Man in Profile

by Thomas Kunkel

  He filed for the paper almost every day. Some of these contributions were more feature-oriented, describing the atmosphere around the courthouse for readers back in the city. Some were straightforward accounts of the day’s testimony; other times he simply gathered odds and ends from the trial. Mitchell produced about two-dozen pieces in all. But even writing the “straight news,” Mitchell brought a more acute sense of observation than the average reporter on the scene, conveying a subtler humanity instead of the easy pathos others went in for. Here, for instance, was how he began his news story about Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s testimony early in the trial:

  FLEMINGTON, Jan. 3—The questioning of Mrs. Anne Morrow Lindbergh by Attorney General David T. Wilentz resembled a tense private conversation. The voice of the mother of the murdered child was so low as she said that Charles Augustus Lindbergh, Jr., was normal, healthy and blue-eyed that the Attorney General impulsively moved several steps forward and stood almost directly in front of her.

  The two were so near that the questions and answers could not be heard, and Judge Trenchard, leaning forward, said, “If the jurors do not hear the testimony, let them speak up and we will see to it that they do hear it.” Mrs. Lindbergh looked startled. She sat even more erect in the chair. Her eyes blinked and she clinched her jaws. Thereafter her voice was louder.

  To shield its staff from the hothouse media environment and the camp followers in Flemington proper, the World-Telegram housed its reporters and editors miles away, at a small, family-run hotel in Stockton, New Jersey. It took over the hotel completely, installing a news wire and turning one of its larger spaces into a makeshift newsroom. Over the nearly two months of the trial, the team got into a kind of routine. While the trial was playing out during the day, Mitchell and the other reporters constantly phoned in updates on the testimony. Then at night, after a hearty, home-cooked communal dinner, they retired to the newsroom to start writing their “overnights”—the stories the paper would run in its early editions, until the trial had resumed and the paper could be freshened with the latest news for its home-delivery editions. “By ten P.M. the room would be full of cursing reporters whacking out nonsense on portable typewriters,” Mitchell later wrote. The men lived for the weekends, when Therese and the other wives were permitted to join their exhausted husbands in Stockton.

  Outside was the depressing northeastern winter, with its short days and cold nights. The Stockton hotel was situated one block from the Delaware River, and for Mitchell the setting afforded a chance to escape the trial’s relentless deadlines. “We used to go down there at night and with slabs of ice as big as box-cars piling up against the bridge pillars,” he wrote. “Late at night we could stand on the porch of the hotel and hear the crunch of the ice in the river.” Sometimes they would sled on the nearby frozen canals. Family lore has it that one day Mitchell teamed up with Herald Tribune columnist Lucius Beebe to climb up the side of the building adjacent to the jailhouse, a vantage point from which they supposedly could see Hauptmann pacing in his cell.

  Writing about the trial several years after the fact, Mitchell was almost blithe in recalling how the experience provided him a welcome interruption from the grind of the city beat. Still, he fully appreciated the serious business playing out in that New Jersey courtroom. After Hauptmann’s conviction and two more years of appeals, he would be put to death. Mitchell by now had been a witness to several state executions; they had shaken him, and he said it would take him a long time to get over what he had seen. He captured that gravity in summarizing his Flemington experience:

  In the morning all the ashtrays would be full of butts and the wastebaskets would hold piles of crumpled copy paper and empty applejack bottles. Whenever I see a bottle of applejack I think of the Hauptmann trial. It was a mess. I have seen six men electrocuted, and once a young woman who had been stabbed in the neck died while I was trying to make her lie still, and one night I saw a white-haired Irish cop with a kindly face give a Negro thief the third degree, slowly tearing fresh bandages off wounds in the Negro’s back, but for unnecessary inhumanity I do not believe I ever saw anything which surpassed the Hauptmann trial—Mrs. Lindbergh on the witness stand, for example, identifying her murdered child’s sleeping suit, or Mrs. Hauptmann the night the jury came in, the night she heard that her husband was to be electrocuted. The older I get the less I care to see such things.

  Professionally, however, the most important thing that happened to Joseph Mitchell in Flemington had nothing to do with the Lindberghs, the Hauptmanns, the media frenzy, or the trial itself. Barely a week into the proceedings, he got a note from St. Clair McKelway, a reporter and editor at The New Yorker—and who soon would be named the magazine’s first managing editor in charge of nonfiction stories, or what everyone there called “Fact” pieces.

  Three years older than Mitchell, McKelway, too, was a native of North Carolina, though he spent his boyhood in Washington, D.C. He began his newspaper career there, but he made his reputation at the New York Herald Tribune. An outstanding reporter with a jeweler’s eye for detail, McKelway as a writer had a lovely, carefree touch that reflected his own personality and perfectly suited the crime stories that became his specialty at The New Yorker. He would also produce one of the most celebrated Profiles in the magazine’s history, a six-part evisceration of Walter Winchell, when the gossip columnist was at the height of his influence. Handsome and unhurried, as dapper as he was droll, McKelway once sat down to do a performance review with a then-new reporter at the magazine, John Bainbridge, and offered this lone piece of advice: “Be more debonair.” He would marry five times, and he suffered spectacular bouts of manic depression that could send him skittering from reality. (As an Air Force information officer during World War II, for instance, McKelway sent a telegram to the War Department, accusing Admiral Chester Nimitz of treason; influential higher-ups quashed it before McKelway could get into serious trouble.) But during these early years of The New Yorker, McKelway was among a handful of people who helped Harold Ross establish its breezily sophisticated tone and its journalistic standards. He also specialized in recruiting some of the best reporting talent in New York.

