Mary McGrory

by John Norris

  If Mary’s father brought the light Irish romanticism to her upbringing, her mother, Mary Catherine McGrory, brought a steely puritanism. Deeply religious and a disciplinarian, Mary’s mother had an exceedingly well concealed sense of humor. Everyone who knew Mary agreed that her own charm was intertwined with a rigid, even authoritarian, streak. “She was not a laughing Colleen,” observed Mary’s close friend and fellow Bostonian Mark Shields. “There was a sternness, an assertiveness, that one did not necessarily associate with Irish at that time.” Mary’s nieces and nephew talked about this side of Mary’s personality, fairly or unfairly, as coming from her mother.

  Mary idolized her father throughout her life, writing about him in her columns and sharing warm anecdotes about him. By contrast, Mary never wrote a word about her mother in a single column, never mentioned her mother to friends later in life, never talked about her in a single interview, and never discussed her impact on any facet of her upbringing. “I only heard her speak of her father with the utmost love, affection, respect, and admiration,” recalled Elizabeth Shannon, who knew Mary for decades. “I literally never heard her say anything about her mother—good or bad.” Mary was not estranged from her mother, but the relationship was chilly.

  Identity was paramount in the Boston of Mary’s youth. The city’s Irish, Italian, Jewish, German, and other communities mixed either uneasily or not at all. Bigotry ran hot. Protestants disparaged Catholics as unwashed pawns of the pope. Irish Catholic priests threatened their flocks with excommunication for even participating in Protestant weddings. It was an atmosphere where your last name and church set your course. The Boston Irish maintained a fierce us-against-them mentality, even as they evolved from oppressed minority to a dominant majority in the city. As the Boston Irish increasingly controlled the city, they propelled the Protestant elite, or “Brahmins,” out toward well-heeled suburbs.

  Mary’s parents represented an intermarriage of sorts. The McGrory half of her lineage was indeed Irish, emigrating from County Donegal in the 1860s, but her mother’s maiden name was Jacobs, and her family had emigrated from Germany to Boston in the 1880s.

  The German influence on Mary’s upbringing was considerable. Her household was bilingual. Mary’s favorite dish as a girl wasn’t corned beef and cabbage; it was sauerbraten and spaetzle. Yet as an adult, Mary virtually never mentioned the German side of her heritage. Her friends and colleagues later in life had no idea that she was of anything other than purely Irish descent. All of them saw Mary’s fundamental Irishness as central to her personality—which, although something of a contrivance, it was.

  Perhaps this is not surprising. Mary grew up in a very Irish Catholic neighborhood in a very Irish Catholic town in a period bookended by two world wars fought against the Germans. She had a good Boston Irish name and a mother with little discernible accent, and nothing was to be gained in social settings, school, or the workplace by self-identifying as anything other than Boston Irish. Mary decided that her public face would be that of a McGrory rather than a Jacobs, and with the zeal of a convert she became more Irish than any Irishman. Like her mother, Mary’s German heritage was simply written out of the story.

  With her family deeply committed to her education, McGrory was accepted to the Girls’ Latin School, in Boston, the finest public school for young women in the United States at the time. It was a stroke of good fortune, and it was at Girls’ Latin that Mary developed a manner that convinced most who met her later in life that she must have come from a wealthy East Coast family.

  The school, located on Huntington Avenue in Boston, was famously demanding. As seventh graders, the girls waded through Caesar’s Commentaries on the Gallic War in Latin, and Mary likened the course work to service in the Marine Corps: “It was basically impossible.”

  Although only a ten-cent trolley-car ride away from her neighborhood, Girls’ Latin thrust Mary into a different—and far more urbane—world. The school was a short walk from the wonders of Copley Square: the Museum of Fine Arts and its magnificent John Singer Sargent murals, the Romanesque spires of Trinity Church, and the beautiful arched reading rooms of the Boston Public Library, where Mary worked summers shelving books.

