The Fun of It: Stories from The Talk of the Town (Modern Library Paperbacks)

by Lillian Ross

  Back in New York (after a sojourn in Africa during which he wrote “Everybody’s Shakespeare”—90,000 copies sold so far), he married and cast about for something to work at. Radio turned out to be his first dish; three months after he was first inside a studio, he had a finger in the production of about twenty big-time programs and some weeks was making as much as $800. Then, last season, he tied up with the WPA and started doing Shakespeare. He now won’t let his name be announced on the air, but can’t prevent the newspaper billing. “Honestly,” we said, “what do you think about the radio?” “I think it’s a lovely medium,” he said. It has been a lovely enough medium to buy him a house at Sneden Landing, where he maintains his wife, a chauffeur, a cook, a gardener, a cocker spaniel, and a Lincoln limousine.

  The success of “Julius Caesar” came as pretty much of a surprise, Mr. Welles says. “When I took the Mercury on a five-year lease, it was the most presumptuous act in modern theatrical history. I still go into a cold sweat when I think what might have happened.” What did happen was bad enough; Mr. Welles, director and star of the production, fell through a trapdoor the night of the dress rehearsal and almost killed himself. (The Shadow knows . . . hahahahaaa!)

  1937

  LEFTIST REVUE — Charles Cooke

  “PINS AND NEEDLES,” that lighthearted revue produced and acted by members of the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union, being practically an obligatory topic of conversation these days, we dropped in at the Labor Stage (né Princess Theatre) last week to see what we could find out about it. The stage was filled with ladies’ garment workers in rehearsal—a last-minute brushing-up before the revue opened on a full-time basis. (They started out, as you undoubtedly know, by giving only weekend performances.) Charles Friedman, a professional director, was badgering them. “That ‘Hell’ wasn’t focussed! It quavered!” he shouted. “Paul, relax when you walk into that wall!” he screamed. Young Harold Rome (words and music) was patiently giving out the piano accompaniment. We crept up behind him and whispered, “Are you a Leftist?” He didn’t miss a note. “It’s not a question of being a Leftist,” he whispered back. “It’s a question of keeping your eyes open.”

  Louis Schaffer, labor editor of the Jewish Daily Forward and manager of Labor Stage, Inc., the “Pins and Needles” producing company, took us around and introduced us to some of the thirty-nine members of the cast. There are, he told us, absolutely no ringers—everybody’s a paid-up member of the I.L.G.W.U. Ten of the thirty-eight locals in the metropolitan area are represented. Ruth Rubin-stein, the comedienne, belongs to the Corset and Brassière Workers’ Local, and works for the Belle-Mode Brassière Company, or did until the present eventuation. It’s her boast that she can turn out forty-five dozen brassières a day. Al Levy, who has one of the show’s hit songs, “One Big Union for Two,” belongs to the Dressmakers’ Local, but has never worked at his trade; graduated two years ago from the Central Needles Trades School but couldn’t get a job. He’d be just as happy, he told us, if the Labor Stage went on permanently, so that he’d never have to work with a needle. The somewhat esoteric Bonnaz Embroiderers’ Local is represented by Paul Seymour, who has been working as a pleater of women’s skirts with the Star Stitching Manufacturing Corporation. “How many skirts can you pleat in a day?” we asked. “Ask rather how well I pleat,” he said coldly. Hyman Kaplan, a cutter with Wellesley Modes, who plays a policeman in one of the skits, is bored, utterly bored, with being ribbed about H*Y*M*A*N K*A*P*L*A*N.

  With the exception of two or three players with minor parts, the entire cast will take a leave of absence from their jobs during the run of “Pins and Needles.” The I.L.G.W.U. will pay them strictly according to garment union scales. This being a slack season in the garment industry, the girls are receiving $23 a week, the men $45. If the run extends to February, when business always picks up, the pay will be raised to $45 and $80 respectively. The production, which cost $10,000, will be out of the red if it runs until March. Any profits will be turned back to the union for future productions.

