Cast of Characters

by Thomas Vinciguerra

  Shaw’s use of “snobbish” was fitting. Once, when sitting next to Gibbs during a “godawful, sentimental” offering called A Roomful of Roses that had the women in the audience weeping into their handkerchiefs, Henry Hewes of The Saturday Review ventured, “Isn’t this terrible?”

  “Yes,” Gibbs responded.

  “But I feel like some kind of snob,” Hewes continued, “when I see all these women very moved by all this.”

  To which Gibbs replied, “What’s wrong with being a snob?”

  There were other reasons why Gibbs was not enthused by his bailiwick. “I’ve always felt that play criticism was a silly occupation for a grown man,” he said.

  The roots of Gibbs’s dramatic antagonism were planted in childhood. He generally found that whenever his mother took him to see a play, the performance rarely matched his expectations. Ben-Hur and Peter Pan let him down at a young age. So, especially, did The Wizard of Oz. The young Wolcott did not like Dorothy’s adult demeanor or her habit of “detaching herself suddenly from the events around her and singing a song.” He particularly hated the palpably costumed Cowardly Lion: “I was sad enough to cry about him, and whenever I read the Oz books after that, it was never a living lion I saw, but a cloth-and-cardboard one, prancing idiotically on its hind legs.” From incidents like this, Gibbs said, he “began to suspect that all so-called ‘children’s entertainments’ were designed to provide adults with a bogus and condescending nostalgia.”

  Yet it was precisely Gibbs’s sharp eye that made him the ideal candidate to replace his good friend Benchley when Benchley began spending long stretches in Hollywood making his film shorts and leading what Gibbs called “one of the most insanely complicated private lives of our day.” Gibbs’s first theater column, about Eugene O’Neill’s Ah, Wilderness!, appeared in 1933, and as the decade progressed, he pretty much became Benchley’s designated successor. Gentle to the core, Benchley encouraged the arrangement. “Once, shortly after Robert returned [from Hollywood], Gibbs told him that he was going to give up theater reviewing, because no matter how hard he tried, his prose sounded awful,” recalled Benchley’s son Nathaniel. “Robert took him out and bought him a drink, and told him not to worry, that his stuff was fine. ‘I wish I could write as well,’ he concluded. It was what Gibbs described as a grotesque thing to say, but he almost believed that Robert meant it, and that borderline belief was enough to encourage him to continue.” In fact, by late 1938 Benchley was telling Ross that he thought Gibbs was “obviously better on the job than I am in my dotage.”

  And so it was that Gibbs settled into Benchley’s job and an idiosyncratic routine. Typically, he would arise at about ten o’clock. After some coffee and a small breakfast, he would compose his review of whatever he had seen the night before. He usually paced in his living room, scattered with copies of Playbill, as he worked out in his head what he wanted to say. Always there would be three Lucky Strikes smoldering in ashtrays that he had positioned at either end of the room and on a coffee table in the middle. As he walked back and forth he would pick one up, take a puff, set it back down, then continue on to the next ashtray. He thus worked his way through three packs of cigarettes a day while actually smoking only about half that amount. He rarely dressed before he went out in the evening, preferring to do his work in pajamas and a dressing gown. This embarrassed Tony, who avoided bringing friends home, lest they see his father looking as if he had just rolled out of bed.*

  When Gibbs sat down to write his review, he would work in the living room on a Royal portable. He could type only with his right thumb, right forefinger, and left forefinger, having once broken the other digits when jumping down a flight of stairs on a drunken bet. (His left pinky was adorned with a family signet ring made of twenty-two-carat gold so soft that he kept it together with a Band-Aid.) But he more than compensated for his infirmity by typing with such speed that his fingers would quite literally become a blur on the keyboard. He hit the keys so forcefully that after six months of constant pounding, the Royal would begin to break down. After another six months, the machine would be beyond repair, and The New Yorker would supply him with a new one. Between the broken-down Royal, his mangled fingers, his own rapidity, and his mania for expressing himself clearly, his copy was usually full of mistakes. So he would hand this mess, complete with Eagle number-one pencil corrections, to Elinor, who would unscramble it and type a clean copy.

