Cast of Characters

by Thomas Vinciguerra

  † Sullivan was apparently unaware that Helen Galpin was the daughter of a butler. Many others also believed that her father had worked on the Long Island Rail Road, including Brendan Gill, who said so in his memoir of The New Yorker. It is not known how this misconception arose.

  ‡ Not long afterward Busch left Time and met with Ross. “I wish you would do something for me,” Ross told him. “Find out who was the stinker who wrote that snide article about The New Yorker.” “I did,” Busch confessed, whereupon Ross hired him.

  § One scholarly study determined that the Profile contained, among its other features, “51 full verb inversions, 12 quotations inversions (all verbs of quotation are inverted)” and “3 structures in which the predicate comes before the subject without a verb (‘most brilliant he,’ ‘handicapped he’).”

  ¶ Senator James Thomas Heflin (1869–1951) of Alabama, also known as “Cotton Tom,” was a leading advocate of white supremacy. The nationally known fitness enthusiast Bernarr Macfadden (1868–1955) published a successful string of magazines.

  # Seven decades later Ross’s private secretary William Walden recalled, “I thought that was the funniest footnote I’d ever read. I really roared.”

  ** Actually, Gibbs had called the rumor not “grotesque” but “fantastic.”

  †† In a portion of the letter that Ross struck from the final draft, there ensued after that sentence the following: “I would remind you that in the article in Fortune, for instance, you called Mrs. White a simple, sensitive gentlewoman, ‘hard, suave, ambitious, sure of herself.’ . . . ‘She handles people smoothly, with a carefully studied courtesy and tact’ . . . ‘shrewd and able politically.’ It is, so help me Christ, a positive crime that such a thing should have been printed, although the statements are so extreme as to be ridiculous and, like all such, are, partially at least, self-discounting. (You had her ‘eloping’ with White in the original draft; nice for her children.) Arno was ‘losing his grip,’ a damaging accusation in an artist’s life. Gibbs was accused of responding to all simple, honest statements by saying ‘Don’t be banal,’ a word which up to that time I am certain he never used in his life. I was ‘. . . not a large man (in the mental, not the physical sense), but a furious and a mad one.’ I was ‘without taste, either literary or good’. I ‘. . . was cruel and largely unnecessary. . . .’ ‘Elwyn Brooks White sold the only painting he ever made to The New Yorker’s art board, on which his wife sits.’ Damned if we aren’t criminally corrupt, among other things.”

  ‡‡ Frank Crowninshield, the former editor of Vanity Fair, thought Ross’s response was “a gem of the purest ray.”

  §§ As part of an attempt to garner favorable coverage of her former plantation in Charleston, which had in the interim become a monastery, Clare told Ross shortly before his death that The New Yorker had “fulfilled its mission of laughter, which always provides a great tonic for the unnecessary miseries our human nature visits on itself.” Apparently ignorant of Diogenes, she added, “A good friend of mine once said: ‘It’s better to light one candle than to curse the darkness.’ You’ve lit lots of gay little candles in the gloom, bless you!”

  CHAPTER 7

  “PRETTY GUMMY AT BEST”

  Well after The New Yorker proved an editorial and financial success, Ross began pondering other ventures. In an echo of the days when he was hatching new projects to escape the grind of the American Legion Weekly, he toyed with the idea of a daily paper devoted entirely to ships’ news, as well as a periodical given over entirely to detective stories. He even invested in a paint-spraying machine.

  It was all of no consequence; Ross’s commitment to his wunderkind was simply too single-minded. “Ross had no valid relationship with any creation excepting only The New Yorker,” said David Cort, who dealt with him on several occasions. “Ross did not care about the money in the enterprise; he cared only about the perfection of this insane impersonation of the sophisticated New Yorker, as a Norman in the year 900 might have wanted to look like a Gaul.”

  Not all his staff felt the same way. The New Yorker might have been emerging as the best general-interest periodical in the country, paying reasonably well and affording space and expression for its people that other magazines could not. But its very consistency, and Ross’s insistence on uniformity of voice, proved frustrating for those who truly wanted to write from their hearts. And so it was, however improbably, that Gibbs, White, and Thurber all eventually began to make efforts to distance themselves from the magazine.

