Cast of Characters

by Thomas Vinciguerra

  On the surface, there was much happiness in Thurber’s life. In 1953 his daughter, Rosemary, a senior at the University of Pennsylvania, married a fellow student, Frederick Sauers. While the father of the bride was opposed to early marriages, he blessed the union; the guests at the “wonderful and perfect” wedding included the Mark Van Dorens and the Whites. Garlands were accumulating in the form of honorary degrees from Kenyon, Williams, and Yale.

  But Thurber exploded when another bastion of higher learning—his alma mater, Ohio State—succumbed to the climate of the times. Hearkening to The Male Animal, the university in September 1951 instituted a gag rule for campus speakers, requiring that its president grant permission for them to utter their thoughts, lest they spread subversion. Calling OSU “that terrible institution,” Thurber fumed, “I wish the entire faculty and student body would resign.” A couple of months later, apparently trying to placate their upset son and get him to tone down his public pronouncements, OSU offered him an honorary degree. On the day of Ross’s death Thurber wrote to the university’s president with terse regret that such an acceptance would be construed as “approval or as indifference to the situation.”‡

  Thurber’s refusal was almost certainly as much the result of his own cantankerousness as it was a defense of free speech. His blindness was permanent. Fans offered heartfelt, if unhelpful, advice—watch Mexican jumping beans, they said, or rub lemon juice in your eyes, or even apply a hot flatiron to the side of your face. His recurring thyroid condition also cursed him on and off. “I have been much worse the past eight weeks,” he complained in the fall of 1952. A year later he told the Whites, “I feel better than I ever have in my life.”

  Whatever his physical condition, and probably in part because of it, he continued to hound The New Yorker for becoming gray and humorless. Now the matter was personal: the magazine was holding back and rejecting his pieces. Thurber resented this disrespect, as he did the picayune queries to which he was subjected. Under Lobrano and Ross, he wrote, “no violent pencil was ever laid upon my manuscripts.” But this was different, a bevy of editors picking apart his copy. Thurber responded with a string of complaining letters.

  [A] letter of mine to the New Yorker, in which I accused the magazine of being “editor conscious,” drew a denial of this charge in the most editor conscious letter I ever got. It contained this sentence, “We thank God every day for Shawn.” I wrote an answer to this, but I didn’t send it, in which I said, “I forgive God every night for having created editors and I thank God for no editor on earth.” It seems to me, as I have told Shawn, a healthy state of affairs when writers heckle editors. If the New Yorker writers ever become editor-dominated, the end will be clearly in view.

  He grew so combative that Whitaker asked him one day, “What’s the matter? You been sick or something? You haven’t threatened this place in a month.” But he was not so fixated on himself that he could not acknowledge his own sapping spirit. “I fear that where my fancy flowered and my wild invention grew, there is now a small and arid space,” he informed John McNulty. “The fresh spaces are wilted and there is rust on my metaphor mixer.” And yet he continued to produce enough good material that he was still able to issue books like Thurber Country, Alarms and Diversions, Further Fables for Our Time, and especially, The Wonderful O, all of which solidified his reputation not only as a master humorist but as an incomparable fantasist.

  By contrast, Gibbs broke little new literary ground after he gave up The Fire Islander. He published virtually nothing in The New Yorker except for his regular column. And at a time when provocative, experimental works were challenging Broadway audiences, he clung to convention. He found Six Characters in Search of an Author “rather painful” and Waiting for Godot “a very sad and confusing situation all around.” In his eyes, musicals that pleased both the critics and the crowds fared only somewhat better. Gibbs singled out The Music Man as “an exceptionally cheerful offering” but dismissed colleagues who compared it with Guys and Dolls, My Fair Lady, and Oklahoma! At the end of 1956, he published in the upstart magazine Playboy a rueful reflection on the current theater scene that said as much about his state of mind as about what he had witnessed: “With the passing years, my judgment, I’m afraid, has grown increasingly detached, and my feeling for the stage, once so miraculously like that of a young man afflicted for the first time with love, is now rather more like that of a middle-aged husband.”

