Cast of Characters

by Thomas Vinciguerra

  But this sort of behavior could not go unnoticed indefinitely. There were lapses, embarrassing ones. On November 27, 1946, the executive secretary of the League of New York Theatres sent Ross a furious telegram:

  ON BEHALF OF A NUMBER [OF] THE PLAY PRODUCERS OF NEW YORK CITY WE WISH TO PROTEST THE BEHAVIOR OF YOUR DRAMATIC CRITIC ON OPENING NIGHTS. ON TWO RECENT OCCASIONS HE HAS BEEN UNDER THE INFLUENCE OF LIQUOR AND WE CANNOT BELIEVE THAT A FAIR AND IMPARTIAL REVIEW CAN BE OBTAINED UNDER SUCH CIRCUMSTANCES. WE ARE SENDING THIS IN ADVANCE OF THE PUBLICATION OF THE REVIEW OF TWO RECENT PLAYS AT WHICH SUCH CONDUCT WAS OBSERVED SO THAT NO CHARGE CAN BE MADE THAT THE REVIEWS WHATEVER THEIR CONTENT HAVE INFLUENCED THIS ACTION.

  On paper Ross took this matter seriously, especially when Richard Rodgers and a cohort of peers from the Dramatists Guild made a similar complaint. “I concur in your opinion that the interests of the theatre and the dramatists require that a critic be in a competent condition,” Ross told Rodgers, “and that we shall accept the responsibility for our representative.” Privately, though, he sensed that certain members of the guild simply “wanted to depose and eat a critic.” He was referring primarily to the imperious Lillian Hellman, who was fuming over Gibbs’s dismissal of her drama Another Part of the Forest. “Serious critics should treat writing seriously,” she told Gibbs. “On two occasions at least you did not do that.¶ . . . Because I respect you as a writer I am more sympathetically sorry for that than you would probably believe.” The unfortunate business quickly blew over, but not before Ross found time to gripe to Maney, “Why don’t that dame go down to Palm Beach and lie in the sand until her menopause has passed?”

  Still, there was no way to dismiss other complaints—like the one that was filed by Cheryl Crawford, the producer of Flahooley. Gibbs, she informed Ross, “was seen being held up against the wall in Shubert Alley by his wife and their conversation was overheard. He was seen staggering to his seat and he was seen leaving after the first act. Whatever his opinion of the show, I feel a producer has the right to expect sobriety and attention. . . . I feel incensed at such treatment.”

  That was Manhattan. On Fire Island, Gibbs could damage himself without fear of professional repercussions. The Studio was often the site of raucous parties; in their aftermath, Elinor—who was as addicted to rye as Gibbs was to martinis—would announce to visitors, “The cat has a headache. Just keep it down, boys.” It was all intensely painful for young Tony, who was sometimes pressed into playing bartender at Ocean Beach revels. As he became aware of the alcoholism of both of his parents, he made his displeasure known to them:

  On Fire Island, I used to drive them crazy. My bedroom was in one of the balcony bedrooms, and I would just sit up there on the balcony and stare down at them while they were drinking, which probably must have been kind of a gauntlet in the house. I didn’t need to say anything, it was just obvious that this disapproval would just radiate out. And I think it made them quite unhappy, but not unhappy enough to stop. I had no idea what to do; I didn’t know if there was anything to do. I mean, for somebody my age it was a position of total helplessness.

  And there was nothing he could do to prevent them from going out to one of the few local establishments. At Goldie’s, Elinor Gibbs and John Lardner’s wife, Hazel, would sometimes fall off barstools and find themselves escorted home by the police. Bel Kaufman, the future author of Up the Down Staircase, remembered seeing Gibbs frequently at Maguire’s in the mid-1940s. “He looked old and shriveled and always drunk.” But she wanted to tell him how much she admired his work. So one night, “I gathered up my courage to talk to him with some flowery words of praise. He weaved over to me and he said, ‘Are you pretty? I can’t see a damn thing.’ ” Kaufman remembered Gibbs, like Elinor and Hazel, occasionally being carried out. “It was heartbreaking.”

