After the Luce brouhaha, he began to branch out into full-blown Profiles as well. One of his earliest was of the gravelly voiced Amherst alumnus Burgess Meredith, who had recently made a memorable impression in Maxwell Anderson’s play Winterset. “His friends call him Buzz, or Bugs, and either of these in some vague way seem descriptive,” Gibbs wrote. He cited Meredith’s former living arrangements with a “genial salesman of pornography,” his peculiar talent for assembling acting troupes that always failed, and the time he got so plastered that he missed his stint on the NBC radio show Red Davis, resulting in $62,000 in canceled ad revenue. Naturally he took the usual swipes at his subject’s physical features: “His pointed face might more reasonably belong to a jockey . . . at the moment it has seemed to him suitable to let his ginger-colored hair grow long on top, so that in dimmer lights he looks rather like a chrysanthemum.” Far from being put off, Meredith thought that Gibbs’s “whimsical evaluation was fairly accurate” and a warm friendship ensued.†
Gibbs also took on Ingersoll when he began making a splash with PM. In its subtly barbed way, the two-part “A Very Active Type Man” was, wrote Ingersoll’s biographer, Roy Hoopes, “surprisingly gentle.” But Ingersoll was not amused when Gibbs sent him advance proofs. Unlike the case with Luce, no physical clash resulted; Ingersoll merely responded with a four-and-one-half page, double-spaced memo. He didn’t mind that Gibbs called him a hypochondriac, or recalled the time he was nearly thrown out of Yale, or wrote that “in general he has an air of having been rather loosely and casually assembled,” with protruding eyes, a pouting lower lip, and jaundiced skin. He did, however, register certain other objections:
(4) So help me God, cross my heart and hope to die, that story about the Weegee picture is fictional.‡ It is also typical of the kind of emphasis of [Dashiell] Hammett which is [a] complete distortion of fact. You can pin many screwier cracks than this on me. . . .
(5) . . . . [F]or God’s sake, lay off trying to pin on me that my operating technique or labor policy or whatever you want to call it is to embarrass me into resigning—which is standard Hearst technique. . . .
(6) and (6a) No kidding, I think that it is unfair to criticize me as a writer by quoting from a diary written on trains and obviously fragmentary and semi-garbled for the purpose of passing censorships. . . .
(9) There is no heating equipment connected with my 22 x 24 foot pool.
“I think I was offended,” Ingersoll later wrote Gibbs, “by the over-all picture of me as a man without taste—either in my own life or in my editorial values.”
In terms of sheer influence, Gibbs’s most potent Profile was probably “St. George and the Dragnet,” about Thomas Dewey, in 1940. Always suspicious of authority, Gibbs painted Manhattan’s Republican district attorney as so hard-driven that he was necessarily suspect. It was part of Dewey’s genius, Gibbs wrote, “to make the jurors feel that they are part of the prosecution, not a difficult feat with a blue-ribbon jury, which usually imagines that it has been divinely appointed to convict, anyway.” He imparted the DA’s inordinate passion with a couple of arresting sentences about his eyes: “These are brown, with small irises surrounded by a relatively immense area of white, and Dewey has a habit of rotating them furiously to punctuate and emphasize his speech, expressing horror and surprise by shooting them upward, cunning by sliding them from side to side behind narrowed lids. At climactic moments he can pop them side to side, almost audibly.” Far from impugning the man’s integrity, Gibbs thought it beyond belief, noting that reporters often called him “The Boy Scout” or, more simply, “The Boy.” He left out no obscure detail, down to Dewey’s admission that he drank more than three quarts of water a day.
The piece, with legwork supplied by John Bainbridge, was explosive. Suspecting that the Democrats had employed Gibbs, Dewey impounded his generally overdrawn bank account. Pegler, not yet the target of Gibbs’s pen, was in awe. The Profile was “a beautiful operation,” he wrote, one that “must command the respect of any colleague and the awe of those cleaver-and buck-saw butchers who cut a man up with woodsman’s strokes.” In fact, he thought the Profile was perhaps too good: “I submit that such a job as the boys have done on Dewey is likely to discourage any public servant and deter good men from entertaining public life.”
