Cast of Characters

by Thomas Vinciguerra

  This mix of personalities and attitudes, so closely jammed together, made for many neuroses. When the vaudevillian Joe Laurie first beheld Fire Island, he declared it “an island booby hatch,” “a sandy insane asylum,” and “a whole island loaded with nuts, running around and playing with toys.” Gibbs himself acknowledged, “They are a very strange people out there, either imperturbable or mad.” Many were also unfaithful. During the summer, wives and children would unwind in the sun for weeks at a time while their menfolk toiled in New York; in their absence, the women would have casual affairs with the resident gardeners, local merchants, and handymen. That would all come to an end every late Friday afternoon, when the ferry known as the “daddy boat” arrived, carrying husbands and fathers. Upon its approach, many a blue-collar Lothario would beat a hasty retreat out a rear door or bedroom window.

  On Fire Island, at least, Gibbs was not much of a canoodler. Sometimes, emboldened by booze, he would make a pass. Arthur Gelb, who married the stepdaughter of Gibbs’s firm friend Sam Behrman, remembered an occasion when Gibbs was seated between two women who were wearing shorts. “At one point—there were a few people in the room—he put his left hand on one’s thigh and his other on the other woman’s thigh. And he started creeping up. They were admirers and they were paralyzed.” Finally, Gelb remembered, one victim grabbed the other, and together they left. “If they hadn’t moved, I think he would have gotten there.”

  Though content to be ensconced in his sanctuary, Gibbs was within striking distance of O’Hara in Quogue and Addams in Westhampton Beach. He kept in rather less close touch with the cantankerous former than with the outgoing latter. Fire Island inspired one of Addams’s better-remembered cartoons; it entailed the two Addams Family children being delivered to their mother and father in animal cages, with the slim wife announcing to her creepy husband, “It’s the children, darling—back from camp.” As Addams recalled much later, “My then-wife and I were sharing a cottage at Fire Island with another couple and the children were especially recalcitrant and the wife said, ‘Well, the children are coming from camp next week,’ and there was the idea already for it. I mean, the animal carriers was the instant thought.”

  Gibbs regarded the summer as sacrosanct, reserved for a genuine recharging of batteries, and he felt that others should follow his example. With simultaneous awe and horror, he recalled Moss Hart being the only writer he had ever known who could type a play in the sand. For a while he lived up the street from Alfred Bester, who would write his stories on his front porch. “Every time he passed our cottage and saw me working,” Bester remembered, “he would denounce me.”

  Dyspeptic though he was, Gibbs came to love many of the locals and summer folk. There was a perennial parade of comers and goers; an obese Liebling once got caught in a deck chair and couldn’t get out. Behrman was a neighbor, and Gibbs attempted to strike up an uncle-type relationship with his son, David, by discussing sports, in which David had no interest. “He would say something about the baseball season, and I wouldn’t know what to say.” David had a rather more successful relationship with Janet, Gibbs’s daughter; as teenagers, they would end up dating.

  Other good friends from Manhattan were Nancy and Henry Stern. The latter, always known as “Bunny”—because he hopped as a baby—was president of a men’s clothing manufacturer; the former was a theater producer. Susan, their daughter, recalled seeing plenty of Addams on Fire Island: “I especially remember him standing in back of my mother while she was trying to get me to finish a meal, making faces and making me laugh, but every time mom turned around to see what was going on, he was deadpan.”

  And as he did with David Behrman, Gibbs took a shine to the Sterns’ son, Morley, who was confusingly nicknamed “Tony.” One time he invited the young man out to Ocean Beach on a lonely weekend. But as Sunday afternoon drew on and Tony Stern was preparing for the ferry back to Long Island, Gibbs began drinking heavily at the prospect of a separation. “He started getting mean,” Tony said, “as if I was walking away and he was alone again.”

