Cast of Characters

by Thomas Vinciguerra

  Conversely, White wrestled with his decision to exile himself. He conscientiously tended to his agrarian responsibilities, to Katharine, and to Harper’s. But as war began to rage, he felt somehow obliged to do something more, even as he realized he would likely stay on the sidelines:

  Maine suddenly seems too remote to satisfy my nervous desire to help in a bad situation. My reason tells me that I can contribute most effectively by staying right here and continuing to produce large quantities of hens’ eggs and to write my stuff every month; but the human system seems to demand something which has more of the air of bustle and confusion. I may try for a job in Washington, in the high realms of propaganda. Or the draft board, locally, may settle the whole matter for me with one quick swoop. I’m only 42, and most of my teeth still show through the gooms [sic]. Here, anybody with natural teeth is taken for the army. There are only three or four of us in the whole county. My wife being an earning girl, gives me no deferment, and I expect none.

  Soon enough he would make his particular contribution to the war effort and continue to break through as a writer by putting together a memorable Harper’s essay collection—one that he told Harper and Brothers would not be “another one of those Adventures in Contentment, or as an Escape from the City, or How to Farm with a Portable Corona.” For the moment, he contented himself editing, with Katharine, A Subtreasury of American Humor. This 804-page anthology, published just before Pearl Harbor, was a cross-section of its title subject, its nearly two hundred entries running the gamut from Benjamin Franklin to Mark Twain to S. J. Perelman. Immodestly, nearly a third of the pieces came from The New Yorker, with seven entries by Thurber, six by Gibbs, and four by White.

  But beyond his glib assertion that the preponderance of New Yorker material “should surprise nobody,” White scored a poignant point in his preface: “One of the things commonly said about humorists is that they are really very sad people—clowns with a breaking heart. There is some truth to it, but it is badly stated. It would be more accurate, I think, to say that there is a deep vein of melancholy running through everyone’s life and that a humorist, perhaps more sensible of it than some others, compensates for it actively and positively.” As proof of his ever-deepening commitment to Katharine, he gave her free rein to edit his words: “[G]et right after it and give it the works,” he told her. “I trust you absolutely to doctor it any way you think it should be doctored. . . . The most important thing, of course, is that you bring a ruthlessly critical mind to my facts and my theories.”

  The book, translated into French and German, was a success, selling tens of thousands of copies. The Columbia University philosopher Irwin Edman not only likened White to Thoreau and Montaigne but called him “our finest essayist, perhaps our only one.” Gibbs gave the Whites the highest praise he could, declaring, “Everybody thinks it is a fine book, including me.” That was not quite true; O’Hara, thin-skinned as usual and not especially funny, was miffed that he was not represented. But Gibbs assured Andy and Katharine, “The O’Hara omission isn’t anything to worry your heads about, I think. John says he is a God damn [sic] sight funnier than Clarence Day, but more or less dispassionately. At the moment he is sore at too many people right here in New York to fuss about anybody in Maine. Anyway, he is drunk most of the time.”

  Thurber, meanwhile, was feeling his age. He was a relative latecomer to fatherhood; his only child, Rosemary, was born in 1931, when he was thirty-six. By late 1938 he was confiding to White, “I am an older man, with my youth definitely behind me and fifty around the corner.” Like White, he had a taste for the rustic; when married to Althea, he had lived for a time in a 125-year-old farmhouse on twenty acres near Sandy Hook, in Connecticut. There he found himself comforted by “the intermittent fall of apples from my apple trees.” Later, with Helen, he settled in Litchfield. Its pastoral nature, while still not too far removed from Manhattan, proved to be the perfect tonic for Thurber’s ever-active mind, Helen recalled: “He could feel the greenness.” Thurber would operate from Connecticut for much of the rest of his life, eventually moving to West Cornwall, where his cherished friends would come to include Mark Van Doren.*