Amid these undertakings, Gibbs found himself stuck taking over “Comment.” Although White contributed sporadically to the section, Gibbs now assumed the magazine’s editorial voice. If his jottings lacked White’s unique panache, they were no less memorable. Here he was on the newly opened World’s Fair:
We spent an hour in the library looking at pictures of Old World’s Fairs and reading what contemporary opinion had to say about them. It might all have come out of Flushing this week. How strange and gratifying, our fathers wrote, that civilization should have culminated in their lifetime, that their Fair should have been the stick in the stand to mark the highest reaching of the tide. How quaint, we said to ourself, looking at the scrolled and turreted buildings at the old Chicago Fair. How quaint, we suppose our grandson will say when he comes across pictures of this one in all its streamlined and functional majesty. We tried to think what his Fair will look like, fifty years from now, but our mind, too, wouldn’t go beyond the miracles of the present. Perhaps, after all, we thought, 1939 will be remembered as the year when the human mind actually did reach the limit of its ingenuity, and Grover Whalen, the flower of a race, built the towers that could not be improved.
When hard-pressed for copy, he wrote about his children. Once he reported on a weird little ditty that four-year-old Tony chanted in the bathtub; it was sung “entirely on one note except that the voice drops on the last word in every line.” It began, He will just do nothing at all, / He will just sit there in the noonday sun. / And when they speak to him, he will not answer them, / because he does not care to. Gibbs called this remarkable achievement “one of the handsomest literary efforts of the year” and took a perverse pride in getting its key word, wee-wee, into print.§ He also wrote a touching paragraph about Tony escorting Janet to her first day of kindergarten. Years later, at a party at the house of the New York Post theater critic Richard Watts, a precocious young Jonathan Schwartz approached him. “I asked Gibbs what his favorite piece was,” Schwartz recalled. Standing by a bookshelf, Gibbs picked up one of his collections and pointed out the anecdote.
And when World War II began on September 1, 1939, Gibbs combined astonishment, revulsion, and prescience. The conflict, he predicted, would be waged against flesh and spirit alike, with the best military brains consumed with their murderous task:
[They] will now think continuously and cleverly of death—planning new and better ways to annihilate an army in the open field (the planes will be very useful this time); planning ways to crush and stifle men in their impregnable shelters (it is a tribute to our ingenuity that no shelter these days remains impregnable very long); planning bombs that set incendiary fires which can’t be put out (a much more economical way of destroying a city than the old-fashioned one of just trying to blow it up); planning death just as thoroughly and competently for old men and women and children as for the soldiers (this war will be quite impartial; it will play no favorites).
And yet Gibbs’s fit with “Comment” was strained. Back in 1931, when he had temporarily filled in for White on the section, Ross had not been impressed. “The trouble with Gibbs’ stuff is that it’s in one tone,” the editor said. “He hates everything, without qualification.” Almost a decade later Gibbs found himself not so much hating everything without qualification as being periodically paralyzed about speaking for the magazine on a regular deadline. He had no illusions about his strengths. He wrote White in Maine, “We all try very hard to keep Notes & Comment up there where you put it, but I’m afraid it is pretty gummy at best.”
How to escape the gumminess? Gibbs determined that the theater might be his ticket out. He had his reasons. Many years before, at Riverdale, his teachers had made h
im “a member of the rabble, a senator, a soldier, and assorted offstage vocal effects” in Coriolanus. The experience taught him mainly that “small boys are likely to make rather convulsive Romans.” Still, he was cast as a conspirator who stabbed Harold Guinzburg, the future founder of the Viking Press, in Julius Caesar.
His most memorable Riverdale Shakespeare experience was an open-air production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. As he recounted in his casual “Ring Out, Wild Bells,” Gibbs played Puck, wearing a motley costume of his mother’s own devising that came equipped with myriad tiny bells. Telling Gibbs that he envisioned Puck as a mischief-maker in perpetual motion, the director instructed him to dance up and down continually, waving his arms and cocking his head. “I want you to be a little whirlwind,” he said. The results were predictably catastrophic. The tintinnabulation— “a silvery music, festive and horrible”—drowned out all the dialogue and so unnerved one of the on a magazine like fairies that when it came time for his big speech, the panic-stricken child unwittingly launched into a recitation of the Gettysburg Address.
