Man in Profile

by Thomas Kunkel

  But at the moment Walker had no jobs open. Besides, he was somewhat alarmed that Mitchell would make such a trip entirely on impulse, with no appointments and with no real prospects waiting for him. The editor advised him that the first thing he should do under the circumstances was to grab any job he could scare up—even in a soda shop, if need be; as he told the farm boy, “Half the soda jerks in the city are from the South.” Walker, however, could see that Mitchell did not lack determination, and the budding reporter somehow came away from their lengthy discussion considerably encouraged. “He did not actually say so,” Mitchell recalled years later, “but [he] gave me the impression that he would give me a job as a reporter as soon as I learned how to get around in the city.” He retrieved his suitcase from Penn Station and got a cheap furnished room in Greenwich Village, near Sheridan Square, at a building that catered to newspapermen. There Mitchell quickly met a copy editor at the New York World, who said he would introduce Mitchell around. It appears Walker may have also made some calls on Mitchell’s behalf. In short order Mitchell accomplished his aim: He’d secured a newspaper job, at the World—and a lavish salary of fifteen dollars a week. Of course, fifteen dollars could carry a frugal young man a long way, even in New York, when a loaf of bread was a dime, cigarettes were fifteen cents, and movies were a quarter—for a double feature.

  As a copy boy, Mitchell ferried freshly written stories from reporters to editors and from editors to the composing room and performed the dozens of other dull tasks that kept a big-city newsroom humming. But it also was the kind of job that revealed a novice’s drive to the paper’s editors, and Mitchell made the most of his chance. Before long, the city room was assigning him to cover police blotters in the outlying boroughs, and on the side he began to contribute Sunday feature stories. Not long after that, just four months after that first impromptu job interview, Walker summoned Mitchell. He was going to work for the mighty Herald Tribune—at double his copy boy’s salary, to boot.

  Though he would work there less than two full years, Mitchell always considered his stay at the Herald Tribune “one of the most exciting periods of my life.” For decades after he’d made his mark as one of the nation’s most accomplished writers, and even after the paper’s demise, he stayed in regular touch with many of his former Trib colleagues. But he was not alone in that; “Tribune men” had a unique esprit in the crowded New York newspaper universe. This was due in no small part to Stanley Walker’s genius for identifying talent, which allowed him to build one of the most capable reporting staffs New York City had ever seen. The Herald Tribune of that era was widely considered the liveliest and best-written newspaper in the city; if The New York Times was the “paper of record,” the Tribune crowd considered it dull going and inferior to what they produced day in and day out. Certainly Mitchell felt there was no better place in the world to apprentice his trade—and no better city editor to have as his mentor.

  Mitchell started in February 1930, and Walker set him to work as a “district man.” Newspaper district men were assigned to cover specific sections or neighborhoods of the city—the Village, the West Side, parts of Brooklyn or Harlem, say—and they typically worked into the wee hours if they were on morning papers like the Herald Tribune. They paid particular attention to the police activity in their district; in fact, their tatty little offices, or “shacks,” often were literally appended to police headquarters. As Mitchell would recall in the introductory chapter of his 1938 collection of newspaper writing, My Ears Are Bent, with so many colorful reporters, cops, snitches, politicians, mobsters, and petty criminals parading in and out through the course of an evening, it was often hard to tell the good guys from the bad—such was the bracing complexity and moral ambiguity of Depression-era New York. When there was a police or fire call, the district man was expected to get to the scene, find out what happened as quickly as he could, and phone in the facts to the paper’s rewrite desk.

  Mitchell would work various districts during his initial time at the Herald Tribune, but he started out in Harlem. The experience proved to be revelatory. Yet Mitchell managed to make something of an impression on Harlem, too, or at least on the hard-bitten colleagues who covered it; they regarded the new man as an overeager puppy. The reporters’ shack was on the ground floor of the Hotel Theresa, a Harlem landmark and cultural hub. “We used to sit in the doorway in swivel chairs and look out at the people passing to and fro on Seventh Avenue, Harlem’s main street,” he wrote. “There were four reporters in Harlem at night, three from the morning papers and one from the City News Association. My colleagues were veterans. The thing they disliked most in a reporter was enthusiasm, and I was always excited. When I got on the telephone to give my office a story…they would stand outside and point at their foreheads and make circles in the air, indicating that I did not have any sense.”