  As was the case with Ross in Stamford, Thurber found his Connecticut digs to be far enough removed to give him breathing room from New York but still close enough to take advantage of its amenities. When in Manhattan, Thurber would often stay at the Algonquin. On one excursion he ran into Gibbs, McKelway, Dorothy Parker, Mosher, Robert M. Coates, and Lois Long, among others, in rapid succession, in the lobby. The experience left him “worn and a little depressed,” and he was relieved to retreat from Gotham: “It is nice to be back under the 200-year-old maples and the apple trees.” To complicate matters, his blindness was becoming worse; in June 1941 alone he had five eye operations. “[H]e cannot go out alone, has to be led around, except indoors, where he is very agile,” Helen confided. “And the worst is that he cannot read or draw. He writes in longhand on yellow paper, but cannot see what he writes, and you know his painstaking method of writing and rewriting.”

  Thurber did his best to make light of the situation. “A blind man benefits by a lack of distractions,” he explained. “I remember sitting with Ross at a table in this restaurant. He picked up a bottle of Worcestershire sauce and then threw it down, saying, ‘Goddamit, that’s the 10,000th time I’ve read the label on this bottle.’ I told him, ‘Godammit, Harold, that’s because you’re handicapped by vision.’ ” Thurber also claimed that his blindness benefited him with the writer’s blessing of total recall.

  Still, when not recovering, he traveled widely, not only within the United States but to Europe and Bermuda and entered the most creatively satisfying and wide-ranging period of his life. Stories like “The Whip-Poor-Will” (1941) and “The Catbird Seat” (1942) were among the pieces that established him as the leading sardonic authority on the battle of the sexes. There was, too, the success of The Male Animal and of Many Moons, a 1943 fairy story about a sick princess who pines for the moon; the latter won the prestigious Caldecott Medal for the most distinguished American picture book for children. Within the calendar year of 1939, Thurber published the more than two dozen vignettes that constituted “Fables for Our Time.” Populated with animals that generally learn life’s lessons the hard way, these Aesop-like yarns were so brief and cleverly constructed that their counterintuitive punch lines, like “It is better to ask some of the questions than to know all of the answers,” came as genuine surprises.

  And, of course, there was 1939’s “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty,” starring the archetypal Thurber man. In this case the hapless husband escapes from domestic routine and his pushy wife by recourse to outlandish fantasies—envisioning himself as a heroic navy pilot, a dexterous surgeon, a fearless courtroom defendant, et al., ending with his defiant death by firing squad—only to be constantly brought back to reality. The story became one of the most anthologized in American literature, its immortality guaranteed when it was reprinted in Reader’s Digest in 1943 and devoured by troops who, like their civilian counterparts, saw at least some Mitty in themselves. Robert Benchley starred in a 1944 radio adaptation (of which Thurber approved); there was also a 1947 Technicolor Danny Kaye vehicle (of which Thurber did not approve). So impressed was Ross with this jewel of a piece, which deftly conveyed the daydreams of Everyman, that he told Thurber, “In your way you are just about the all-time master of them all, by Jesus, and you have come a long way since the old N.Y. Evening Post days.”

  Gibbs had also come a long way from his cub reporter background. Despite the distractions of work and family, he now had at least some time to devote to his few cherished pastimes. He had enjoyed tennis since prep school and had honed his skill under the tutelage of his publisher cousin Lloyd Carpenter Griscom at Huntover, Griscom’s country place on Long Island’s Gold Coast. If Griscom had hired him at the East Norwich Enterprise at their cousin Alice Duer Miller’s urging, Gibbs also suspected that his ability to bat a ball back and fort
h with his weekend guests got him the job. Not that he had any objection. “As much as anything else, I guess, I would have liked to instruct an endless succession of beautiful young women to play tennis,” Gibbs said. “The only trouble with that was that I didn’t really play tennis very well.” Still, he held his own with his colleagues Lobrano and Kinkead.

  For such a physically slight man (he weighed only 135 pounds while standing five foot ten), Gibbs had an active interest in burly sports. He would diagram baseball proceedings painstakingly, sometimes sending detailed reports to such like-minded friends as Alec Waugh. “As you will note,” Gibbs told him following a Dodgers-Cubs encounter, “there was a rather interesting play in the second inning when [Gil] Hodges reached first on a single and then scored on two successive errors by the Chicago first-baseman, who dropped the ball on an easy pick-off play and then overthrew second, with the ball winding up in the outfield.” His real passion, when it came to the diamond, was going to the Polo Grounds, even though he knew his trips were usually wasted. “He kept on rooting for the Giants, as he once said, as if he were rooting for the brontosaurus,” recalled Tony.

