Come the fall, though, once Katharine’s divorce came through and both she and White returned to New York, it was all but obvious that they were destined to be together. On November 13 they slipped away to Bedford Village, fifty miles north of the city, and were quietly married, telling no one. Walter Winchell soon broke the news in his column, leaving their co-workers and relations agog. White acknowledged, “This marriage is a terrible challenge: everyone wishing us well, and with all their tongues in their cheeks.” But once committed, he had no doubts, as he told Katharine shortly after their wedding:
I have had moments of despair during the last week which have added years to my life and put many new thoughts in my head. Always, however, I have ended on a cheerful note of hope, based on the realization that you are the person to whom I return and that you are the recurrent phrase in my life. I realized that so strongly one day a couple of weeks ago when, after being away among people I wasn’t sure of and in circumstances I had doubts about, I came back and walked into your office and saw how real and incontrovertible you seemed. I don’t know whether you know just what I mean or whether you experience, ever, the same feeling, but what I mean is, that being with you is like walking on a very clear morning—definitely the sensation of being there.
Their happiness needed no further emotional cementing. But the birth of their son, Joel, the following year, made it complete.
Ross may have been bent on keeping sex out of the office, but there was little he could do to guide his people through their private romantic entanglements, especially when they came into contact in some way with The New Yorker itself. In fact, he was a test case. His first wife, Jane Grant, was instrumental in the success of his enterprise; they had pooled their life savings to establish The New Yorker, and Jane had played an early and invaluable role in getting its feet on the ground. By Ross’s admission, “She is the one who got Fleischmann interested in promoting the magazine. There would be no New Yorker today if it were not for her.”
But Grant’s strident feminism, coupled with Ross’s single-minded devotion to his creation, led them to divorce in 1929 after nine years as husband and wife. Ross remarried twice, and both unions ended unhappily. From Grant, he went first to a “beautiful and mysterious Frenchwoman half his age,” a divorcée named Marie Françoise Elie. But they had almost nothing in common and split in 1939—not, however, before they conceived Ross’s beloved daughter, and his only child, Patricia. Ross’s third wife was Ariane Allen, an alumna of Barnard and the University of Texas, a charming and flirtatious minor actress and model; they married in 1940. But her show business way of life simply did not wear well with the fun-loving but rather more literary-minded Ross. The New Yorker, said Thurber, “was the deadly and victorious rival of each of his three wives.”
Thurber’s involvement with women never interfered, at least not seriously, with his life at the magazine. But he did manage to intertwine his personal and professional worlds, generally in an awkward fashion. At parties with staff members and friends, he could often be counted on to make drunken and clumsy passes—a “grabber,” in short.‡ Much of this behavior was a consequence of his unhappy first marriage to Althea Adams, an associate from his Ohio State crowd who hung about Columbus following their graduation. The large-boned Althea stood five feet nine inches tall, with a personality to match her stature. “She was the domineering type, bossy and pushy, always wanting her own way,” said Thurber’s brother Robert. “Why Jamie married her, I’ll never know.”