  The years at Girls’ Latin cemented Mary’s love of the written word. As a voracious reader she gravitated to the melodrama and heaving bosoms of period pieces like Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre. Mary’s musings in her journal at the time were deeply bifurcated. One moment she would dream of a career as a reporter or a famous author, and the next she would resign herself to being a schoolteacher or being trapped in Roslindale in perpetuity. She toyed with the idea of becoming a nun. She always attended Sunday Mass and was never one to get in trouble or be disrespectful. Yet underneath the surface she yearned for the adventures of a fictional heroine. Mary’s buttoned-down manner concealed a streak of impetuousness, and her ambitions felt at odds with her prospects. It was as if the world of literature had allowed her to glimpse a new world of which she could not be part.

  Mary went on to become the first in her family to graduate from university—Emmanuel College, in Boston. (Mary had her heart set on attending Radcliffe College, Harvard’s all-women sister school, but her scholarship application was rejected because of her mediocre math and science scores.)

  Mary graduated from Emmanuel with a bachelor of arts degree in English in June 1939, and by her twenty-first birthday she was enrolled at the Hickox Secretarial School, learning typing and shorthand. The restless optimism of the Girls’ Latin years was gone. “With the passing of the years has come the realization that I shall not, as I have always fondly fancied, grow up to be a remarkable woman,” Mary wrote at the time. Neither employment nor romance were anywhere in sight.

  On September 8, 1939, after a bout of pneumonia, Edward McGrory passed away. He was fifty-nine years old. News of Europe descending into the horrors of World War II dominated the headlines. It was a dark time, and by January 1940 Mary was feeling theatrically sorry for herself, bemoaning that her best hope was to “find some nice congenial job in a nut and bolt factory, and settle down to a nice, even melancholy for the rest of my lonely days.”

  Her mood rebounded considerably in March 1940, when she landed a job cropping pictures for textbooks in the art department at the Houghton Mifflin Publishing Company, earning $16.50 a week. After about a year, and against her mother’s advice, Mary left the relative security of her position for a brief, unhappy stint working on a local mayoral campaign in 1941.

  Again out of work, Mary decided to pursue her dream of working at a newspaper. She had been attracted to journalism as a girl by reading about the comic strip adventures of Jane Arden, a prototypical spunky female reporter.

  Thanks to a tip from one of her former Houghton Mifflin colleagues, Mary landed a position as an assistant to Alice Dixon Bond, the literary editor of the Boston Herald Traveler, in 1942. (The Herald and the Traveler were separate papers housed in the same building.) Mary and Bond had little in common. Bond was a Beacon Hill socialite inclined to floral prints and pearls who covered the literary scene in the fawning tones of a high-minded gossip columnist. The book review department was staid, but Mary loved the chaos of the nearby newsroom, with its pastepots, piles of newspapers cluttering the surfaces of cramped rows of wooden desks, and editors yelling to be heard over the din.

  Mary started out in journalism with no connections and no credentials, at a time when the field was dominated by men, from publishers down to the lowliest copyboy—hardly a suitable profession for a nice Catholic girl from Roslindale. As author and media historian Eric Alterman joked, “Reporting was seen as a job for winos, perverts, and those without sufficient imagination to become gangsters.”

  Mary longed to work in the newsroom, but Alice Dixon Bond viewed Mary’s ambitions as unlikely and improper. Frustrated, Mary appealed directly to George Minot, the Herald Traveler’s editor, for a chance to write color stories or features. Minot br
ushed her off, saying that she was too shy to make a good reporter.

  In March 1946, Mary’s editors grudgingly agreed to let her write a column about her dog. Her story about Mac, her unruly pet with the demeanor of the “MGM lion with a hangover,” was a surprise hit with readers. In a stroke of luck that would irretrievably change her life, John Hutchens, the editor of the New York Times Book Review, read some of Mary’s work and liked it. Hutchens asked Mary if she would be interested in writing occasional reviews for the Times while keeping her position at the Herald Traveler.