  Heartbreaking, too, was the personal conversation that McKelway once set down in his journal about his relationship with his foul seductress:

  Alcohol is one of the chief things that have been interfering with both my work and my marriage. I do not want to forbid alcohol, because forbidden things are apt to take on an additional charm, especially in the case of a Presbyterian like myself. If I can use alcohol—under certain rather rigid circumstances—without letting it interfere with my work or my marriage, well and good. But if alcohol in any way at all prevents me from being at my best in the morning—when I work—or in the evening—when I play—it can go and fuck itself. It will no longer be on my list of friends. It will, in that case, not be forbidden, but will simply be clouted over the head, kicked in the ass, and abandoned. So, Alcohol, you watch your step if you want to remain a friend of mine.

  But internal ruminations could only go so far. Almost invariably, what was then known as “taking the cure” was a necessary antidote. There were a number of refuges for this purpose. “John McCarten, our old drama and movie critic, used to joke that they had a special New Yorker dry-out wing at Payne Whitney,” said Helen Stark, referring to the historic Upper East Side psychiatric facility. “He was a naughty man. When his wife had a child I told him he’d soon have to stop partying and stay home with his wife and baby. He said, ‘In a pig’s ass I will.’ ”

  Payne Whitney was often not enough. To truly escape the temptations of New York and regain some semblance of composure, the cast of characters periodically fled to a collection of sanitariums in pastoral settings. Two of the most popular were the Foundation Inn, aka Austen Riggs Associates, in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, and Nonkanahwa in Kerhonkson, New York. The former was usually referred to as “Riggs” and the latter as “Foord’s” after its chief physician, Andrew Green Foord. Ross went to Riggs at least once. But given his ulcers, he was not a boozer by nature and so managed to steer clear of the establishment. For many others, though, these places were necessary evils. On his first known visit to Foord’s, in 1934, Gibbs telegrammed Elinor: ARRIVED AT THE MINES JOEY IT IS ALL RIGHT BUT YOU MUSTN’T VISIT THE OTHER INMATES.

  Admission for the agreed-upon length of commitment—which usually ranged from two weeks to a month or more—was not automatic. When McKelway checked into Riggs to write his Winchell series, he had to secure an endorsement from an outside party and a supporting letter from Ross to one of the resident physicians. “I have had a talk with McKelway, and I have told him to take your treatment seriously, which he has promised to do so,” Ross reassured the doctor. Ross stated that The New Yorker would meet McKelway’s expenses, which McKelway estimated would come to $800 for two months, apart from approximately $70 per week for room and board.#

  Things didn’t always go that smoothly. Around Christmas 1941, Thurber and Honeycutt tried to check into Foord’s while both were three sheets to the wind, with “Thurber shouting and waving bottles, Honeycutt hysterical and screaming,” Daise Terry recalled. “They just about scared the pants off the old ladies gathered in the lounge having tea. Foord would have none of them and kicked them right out, threatened to get the police. . . . [I]t ended up [with] their being thrown out and having to spend the night at an inn. They came back to town the next day, very meek.” In one of his casuals, “Eden, With Serpents,” Gibbs depicts himself alighting at Foord’s in a similarly riotous fashion. Disguising the place as Mink-a-wonk-it Lodge, he writes of arriving on the grounds in a taxi direct from the city, accompanied by a couple of empty bottles and an unnamed companion who was almost certainly a stand-in for McKelway. Despite having insisted that he be brought to the place, the Gibbs character roars, “I’m not going to any god-damn asylum,” and runs away, while his sidekick allows himself to be taken into the kindly care of the facility.

  If a patient did stick it out, the results were usually beneficial. “It’s nice here, the place, the people, the country,” Thurber wrote Honey from Foord’s in 1935. “I do not accept that lank, sick, nervous man who for years wandered from the N. Yorker [sic] to the Algonquin to Tony’s. I don’t accept the things he said or did. I never want to see him again. I don’t marvel that you &
everybody else avoided him. . . . I don’t miss drinking at all.” In another dispatch to her, he reported, “The food is excellent, the rooms bright and easy, the people easy, the woods and cascades and cliffs make you silent like stout Crotz [sic]** (who would have run some of the fat off his adventurous ass up here). There is no vista in Tony’s and where there is no vista the people perish.” In yet another communiqué, he admired the mild discipline of the outfit. It was, he said, “not strict or rigorous, but gently firm—the hours, the meals (including a quiet tea time), the walks, the baths, the massages. It makes the rusty wheels of my mind begin to turn in rhythm again—old thoughts and plans and ideas fall into line; I can think already, straight again.”

