. He felt the same reservations.”

  Nonetheless, she wrote him scores of letters both longing (“I do want to see you”) and humorous (“This attractive thing is a chart of my sunburned nose—It’s peeling all over”), filled with details about her daily routine, which included horseback riding, and about her fellow denizens of the Circle S Ranch. Once she sent him a sage blossom. But White did not venture west to visit her. On the contrary: his nerves frayed by his involvement with Katharine, and beset by internal doubts, he decided to take an indefinite leave of absence from The New Yorker and lit out for Camp Otter, in Ontario, where he had once served as a counselor.