  Thurber was the first to bolt. By the mid-1930s he was not only ready to settle down to a comfortable domestic life with his new wife, Helen, but was grappling with both progressive blindness and considerable ambition. His books My Life and Hard Times, The Middle-Aged Man on the Flying Trapeze, and Let Your Mind Alone! were popular and critical successes. For The New Yorker, he reached beyond “Talk” and casuals and cartoons to write columns about tennis and other in-depth factual subjects. He wove the research of reporters like Eugene Kinkead into a popular series called “Where Are They Now?,” a retrospective look at news fixtures who had once commanded the public eye, like Gertrude Ederle, the first woman to swim the English Channel. Another focused on Virginia O’Hanlon, whose plaintive inquiry of “Is there a Santa Claus?” to the New York Sun in 1897 had yielded the most famous editorial in American newspaper history, composed by Francis Pharcellus Church and answering in the affirmative, “Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus.”

  One of Thurber’s efforts went down in journalistic and legal history. It was an update of the life of William James Sidis, a onetime child mathematics prodigy who had entered Harvard at the age of eleven, the youngest student to enroll in the university’s history. Thurber’s examination of Sidis’s pathetic downfall, complete with details of a reclusive existence in a shabby Boston apartment and an obsession with streetcar transfer tickets, became the focus of a celebrated invasion-of-privacy lawsuit. Perhaps because these works were such a departure from his usual milieu, he signed them with the pen name “Jared L. Manley.”

  Amid his writing, Thurber decided to “go away somewhere to get organized,” as Helen put it. And so the two spent a couple of months in Bermuda, where both Gibbs and O’Hara had honeymooned and where he would return periodically. On that peaceful island, he formed a fast friendship with Jane and Ronald Williams. The latter was the publisher of The Bermudian, and Thurber would end up contributing light essays to the struggling Caribbean publication, gratis.

  It was the beginning of a general branching out. Thurber left the formal ranks of the New Yorker staff but negotiated a freelance arrangement. Freed from the strictures of office work, he wrote widely for other publications. In 1940 and 1941 he intermittently published a column called “If You Ask Me” in his old colleague Ralph Ingersoll’s upstart liberal newspaper PM. Eschewing most of the paper’s avowedly progressive political coverage, Thurber tended to focus on humorous subjects. Ross complained, “You’re throwing away ideas on PM that would make good casuals.” Thurber shrugged off the charge. “I was out from under the strict and exacting editing for which the New Yorker was and still is famous,” he said, “and I needed this relaxation and the hundred dollars a column Ingersoll paid me.”

  He further refined his reputation as a professional misogynist, as he revealed in a self-conducted interview for Mademoiselle:

  MLLE: If you had been born a girl, Mr. Thurber, what kind of girl would you want to be?

  THURBER: That’s an interesting thought because I almost was a girl. My mother wanted a girl before I was born, so she did everything she could with prenatal influence to mark me—embroidered, cooked, sewed and looked at pictures of Mrs. Grover Cleveland all day long. But . . .

  MLLE: It didn’t work?

  THURBER: No, shortly after I was born they discovered I wasn’t a girl. A woman nurse brought me into this world—women have always influenced my life—and on top of breaking the news to my mother that I wasn’t a girl, she then told
her that I had a full head of hair, and that children born with a lot of hair are never bright. That’s a prophecy still to be cleared up, of course.

  MLLE: Supposing you had been a girl—

  THURBER: Ah, I would have been a hussy. (Thinking) Or would I? No, on second thought I think I’d be the quiet, sympathetic-listener type of girl.

  MLLE: Is that because, being a man, that’s the kind of girl you like?

  THURBER: Probably. I like a girl who’ll listen while I talk—about myself.