  Gibbs also benefited from the treatment; any number of times he wrote Elinor to tell her he was feeling better, such as: “So nice not to wake up and wish you were dead.” But his relief was mixed with boredom, especially when he found himself “playing anagrams with old ladies every night (can you take CHOIR with an E?).” His fellow inmates, he found, ranged from plain dull to “pretty terrible.” Among the specimens were a Miss Whelen (“cries herself to sleep at night”), a Mr. Tierney (“always gets gas on his stomach immediately after eating”), and a Mrs. Martin and Miss FitzHugh (“quieter and just shake, but you can see they aren’t happy either”). Their respective conditions filled him with self-loathing. “It’s miserable to think that I can’t cope with life any better than these other lunatics, and worse to realize that it’s a regular thing with them—a week at Foord’s every year to put your character together again,” he wrote home. “I can’t face a prospect like that, if I have to spend the rest of my life on the wagon.”

  There were some rudimentary attempts at rooting out the psychological problems that undergirded all the drinking and depression. When McKelway checked into Riggs during his Winchell interregnum, one of its specialists informed Ross vaguely, “Among his sources of satisfaction is the deepening degree of insight into the genesis of certain of his handicapping personality traits. He also says that certain of his values are clearing themselves of the emotional fog which previously surrounded them and they are now standing out in a more clear-cut manner.”

  In general, however, the inebriates’ personalities received little attention. Rather, the emphasis was on cleaning them up and keeping them busy with enforced activities whose discipline would serve them well as an example when they returned to their normal routines. There was some emphasis on arts and crafts. In fact, it was that aspect of Ross’s brief stay at Riggs that one of the physicians remembered most vividly: “Ross just made one bench, very quickly, and went back to town!” Among the therapists who worked for Dr. Foord was his son, Fritz, who was close to many of the Algonquin crowd; when not designing movie sets, he taught painting classes on the premises. He can be seen in a famous 1938 photograph featuring Gibbs, Thurber, Maloney, McKelway, Frank Case, Parker (wearing what appears to be a fez), and her husband, Alan Campbell, in the lobby of their preferred hotel.

  The doctors considered exercise, to tone up the body and purge it of toxins, more important than basket weaving. Such physical activity could include long walks, dumbbells, throwing around a medicine ball, or more strenuous pursuits. This hit-or-miss approach did have its beneficial aspects. On one occasion, after walking five miles one morning and playing tennis all afternoon, Gibbs found himself “lame as all hell and covered with blisters, but otherwise fine,” although he also grew “stupefied” by the procedures.

  The most curious aspect of the sanitariums’ treatment was their emphasis on hydrotherapy. This was not a case of merely relaxing in whirling, warm Jacuzzis or floating aimlessly in a pool. Rather, the subjects would periodically be marched into a huge tiled room and squirted with hoses. Somehow, it was thought this would relax them and improve their circulation. It was an ignoble procedure. “I have just been hosed and pummeled (one ‘I’; they beat the other one out of me),” Thurber reported to Honey. “Every day for an hour I’m hosed and pummeled.” He even drew a caricature of his ordeal that depicted his nude self being drenched, incongruously, with his glasses on. He captioned it, “Just warm them cold as a son of a bitch, as my Aunt Caroline used to say.”

  Topping off the process, at Foord’s anyway, was an attempt to bring the charges back into the routine of normal domestic life. To that end, Foord kept his own family on the four-thousand-acre compound and often allowed them free access to the residents. When the main house grew too cold, he would have them sleep on one of the asylum floors. “I can’t think of a stranger environment for the young,” Gibbs reflected. It was through such proximity that Foord’s granddaughter, Carol, came to play with Gibbs and become acquainted with McKelway and Thurber. Foord further expected his guests to dress in evening clothes for dinner to instill some sense of decorum and order. “His ideas about what was best for these people was very unusual,” said Carol.