  Mary’s review of Richard Burke’s Reluctant Hussy appeared in the Times Book Review in June 1946, with Mary declaring it to be “an unabashed bonbon of a novel.” A review in the Times was a significant feat for any writer; it was almost unheard of for a twenty-eight-year-old woman in the 1940s. Arthur Gelb, the former managing editor of the Times, commented, “The Book Review was so sacrosanct, such an institution, it had such power, that getting your name in that Book Review became one of the great achievements.” In 1946, the Times had only four women working as reporters or editors, all of whom were junior staffers relegated to a single row of desks.

  In the spring of 1947, Hutchens informed Mary that the Washington Star was looking for an assistant book critic, and she made the leap, moving to the nation’s capital in August to begin working at the Star for a salary of seventy dollars per week. Mary expected her mother to disapprove, but her aunt Kate came to the rescue, saying that she would look after Mary’s mother. For Mary, her aunt Kate’s willingness to assume these family responsibilities was a gift beyond measure. She finally had freedom to roam beyond Roslindale. Despite Mary’s eagerness to escape Boston, she loved it all the more for having left it.

  Arriving in a capital that had become a boomtown as a result of the growth of government during World War II, Mary was struck by a feeling of openness and mobility. Washington’s avenues were broad and tree-lined, unlike Boston’s cramped streets. More important, “in Boston, your name or your face froze you into place,” she said. “In Washington, nobody knew exactly who anybody else was,” allowing her to invent herself as the person she wanted to be. While her identity had been a source of persistent unease in Roslindale, her slightly airbrushed image as classically Boston Irish became a source of enduring pride in Washington.

  The Washington Star was one of the most important and successful newspapers in America at the time. Founded in 1852, the paper was owned and run by three families: the Kauffmanns, Noyeses, and Adamses. The Star was moderately conservative in outlook, a pillar of the Republican establishment. Tradition meant a great deal at the paper, and legend had it that President Abraham Lincoln had personally handed Crosby S. Noyes a copy of his second inaugural address so it could be printed in the Star.

  Afternoon newspapers like the Star were a daily marvel at a time when most people still settled down to read the news after getting home from work. The Star actually produced five different versions of the paper throughout the course of the day, from its first edition, at nine in the morning, to the final edition of the day, the “red streak,” which had the closing numbers for Wall Street and was sold only at newsstands. All of its home deliveries were of afternoon editions, and deadlines for the Star’s reporters and columnists were all pinned to its identity as an afternoon paper.

  It was a massively labor-intensive operation. Reporters called in stories to dictationists, who typed on mimeograph paper. The stories were physically cut and pasted together after being marked up by editors, manually set in type, and printed. The Star traditionally hired many of its press operators from the local school for the deaf, Gallaudet University, since they were unperturbed by the ceaseless noise from the huge presses. The relentless pressure to deliver created a great spirit at the Star, and the newsroom was loose, chaotic, boozy, and full of gifted, difficult souls. Getting the story meant everything. “It was heaven,” Mary said. “Just a wonderful, kind, welcoming, funny place, full of eccentrics and desperate people trying to meet five deadlines a day.”

  Mary fit in easily at the Star. “Newsrooms are large places, full of messy desks and lippy people who hang around gossiping and making cheeky remarks about their betters,” she later recounted, “until deadlines, when they become distraught, turn pale, or red, groan, bark, curse, kick wastebaskets, and behave in the other socially unacceptable ways common to people who must write in a hurry.”

  The freewheeling atmosphere of the newsroom was usually transported to the preferred neighborhood bar, the Chicken Hut, after hours. Mary sang, drank, and smoked along with the boys as reporters gabbed about stories, complained about editors, and lambasted one another’s mistakes. For Mary, the Star was like Girls’ Latin School leavened with sarcasm, alcohol, and nicotine. Thrilled with her new circumstances, Mary put romance on the back burner, leading one of her friends to complain that she was giving short shrift even to men with “all a gal could want.”

  Although Mary fit in with reporters, her Catholicism set her slightly apart from the rest of the breed. She didn’t like it when reporters gambled, and she took the Church’s dim view of things like premarital sex seriously. She also had an abiding belief in the importance of doing good works. Not long after settling in Washington, Mary visited the St. Ann’s Infant and Maternity Home, a short walk away from where she was living, by Dupont Circle. St. Ann’s was a refuge for unwed mothers and their children, and its clientele was mostly young Catholic girls who had gotten into trouble.