Thurber owed Althea his first professional success at The New Yorker—specifically, his casual “An American Romance.” But she was simply too much the archetype of the Thurber woman for their marriage to endure, and they divorced amid considerable press attention in 1935. That same year Thurber married Helen Wismer, a smart, confident Mount Holyoke graduate who would provide him with the succor and support he needed as he became both increasingly famous and progressively infirm. He proposed to her immediately following his divorce. “When we finally found each other in the Algonquin lobby that day and sat down to have a drink,” Helen remembered, “he just turned towards me and said, ‘Will you marry me?’ I said, ‘Wait a minute,’ went to the ladies’ room to recover, and when I came back, I said, ‘Yes.’ ”
But before Thurber married Helen, he became enmeshed with and was periodically overwhelmed by Ann Honeycutt, a blond, somewhat plump Louisiana expatriate known as “Honey.” A radio producer for WOR and CBS, Honey was a bona fide free spirit, living in digs that were painted in shades of pea green and eggplant. She wrote only a handful of pieces for the magazine. But because she ran with its regulars so often, and Ross saw so much of her, he concluded that she was a member of his staff. At one point he remarked, “That was a good piece you did on the Philippines,” when in fact she had written no such thing. (She thanked the confused editor anyway.) She was the magazine’s darling, with an extraordinary ability to bewitch gentlemen without meaning to. Edward Newhouse recalled that if any man between sixteen and ninety was in the same room with her for an hour, he was a lost cause: “You were in love!” For a few years she was the third of McKelway’s five wives.§
For all her flirtations and affairs with others on the New Yorker staff, Honey and Thurber became each other’s particular fascination. “I’d been thwarted by much of life, and Jim opened doors for me,” she said. “He claimed to suffer from inferiority feelings and said it was why he needed to be seen with attractive women.” Improbably, Honey insisted that she and Thurber never had intercourse. Nonetheless, she said, “for a half-dozen years I had more fun with Jim Thurber than I’d ever had with anyone in my whole life.”
“He always carried a torch for her,” said Thurber’s colleague “Jap” Gude. “She was something special, perhaps unattainable, for him.” Many years after his initial intoxication with her had worn off, he told White that he realized that at heart he didn’t particularly like her. “Our love,” he explained, “never ripened into friendship.”
The spell that Honey cast on the men at the magazine enveloped Gibbs as well. He dated her on and off, even though he was decidedly ambivalent. He called her “Miss Honeyclutch, who makes me think of walking up two flights into the smell of cabbage.” Yet he once sent her a telegram that read IN BED A BROKEN MAN AFTER CALLING YOU FOUR THOUSAND TIMES. They shared an unlikely love of baseball and, even more unusually, boxing; he once took her to a bout between Primo Carnera and Jack Sharkey. For a while, in the early 1940s, Gibbs and Honeycutt even constituted a third of the owner-management of the decidedly second-rate heavyweight fighter Melvin “Eddie” Edge.
Honeycutt was not the only New Yorker woman with whom Gibbs found himself involved; among those he squired was the exotic correspondent Emily Hahn. As was the case with Thurber, his romantic encounters began with the erosion of his first marriage. When it came to affairs of the heart, the young Gibbs had been hopelessly inexperienced. What with his prep school upbringing, summers sequestered with relatives in the town of Merrick on Long Island’s South Shore, and the all-male company of Long Island Rail Road crews, females had never really been part of his world.
As he entered his early twenties, spurred in part by his fragmented home life, Gibbs found himself searching for someone to love, only to get nowhere. Poems to two of his would-be conquests, their identities lost to history, reflected that frustration:
Paula
You made your pose a lack of pose,
Suave seeker after paradox;
Shunned worldliness and rather chose
To mock this callow soul that mocks.
Not cynicism would you sing,
Enthusiasm’s quite the thing,
Agnosticism’s on the wing
It’s sweller to be orthodox.
Babette
She wears a white star in her hair
And holds herself aloof from “mushing.”
Today when children lisp of Freud
She’s disinterred the art of blushing.
&nbs
p; The rose that glows in Babette’s cheek
Proclaims the child an early riser.
Babette is pure and good and sweet.
And so I’m going out with Liza.
But on July 24, 1926, while still a cub reporter at the East Norwich Enterprise, Gibbs married Helen Marguerite Galpin, the daughter of William Galpin, an English-born butler and all-around jobs boss for Mortimer Schiff, the immensely wealthy head of the financial firm Kuhn, Loeb. Gibbs apparently met her through his publisher cousin, Lloyd Griscom. At that time, Griscom was chairing a drive to raise money to build a local Boy Scout camp; the project had the full blessing of Schiff, the Scouts’ international commissioner. Somewhere along the way, Gibbs encountered his butler’s daughter. A twenty-year-old student at Elmira College, Helen had demure looks, wavy, bobbed blond hair, and an aristocratic voice. She was something of a flapper, loving jazz and venturing from her Oyster Bay home whenever possible to take advantage of Manhattan nightlife. For the perpetually insecure Gibbs, she would have been an exotic creature.