  1937

  EXILES IN PRINCETON — E. J. Kahn

  WITH both Thomas Mann and Einstein settled in Princeton, that community could easily advertise itself as a centre of German intellectualism. Dr. Mann has rented a large red-brick house at 65 Stockton Street, a short distance from the campus, and lives there with Mrs. Mann and whichever of his six children are at home. Ever since he left Germany, the author told us in his library the other afternoon, he has wanted to live in a university town. Princeton opened the way by appointing him Lecturer in the Humanities. He is giving six lectures, four in English to the public and two in German to advanced students, on four subjects: Goethe, Wagner, Freud, and his own book, “The Magic Mountain.” He writes his lectures in German and his wife translates them into English. He will continue to write in German no matter what Hitler does. His only composition in English to date, aside from a few letters, has been his speech at a pro-Czechoslovakian meeting in Madison Square Garden a couple of months ago. At the moment he is at work on a novel based on the life of Goethe. Dr. Mann says this will be a “tragi-comic little thing.” He writes about three hours every morning, starting directly after breakfast. His afternoons are devoted to reading and answering correspondence. His wife serves as his secretary.

  The Manns took out their first citizenship papers last May, about the time the author was completing a lecture tour. On this trip so many people wanted to hear him that frequently the police had to be called out. In Cleveland the excitement was so great that Dr. Mann thought the cops were present to shield him from enemies. He had scarcely regained his calm when two days later, in Toronto, he and Mrs. Mann awoke to find a note under their door reading, “We’ve got you now,” or words to that effect. The Manns ran next door to the room of their lecture agent. It was ultimately revealed that the note had been left for the agent by some ribald friends of his who had made a mistake in doors. We found Dr. Mann troubled not only about the Nazis but about a Christmas tree, which he didn’t realize could be purchased in Princeton. The library is his favorite room. He writes there at a large desk which he sneaked away from Hitler by a ruse, sending it to a friend in France, near the border. On the desk are the bronze head of a Siamese warrior, a wooden figure of a servant taken from an Egyptian tomb, and half a dozen medals, one of which was presented to him by President Hindenburg in the old days for his services to German culture. He took another from a case and handed it to us with the remark that it was heavy—“and solid gold, too.” We admired the sculptured figures on one side and the bas-relief of a head on the other, and the inscription, “Nobel.”

  Before he moved to Princeton, Dr. Mann had frequently visited Einstein there. The two men were friends in Germany. Now they meet for lunch or dinner at each other’s homes or at the home of Dr. Mann’s other translator, Mrs. Lowe-Porter. Einstein is no longer regarded as a campus novelty in Princeton. There is a story to the effect that one time none of his neighbors’ radios would work and a repairman who was called attributed this to the presence of a certain type of electric heating pad in the vicinity. They eliminated every house but Einstein’s, and then sent a timid delegation there. Einstein readily admitted he had such a device but insisted on illustrating, by a bewildering series of mathematical calculations, that his heater couldn’t possibly cause trouble. The neighbors nodded politely but, nudged by the repairman, asked if he would mind if they bought him a different kind of heater. Einstein agreed, and after they got him a new pad all the radios worked.

  1938

  1940s

  INTERNE — Eugene Kinkead

  DAVID ROCKEFELLER, the youngest of the sons of John D. Rockefeller, Jr., has now been working at City Hall as an unpaid secretary to Mayor La Guardia for six months, with little or no fanfare. He has stayed, in fact, well under cover, being seldom photographed and never interviewed. The Mayor speaks of him as an “interne,” a term used at City Hall to describe a student who performs municipal chores with
out pay, in return for the experience and whatever academic credits he can arrange to get from his college. This doesn’t seem quite accurate as applied to David Rockefeller, who is already up to his waist in academic credits: he graduated from Harvard when he was twenty, stayed on for a year of postgraduate work, put in another year at the London School of Economics, and last summer took his Ph.D. at the University of Chicago. His doctoral thesis, incidentally, dealt with “the theory of unused capital resources,” and is said to agree with the New Deal theory of deficit financing during depressions. At any rate, young Rockefeller sits at the desk formerly occupied by the Mayor’s press secretary, who drew a weekly salary of $125.