  The most colorful member of the cadre was Valentine Sherry, a diamond merchant by trade, a producer by occasional whim, and a bon vivant and true eccentric at all times. Generally sporting a cravat and a silk handkerchief, the chunky Sherry wore a Jerry Colonna–type moustache dyed as black as his hair. At his many dinner parties, he served hot grapefruit as an appetizer. He had a taste for offbeat gifts, once giving the singer Joanna Simon, the daughter of the publisher Richard Simon, a diamond “smaller than a grain of rice” and trying to track down some of Elinor’s silent movies to present to her. For Sherry, mechanical objects were objects to be mastered and abused. He once arranged for a cherry picker to smash through the outside wall of his third-floor diamond office on Canal Street at four in the morning to retrieve a safe. His odder qualities notwithstanding, Sherry was a talented amateur photographer and, on Gibbs’s porch, snapped the critic’s favorite picture of himself—lying with shirt off in a deck chair, its cushioning decorated with nautical motifs, while flipping through the Sunday New York Times, sunglasses dangling from his lips. The photo reflected Gibbs’s peace with his environment and adorned the back cover of More in Sorrow.

  Gibbs’s best friend on Fire Island, and perhaps anywhere, was the Ocean Beach realtor Bill Birmingham. Born in Brooklyn, he worked on commercial fishing boats and, like Gibbs, became acquainted with Fire Island as a teenager. He joined the Coast Guard during Prohibition and cruised Lake Champlain on the lookout for Canadian whiskey smuggling. Come World War II, he was attached to the British wing of the Normandy invasion. Birmingham was rock solid physically and emotionally; broad-shouldered, six feet tall, and two hundred pounds in his prime, he had huge hands and looked like a prizefighter. But “he had an almost boyish enthusiasm about him, and he was quick to lend a helping hand.” Gibbs was fascinated by his mechanical abilities, his natural skill as a raconteur, and his dependability in general. “He was as good a friend to my father as Charles Addams,” said Tony. “A marvelous guy, marvelous.” It was to Birmingham whom Gibbs dedicated More in Sorrow.

  With the raw material of these and other acquaintances, his ever widening familiarity with Fire Island, and some imagination, Gibbs set about writing a group of short stories about his favorite place. In doing so, he was treading on what was by now familiar New Yorker literary ground—the semiconnected series. Among the better known examples were O’Hara’s “Pal Joey” letters; Frank Sullivan’s “Cliché Expert,” which employed nothing but threadbare expressions to testify on everything from war to tabloids; Ruth McKenney’s autobiographical yarns about herself and her free-spirited sister, Eileen, which became the musical Wonderful Town; and of course, Clarence Day’s “Father” stories.

  Appearing in issues that spanned November 10, 1945, to September 14, 1946, Gibbs’s nine entries ran under the rubric “Season in the Sun.” Among the island folk he thinly disguised were the Pastorfields as the “Jermyns” and Polly Adler as “Molly Burden.” At the core of the stories was the Crane family: George (Gibbs), his wife, Emily (Elinor), son Billy (Tony), and daughter Marcia (Janet). Curiously, Gibbs revealed very little about his alter ego, George. Instead, he assigned much of his own background to a bland, Princeton-educated construct named “Mark Anderson.” To Anderson, Gibbs ascribed his unfortunate marriage to Helen Galpin, his Long Island newspaper days, and what he regarded as his own mediocre way with words: “He had one of those polite, derivative talents that are often regarded as terribly promising on the campus but never seem to come to very much later.”

  The format proved flexible enough to accommodate a variety of approaches. “Song at Twilight” was a droll, meandering sketch about a shaggy-dog story being told amid general booziness on a porch at dusk, while the fairly serious “The Foreign Population” concerns a little boy who is rebuked for his budding anti-Semitism. The most haunting of the bunch was the deeply allegorical “Crusoe’s Footprint.” Against the backdrop of an approaching hurricane, G
eorge and Emily walk along the beach, making small talk until they encounter a woman’s moccasins, along with her eyeglasses and a watch. Having seen no one in either direction, they conclude she has drowned. Despite Emily’s protests, George plunges into the churning surf to find her and nearly dies in the process. In the end, the young woman is discovered to be safe, and the Cranes are taken home in a Coast Guard jeep to escape the storm—with George feeling foolish and Emily sound asleep.

  At the other extreme was the out-and-out comedy “The Cat on the Roof,” based on a visit of the “extremely disreputable” playgirl Leonore Lemmon, who achieved her greatest fame as the girlfriend of the actor George Reeves. Disguising her as “Deedy Barton,” Gibbs composed a vignette drawn almost entirely from real life. “What happened was that her cat got stuck up on my roof and she drunkenly turned in a fire alarm and the whole village came to my house to watch,” he told Sam Behrman. “It’s just the kind of thing that would really drive the character in these stories crazy.”