Obviously Gibbs was not destined to be an actor. Perhaps, though, he could be a playwright in the mold of Thurber and The Male Animal. His attempts to mount a theatrical had begun as early as 1935, when he tried to collaborate with McKelway on a comedy whose main character would be Ross. “Gibbs wrote a perfect opening scene by himself and then we wrote some kind of draft of a couple of acts,” McKelway recalled. But they gave up almost immediately. “As others have done since, we had made the mistake of trying to do a play about ‘The New Yorker’ itself and about the real Ross, instead of a play about some believeable people who work on a magazine like ‘The New Yorker.’ ”¶
Gibbs got much further with a musical that he wrote sometime during the war. It was based in part on two of his short stories—“Feud” and “The Courtship of Milton Barker,” both of them concerned with comedic mishaps on the Long Island Rail Road. In developing the material for the stage, Gibbs wove a plot around a “virtuous brakeman” named Martin, his innocent girlfriend, Selena, and a traveling circus. In brief, Martin foils a plot hatched by a crooked railway cop and the nearly destitute circus owner—the father of a seductress named Juanita—to wreck the show for the insurance money. In the process, Martin wins the hand of Selena, who happens to be the yardmaster’s daughter. Gibbs called it Sarasota Special.
Written with an eye for visual spectacle (the suggestion of the circus pulling into the yards would make for “a nice, noisy night effect”) and an ear for appropriately placed musical numbers, it held some promise. Gibbs wrote an entire script and hoped that O’Hara, still triumphant from Pal Joey, would join him in bringing it to the stage. He did want proper credit. “I don’t want to be taken over by you, winding up as ‘additional dialogue by Wolcott Gibbs’ or based on a story by,” he told O’Hara. “In fact, [I] want it basically something like this now. Maybe I ought to get two thirds of the book as a matter of fact.” Gibbs even considered enlisting White to compose the lyrics because “[h]e isn’t doing anything that I know of.”
Sarasota Special never got off the ground.# Though competent and entertaining, it offered little to distinguish it from much of the Broadway dross against which it would have competed. It was “just the bunk,” Gibbs admitted years later. “It’s a faulty play. There’s one good scene in it that goes on for twenty minutes, but twenty minutes is not a play.” Anyway, he told O’Hara, “I am a hell of a writer to try a collaboration, being generally against other people’s ideas.”
As it turned out, Gibbs would indeed make a name for himself in the theater. But it would be from the audience, not the stage.
* Hellman, as much a fabulist as Thurber, denied that this exchange ever took place. In 1975 she told White that she had not seen Thurber in Paris at the time he reported. Moreover, she said, “I never said any such thing and I don’t believe anybody else ever said it, except maybe somebody in a nut joint pillow fight.”
† His friendship with Gibbs notwithstanding, Meredith was one of many who mangled his most famous line. In his memoirs he reported it as “Backward go the sentences until boggles the mind.”
‡ Arthur Felig (1899–1968), aka “Weegee,” was a famous realist photographer of New York City street scenes, lowlife, crime, accidents, and similar subjects.
§ The composer Celius Daughtery later set the incantation to music. Titled “Declaration of Independence,” it was recorded by Pete Seeger.
¶ Gibbs cannibalized the opening scene for his November 27, 1943, casual “Miss McManus and the Muse,” about an exasperating encounter between a frustrated poet and a by-the-book telephone operator in the switchboard room of The New York Literary Messenger, “a magazine of deep thought.” In McKelway’s estimation, the casual’s source material “was the only publishable thing in those whole two acts.”
# NBC broadcast a modified version ofSarasota Special, sans music, on May 6, 1960. Titled Full Moon Over Brooklyn, it was produced by David Susskind, directed by Jack Smight, and starred Robert Webber, Barbara Barrie, Elaine Stritch, and Art Carney. “It did not get uproarious,” wrote John P. Shanley in The New York Times, “but except for a tedious longish stretch in the middle, made for a pleasant enough hour.”