  When Rockefeller reported for work, La Guardia warned him to “stay away from those fellows in Room 9” (the City Hall press room), and also warned the photographers that if they took any pictures of Rockefeller not authorized by the Mayor, Rockefeller would be fired. The striking injustice of this dictum paralyzed the photographers’ trigger fingers, and the young man gets on well, in a noncommittal way, with the fellows in Room 9. “He’s a swell guy,” one of them told us. Also, he added, he is certainly the best-dressed man in City Hall. Usually he wears modest gray or brown suits, with white, soft-collared shirts and a Homburg. He drives down to work in a Lincoln Zephyr, arriving at nine and staying, like most of LaGuardia’s staff, until six or seven in the evening. The Mayor’s secretaries—there are seven of them—must answer the bulk of the thousand-odd letters that come in every day from citizens, asking favors, complaining about the insolence of police officers, etc.; Rockefeller handles his share of these, and also talks on the telephone to impetuous people who want the Mayor’s ear. You can’t telephone the Mayor; he hasn’t got a telephone. Occasionally, Rockefeller welcomes moderately famous people to City Hall, a chore once performed by Chief Magistrate Curran when he was Deputy Mayor.

  Rockefeller shares with Byrnes MacDonald, another of La Guardia’s secretaries, the job of accompanying the Mayor at his various public appearances— a tree-planting on Sixth Avenue, a ladies’-club luncheon in Brooklyn, or whatever. At first he seemed surprised and amused by these modest ceremonies; now, apparently, he accepts them as part of the necessary technique of politics. The only time Rockefeller has really caused any talk at City Hall was last September, when he got married and announced the fact to some of his colleagues. The announcements bore a crest, and this floored some of the earthier councilmen.

  1940

  THE ADMIRAL’S CHAIR — Eugene Kinkead

  NOW, here is an item about a distinguished naval man who, among many other things, is, in both senses of the word, the Waldorf-Astoria’s oldest resident—Rear Admiral Bradley Allen Fiske, U.S.N., retired, who is close to eighty-eight years of age and has lived in the present Waldorf ever since it was opened for business. Matter of fact, that isn’t all the story. Admiral Fiske checked into the old Waldorf ten years after his retirement from active service in 1916; he lived there until it closed down and then waited fretfully in the Commodore for the new one to open up. These days Admiral Fiske doesn’t venture out of the hotel at all. He comes down to Peacock Alley every morning after breakfast and sits there until toward dinnertime, leaving it only to go to lunch in one of the restaurants, where a table is reserved for him. His Peacock Alley armchair is reserved for him, too, and bears a sign to that effect.

  We called on Admiral Fiske one afternoon last week, but before doing so we read up briefly on his career, which marks him as one of the notable naval inventors of all time. He was born in Lyons, New York, the son of an Episcopal clergyman, graduated from the Naval Academy in 1874, second in his class, and first smelled powder at Manila Bay as a lieutenant on the gunboat Petrel. Dewey cited him for gallantry. In addition to putting in a full term of active service, he found time to invent a hundred and thirty-odd improvements to naval equipment, the most far-reaching being the telescopic sight for ships’ guns, which, we gathered, is now used on every warship in the world, and the torpedo-plane.

  When we found Admiral Fiske in Peacock Alley he was occupying his armchair, reading P. G. Wodehouse’s “My Man Jeeves,” and smoking a cork-tipped cigarette. He was sprucely dressed in a blue suit, white shirt, and bow tie, and we couldn’t help remarking that he didn’t look his age. “It’s my complexion,” he said. “I got it from my father.” Wodehouse, he explained to us, was by way of change from his customary literary fare, the works of Charles Dickens. “The language’s greatest writer,” he observed, with naval decisiveness. He added that he has read “The Pickwick Papers” fourteen times.