  By now he was beginning to return to Columbus, posturing as the local boy who had made good. And in 1940 he and his old friend Elliott Nugent triumphed on Broadway with The Male Animal. Nugent himself starred as Tommy Turner, a professor at a small university in the Midwest; the cast included a young Gene Tierney. The more typically Thurberian aspect of the comedy dealt with the romantic conflicts that arise when a football hero ex-boyfriend of Turner’s wife returns for a campus visit. But at the heart of The Male Animal was the issue of free speech, which would increasingly concern Thurber. An unwitting Turner becomes embroiled in campus politics when reactionary trustees threaten to fire him because he wants to read to his class the statement of the anarchist Bartolomeo Vanzetti, made prior to the pronouncement of his 1927 death sentence. Turner is driven to share the speech not as a political manifesto but as an example of crude yet eloquent English composition.

  The production was not without incidents. At one point Thurber tripped over the footlights and tumbled into the orchestra pit while at a rehearsal. Daise Terry, who went to see the play with most of The New Yorker staff, was not particularly amused; she compared it to “an unfunny Thurber drawing acted out” and reported that McKelway and Gibbs, among others, “didn’t think it was a knockout by any means.” But in general the critics loved The Male Animal, likening it to Life with Father and The Man Who Came to Dinner. It ran for nearly 250 performances and established Thurber not merely as a man of letters but as a literary celebrity in the mold of Woollcott.

  Not everyone was happy about Thurber’s new horizons. He received a poem from a fan who bemoaned his periodic absence from The New Yorker’s pages:

  We Ask the New Yorker

  Oh where has Mr. Thurber gone?

  Admirers ask from night to sun (morn doesn’t rhyme either)

  Has he forgotten how to write,

  Or is it just in rage and spite

  He draws his women with a curse?

  (How he must hate them, book and verse)

  When Friday comes we watch the clock,

  We wait the postman’s cheerful knock,

  The wrapper’s torn with hungry look,

  We leap from “Notes” to Fadiman’s “Books.”

  Alas! No Thurber can be seen,

  Except a dog of noble mien

  (So different from his vicious gals

  Or timid men who shrink from pals)

  Oh, Mr. Thurber, come back home,

  Or write more often, as you roam.

  Thurber was so tickled by this doggerel that he adorned it with a caricature of himself waving at four stern-faced men labeled “Gibbs, Maloney, O’Hara etc.” with the impish greeting “Hi, Fellas!”

  White did not thirst for recognition as achingly as Thurber did, although the two did once make a half-hearted stab at collaborating on a play “about the difficulty people are experiencing in the decline of snobbery.” In any event White, too, was restless. He was also genuinely unhappy. In the eight months between August 1935 and March 1936, his father and mother died. In between these two losses, Katharine had a miscarriage, and their close friend and New Yorker mainstay Clarence Day passed away. “I see him roaming the Hereafter / Racked with unregenerate laughter, / I see him chuckle as he sings / Of devil’s tail and angel’s wings,” White pined.

  On a professional level, he found himself chafing under The New Yorker’s limitations. He achieved periodic public attention with endearing pieces like “Farewell, My Lovely!,” his whimsical, nostalgic homage to his Model T “Hotspur” and his 1922 cross-country tour. But his energies were sapped by the demands and anonymity of “Comment.” In 1934 he published a collection of his items, titled Every Day Is Saturday. It was well received; Gluyas Williams told Katharine that it was “about the only thing that has cheered me up this fall.” His identity as the uncredited scribe behind the section now revealed, White asked Ross in 1935 if he could start signing his pieces. It had become “almost impossible to write anything decent using the editorial ‘we,’ unless you are the Dionne family,” he said. Anyway, the paragraphs were beginning to take on a life of their own:

  Speaking for the writer of comment [sic], I can say that it tends to become (is) a mongrel department, or hybrid, half fish, half snail. . . . I feel that N & C are not, literally “the talk of the town.” Maybe they were originally intended to be, but it hasn’t worked out that way in practice. They are, specifically, editorial paragraphs with a bias or slant or conviction. And they are, to some degree, personal. . . . [I]t is pretty hard to write comment [sic]—or anything—over a long period of time without putting a lot of personal junk or notions into them.