  It was the kind of thing guaranteed to drive Gibbs crazy as well. As gregarious as he could be with friends and associates, he distrusted strangers and interlopers. A solid wooden railing encircled The Studio’s porch, and Gibbs would routinely drop down behind it to shield himself from the gaze of passersby. He relished his quiet. “We ourself would like to see it made a federal offence [sic] to play a portable radio on a beach,” he wrote in “Comment.”

  In contrast to his dapper appearance at The New Yorker, Gibbs would neglect his appearance while on vacation, routinely going for a week without shaving. He donned khakis or a bathing suit and sported a light Mexican Guayabera shirt of which he was so fond that he wore it until it literally dissolved in the wash. He became a heliotrope, lying on the beach for hours at a time, his thin knees tucked up under his chin, his hair becoming so bleached and his skin so dark that he would come to be likened to a photographer’s negative. “A man with an impressive coat of tan may still be an almost total physical wreck, a perennial bankrupt, and a stupefying bore,” he wrote, “but so powerful is the tradition that a well-bronzed skin postulates health, wealth, and strange adventures in distant lands that his chances for social, financial, and even amorous advancement are usually excellent.”

  When not tanning, Gibbs could often be found, like White, afloat. Whereas White sailed, Gibbs cruised in a succession of powerboats, all named after Elinor. And he fished, usually for fluke or flounder but sometimes for weakfish and bluefish. To attract blues, Gibbs would chum with ground-up menhaden—an oily, bony specimen otherwise used for fertilizer and cat food—through a most unusual means of dispersal: he would purchase a five-gallon drum of the stuff, open it up, then turn it upside down onto a makeshift toilet built under the port front seat. He often went fishing alone but would frequently pair up with Birmingham or Tony; at one point he went out daily with Richard Adler, the composer and lyricist of The Pajama Game.

  Gibbs was a good enough angler, and sometimes he lucked out. One Sunday he caught a twenty-pound striped bass and went over to Behrman’s house to make a present of it. There he found Arthur Gelb, who told him that Behrman “had locked himself in his room and might not reappear until summer’s end. Gibbs, crestfallen, left. But he returned with his fish a few hours later, wobbly from the effects of alcohol. Berrie was still in his room, I informed him.

  “ ‘By God,’ said Gibbs, ‘he’s a hard man to give a fish to.’ ”

  * The actor Sam Waterston currently lives in Thurber’s West Cornwall house.

  CHAPTER 10

  “ALWAYS POISON”

  Gibbs’s bizarre fish episode was shorthand for a whole catalog of alcohol-related misbehavior by New Yorker types. Alec Waugh might have put it most succinctly when he wrote, of the crew’s bibulous habits, “Every drink was an adventure; every drink was a protest against an outrageous imposition of authority.”

  The New Yorker had been forged during the Noble Experiment of Prohibition, and befitting its stated purpose as a conveyer of metropolitan wit and gaiety, the magazine devoted no small portion of its early contents to the nightlife that surrounded the flourishing and surreptitious trade in illegally manufactured potables. In those days, it was officially estimated that there were as many as one hundred thousand speakeasies in the five boroughs. In his 1927 story “Speakeasy Nights,” Niven Busch painted a memorable portrait of one such establishment that came equipped with a side entrance, a tinny piano playing “Baby Face,” and an electric dumbwaiter that would, at the touch of a button, dump liquor bottles into the cellar in case of a raid. Even before he began at The New Yorker, Gibbs drove from Long Island to Manhattan “to spend the afternoon at a resort known as 40 East 60th Street, where tired young men gather to drink tea and jerk bored damsels through the Charleston and Black Bottom.” And after he arrived at the magazine, he wrote of a hangout that was ostensibly located in the basement of the Argonaut National Bank. “The liquor,” he said sourly, “is not very good—you’re apt to find bits of paper—torn bonds or currency—floating around in your glass.”

  Lois Long’s “Tables for Two” column typified the coverage of this decadence, as she recalled long after the Eighteenth Amendment had been repealed:

  You went out—how quaint it seems now—to have fun. Every time I think of the childlike verve with which we visited the dingy joints of those days, I am ashamed to look the clear-eyed young people of today in the face. It was a foolhardy, collegiate, naïve era, and the miracle is that any of us survived it. Nonchalantly we romped through hole-in-the-wall speakeasies that were here today and gone tomorrow. There were gentlemen in most of them who used a gun so casually that murders weren’t News [sic] unless the murderee was a somebody in gangland. At closing time, headwaiters of perfectly proper night clubs gave you cards to late places that turned out to be grim little apartments full of hostesses where you got a check for $18.75 for four drinks—and the waiters were awfully big.

