Cast of Characters

by Thomas Vinciguerra

  “Runners keep telling me you’re sick,” wrote Ann Honeycutt. “I am very, very sorry and wish I could do something to help you feel better. Would you like my stomach, for instance? Ask the doctor if he could make such a transfer. Or the whole torso if you need it. I’m the spiritual type and don’t really need an earthly home and care less and less about it furthermore, so keep it in mind.”

  But no stomach or torso transplant would have helped Ross. He rallied and faded through the rest of the year, enduring thirty-nine separate radiation treatments. In September, he mounted a brief return. “I have taken back about one-third of the work I used to do at the office,” he told Rebecca West in October, “but that has kept me busy, partly, because, I suspect, I just got out of the habit of working and partly because I am only about fifty percent efficient yet, although I am pronounced and seem to be eighty-five percent recovered.”

  Actually, he was not. On December 6 Ross underwent exploratory surgery at New England Baptist Hospital to determine if his cancer had metastasized. Just before the procedure, he managed to place a phone call to George S. Kaufman, who was in town. The editor told him, “I’m half under the anesthetic now.” He never came out of it: After the surgeons removed his cancerous right lung, he died at about six-thirty p.m.

  “Ross won’t leave my thoughts, and probably never will to the end of my days,” said Frank Sullivan, “and it is all right with me.” White felt as if he had been “disemboweled.” The word went out, and instinctively the faithful gathered at one another’s apartments, in bars, anywhere they could commiserate. The next day a pall hung over the New Yorker offices. A blind Thurber somehow found his way there and, in a heart-rending scene, clutched the corridor walls and wailed, “Andy! An-dy!”

  By unspoken consensus, it fell to White to compose the obituary. Jettisoning hearts-and-flowers writing, he emphasized Ross’s unrelenting commitment to The New Yorker, his preoccupation with his people, and his many eccentricities. White’s tribute was laced with typical rhetorical touches, such as, “Ross always knew when we were in a jam, and usually got on the phone to offer advice and comfort and support. When our phone rang just now, and in that split second before the mind focusses [sic] we thought, ‘Good here it comes!’ But this old connection is broken beyond fixing.” He allowed himself a few indulgences: “We love Ross so, and bear him such respect, that these quick notes, which purport to record the sorrow that runs through here and dissolves so many people, cannot possibly seem overstated or silly.”

  Readers concurred. “I started reading your article on Harold Ross as I was crossing the street at 33rd St.,” one of them wrote. “I couldn’t go on because I was crying. I tried to read it again at the office and again I was crying. Perhaps I shall never have the heart to read the complete story.” Carl Rose wrote to Katharine:

  You know, these days, it’s difficult for me to apply the word “beauty” to many current creative efforts. I mean beauty in the sense that a da Vinci or a Pisanello or a Rembrandt sketch is “beautiful” or that marvelous Michelangelo sculpture “Pieta” is “beautiful,” but what Andy wrote about Ross had true beauty. I say it with no qualifications whatever. I’ve read it half a dozen times. It’s better than a hundred headstones, and in the long run, will prove more durable.

  White disagreed. “No, Ross wouldn’t have liked it,” he said. “He would have written in the margin ‘writer-conscious’—an adjective he invented for just such pieces.” By contrast, he would have been amused by a telegram that the magazine sent to Elmer Davis in Washington, D.C., informing him about the funeral; it referred to him as “Reverend Harold Ross.” Circling that peculiar locution, Davis scrawled, “Ross would print that.”

  The service at Frank Campbell’s was an ordeal—“about four hundred of the most restless and noisy people in town, silent as a horned toad and a thousand times sadder,” said White. “My job was to be sure that nobody but New Yorker people got in,” said Frank Modell. “It was like suddenly a military exercise.”