  In that regard, he was becoming alienated from the people closest to him. “They couldn’t live with each other and they couldn’t live without each other,” said Tony of his parents. Though Janet was only in high school, her father was already making absurd plans for her domestic future. He hoped aloud that she would first marry a man with money, then one possessed of creativity, then a third with royal blood, and then—finally—someone she could actually love. “That was shocking to me,” said Karvonides, “to talk about one’s daughter this way.”

  He also had sharp thoughts about his son. “Gibbs used to complain to me about Tony because he was so damn straight,” Karvonides said. “He used to say to me, ‘Why don’t you take him out and get laid? When I was his age, I was screwing chorus girls.’ ” Tony, however, had a more respectable agenda. After graduating from Princeton, he found himself in the army, working at Fort Hamilton and avoiding contact with his parents. On Fire Island he met a straightforward, presentable young graduate of Wheaton College from Garden City, Long Island, named Elizabeth (“Tish”) Villa, the daughter of a Swiss-born cheese importer. Gibbs was not happy about their conventional coupling; when he saw them walking hand in hand, he would say, “I think I’m going to throw up.” Tish had no illusions about her persona. “By his standards, I was certainly dull,” she said.

  But before long they were engaged. Gibbs and Elinor took the news hard. “I think they just had this vision that Tony should maybe be a playboy or something,” said Tish. Come the wedding day in January 1958, Gibbs bewailed the nuptials at the Cathedral of the Incarnation in Garden City. “He found the prospect absolutely intolerable,” Shawn said. “He said it was so damn middle-class” (emphasis in the original). In the end, Gibbs got drunk and inexcusably didn’t show up. Elinor attended but, under the influence herself, spent most of her time at the reception at the Garden City Hotel in an anteroom bemoaning the union. Tony—whose best man was Bill Birmingham—was unmoved by his parents’ woes. “They were so continuously unpleasant about all the women I went out with that I had simply written off their opinion.”

  As 1958 proceeded, however, things seemed to get better. Throughout the first half of the year, Gibbs did “a complete 180” about the marriage, telling Birmingham that he was actually pleased by it. Sometime in July he gave up booze and cigarettes alike. He even began seeing a psychoanalyst—this despite having declared only a few years before, “I am just about the only member of my little world who has never been ‘in analysis,’ as the sorcerous [sic] jargon seems to go.” He was happy about the forthcoming publication of Thurber’s The Years with Ross, personally editing two chapters and, in early August, responding to one of Thurber’s many inquiries with information that would round out the idiosyncratic work. “It was a letter typical of Wolcott Gibbs at his best—sharp, ironic, funny, and I am glad to say, cheerful,” Thurber remembered. “Wolcott was not a man easy to please, and no one’s pleasure gratified me more than his, and no one’s judgment meant more to me.”

  Gibbs returned the compliment. He thought that The Years with Ross “should serve always as a model for such reminiscences. In addition to a phenomenal memory, Mr. Thurber has enormous perseverance in research, a wit and style that have always commanded my stunned admiration, and, I should say, a romantic heart that has enabled him to think of his place of business as the most picturesque establishment in publishing history.”

  As it was, Gibbs was looking forward to his own upcoming collection, More in Sorrow. “Because of a late-blooming and therefore more than usually passionate energy
, I have contributed more words to The New Yorker than anybody in its thirty-odd year span,” he wrote in his introduction. Given the physical limitations of the book and his prodigious output, the oeuvre constituted the barest taste of a fillet. A quarter of the book’s contents had already appeared in Bed of Neuroses in 1937. Another 25 percent had been reprinted in Season in the Sun and Other Pleasures back in 1946. Irrespective of their previous appearances, the entries were generally worthy. Among them were notable theater pieces, the Profiles of Alexander Woollcott and Thomas Dewey, a salute to Robert Benchley, a “Wayward Press” column on gossip writers’ reactions to Pearl Harbor, a couple of the better Fire Island stories, Long Island Rail Road reminiscences, certain casuals, and the best parodies—of Hemingway and Sinclair Lewis, of Aldous Huxley and Westbrook Pegler. “Time . . . Fortune . . . Life . . . Luce” ran first.