Unfortunately, the union was impulsive and calamitous. In a short story called “Love, Love, Love,” composed some twenty years later, Gibbs would write that he had married Helen following an all-night revel with several other couples. Because she was “a respectable girl with a family to whom it would be impossible to explain an overnight absence,” she became hysterical the following morning. Gibbs was able to alleviate her “climax of despair” only by promising her to drive them as soon as he could to the nearest justice of the peace. This he proceeded to do; one of his fellow Enterprise reporters, Louis Stancourt, and his wife, Evelyn, served as witnesses. When he awoke the following morning, he found himself staring blankly for about half an hour at his coat, in which was contained his marriage license. “I thought there might be some way I could just ignore the whole thing.”
He couldn’t, of course. Even if the marriage had taken place under better circumstances, Gibbs and Helen were still a bad fit. In real life, Helen was sassy and outspoken; in columns he published in the North Hempstead Record, Gibbs would disguise her as a dangerous harpy named “Hilda.” He wrote of her becoming so enraged at a Long Island Rail Road conductor who demanded her ticket, even though she couldn’t get a seat, that she attacked him with an ax and tossed his body out the train window. He imagined himself throwing her into Camann’s Pond in Merrick: “She looked perfectly absurd rooting down there in the eel-grass and we had a good hearty laugh as we hauled her out and thumped some of the water out of her.”
The marriage ended in divorce around the time Gibbs came to work at The New Yorker.¶ Then, in August 1929, he married Elizabeth Ada Crawford, a native of Detroit who worked as a writer in the magazine’s promotion department. It was as impulsive a joining as the one with Helen; the two were wed at a “Gretna Green”—a locale where they could escape tiresome premarriage legal procedures—in Connecticut. Still, by all accounts the young couple flourished, and Elizabeth was one of the most popular members of the New Yorker staff. After a sojourn in Bermuda, they settled down to what appeared to be a secure domestic life.
That all ended, tragically, on March 31, 1930, when Elizabeth committed suicide by jumping out of a window of the couple’s seventeenth-floor apartment in Tudor City. Some accounts state that Elizabeth leaped when Gibbs was talking with O’Hara and the men would not let her join in the conversation. Others believe she was driven to kill herself after Gibbs cruelly and repeatedly mocked her attempts to be a writer.
As best as can be determined—and the details still seem improbable—Gibbs and Elizabeth had attended a performance of Death Takes a Holiday the week before at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre. In this memorable work, a beautiful young girl falls in love with Death (played on Broadway by Philip Merivale), who is masquerading as a handsome young man. When Death returns from a three-day holiday on Earth, he takes the young girl back with him as his bride. Gibbs informed the police that Elizabeth had told him, “One of these days, I am going to jump out of the window”—an indication that she somehow wanted to join Death on a permanent holiday. “I never, of course, took her seriously, and her remark had slipped my mind, almost immediately after she said it.”
Katharine White said that Gibbs and Elizabeth had been up all night prior to her suicide and that when she pretended to be asleep that morning, she had jumped out the bathroom window. But all press and police accounts contradict her recollections: Gibbs’s sister, Angelica, who was about to graduate from Vassar, had been lunching with them at their apartment. At one point, Elizabeth excused herself to the bedroom. When she failed to return after a few minutes, Gibbs looked out the window and saw her on the pavement, a crowd rapidly gathering around her.
The fallout was appalling. Gibbs phoned Katharine at the office and exclaimed, “Could you come right over—Elizabeth has killed herself!” Katharine dashed from her desk and arrived to find Gibbs moaning, “I never should have left the room.” He was in hysterics. “He was already threatening to kill himself and he kept emphasizing what bad publicity this was for The New Yorker and said he could never return to the magazine again,” Katharine remembered. Somehow she got Gibbs into a hospital, where he was sedated. The death was shocking enough to make tabloid headlines and rattle even the case-hardened detectives of the East 51st Street Station. “If I were God,” said one of them, “I would bring her back to life again.” So concerned was O’Hara about Gibbs’s sanity that he stayed with him following the nightmare.