  Eventually Gibbs would get dressed and, with Elinor frequently in tow, proceed from the East 51st Street apartment to the theater district, where he would dine out before the curtain.† Making it to a playhouse should not have been a major ordeal, but it often was. “[T]here are seldom any cabs in the slum area in which I live,” he told his readers, “so that I have to progress dismally and circuitously from East to West underground, usually winding up somewhere in the mysterious catacombs underneath Times Square, where it is said many a man has been lost forever.” He continued:

  The theater itself, on an opening night, isn’t a very comforting place for a nervous man. The old faces (and some of them are getting very old indeed) have the effect of a recurring nightmare: the off-stage conversation is loud and generally facetious, for there is hardly a first-nighter who doesn’t fancy himself as a humorist; the air is almost always either too hot or too cold and strongly charged with the scent of alcohol, perfume and disinfectant; there is rarely any adequate place to dispose of a hat and coat; and again there is the anxiety about getting a cab in the end—a doomed project, since only the first ten or twelve people leaving the theater are likely to be so accommodated and there are those who, after years of experience, can run rings around an antelope.

  These are by no means all the physical discomforts attached to my career—there is, for instance, the matter of trying to make notes on a program in the dark which are apt to say, “Why she keep that goat in the attic?” on inspection the following morning—but they are probably enough. It has sometimes occurred to me that managements would be well advised to furnish each critic with a good stiff drink of something or other on his arrival at his seat, but I’m afraid this idea will never really take hold, the consensus among producers being that a writing man operates best in a state of faint uneasiness and melancholy.

  From time to time, Gibbs would try to ameliorate these conditions. He brought Elinor with him as much for her ability to magically find a taxi amid the postcurtain crush as for her companionship. And periodically he would buy unreliable trick pen-and-flashlight combinations at novelty shops, hoping they would help him scrawl his notes with some degree of legibility in the dark. But they never quite worked. He was forever jotting cryptic, even indecipherable messages like “Lanchstr get face stuck I these nights awful if.”

  What with his job challenges, his natural irascibility, and the mediocrity he so often witnessed onstage, Gibbs quickly acquired a reputation as a hanging judge. Frequently he would be so unimpressed by what was being unfurled that he would simply cross his arms and glower. Or he would cup his chin in his hand and feign sleep. Not infrequently he did pass out, either from inebriation or from sheer boredom. So did Elinor. Once she awoke suddenly in the middle of an act and blurted out, “What are all these people doing in my bedroom?”

  Often he was so appalled by the proceedings that he would not stick around. Regarding Sleep, My Pretty One, by Charlie and Oliver H. P. Garrett, he wrote, “There was said to be a brief flurry of excitement toward the end of the third act, but unfortunately, I wasn’t there by then.” When it came to the “massacre” that was Stanley Richards’s Marriage Is for Single People, he departed “while the malady was still in its primary stages.”

  He may have left early, but his judgment was usually acute. “He was always right,” said Geraghty’s assistant, Frank Modell. In The Yale Review, Vernon Young said that Gibbs’s criticism was “unique and indispensable” and “surely unsurpassed for its purpose by any weekly jester since The Age of Dryden.” Young exulted, “I would forgive him anyth
ing—even poisoning.”

  But if he had admirers, he had far more detractors. Charles Cooke, a former New Yorker employee, once told Ross that Gibbs not only had a “sick critical viewpoint” but that his old boss had begun to “confuse Gibbs’ little-boy ‘I hate everything’ complex with true sophistication.” (“You don’t suck me into any argument on Gibbs,” Ross shot back.) After Gibbs dismissed Lillian Hellman’s The Searching Wind, Dashiell Hammett consoled her: “I read the Gibbs review last night and a nasty little puppyish affair it is. Jesus, the impudence of the little when they happen not to like something! It fills them with all the power of a beauty contest judge.” His pan of The Biggest Thief in Town by Dalton Trumbo, which lasted all of thirteen performances, brought this outraged letter from the author:

  Dear Mr. Gibbs:

  I have just read your obstinately wrong-headed review of The Biggest Thief in Town.

  I call to your attention the sentence, “Unfortunately, Mr. Trumbo, whatever his gifts as a political thinker may be,” is a dull dog, etc.