  The fallout was worse. There was, to begin with, the matter of Ross’s estate. Many of his friends had not taken to his widow, Ariane, with whom he was engaged in messy divorce proceedings; they thought her simultaneously greedy and clinging. Thurber even reported that Julius Baer, who made the arrangements with Campbell, did so with Ariane in person at her apartment at midnight—because he was “afraid Ariane would take it over herself and might make the services private.” Ariane resented such talk and denied it specifically in a letter to the Whites within two weeks of her husband’s death. She pleaded for understanding amid a lawsuit that she insisted she had pretty much been forced to launch against him:

  I cannot bear to think that anyone Harold cared for should think I did not love him or would have, willingly, hurt him in any way. Although we had been living apart since September, 1950, I lived that time in almost complete retirement, always with the hope that we might eventually work [out] our problems and be happy together again. . . . [I]n spite of our differences, I loved Harold with all my heart. . . . I wish people he cared for could know the truth. I hope he will understand my writing this letter. He meant so much to me.

  Though it took six years to settle the estate, the issue was resolved unsurprisingly: “a third of the money to Ariane, a third to Patty—and a third, naturally, to the lawyers.”

  More relevant for the staff was the question of how The New Yorker would carry on. Its key people, consumed with contracts and personal histories that they had developed with Ross, were bewildered. When they wondered what would happen, Liebling supposedly replied, “The same thing that happened to analysis after Freud died.” The conclusive answer came on January 21, 1952 when, after more than six weeks of official silence, Raoul Fleischmann posted on the bulletin board an announcement stating, “William Shawn has accepted the position of editor of The New Yorker, effective today.”

  Shawn’s anointing was inevitable. He was a fact man in the Ross mode and had, more than anyone other than his boss, pulled the magazine through World War II and its aftermath. Although he was “as different from Ross as The New Yorker is from the National Geographic,” he worked up to fourteen hours a day and inspired considerable confidence. “I like to do a New Yorker piece once a year,” Sam Behrman said, “just to get the benefit of Shawn’s editing.”

  His elevation, however, was not unanimously acclaimed. Within a few months of the handover, Thurber—never shy about sharing his opinions—complained to the staff writer Peter De Vries, “I’m beginning to worry a little about Shawn’s sense of humor and I hope you will tell me it is simply a case of an old magazine passing through the tail of a comet.” Thurber specifically bewailed what he regarded as an influx of hackneyed cartoon situations: “I don’t want to believe [Rea] Irvin is back. I wish to Christ Ross were.” Others had simply favored Gus Lobrano over Shawn, John Cheever among them. Not long after Shawn got the nod, the writer found himself playing a roughhouse football game at E. J. Kahn, Jr.’s place; he made “a particularly bullish charge” and, careening into the defensive line, knocked Shawn over. “My father took such delight in telling that story,” said Cheever’s daughter, Susan.

  Suggestions to the contrary, when Lobrano died on March 2, 1956, at the age of fifty-three, it was not of a broken heart but of cancer. His daughter, Dorothy—who herself would work for the magazine—was always upset by rumors that the rite of succession had somehow helped kill her father. The self-effacing Shawn, she insisted, never trumpeted his triumph. Of the affection and loyalty Lobrano inspired there was no doubt; Perelman and Salinger were particularly hard hit by his passing. White never forgot how his old roommate and Cornell brother left “a trail of friendship that penetrates the literary scene in every part of the globe.” The short-story writer John Collier told Katharine, “A great part of my pleasure in writing stories again was based on the hope that I might do some that would please him.” It was a sentiment that moved her deeply. Collier’s condolence letter, she told William Maxwell, w
as

  the most remarkable summing up of what Gus meant to contributors, and it had a message for you in particular. This tribute really said what Andy was groping for in his obituary. That, by the way, was the most awful ordeal for Andy—far harder than to write about Ross, because he was closer to Gus. He felt that he had failed Gus, but Shawn felt just the opposite—that he had summed up both his personality and his career. . . . Gus can never be replaced.

  The Whites marked Shawn’s official debut at a party on March 1, 1952, at their duplex at 229 East 48th Street, overlooking Turtle Bay Gardens. Katharine scrupulously divided the guests into “Staff,” “Writers and Artists,” and “Outsiders.” All together, 130 people attended. In homage to The New Yorker’s origins, some of the women wore flapper garb, and at least one came equipped with a feather boa. At first the atmosphere was chilly, given the deference to Ross and the uncertainty about Shawn. “No one was used to a party like that,” said one guest. “They all just sat around and stared at each other.” But as the night went on, acquaintances warmed. Lillian Ross met Peter Arno for the first time and spent a good stretch charmed by him as they sat on the sofa; Shawn loosened up matters by playing jazz piano. Toward evening’s end, however, the tiny Maeve Brennan began shouting drunkenly, “Charlie Addams, you’re a pig!” Even after Katharine decorously arranged for Gardner Botsford to take her home, she continued to yell from the taxi, “Charlie Addams is a pig! Charlie Addams is a pig!”