  But Ross, though he thought White’s contributions “among the best stuff being written today,” refused to divorce “Comment” from leading into “Talk” and rejected the notion of signed essays. “Your page is stronger anonymous, as an expression of an institution, rather than of an individual,” Ross explained. “I feel this very strongly.”

  Impersonality and personal prejudice aside, White was also conflicted about the tenor of the section. “The suggestion has often been made,” wrote one critic of Every Day Is Saturday, “that the distinctive prose which regularly fills the opening pages of The New Yorker has as its base a kind of ambergris resulting from a peculiar unrest growing out of actual fear of (a) the telephone company, (b) perambulators, (c) hoot owls, (d) locked doors.” Though the observation may have rankled, it rang true. It was one thing to be irreverent during the Roaring ’20s or, at worst, mildly neurotic. But with the Depression dragging on and Europe edging toward war, White felt a gnawing obligation to be serious.

  Thurber thought this attitude absurd. “Never has there been so much to laugh at,” he wrote White. He tried to convince him that a writer should be true to his métier:

  It is the easiest thing in the world nowadays to become so socially conscious, so Spanish war stricken, that all sense of balance and values goes out of a person. Not long ago in Paris Lillian Hellman told me that she would give up writing if she could ameliorate the condition of the world, or of only a few people in it.* Hemingway is probably on that same path, and a drove of writers are following along, screaming and sweating and looking pretty strange and futile. This is one of the greatest menaces there is; people with intelligence deciding that the point is to become grimly gray and intense and unhappy and tiresome because the world and many of its people are in a bad way. It’s a form of egotism, a supreme form. I’ve toyed with it myself and understand it a little. It’s as dangerous as toying with a drug. How can these bastards hope to get hold of what’s the matter with the world and do anything about it when they haven’t the slightest idea that something just as bad and unnatural has happened to them?

  White attempted to thread the needle of his trademark light touch with bona fide social awareness in a March 13, 1937, “Comment.” With maximum indignation, he attacked FDR’s misbegotten attempt to pack the Supreme Court. Denouncing as “balderdash” the president’s insistence that those who opposed his plan were perforce anti–New Dealers, he called Roosevelt “a petulant saviour” and “an Eagle Scout whose passion for doing the country a good turn every day has at last got out of hand.” But instead of recommending outright opposition to the court plan, White said The New Yorker would “sleep on it.”

  Ralph Ingersoll would not sleep on it. Having previously tweaked White’s “gossamer writing” in his Fortune article, the increasingly activist editor now protested his former colleague’s p
assivity. He accused White of “gentle complacency” and beseeched him, “Andy, Andy!! Doesn’t that well-fed stomach of yours ever turn when you think of what you’re saying? Let us sleep on suffering, want, malnutrition. Let us sleep too on young men who are so fond of phrasing things exactly that humanity never troubles them.”

  Within a couple of months, whether inspired at all by Ingersoll or not, White decided he would cease writing “Comment” and take a year’s leave of absence. He was not interested in another job per se; the year before, he had turned down Christopher Morley’s offer to be editor of The Saturday Review of Literature. He and Katharine even refused Fleischmann’s suggestion that they assume joint editorship of The New Yorker. What he wanted was what he had always wanted—to write as he pleased, even if he was not quite sure what that would constitute. He also needed to scour himself of more than a decade of Manhattan living. Besides, he told his brother, “I want to see what it feels like, again, to let a week pass by without having an editorial bowel movement.” Assuming the pose of Eustace Tilley in the August 7 issue, he explained his rationale obliquely:

  I want time to think about many people, alive and dead: Pearl White, Schoolboy Creekmore, Igor Sikorsky—I couldn’t begin to name them. I want to think about the custom of skiing in summertime, want to hear a child play thirds on the pianoforte in midafternoon. I shall devote considerable time to studying the faces of motorists drawn up for the red light; in their look of discontent is the answer to the industrial revolution. Did you know that a porcupine has the longest intestine in Christendom, either because he eats so much wood or in order that he may? It is a fact. There must be something to be learned by thinking about that.