  After a stint at Foord’s or Riggs, the affected parties would generally return healthier and happier. But this rarely lasted. Thurber went into and out of drinking phases for most of his life, as did McKelway. In some cases, like that of Benchley, boozing would literally be the death of them. “Drinking did kill him in the end—got him in the liver,” White said.

  As for Gibbs, Ross monitored him closely. In the summer of 1937 he wrote Katharine White, “Gibbs hasn’t had a drink in months, is clean-eyed and in command of everything since he came back from the sanitarium, and there is no theatre to speak of this month. He could carry on all right.” A year later he wrote Andy with confidence, “Gibbs hasn’t had any jitters lately that I’ve seen or heard about. I thought they were going to be recurrent and maybe they are, but if they are the interval is apparently longer.”

  There may have been intervals, but there were no permanent respites. A good ten years after Ross made his observations about Gibbs’s jitters, the critic confided to Behrman:

  [H]ere is a nervous, melancholy letter from Fifty-second street, from a man just back on the wagon after a ten-day’s bender. Son of a bitch if I know how these things happen to me because they’re always poison, or anyway no damn fun and the pieces nearly impossible to put together again afterwards. . . . I’d say arrogantly, Sam, that the big trouble with getting soused, really soused, is that you give too many awful people an edge on you. You wouldn’t know. You’ll just have to take my word for it.

  Gibbs might not have understood how such things happened to him, but the novelist Dawn Powell did. Instancing Gibbs, Dorothy Parker, and Arthur Kober, among others, she pegged their essential insecurity:

  They challenge each other by being seen at certain parties, places; they are each other’s sores and are half-fascinated, half-repelled. They are ruined by not being able to want what they individually want, but most want inevitably what the other wants. They are spoiled nursery children who really want to go on playing with an old clothespin, but seeing Brother happy with an engine, must fight for engine. Winning it, they are discontented, ill-natured.

  Most of all, they have perverted their rather infantile ambitions into destruction of others’ ambitions and happiness. If people are in love, they must mar it with laughter; if people are laughing, they must stop it with “Your slip is showing.” They are in a permanent prep school where they perpetually haze each other. They destroy their own happiness by being ashamed of whatever brings it; they want to be loved but are unloving; they want to destroy but be themselves saved. They are afraid of being used, even while they use.

  * Sullivan’s piece, “Agosto Port and Mint Juleps,” about a customer who walks into a bar on a warm day and offers absurdly explicit instructions on how to make the drink of the title, ran in the July 22, 1933, issue of the magazine.

  † Instancing Benchley, White once remarked, “A man can do a lot of drinking and still turn out a lot of work.”

  ‡ As the years went by, and cigarette smoke and grease darkened the murals’ contours, attempts were made to brighten up and retrace them. When Cos
tello’s closed for good in 1994, the originals were believed to be lost. However, a patron rescued a sketch that Thurber had drawn on a tablecloth stained with whiskey and steak juice and presented it to Helen.

  § Vanderbilt died in 1967—a suicide, according to Gardner Botsford.

  ¶ The name of the other play that Gibbs did not take seriously is not known.

  # This figure did not initially include a charge of $2.50 that McKelway incurred when he placed a lit candle next to his bedside lamp and ended up burning the lampshade.

  ** A misspelled reference to “stout Cortez” from “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer” by John Keats.

  CHAPTER 11

  “FLYING HIGH AND FAST”

  Around midday on December 7, 1941, Gibbs was tuned in to the radio in his apartment to listen to a game between the Brooklyn Dodgers and the New York Giants—the football teams, not their baseball counterparts. When the news broke, he twisted the dial, combing for information amid Christmas carols and department store advertisements. When it was time for him to compose his “Comment” for that week, he took his cue from White and resisted the temptation to succumb to grandiloquence. Instead, he led with the initial shock of confusion. “War came to us with the ball in Brooklyn’s possession on the Giants’ forty-five-yard line,” he wrote. “ ‘Japanese bombs have fallen on Hawaii and the Philippine Islands,’ a hurried voice broke in to announce. ‘Keep tuned to this station for further details. We now return you to the Polo Grounds.’ No more than that.”