  The very wording of the comment indicates that here I have you on unfamiliar ground. Please, therefore, be informed that my gifts as a political thinker are of a very high order.

  Other assaults were even more savage. A dozen supporters of Flahooley, an overblown puppet show whose book and lyrics were the work of no less than “Yip” Harburg (“I’d avoid it if I were you,” Gibbs wrote), called his review “the most stupid thing we have ever read.” Above their collective signature they wrote DOWN WITH GIBBS. Calling Gibbs “egregious,” Eric Bentley said he disguised his “barbarism in the sheep’s clothing of a dilettante” and that his “special contribution is an attempt to legitimize philistine prejudice.” Raymond Chandler felt similarly:

  The fact that Gibbs (together with other New Yorker critical minds) is gifted with a talent for derogatory criticism doesn’t necessarily make him a good critic. I remember, long ago, when I was doing book-reviews [sic] in London, that my first impulse always was to find something smart and nasty to say because that sort of writing is so much easier. In spite of its superficial sophistication, the whole attitude of the New Yorker seems to me to have that same touch of under-graduate [sic] sarcasm. I find this sort of thing rather juvenile.

  For a while, Gibbs felt obliged to respond to the criticisms of his criticisms. But this quickly proved impossibly time-consuming. He solved the problem very simply. To anyone who questioned his judgment, he would send a form response that read, “Dear Sir [or Madam]: You may be right. Sincerely, Wolcott Gibbs.”

  Gibbs was quite capable of missing the mark. By his own admission, he was tone-deaf and so could not wholly appreciate musicals. “I have no idea how the damn things get there in the first place,” he acknowledged. Mel Brooks once asked him, “Mr. Gibbs, why did you never give a musical a good review?” He could be as capricious as anyone. “When youth and beauty walk on the stage,” he said, “to hell with Sarah Bernhardt.” And like other critics—Alexander Woollcott included—he was capable of putting himself out on embarrassing limbs. “Every now and then he goes off on a book or a play, liking it when nobody else can stomach a word of it and it is usually a one-joke book or a one-joke play,” observed The Harvard Crimson. “A few years ago he liked a musical called Park Avenue which flopped. It was one long, dull joke about intermarriage and divorce in the Park Avenue set. But Gibbs raved about it, for what must be curious reasons.”

  Gibbs could sometimes be grievously wrong not just critically but factually. Although he admired South Pacific, he thought it bore little resemblance to James Michener’s original source material. Michener and his friend Herman Silverman were outraged. “We decided to call Gibbs and tell him what a jerk he was,” Silverman recalled. “To our gratification, Gibbs apologized and explained that he had used as his reference a paperback edition of Jim’s book which omitted the two stories upon which the musical was based.” Gibbs’s explanation seems improbable in the extreme, but Silverman bought it.

  He engaged in a delicate balance with playwrights, producers, cast members, and all the other interrelated parts of the incestuous Broadway culture. Fair comment being what it is, there was usually no recourse for the stricken. At one point James Reilly, executive director of the League of New York Theatres, protested that Gibbs was guilty of “continual carping,” having sneered at nearly half of Broadway’s recent twenty-five openings, dismissing Tennessee Williams’s Summer and Smoke as “cloudy and monotonous” and Jean-Paul Sartre’s Red Gloves as “slightly irritating.” In an internal memo, Ross brushed aside the charge: “Mr. Reilly’s is funniest letter of the month.”

  Still, blood was occasionally drawn. When Apple of His Eye, by Kenyon Nicholson and Charles Robinson, failed to impress Gibbs early in 1946, the producer, Jed Harris, refused to send him press tickets to his fall production of Loco, the undistinguished handiwork of Dale Eunson and Katherine Albert. Gibbs outwitted Harris by quoting several negative reviews from some of the New York dailies and deduced, “On the whole, it seems possible that Mr. Harris sent his tickets out to quite a lot of undesirable people.” The incident became so well publicized that when Congressman Emanuel Celler scrutinized the Shubert organization some years later, he cited it as one of the reasons for his investigation.