  Brennan had just begun to make herself known as one of the leading chroniclers of the Irish diaspora, with many exquisite short stories in The New Yorker. Later she would achieve semianonymous renown in “Talk” as “The Long-Winded Lady.” In private life she had a talent for bewitching her fellow contributors. According to Botsford, she was involved not only with Addams but with Brendan Gill, Joseph Mitchell, and supposedly, Gibbs. She also became the fifth Mrs. St. Clair McKelway. The marriage took place in New Jersey, Gibbs said, “because the other states around here are getting bored with him.”

  By this time, McKelway’s romantic existence had become hopelessly convoluted. He and Ann Honeycutt had long been divorced. In 1944 he entered into a short-lived fourth marriage with Martha Stephenson Kemp; in the four previous years she had been both the widow of the bandleader Hal Kemp and the ex-wife of Victor Mature. A debutante and a starlet, she was an “execrable” woman, said Edward Newhouse. “I was gonna shake her hand,” Harold Ross grumbled, “but hands that have touched Mature will never touch mine.” McKelway’s marriage to Martha had been bracketed by his involvement with the free-spirited Eileen McKenney (who, as previously mentioned, had inspired her sister Ruth’s New Yorker stories about her) and a fling with the actress Natalie Schafer.* In 1954 McKelway capped these amorous misadventures by marrying Brennan—as big a drinker as he and, for all her talent and productivity, just as nutty.†

  “It may not have been the worst of all possible marriages,” William Maxwell reflected, “but it was not something you could be hopeful about.” When the couple held a reception at their new place on East 44th Street, near the United Nations, Shawn shook his head slightly at Philip Hamburger as he beheld what was obviously a doomed union. McKelway and Brennan, said Roger Angell, were “like two children out on a dangerous walk: both so dangerous and so charming.” Still, McKelway did his best to make a go of it, writing to himself:

  My objectives in life are now two. To revel in my marriage, by being at my playing best when not working, and to revel in my work by being at my working best when not playing. Since I can only play well when I have worked well, work, in a sense, must be the main objective—but only because it leads me to the best objective—that of being happy with Maeve. Nothing must be allowed to interfere with my work, and it will follow that nothing can interfere with my marriage. Even my marriage must not be allowed to interfere with my work, because that would constitute interference with my marriage, and that I won’t put up with.

  No amount of effort, however, could salvage the misguided joining. Before and during their marriage, Brennan would publish half a dozen stories in The New Yorker about their riotous life. Barely disguising their place at Sneden’s Landing as “Herbert’s Retreat,” she would chronicle a series of sodden, disillusioned get-togethers with their literary friends. In real life, her marriage to McKelway would last all of five years. As it vaporized, Maeve clipped and sent to him a syndicated newspaper question-and-answer column that asked, “Are geniuses aware of their special gifts?” The response: “Not in early adulthood, and apparently many never come around to that realization.”

  As disheartening as his breakup may have been, McKelway suffered worse grief on another front. In the early 1930s he and his second wife, Estelle, had had a son, St. Clair McKelway, Jr., aka “Saint.” The young man had gone to Cornell, where he formed a friendship with Joel White and become editor of the humor magazine The Widow. “Since he draws and writes pretty well, [he] hopes to use both talents as sidelines—which I think is very sound,” his father told Katharine. Saint graduated from Cornell in 1952 and, following St. Clair, Sr.’s, example, entered the air force. Stationed in France, he trained to fly the H-19B Chickasaw rescue helicopter. It was in one of these vehicles that, on a routine flight near Bordeaux on June 3, 1954, the twenty-two-year-old lieutenant and three other crew members died. A main rotor blade became detached, and several explosions sent the craft plummeting.