  He was intensely interested in boxing as well, as evidenced by his part ownership of Eddie Edge. In keeping with his feel for the aesthetics of the theater, he appreciated the pure movement of the sweet science, cheering on true pugilists and disparaging mere hitters. He admired Sugar Ray Robinson, found Rocky Marciano boring, loved Joe Louis, and felt Max Baer underrated, faulting him only because “he sleep-walked through his talent.” For a man so finicky about what he witnessed on stage, Gibbs took a perverse pleasure in boxing’s seamier aspects; with his compatriots John Lardner and A. J. Liebling he lapped up the fouls and other low-blowing that took place within the ring. Nor did he restrict himself to the reasonably respectable forum of Madison Square Garden; among his preferred venues was the “really seedy, smelly pigpen” that was the St. Nicholas Arena.

  Gibbs’s nonsporting interests were few. He enjoyed poker and took on such well-heeled opponents as Raoul Fleischmann. Sometimes the stakes got a tad high. Louis Kronenberger of PM once came late to a Gibbs game and ended up sitting “next to a man I had never seen before who, I suddenly discovered, was packing a rod, or at any rate wearing a holster containing a revolver.”

  For all his interest in sports and cards, the high-strung Gibbs found he needed relief of a far more elemental sort. As Ross went to Aspen to reconnect with his roots, and Thurber paid court to Columbus, so Gibbs tried to get in touch with his own background by dropping in at Hauxhurst, the one-time estate of Alice Duer Miller’s grandfather, in Weehawken. He recorded this haunting snapshot for Nancy Hale:

  There is still a hollow place in the lawn where my cousin and I and two Townley girls dug a cave where we could get undressed and paint ourselves, or each other, with water colors [sic]. The dawn of the biological urge, and look where it’s got me. There is also a place under a tree where I buried, with more horror of the spirit than I have ever known since, a stray cat I shot. Up in the attic . . . I have found a trunkful of children’s books, which suggest a New Yorker piece long enough to buy you a small automobile. Things like “Slovenly Peter,” “Little Black Sambo” and so on, and the interesting thing about them is that they’re the cruellest [sic] books I’ve ever read, full of pictures of children who were unkind to animals and were subsequently eaten, in full view of the reader, by irritated cats and dogs.

  These were morbid memories. Gibbs found more genuine relaxation in a place he had occasionally visited when he spent his prep school summers with his aunt Elizabeth, uncle Carroll, and cousin Dan in Merrick. It was a spit of land thirty-two miles long and less than a mile wide, “stretched out like a basking lizard” about five and a half miles south of Long Island across the Great South Bay.

  John Chapin Mosher had preceded Gibbs as a Fire Island denizen by a couple of years, staking out turf with his boyfriend Philip Claflin. They did so at Cherry Grove, a haven for what were then called “nances” who required discretion and distance. Mosher helped bring Fire Island to public attention, publishing three short stories about it in The New Yorker in the spring and summer of 1939. By this time the place was already becoming a refuge for writers, entertainers, advertising executives, “party animals and old-fashioned families” who craved summertime peace.

  If Hauxhurst reawakened Gibbs’s childhood jitters, Fire Island rejuvenated its joys. During his young summers, it had been a place where he could, however temporarily, get out from under the death of his father, the separation from his mother, and the miseries of boarding school. Now he was determined to turn back the clock, reminiscing, “Most people these days seem to have had miserable childhoods, but I had a hell of a time.” Soaking up the rays, his toes scrunching the shore, he was atypically happy. “I am a child of the sun,” he told Nancy Hale, “and in the summer I am happy, singing from morning till night, but when it gets cold I die.”