CHAPTER 8
“A SILLY OCCUPATION FOR A GROWN MAN”
“There is nothing like an Opening Night to make the performer wish he were temporarily dead or at least slightly numb,” wrote Louis Sobol in 1945. “The producer doesn’t feel too frolicsome either.” Describing “that second of throat-catch and heart-pause when the house lights dim out,” he noted that at that moment,
[B]ackstage folk shiver with the swoon-droops, a sinister ailment germinated not by the thought that out front are notable First Nighters like Fannie Hurst, Herbert Bayard Swope and Irving Berlin, Hope Hampton, Moss Hart and Gilbert Miller, or that relatives are in back seats or in the balcony, but by awareness of a dozen or so deadpanned gentlemen and unemotional ladies of varying ages, moods and eccentricities, generally referred to by the honest and the fearless as Dramatic Critics. These exalted personages draw handsome salaries from the newspapers or magazines they represent in return for submitting a candid report on the latest play. On this report may hang the fate of the producer’s investment—anywhere from $20,000 to $250,000. Similarly, on the critics’ decision may rest the length of the actor’s job—the yardstick which measures the difference between being able to dine at “21” and the Stork and standing in line at the Automat.
The bottom portion of the opening spread of Sobol’s magazine piece caricatured nine of those critics clustered in the front row, their faces registering expressions ranging from mild skepticism to outright hostility. Third from the left was Gibbs, looking directly at the reader with a countenance that was quite unsmiling.
When Gibbs composed a review, he did so “in the manner of a little boy plucking the wings off a nasty insect.” Gibbs, it was said, set “standards so high that even he could never attain them,” as these snippets attest:
The Man with Blond Hair, which vanished from the Belasco after seven performances, was a striking example of the effect of lotus-eating on the human mind.
In the course of the piece known as I Killed the Count, which bounced into the Cort one night last week, the audience was permitted to see the same man killed three times by three different people and to hear a fourth confess to the crime. It remained, nevertheless, about the dullest exhibition you can imagine.
Very soon after the curtain rose on A Boy Who Lived Twice, a society matron from Oyster Bay declined a cup of tea offered her by the butler and ordered up a slug of Scotch. “Braxton,” she said frankly, “I’m pooped.” This established the approximate comedic level of last week’s entry at the Biltmore.
Sea Dogs, which blew into the Maxine Elliott, was hard for me to accept as a serious dramatic enterprise, undertaken for profit. The ship was on fire, the captain was drunk, and from where I sat, the audience appeared to be either dead
or asleep.
[Abie’s Irish Rose] had, in fact, the rather eerie quality of a repeated nightmare; the one, perhaps, in which I always find myself in an old well, thick with bats, and can’t get out.
“God, he’s brilliant,” said an anonymous admirer. “He doesn’t like anything.” To which Ross supposedly replied, “Maybe he doesn’t like anything, but he can do everything.”
Actually, Gibbs was always ready to praise good work, often at length, and he was generally perceptive enough to recognize its merits. He found Noël Coward’s Blithe Spirit to be “as deft, malicious, and fascinating a comedy as you could hope to see.” Of Guys and Dolls he declared, “I don’t think I’ve ever had more fun at a musical comedy than I had the other night.” On a more serious level, he was appropriately moved by Death of a Salesman. In describing Arthur Miller’s masterpiece, he acknowledged, he had not done justice in conveying “the quality of his work, of how unerringly he has drawn the portrait of a failure, a man who has broken under the pressures of an economic system that he is fatally incapable of understanding.”
Nonetheless Irwin Shaw, the author of the archetypal New Yorker short story “The Girls in Their Summer Dresses,” made a telling point when he wrote,
Critics in New York are made by their dislikes, not by their enthusiasms. Their bon mots, which are quoted and remembered, are always capsule damnations, cutting and sour. Their reputations and, I suppose, their pay, depend, then, upon disliking plays. Wolcott Gibbs, of the New Yorker, despite his firm resolve to learn nothing about the theatre and to treat it like a garrulous mother-in-law who will stay the winter if given any encouragement, is, in his handsomely written, cranky tirades, often uproariously funny. But when he is trapped into praising a play, his review reads like a paper by an intelligent, somewhat snobbish sophomore at a nice college in a course in contemporary literature, and is forgotten as soon, except by the actors and playwright he reluctantly patted on the head.
Cast of Characters Page 21