  The news, coming shortly after the marriage to Maeve, was shattering. McKelway retreated into his past, publishing in The New Yorker several moving pieces about his childhood and his early newspaper days. But his personality disorder kicked in again; he became convinced that Saint was sending him coded messages via automobile license plates. On these plates, too, McKelway saw the initials of many of his colleagues—Thurber, Liebling, Whitaker, Maeve, Gibbs, and Shawn, “to mention a few.” He envisioned Katharine “directly behind me” on the road, and White “scooting on ahead.” McKelway’s published literary excesses climaxed in “The Edinburgh Caper,” a frequently unreadable trip into paranoia involving a CIA conspiracy, a Soviet-inspired kidnapping plot against Eisenhower and the British royal family, and similar delusions. Though reminiscent of “Peter Roger Oboe” it was far more lunatic and lengthy.

  Gibbs struggled under Shawn for his own reasons, even though the two had a good working relationship. Back in 1941 Shawn had called Gibbs’s Profile of Richard Maney “a miraculously skillful, funny piece of prose.” Lillian Ross personally witnessed the editor’s regard: “I remember Bill Shawn thinking that Wolcott was much better than E. B. White.” Shawn, said the editor’s son, Wallace, “adored” Gibbs. But adoration went only so far. As was always the case with Gibbs, self-doubt and depression made their appearances. A few weeks after Shawn’s coming-out party at the Whites’, Sam Behrman expressed his concern to McKelway:

  I’ve been worried about him off and on for years. He goes through these bad periods and then suddenly and unaccountably turns some kind of corner, cheers up, and does a lot of work. I don’t know what we can do for him. . . . I heard from Charlie Addams that Elinor had said she was more worried about him now than she had ever been before. . . . Gibbs being the man he is, I wouldn’t be at all surprised to hear that, since I last talked to him on the phone, he has completed his new play and has written a novel comparable to War and Peace. On the other hand, the fact that his success with Season, and the security that should have come to him . . . have not made him less anxious but seem to have made him more so, and more melancholy, suggests to me that his trouble may be deeper than I ever thought.

  His rare office visits became even rarer. It was not until 1954, after she had been on the staff for eight years, that Lillian Ross finally spoke with him. Gibbs poked his “slim, dapper, jaunty-looking” corpus into her office one day to congratulate her on a recent piece that had made considerable fun of the Junior League’s precious planning of their Mardi Gras Ball. “ ‘You really gave it to those bores, I can’t abide them,’ ” he
said, grinning. “ ‘Great writing!’ ” More typical was the experience of William Murray, the son of Janet Flanner’s lover Natalia Danesi Murray. When he arrived to work at The New Yorker in 1956, he was installed in Gibbs’s office. “He hadn’t been seen around the premises for years, but he had never officially withdrawn,” Murray remembered. Gibbs’s desk was still cluttered, and one of his khaki shirts was hanging from a hook. Staff members referred to the office as “The Shrine.” Its status was so sacrosanct—and office space so coveted—that at around the time Murray arrived, Katharine White wrote a lengthy and strangely agonized personal memo to Shawn about how it should remain assigned to the fiction, rather than the art, department.

  In January 1955, Gibbs endured the passing of his sister, Angelica. Although she had successfully juggled her work with raising a son and a daughter, her domestic life came apart when her husband, the respectable Republican lawyer Robert Canfield, had an extramarital affair. Not long after they divorced, she died at age forty-six. To Behrman, who offered condolences, Gibbs expressed atypical introspection: “She was a fine girl, and I’m sorry that more people didn’t know her better. We grew up apart, and I didn’t see much of her myself, which seems a great pity to me now.”

  Gibbs’s troubles extended to his freelance activities. He completed a domestic comedy called Diana, but despite announcements that Nancy Stern would bring it to Broadway, she did not. More serious was his failure to deliver an eighty-thousand-word novel, Starry Stranger, to Random House. Four years after he was due to turn in the manuscript, Random sued him for his $2,500 advance; in 1953 the New York State Supreme Court issued a judgment against him for $3,104.16, the figure including interest and costs. “I owe so much and can only say that I am probably the most improvident son of a bitch who ever lived,” he once told Ross. He was not exaggerating. After a while he and Elinor did not pay their bills; rather, they stuffed them in shoeboxes in their closet. “That was my mother’s way of dealing with financial crisis,” said Tony. “I’m surprised at how often it worked.”