  In Harlem, as in his hometown, Mitchell experienced a jumble of races and classes. But the flamboyant characters he encountered there, and the jazzy, desperate extremes at which life was lived, were like nothing he’d ever seen in North Carolina. When things at the district shack were slow, Mitchell made the rounds of clubs, diners, storefront churches, and speakeasies, looking for stories. He quickly found his way to many of Harlem’s more established eccentrics, every one of whom he filed away—and many of whom he revisited a few years later when he was writing features for the New York World. These included the gambler Gill Holton, who earlier in his career ran the Broken Leg and Busted Bar & Grill; the famous preacher and entrepreneur Father Divine; and the proprietor of the most patronized voodoo emporium in Harlem. Other times his police contacts got him into places that were as harrowing as they were exotic, such as the neighborhood’s out-of-the-way marijuana dens. One night a black detective Mitchell knew offered to take him on his rounds along Lenox Avenue, to check in on some of the evening’s “rent parties” (which tenants threw when they couldn’t make their rent, beseeching the guests to chip in). After several raucous stops, Mitchell followed the detective into a sixth-floor tenement flat. In the dark, smoky space they found several well-dressed whites in the company of blacks, all smoking unfamiliar (to Mitchell) brown cigarettes. Then, from out of the haze, a shot rang out.

  Everyone was watching the tall detective. Suddenly he turned on his heel and grabbed a small, forlorn Negro. Then I saw that the fellow had a .45 in his hand. They caught at each other, and the detective kept a muscular grip on the small man’s gun hand. They wheeled about the room, grappling, until the detective got one hand gripped about the gunman’s neck. He began to choke him, steadily. They fell against the piano, and then the gun went off. It broke a key on the piano, and there was an explosion, and a tiny, futile tinkle came from the piano. All the people began to laugh. The detective choked the gunman to the floor, picked the pistol from his hand, and motioned me to open the door.

  He pulled his sparring partner to his feet, and the three of us stumbled out of the room. As I closed the door I saw the very pale man light another dark cigarette. We walked down Lenox Avenue, and people from the night clubs began to question us, but we did not notice them. The detective was escorting the gunman to the precinct station.

  “What kind of place was that?” I asked.

  “That was a very nice place,” the tall detective said, smiling.

  At the time, Mitchell probably lived not far from the site of that rumble; one of the many places he occupied during his first few years in New York was in a largely Puerto Rican neighborhood on West 96th Street. As he relocated with his different district assignments, Mitchell lived in a series of “furnished-room houses and side-street hotels” in the early days of the Depression—among them various places on the Upper West Side, in Tudor City, in Greenwich Village, and in Times Square. In doing so, he was scrupulously following some of the advice Stanley Walker had given him in their first meeting. To really learn a city quickly, Walker had said, a reporter should live close to the areas he’s covering. And he should walk, constantly. It was
all right to take a trolley or streetcars, where you can see out, Walker told him, but it’s vital to walk and take in as much as you can. “I started walking, all day, solitary walks, with a map in my pocket and a sandwich,” Mitchell recalled years later in his journal. “Before long, he gave me a job but walking in the city had become addictive. When I left the [Herald Tribune] and went to the [World] I continued to walk on my days off. When I left the [World-Telegram; the two papers merged in 1931] for [The New Yorker], I continued, and I still do.”

  Walker gave his young charge one more piece of professional advice that stuck. Once Mitchell became a reporter, Walker instructed him to go to Brooks Brothers and buy himself a decent suit. He did, and for the rest of his life, the always smartly dressed Mitchell purchased every piece of his wardrobe, from socks to hats, from Brooks Brothers.

  The education Mitchell was afforded during his Herald Tribune apprenticeship, in the totality of the experience, cannot be overestimated. More important than just learning the city, he was learning its rhythms, how it worked. He was figuring out whom to ask when you needed to get to the “right” people. He was encountering the city’s myriad characters and sussing out who was worth a story from who was simply crazy. And he was learning how to get out of their way and listen.