  Mary introduced herself to the sisters who ran St. Ann’s. Chatting over tea, she opined that many of the single women she met in Washington were alarmingly self-absorbed, and she wanted to volunteer at the orphanage. The sisters, never having had a volunteer, weren’t sure what to make of this insistent young woman. As they tried to diplomatically say “No, thank you,” one of the orphans wandered in from the playground and clambered into Mary’s lap. With upturned eyes, he asked Mary if she was going to stay the night. St. Ann’s had its first volunteer.

  Mary became a fixture at St. Ann’s. Since many of the children struggled with the rolling r’s of her last name, they took to calling her Mary Gloria. Mary loved the mispronunciation; it sounded exotic and Italian. For more than five decades, she spent hours each week reading with the children and trying to give them the small, unremarkable luxuries of a normal family life—someone to kiss a skinned elbow or teach them the alphabet song. “Mary could be wearing her nicest clothes, and be headed to a fancy embassy dinner party right after helping out at St. Ann’s,” Sister Mary Bader explained, “but she would never flinch as a muddy kid came right off the playground into her arms.”

  Mary was brazen in pressing others at the Star into her cause. It was Mary’s insistence on enforced volunteerism that led columnist Maureen Dowd to describe her as “she who must be obeyed.” Few of her fellow reporters dared say no when it came to helping with the field trips and picnics for the kids from St. Ann’s. Every “volunteer” was given a clearly assigned role—from driving the van to making peanut-butter-and-mayonnaise sandwiches. Any volunteer who missed the “junior picnics” with the children was not allowed to attend the “senior picnics”—the alcohol-soaked dinners that followed.

  Mary instituted an annual Christmas party for the orphans, usually held at the house of a coworker. She soon enlisted Tommy Noyes, the youngest of three Noyes brothers at the paper, to play Santa. The Christmas party evolved so that it was staged around the same careful ritual every year: Santa would pretend to be asleep on the couch when the orphans arrived, and the children would rouse him with a steadily rising chorus of “Jingle Bells.” Santa would then provide gentle encouragement and admonitions to the children before gifts were opened. As the columnist Anthony Lewis observed, “I can’t imagine any other journalist in Washington doing what she did with the children.”

  Back at the Star, Mary complained that “no one seemed to pay the slightest attention” to her book reviews, but
her time in the book department helped shape her personality in important ways. She learned to deliver a tough critique and look an author in the eye afterwards. She came to appreciate that the most successful authors made themselves into their most interesting characters. She began to develop an eye for fashion, and she could hold her own in conversation with even the most jaded of reporters. But hers remained a small job in a much bigger world.

  While still reviewing books, Mary prodded editor Newby Noyes for a chance to cover politics, and finally, in 1953, Newby suggested that she do a series of profiles on some of the more interesting politicians in town. These were the first stories to showcase classic Mary style and craftsmanship. She described Senator Alexander Wiley of Wisconsin as running on a platform of “preparedness, non-intervention, and cheese” in speeches that displayed “marvelous disregard for unity, coherence, and emphasis.”

  Mary’s 1953 profile of Lyndon Baines Johnson, who had just become Senate minority leader, drew the most attention. Mary spent a good deal of time with Johnson as she prepared her story, and the senator already had a reputation for intimidating even the most battle-hardened journalists. But Mary was not cowed by the voluble LBJ, and she delivered a solid character study of the Texan.

  Mary, as she would do many times in the years to come, got a quote out of Johnson that was a little more quotable than he would have liked. Johnson told Mary that while many people in Washington thought he was too conservative, his constituents back home tended to think he was too liberal. “I’m a Communist in Texas,” drawled LBJ, “and a Dixiecrat in Washington.” Johnson liked the quote until it started appearing in Texas newspapers and he was forced to downplay it. After the piece ran, Johnson wrote to Mary in buttery tones, saying how glad he was that Mary had enjoyed her visit and how pleasurable it had been “to cooperate with such an acute and perceptive writer.”