  Curiously, Gibbs enjoyed a respectful, even admiring, relationship with many of those on whom he passed judgment. Theater people would often genuflect before him. Linda Kramer, a childhood friend of Gibbs’s daughter, Janet, saw them do so at “21” and other pre- and post-Broadway venues. “It was quite exciting because he was terribly important. He was sort of an idol.”

  Of course, it helped if he liked their work. Even before he publicly declared Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Oklahoma! “a completely enchanting performance—gay, stylish, imaginative, and equipped with some of the best music and dancing in a long time,” he crossed the length of Sardi’s to shake hands with the choreographer, Agnes de Mille. “I want to congratulate you,” he said. “That was most distinguished.” The praise, de Mille said, left her “in a sort of stupor.” Similarly, when he extolled Tallulah Bankhead in The Circle, she was so taken that she later entertained him while he was in the hospital. “I put on a one-woman floor show designed to cure or kill,” she wrote in her memoirs. “The nurses swore it was the most exciting vaudeville ever seen on the floor. Without music, too! After the drubbing I had taken in Cleopatra, Gibbs’ words had been nectar. I would have married him on the spot, had not the venture involved double bigamy.”

  Gibbs’s most gratifying, problematic, and complex relations with the Broadway set were with his fellow critics and columnists. In the 1940s and 1950s their pronouncements on live dramatic entertainment were practically gospel, and they were accorded commensurate respect. The producer Mike Todd once commissioned a four-by-thirty-six-inch painting of six of the day’s leading critics—Gibbs included—holding up their enthusiastic reviews of his musical As the Girls Go. This was transmuted into a billboard measuring 26 feet high and 156 feet long above the Winter Garden Theatre, where the production was playing. All together Todd paid more than ten thousand dollars for the effort. Dozens of Broadway tastemakers were similarly canonized in an Al Hirschfeld mural called “First Nighters” that once adorned a curving wall behind the bar of the Hotel Manhattan on West 44th Street at Eighth Avenue. Gibbs, squeezed in at the far left, was caricatured with a boutonniere, sallow expression, cigarette in drooping hand and rail-thin corpus.

  Amid the first-night crush, and the competition with the other press, Gibbs navigated his way among his fellows. His closest confidant was John Mason Brown, the elegant, Harvard-educated reviewer for the New York Post and, later, The Saturday Review. “[F]rom time to time I seem to be in disagreement with a great many of your opinions,” Gibbs told him, “but it is all so literate and charming and persuasive that I am often almost convinced against my own strong, interior judgments.” When, in 1942, Brown left the Post to fight the war, Gibbs remarked that opening night
s seemed “pretty bleak and strange” without him. In turn, Brown congratulated Gibbs as “the best parodist to have written since Beerbohm.”

  But for the most part, Gibbs regarded his peers askance. Some, like George Jean Nathan of Esquire and The American Mercury, merely amused him. “Mr. Nathan can be moderately silly when his special prejudices are involved” and “I am embarrassed to admit that Mr. Nathan fascinates me somewhat more as a genial essayist than as a critic” were representative jabs. When Russell Crouse found himself captivated by a blond actress named Lorna Lynn, he told Gibbs that he hoped to marry her. After a moment’s thought, Gibbs responded, “George Jean Nathan probably will.”

  In a rather different fashion he actively despised Burton Rascoe of the World-Telegram. Their enmity dated to the 1920s, when Rascoe was writing for the Great Neck News, the regional rival of Gibbs’s North Hempstead Record. By the 1940s Gibbs thought that Rascoe, like his old nemesis Woollcott, had become excessively self-indulgent; he called his column “Burton’s Anatomy of Rascoe.” To Brown he confided, “I’m sure Mr. Rascoe is a moral man, but he isn’t decorative and I’m damned if he knows what he’s talking about most of the time.” Rascoe in turn called Gibbs “the New Yorker’s tired young man of the theater.” More seriously, he accused Gibbs of plagiarism. In 1943, after Rascoe wrote a review of Men in Shadow by Mary Hayley Bell, he noted curious similarities between some of his phraseology and certain Gibbs sentences that appeared in The New Yorker some days later. This raised Gibbs’s hackles. “I have done many terrible things in my life,” he said, “but I have never robbed the poor box.”