  Gibbs and his Merrick relatives had sailed all over the South Shore during the years before, during, and after World War I. His cousin Dan, a natural seaman, had taken Wolcott in hand, literally showing him the ropes as he instructed him in the basics of boat handling. Gibbs wrote any number of paeans to Fire Island for “Comment,” none more heartfelt than the one he composed about the clinker-built Sea Bright dory powered by a one-cylinder, two-cycle inboard make-or-break Eagle engine that his family presented to him in 1916, when he was fourteen. “It could do three miles an hour,” he remembered fondly, “except when the weedless propeller enmeshed itself hopelessly in weeds.”

  When Gibbs began coming out to Fire Island as an adult in 1936, it was a true getaway; the only telephone within reach was at the local firehouse. A telegraph office connected the island to the outside world, and it was here that Ross, much to Gibbs’s annoyance, would periodically try to reach him. Then as now, no automobiles were permitted. Once they departed from their various ferries, visitors would pile their luggage and belongings into little wagons and trundle them along a maze of interconnected boardwalks until they reached their residences. Local boys would make a killing by charging less able-bodied vacationers for this service. So ubiquitous were these carts that when John Lardner bought a Fire Island home from a psychoanalyst, “she told him solemnly that the natives were a strange species indeed, biological mutants somewhat on the order of the centaurs. ‘Their front portions,’ she said, ‘are human, but their rear portions are shaped like a boy’s express wagon with a suitcase in it.’ ”

  Although there was some overlap and mixing among the cultures that constituted Fire Island’s twenty or so communities, most had distinct identities. Cherry Grove, of course, was for gays, as was the neighboring Pines. Saltaire, on the other hand, was “stuffy or Victorian, perhaps even mainlandish.” Fair Harbor would come to attract many actors; Seaview was known as “Scarsdale-by-the-Sea,” whereas Gibbs characterized Point O’Woods as “a sort of Brooklyn Southampton.” Straight, single men and women came to favor Davis Park. Gibbs chose Ocean Beach, a family-oriented enclave that, by virtue of its size and amenities, including the telegraph office, was the de facto capital. Each house in every community had its own name; before settling into The Studio, Gibbs rented a one-story, green-trimmed affair called The Normandie. It was dubbed after a painting of the famed ocean liner that hung over the fireplace; another painting of the ship also adorned the back of the living room, a double image that thoroughly confused some guests.

  The collection of boldface names that flocked to Fire Island in those days included Fanny Brice, Billy Rose, Bea Lillie, George and Ira Gershwin, Jimmy Durante, Leslie Howard, Moss Hart, and Helen Hayes. Another notable was Polly Adler, a notorious New York madam whose clients included Benchley. “Everyone’s absolutely up in arms and appalled and horrified that this Adler creature’s roaming around loose on the island, and they say on a talent hunt,” exclaimed a regular. Still, like most of her neighbors, Adler kept a low profile, as nightlife was generally confined to one’s
home. The few night spots included Flynn’s, Maguire’s, the Bayview, and Goldie’s, this last the personal provenance of Lou “Goldie” Hawkins, an accomplished cocktail pianist and Manhattan nightclub owner. He hailed from Fort Deposit, Alabama, and referred to his namesake establishment as “my caravansary.”

  The locals were as memorable as the summer people. Blanche Pastorfield, the hunchbacked landlady of the hotel in Crest O’Dune, was a “demon” who treated her customers with contempt. “She insulted them and overcharged them and threw them out when she got sick of them,” Gibbs recalled, “but they’d got the idea that she was a picturesque old character, a wonderful, rather obscene joke that they’d made up all by themselves, and so they put up with her.” The unofficial chief of the beach was her husband, Jerry, “a man with a face like Punch and a body like Santa Claus. . . . There were no shoes on his feet, which he washed intermittently by the lazy October tide.” Pastorfield didn’t hesitate to throw his weight around. Following a major hurricane that swept away a number of beachside houses, a major debate ensued about whether it made more sense to plant sea grass or create more dunes to prevent further erosion. Although the majority of residents voted in favor of sea grass, Pastorfield owned the only bulldozer around and was thus able to impose his minority will by piling up the sand.