After Elizabeth’s death, Gibbs managed some semblance of a home life with his newly college-graduated sister, moving into an apartment with her at 21 East Tenth Street. Like her brother, Angelica was finding her way in the literary world. Having co-edited an anthology of poetry at Vassar, she would go on to be an editor at McCall’s and publish some fine Profiles and fiction in The New Yorker. Her short story “The Test”—a subtle, sensitive glimpse of racism in action—was anthologized in one of the magazine’s prestigious fiction collections. Life with Wolcott, by contrast, was not as pleasant. Gibbs dubbed Angelica, not known for her housekeeping, “Miss Dirty Dishes of 1931” and called their joint quarters an “orange and green seraglio.”
When Angelica left to get married and settle in suburban Port Washington, Long Island, Gibbs took in the future Broadway producer Leonard Sillman for seven months. The room that Sillman rented from him had its own entrance from the hallway and a connecting doorway with Gibbs’s room; Sillman would slip his ten-dollar rent under the door between them. They rarely met; Silllman was generally out at night and Gibbs all day. But they did occasionally encounter each other, after a fashion, as Sillman recalled:
When I got back to the apartment I heard my landlord in the adjoining room bidding goodnight to some guests. I heard him say his goodnights and I heard him close the door and then I heard him close the door and then I heard a ghostly sort of a “plop!” Alarmed, I unlocked the door that separated us and entered Mr. Gibbs’ apartment. My landlord lay in a heap by the door.
I picked him up, carried him to his bed, undid his tie, took off his shoes and laid his blankets over him. I tiptoed back to my room, got my overcoat, and hell-footed it up to Harlem.
That scene was repeated several times.
Gibbs’s view of life, already dark, became even more desperate. The perplexing personalities of women in general became toxic for him. In his own way, he was as much a misogynist as Thurber. After the death of his second wife, he held forth at grisly length on the “new girl” of the era:
Hats in this unfortunate year sit far back on their wearer’s heads, disclosing foreheads curiously like white and bulbous tombstones. Scarlet lips and great fringed eyes stare out of faces as pallid as plumbing fixtures. Long red fingernails seem to threaten the startled young man’s throat as they reach across the table for another of his cigarettes. Altogether the effect is unpleasantly mortuary and, hard as it is to believe, probably intentionally so.
Around that time, though, Gibbs met the apparen
t love of his life. Nancy Hale, a writer at Vogue, began contributing to The New Yorker in 1929. The granddaughter of Edward Everett Hale and the great-niece of Harriet Beecher Stowe, she would eventually become well known for novels and short stories about New England and the complex lives of fashionable women. Hale was elegant, distinguished, frank, and beautiful, and Gibbs was her editor. It was not long before they became romantically involved.
Their affair apparently began in either the latter half of 1930 or the first half of 1931. From the start he was besotted, and for the better part of two years he maintained a uniquely barbed tone of infatuation:
It seems very likely to me that I am going to die at about four o’clock this afternoon unless you telephone me or something.
I love you because you’re smarter and better looking than anyone I know, and have the most appalling character.
I miss you terribly already and I’m beginning to get some fine morbid ideas. I can see you sitting on the nice clean sand and making up your mind that I’m a sort of mushroom growth, urban and sickly, and not practical at all.
Christ, a year ago I didn’t give a God damn whether I could write, or how I looked, or what people thought about me, and now I want to be swell at everything so that you’ll think of me as a bargain.
When you’re away I equip you with a beauty and wisdom and nobility of character that would be quite impossible in a human being—like the girls who were always kicking off with t.b. in old poems. I wouldn’t like it at all if you were really like that, but there’s a gloomy satisfaction at the moment. Darling, I wish loving you didn’t make me talk silly.
Cast of Characters Page 14