  After Prohibition died, it turned out that drinking had taken so firm a hold that it pervaded the off-hours of the Manhattan literati. Such minutiae as the ratio of the perfect martini and the best barware became manias. “Preciousness almost engulfed us back then,” wrote Roger Angell. “Tiffany’s produced a tiny silver oil can, meant to dispense vermouth.” When Ross suggested to Dorothy Parker that she contribute to the column that would become “Onward and Upward with the Arts,” he said half in jest that she should write about drinking as if it were an art form. “And then I thought that this wasn’t really such a bad idea and then I thought that perhaps you would be the writer to write on the subject,” he told Frank Sullivan. “I had in mind your mint julep piece, which I will always remember as something sweet and tender in my life.* With prohibition going, or gone, the art of mixing drinks will be important, and a timely subject.”

  Ross was a tad naïve about the effects of demon rum. “He once said to me ‘Eighty percent of the people I know are sound about liquor,’ ” Thurber told Gibbs. “I have never forgot that. Two things about it impressed me deeply, the utter conviction with which he spoke, and the complete untruth of the statement.”

  Simply put, drinking suffused The New Yorker. “Everyone seemed to drink back then,” said Helen Stark, the magazine’s longtime librarian. The extent of this activity astonished Thurber’s brother, Robert. “I never could figure out how all those people could drink all that stuff and stay so sharp,” he said.† “I don’t think I finished one dinner on theater night before curtain time, so much was spent on cocktails.” The young writer Walter Bernstein once saw A. J. Liebling in action: “He ordered a martini straight up and drank it down like a glass of water.” Every night Russell Maloney would come home with a bottle of gin, once prompting his toddling daughter Amelia to lisp, “Bat’s mo,” i.e., “That’s more.” These were among her first words.

  As the speakeasies morphed into respectable outlets, The New Yorker’s leading lights moved readily among them. For straightforward cocktails and dinner, the Algonquin, “21
,” and Martin and Mino’s on East 52nd Street were the destinations of choice. For slightly more exclusive surroundings, the personnel gravitated toward those hallmarks of café society, El Morocco and the Stork Club. The former became famous for its zebra-striped motifs, commemorated in myriad photographs by Beebe’s photographer boyfriend Jerome Zerbe. The latter is today remembered for its equally famous pictures of notables clustered at tables that were graced by its trademark ashtrays and top-hatted stork centerpieces. This was where Winchell held court, and from which Gibbs’s Fire Island nemesis Leonore Lemmon reportedly became the first woman to be ejected for fist fighting.

  New Yorker people did not necessarily go to these places to see and be seen. (Peter Arno, in the company of Brenda Frazier, was a notable exception.) Their preferred watering holes were both conveniently located and tended to have a quirky ambiance. An Italian immigrant named Tony Soma, a former waiter, opened a namesake restaurant at 57 West 52nd Street that drew Ross and his brood in part for his outlandish stunts. Soma was an early yoga fanatic, frequently doing headstands on the premises during the height of business hours and even on the sidewalk to attract customers.

  Another immigrant, this one from Ireland, also operated an establishment named for himself. Tim Costello, though possessed of little formal education, was a devotee of the English language and often conveyed his literary tastes as might a college professor. Costello’s was far from classy; its food was often terrible, with green vegetables simmered beyond recognition into a pulpy mess. Physically, it was “a long narrow shoebox of a space, with the bar itself running along the south wall and a number of cheap wooden booths facing it on the opposite wall,” recalled Brendan Gill. “In the space that remained between the last booth and the serving pantry were a few tables, covered with white, much-mended tablecloths.” But it achieved a certain kind of perverse immortality thanks to a few mainstays of The New Yorker. In one often-retold story, a drunken O’Hara, equipped with a blackthorn walking stick, encountered Ernest Hemingway there in the wee hours. Supposedly a bullying Hemingway, not believing an equally bullying O’Hara’s assertion that he possessed the best blackthorn walking stick in New York City, bet O’Hara that he could break it over his head and proceeded to do so. Costello saved the pieces and mounted them over the bar.