  Credit 4.1

  Having taken Stanley Walker’s sartorial advice, Mitchell—hat cocked just so—poses as a proud apprentice member of New York’s Fourth Estate.

  Most important, the raw kid from Fairmont was gaining a big-city confidence. He recalled in his journal that once he went to New York and became a reporter, he began to detect a welcome transformation in himself. “Lost my shyness—would approach anyone from the mayor on…. ‘This is Mitchell of the World-Telegram or the NY Herald Tribune.’ ”

  That rising confidence didn’t escape Walker’s notice. In the fall of 1930, the city editor recalled Mitchell from the district shacks and put him to work as a bona fide reporter on the city desk.

  —

  Sometime in 1930, while on assignment at Madison Square Garden, Mitchell met a fellow reporter whom he found considerably more interesting than the story he was supposed to be covering.

  Therese Jacobsen was working the same Garden event for the Mount Vernon Daily Argus. At the time it was unusual for a female reporter to be doing anything other than writing stories for the “women’s pages.” Even more unusual was the fact that Therese’s older sister, Maude, was also a reporter and, like Therese, would go on to graduate from Columbia’s prestigious journalism program. Therese was gregarious and had a talent for the work—in what would be an abbreviated print career, she wrote for such publications as the New York World, Brooklyn Eagle, Irish Times, and the Argus, the last located in suburban Westchester County, New York, where she shared an apartment with Maude at the time she met Mitchell. Therese was only twenty years old, a year and a half younger than Mitchell, and she was hard to miss, even in a crowd at the Garden: very attractive, with beautiful hazel eyes and an easy, engaging smile that conveyed an effervescent personality. Her confident demeanor showed she was thoroughly a city girl, and the farm boy was smitten immediately. Soon after meeting, the two were dating; sometimes they even arranged to cover stories together. But at first Therese’s protective family didn’t quite know what to make of this laconic, dark-haired Southerner. Not long after meeting him, Therese’s father asked Mitchell if he owned anything. He thought for a moment, then said, “Well, I own a horse.”

  Born in New York, Therese (she sounded the “th” like “thimble,” and her full name was pronounced the-RESSE) was the daughter of Scandinavian immigrants. Her father was a respected civil engineer, who was educated in his native Norway and then immigrated to New York, where he worked on the city’s subway system and helped build the Lincoln and Queens–Midtown tunnels. Perhaps his proudest accomplishment, however, was being invited to design and construct the grand drive for Theodore Roosevelt’s Sagamore Hill home in Oyster Bay, which yielded him several prized letters from the former president. Therese’s mother was a native of Denmark; she met her husband-to-be on the boat they shared when he was first immigrating to America and she was returning from a visit home.

  Credit 4.2

  A bright and vivacious city girl, Therese Jacobsen charmed country boy Joseph Mitchell from their first meeting.

  The Jacobsens settled in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park neighborhood. Theirs was a close family, and the household was one of much warmth and humor, which helped shape Therese’s outgoing nature and highly developed sense of fun. She was an excellent cook and an athlete who as a teenager swam and fenced competitively. Therese was, in sum, a bright and vivacious young woman who was sure of herself. “She…had a benign view of the world and could be very funny,” recalled her daughter Nora. “She had a great sense of irony and of the absurd and did not take herself too seriously.” An example Nora cites: Therese was brought up as a Lutheran, and all her life, when the Baptist-raised Joseph would take Communion, she delighted in calling him a “cannibal.” This combination of qualities—beautiful, cheeky, as curious about other people as he was—made the young lady reporter enormously appealing to Mitchell.