  Marking his place in “Jeeves” with a picture postcard, Admiral Fiske told us that the idea for the telescopic sight came to him more than fifty years ago, when he was a lieutenant. His ship, which had the old open sights of that day, was returning from gunnery practice when he happened to raise his telescope to his eye and picked up several fishing schooners. He had the sudden impish thought that it would be easy to sink them all if the guns of his ship were sighted through a telescope. Not long after, in 1890, he took out the first of several patents on telescopic sights. It was a great joke among his messmates and for a time he thought he was crazy, or at least misguided. The first test of his invention was a failure, but the second, six months later, was a convincing success. Admiral Fiske first thought of the possibilities of the torpedoplane in 1910 while brooding over the problem of defending the Philippines. He reasoned that if airplanes got bigger, a group of them, based on one or more of the many Philippine Islands, could be fitted out to carry torpedoes and attack any invading fleet. In 1912 he noticed that planes were getting bigger and worked out a device to accomplish his purpose. He recalls that he remarked sweepingly at the time that he had invented not only a new weapon but a new method of warfare. In the cold light of 1942, he seems to have made no overstatement. We asked the Admiral if his theory was that of the British at Taranto and, more recently, of the Japanese at Pearl Harbor, and he said yes, that was his theory exactly. As we left the Admiral, we asked him the inevitable question, “How long do you think the war will last?” “How the hell would I know?” said he, reasonably, returning to Jeeves.

  1942

  COOKLESS CONGRESSMAN — Geoffrey Hellman

  CONGRESSMAN CLARE LUCE is living in an apartment—two bedrooms, living room, dining room, and kitchenette—in the annex of the Wardman Park Hotel in Washington, where she percolates her own coffee every morning and reads herself to sleep with the Congressional Record every night. She hopes to have people for dinner someday but has had a hell of a time trying to get a cook-maid. For a few days she had a girl who mixed everything up—chicken on the butter plate, butter on the chicken plate, and so on. Representative Luce, well aware of the servant scarcity in the nation’s capital, kept her mouth buttoned up during these goings-on, but a glance must have betrayed her, for soon the lass said, “I’ve worked for some mighty fine people and I ain’t ever had a complaint yet,” and left. Mrs. Luce, hoping that her well-publicized championing of the Chinese might stand her in good stead, telephoned a prominent Chinese friend in Washington and asked her if she could recommend a Chinese cook. The lady replied that she hadn’t been able to find a Chinese cook for her own household, although anxious to do so, and as we go to press Mrs. Luce is still cookless. Because of the manpower shortage, Wardman Park waiters are permitted only to leave meals in rooms; they may not serve them. Mrs. Luce eats in the hotel dining room when she is home of an evening. Weekends her husband generally joins her.

  We obtained these items, and one or two others, from our non-military attaché in Washington, who, shortly before Mrs. Luce made her splash, sought her out in her congressional office—a couple of rooms equipped with global maps; an electrical teapot on which the Representative, who stays around till six-thirty or seven, makes tea at five-thirty every afternoon; a perfume atomizer which a thoughtful friend sent her to squirt around after the departure of cigar-smoking visitors; and a small, carved figure of a Chinese god of luck, the bel
ly of which she scratches every morning for luck. When our man arrived she was wearing a dark-red dress, two black bows in her hair, and a black kerchief with “Clare” printed on it in scarlet.

  “Congressmen are a more patriotic lot of people than people give them credit for,” Congressman Luce told our man. “They understand the people a great deal better than the people understand Congress. They have been forced to abdicate so many of their powers that they feel completely frustrated. People are demanding that Congress behave in a way it can’t possibly behave because it no longer has the power. Freshmen congressmen come here half persuaded that their constituents’ impression of them is true, that they are going to save the country, only to find out that the mechanics don’t exist for saving the country through Congress.” Mrs. Luce herself is not disillusioned, having read a lot of books about Congress before taking office. “Just as, when I went to China, I read a lot of books about China first,” she said. “Far from being disillusioned, I was agreeably surprised about the personnel of Congress. The trouble is most of them live in the shadow of reëlection, and the pressures get to work on them. Gertrude Stein should have written a poem called ‘The Congressman’—‘A pressure is a pressure is a pressure is a pressure.’ ” Mrs. Luce’s main pressures, as indicated in her mail, come from Connecticut hatters, plumping for women’s hats; from householders, plumping for more fuel oil; from businessmen, plumping for the Ruml tax plan; and from members of the armed forces, plumping against strikes. She received two letters opposing Errol Flynn’s nomination for Ambassador to Australia, and almost every day some sheet music arrives, accompanied by a request from the composer to promote it. She showed our attaché a sample entitled “Do God’s Work and Smile,” along with a note from its creator asking her to introduce a bill to have it sung on the floor of Congress. “Fairfield County is just a cross-section of the country,” she said.