  “In my opinion, the selection that follows contains the best of this staggering output, or at any rate the part that pleases me most,” Gibbs wrote. “I will be grateful, and rather startled, if anyone agrees.” With these words in hand, Gibbs ascended the stairs of The Studio on the night of August 16.

  * Schafer would achieve dubious immortality as “Lovey” Howell on the TV series Gilligan’s Island.

  † In 1981 Maeve camped out slovenly in The New Yorker’s reception room for a couple of days. She died in 1993, having long wandered the streets of Manhattan when not in a nursing home.

  ‡ Thurber had his own brush with charges of disloyalty: the FBI kept a file on him. In 1953 the self-appointed political defense organization AWARE—which made its money by “clearing” creative artists of subversion—suggested to the ABC television network that it would “run a serious risk of adverse public opinion” by featuring Thurber on its airwaves. For this warning, and Thurber’s subsequent exoneration, AWARE received twenty dollars. In 1962, arguing the celebrated lawsuit of AWARE’s most famous victim, John Henry Faulk, Faulk’s lawyer Louis Nizer praised Thurber—who was by then deceased—as “one of the great figures that we ought to be proud of in America.”

  CHAPTER 14

  “WHOSE DAYS, IN ANY CASE, WERE NUMBERED”

  “I’ll be here when I’m sixty, snarling,” Gibbs once predicted to Nancy Hale. He was off by four years.

  In his final nontheater piece for The New Yorker, the short story “A Fellow of Infinite Jest,” Gibbs assigned himself the alter ego of Bardolph Martin, “the last of the fashionable literary humorists.” He transmuted Elinor, Tony, and Janet into “Perdita,” “Cyril,” and “Ariadne.” In a mordant and extended scene, Gibbs had them discuss his past accomplishments, his decline amid changing public tastes, and the possibility of dispatching him for his insurance money. Ariadne thinks he is worth about a dime, whereas Perdita estimates a return of about $300,000. The story ends with the arrival of Bardolph. His “halting footsteps were audible in the hallway,” Gibbs wrote, “clearly those of a man whose days, in any case, were numbered.” It was an ending that Katharine White thought “masterly.”

  His actual departure was as mysterious as his marriage to Helen and the suicide of Elizabeth. Winchell, with his penchant for inaccuracy, reported, “Mrs. Wolcott Gibbs was upstairs in their Fire Island home confined to a wheel chair [sic] when Gibbs died at his desk downstairs. Charles Addams, whose cartoons are usually connected with macabre things, dropped in and found him.” Forty-five years later Botsford conveyed a similarly garbled version. “Gibbs was upstairs in his bedroom, reading proofs,” he wrote.

  Periodically, Elinor would call up to him to remind him of lunch, but there was never an answer. Finally, she asked the maid to go up and rout him out. The maid came back and said, “Maybe you’d better go up, Mr. Addams.” Charlie went up, and there was Gibbs, dead in his chair. “He had his feet up on the windowsill,” Addams told me later, “and the proofs of his book More in Sorrow were in his lap. He had a cigarette in his hands and it had burned right down to his fingers.”

  Some of these details are correct. Elinor was indeed in a wheelchair, having recently injured her ankle. And every reliable account places Gibbs with some form of More in Sorrow and a cigarette in hand. But no maid was likely in attendance. Nor, definitely, was Addams. And Gibbs was not sitting up. The most authoritative version comes from Tony. Though not present—he was with Tish at her parents’ place in nearby Seaview—he pieced together what happened:

  My understanding was that he had taken the first copy of More in Sorrow upstairs the previous evening to look it over. He hadn’t seen it; it had only just arrived. And then he didn’t come down to breakfast the next morning, didn’t come down at all. And my mother grew mildly concerned, and went up to see what was wrong and discovered that he was in bed and dead with the book. And I don’t know if she saw a bottle of pills or what, but my understanding, again, is that she called—because I think we had a telephone at that point—Bill Birmingham and their doctor, or Bill may have called the doctor, because she probably didn’t want doctors or didn’t know how to get hold of them. I don’t think the town had a phone book at that point. But I guess Bill went up and had a look at him and knew immediately he was dead.