  On February 27, 1931, after having dated for the better part of a year, Joseph and Therese made the short train trip up to Greenwich, Connecticut, where they were married by a justice of the peace. If they were excited about eloping, they didn’t seem especially anxious; they passed the time on the ride up by scoping out the first issue of the newly merged New York World-Telegram, which they couldn’t know was soon to figure prominently in their lives. It’s not clear why Joseph and Therese chose elopement or, more interestingly, why even after the fact they decided not to tell their parents what they had done. (Nora later speculated that it may have been a product of the Depression mentality—to safeguard their respective jobs when some editors at that time felt it wasn’t fair for two positions to reside in a single household, with plenty of “good men” looking for work.) Maude was in on things, however, because she let the newlyweds take over the apartment she’d been sharing with Therese. But this ruse actually proved to be the undoing of their secret. When the telephone rang early one morning, Mitchell reflexively answered it; it was Therese’s father on the other end of the line. When he sternly inquired what Mitchell was doing at his daughter’s apartment at that inappropriate hour, Mitchell had to confess to the elopement. Hurt and angry at having been misled, and mindful of appearances for their daughter, the Jacobsens arranged for an elaborate Norwegian “church wedding” in Brooklyn, to be held on the first anniversary of their elopement, after which Joseph and Therese’s marriage was publicly announced. As for the Mitchells, when Joseph informed them, by telegram, of his marriage to a New Yorker of Scandinavian descent whom they had never met, A.N. is said to have replied, “You made your bed and now you better lie in it.”

  —

  Not long after the “real” wedding—the one in the church—Therese gave up her reporting career. She never told her family exactly why, and it’s altogether possible it did have something to do with the hard-times “job rationing” then occurring in the industry. But years later her sister allowed that Therese considered it “inevitable” that her talented husband would outshine her as a writer; she decided that, instead of competing with him, she would pursue an alternate creative outlet. She did this with her usual enthusiasm. She loved photography, and now she took formal lessons to learn how to shoot professionally and develop her own photographs. Before long she had learned how to convert an apartment bathroom into a makeshift darkroom, and for the next fifteen years or so (until two young daughters made too many demands on her time), Therese Mitchell and her Rolleiflex were fixtures on the intimate streets of Greenwich Village, where the couple eventually settled.

  Therese’s forte, and her passion, was photographing candid scenes of the city’s inhabitants. She didn’t chase celebrities, and she wasn’t interested in capturing scandal and crime for the tabloids. She took photo
graphs of regular people—sometimes in extraordinary situations but as often as not just being themselves, not even aware of the photographer’s presence. She paid particular attention to the working class, union members, and the working poor. When the couple would go to Fairmont for summer vacations, Joseph’s “foreign wife” (as some in Fairmont initially referred to her) was no less engaged, taking photographs of the farms and warehouses and humble dwellings of the tenant farmers—as well as of the farmers themselves. Whether taken in the city or the countryside, her black-and-white images are natural and very affecting; she achieved an empathetic documentary quality akin to that of Dorothea Lange and other better-known photographers of the Depression years. Her photographs could have been taken only in those places and only at that time in American history. One other thing is evident in Therese’s photography: She fully shared her husband’s fascination with people whom others found odd or outcast. That palpable appreciation of a fundamental dignity in the less advantaged proved to be one of the most important and enduring aspects of their relationship.

  At the Herald Tribune, Mitchell was quickly validating Walker’s confidence in him. He seemed able to do anything, from working police sources to conducting quickie celebrity interviews to covering mobster funerals. And then, about the time of his elopement, early in 1931, he stumbled onto a story so sensational that it alone could have made his reportorial reputation in New York. According to Richard Kluger’s account in his book The Paper: The Life and Death of the New York Herald Tribune—which he derived largely from Mitchell himself (and about which Mitchell left some corroborating journal notes)—the young reporter was covering the murder of a prostitute in Midtown Manhattan and went to the victim’s apartment with a detective. There he saw the police investigators come upon her diary. The book turned out to contain the names of her well-known clientele—whom, it seemed, she had been blackmailing. The detectives also found drafts of a letter she was composing to the Seabury Commission, the state panel then investigating police corruption, offering to testify against vice-squad officers she alleged were framing her. Mitchell excitedly called Walker, who urged him to get as much information as he could before the police bounced him from the crime scene. He did, then returned to the city room to start writing his spectacular exclusive. The paper’s managing editor, however, “decided the story was too hot to be entrusted to one of Walker’s cubs,” and he ordered Mitchell to turn over his notes to a senior reporter who was friends with Ogden Reid, the Herald Tribune’s owner and editor-in-chief. The glory moment passed. As Kluger recounts, “Deprived of his scoop, back pounding the pavements of the Bronx on routine police stories, Mitchell burned. He did not know exactly who was responsible for what had happened, but his anger focused on Ogden Reid.”