  Amid the grief and confusion, it would not have been surprising for the ever-supportive Addams to place himself in the scene to somehow take some of the burden of the discovery off Elinor. It was not surprising, either, that Birmingham insisted that no autopsy be performed. When the attending physician mentioned the procedure, Elinor became quite upset, at which point Birmingham drew the doctor aside.

  “What he did say, I was told, was, ‘If you insist on an autopsy, you are finished in this town,’ ” said Tony. “I’m sure Birmingham probably also at the time reassured him and said, ‘Look, I know this guy and he’s not healthy and he just slipped away in the night. So why are you making this production about it?’ And certainly there was no sign of foul play or anything like that, so the doctor probably had no great problems squaring it with his conscience.” Therefore, the official record was fudged. The coroner entered “Congestion and Cyanosis of Lungs” as the cause of death, with notations that an investigation and a chemical analysis were pending. It was further stated on the certificate that an autopsy had been performed, when in fact it never was.

  Elinor suspected that her husband had killed himself. More than once he had overdosed, intentionally or unintentionally, on a combination of sleeping pills and alcohol. Gibbs’s access to drugs increased in his last years when the family moved from their semiprivate East 51st Street digs to a large apartment building on Park Avenue and 82nd. Mail was often left on a communal table in the lobby; among the parcels were pharmaceutical samples that were dropped off for the three physicians with offices on the ground floor. Elinor took full advantage of them. “She would sweep through without a second thought,” said Tony. “Anything that looked interesting, she’d take it.”

  Tish, among others, was dubious about a suicide. “He seemed rather, for him, in a more up cycle,” she said. “I don’t think that I can remember a bad time. . . . It wasn’t like he’d been ailing.”

  The news made the front page of the Times. Thurber, in London with Helen, telegraphed Shawn: DEEPLY SHOCKED AND GRIEVED PLEASE HAVE [DAISE] TERRY SEND FLOWERS FOR US TO FUNERAL AND TO ELINOR. Tom Gorman of the secretarial staff told Katharine he was “drenched in grief.” When word reached O’Hara, he wept. He concluded that his old friend had drunk himself to death. “I had hoped, without much hope, that he might last out this phase and be one of my old-age cronies as he had been of my youth, but the whole business of life was stacked against Gibbs,” he told a friend. “I know of no one who had better reasons for being soured, and he is all the proof you need that things do not even up in the end. They never evened up for him.”

  “We can’t bear it,” wrote John Mason Brown and his wife, Cassie, to Elinor. “We can’t believe it.”

  The wake was held, as Ross’s service had been, at Frank Campbell’s. The funeral proper took place at the Protestant Episcopal Chur
ch of the Ascension at Fifth Avenue and Tenth Street, not far from where Gibbs once lived with his sister. It was an odd ritual; Rev. Peter Wilkinson, the assistant rector, did not once mention the name of the deceased, having never met him. “He wasn’t about to take the chance of pronouncing the name ‘Wolcott’ from a standing start,” said Tony. A number of Gibbs’s brothers in theatrical criticism were at the burial at Ferncliff Cemetery in Hartsdale. So were McKelway, Perelman, Liebling, Mitchell, Meredith, Burr, and Maney; Sam Behrman’s son, David, handled Elinor in her wheelchair. When he returned from the services, Sam found a copy of More In Sorrow waiting for him in his hallway, presumably sent either by Henry Holt or by The Saturday Review; the magazine was hoping he would write a review. “Just can’t,” he jotted in his diary a few days later.

  White offered The New Yorker’s official farewell—with typical affection, humor, and personal insight. Gibbs probably would have been most pleased with White’s estimation of his nontheatrical editorial abilities:

  Often the editor would have been far happier to publish a Gibbs opinion sheet than the manuscript to which it was attached. In fact, if these spontaneous and unguarded written opinions of his could be released to the world (and they most assuredly can’t be), they would make probably a funnier and sounder critique of creative writing in the late twenties and early thirties than has ever been assembled.