  Which was why he had reached out to Mitchell. Specifically, McKelway wished to discuss some potential Reporter at Large story ideas—but, more broadly, he wanted to talk about Mitchell’s future. “When the Lindbergh trial is over (or is it ever going to be over?) I’d like very much to have a talk with you about how you are getting along in your work for this periodical,” McKelway wrote.

  Credit 5.3

  The dashing St. Clair McKelway, Mitchell’s first editor at The New Yorker, would marry five times. His fourth marriage was to Martha Kemp Mature, soon after her divorce from Hollywood leading man Victor Mature.

  McKelway was ardent. That March, with the trial’s close, he was pitching Mitchell on a Profile of a well-known yachtsman and “caviar king.” A few months later he suggested a Reporter at Large piece on nude beaches. By that fall Mitchell’s old mentor, Stanley Walker, had joined Ross’s editing staff, and he, too, was trying out story ideas on his protégé. Mitchell was flattered by the attention, but, revitalized somewhat by the forced time away from the city, he was already back on the daily treadmill. Not long after the trial, he was putting the finishing touches on a mammoth six-part series on the nation’s best-known liberal journals, including The Nation, the Daily Worker, Commonweal, and The New Republic. (Said the headline on the opening piece: LIBERAL JOURNALS ARE INFLUENTIAL BECAUSE THEIR SUBSCRIBERS ARE ENLIGHTENED CITIZENS.) Other series during this “second stage” of Mitchell’s World-Telegram tenure involved profiling New York’s busiest social caseworkers, sagest magistrates, and bravest firefighters, the last stories liberally illustrated with their heroic exploits. He continued to crank out the celebrity profiles like a mimeograph machine: Eleanor Roosevelt, Kitty Carlisle, Jimmy Durante, George M. Cohan, Tallulah Bankhead, and Gene Krupa, to name just a few. Nor did he neglect the city’s curiosities: New Yorkers who
wanted to pull down all the city’s statues, lady parachutists, and the inventor of the combination toothbrush/hairbrush/shoe brush.

  Odd or mainstream, long or short, almost every story Mitchell now wrote appeared on the World-Telegram’s front page or main feature page. His stories were popular with readers, who connected with their humor and humanity. The paper in turn fueled that popularity by making Mitchell one of the reporters it featured on the side-panel billboards of the World-Telegram delivery trucks that raced around the city. Meantime, Mitchell continued to refine the unconventional, understated, and elegant style that was a precursor to his later New Yorker work. Other than a little sentiment now and again, his work at this point was largely absent of authorial emotion. But he let that façade crack in a powerful story that appeared in late 1935.

  Mitchell visited a hospital that housed wounded veterans from the World War, men who had sustained the gravest kinds of physical and psychological injury. He gained access to one of the back wards, where the most profoundly damaged men stayed. Mitchell described how some of them seemed unable to move; others wore frozen, emotionless expressions. The more socialized of the patients were sitting at a table, trying to make baskets from reeds. “Outside the leaves on the maples in the eighteen acres of hospital grounds were yellow and red,” Mitchell wrote, “and on Kingsbridge Road kids were throwing a football about and yelling, and on the blue Hudson two young men were rowing a boat, and inside, huddled around the radiators, five middle-aged men whose nerves had been blasted out of coordination by screaming shells were struggling with reed baskets. It takes them hours to do the work a child can do in no time. It made one furious watching them struggle with the lengths of reed, trembling and fumbling.”

  The World-Telegram was also sending Mitchell to where important news was occurring—and one such instance nearly cost him his life. In the late winter and early spring of 1936, the Ohio River was flooded for its entire length, and Mitchell traveled to see the situation for himself. He was scheduled to fly out of an airport in Cleveland in a small airplane, to survey the upper reaches of the Ohio over two days and document the extent of the damage. The first day’s trip went off without incident. But day two—March 20, 1936—proved more eventful.

  Mitchell was in the single-engine craft with the pilot and two other newspaper reporters. Approaching takeoff, the plane clipped a snowdrift along the runway and flipped, coming to rest upside down. Mitchell and the others, strapped securely into their seats, were pulled out by horrified onlookers. They were shaken but unharmed. In short order, in fact, the group had secured another plane and took off as planned to finish the assignment. “It all happened too fast for us to get scared,” Mitchell told the World-Telegram, which also ran a small photograph of the mishap. Then the paper printed his report on the flooding, which was typically thorough and made no mention of the accident.

  —

  In the thirties, as was the case in preceding and succeeding decades, the gears of the New York media world were lubricated at certain favorite bars. Newspaper reporters and editors, magazine contributors, theater publicists and producers, agents, and assorted friends of the court came together there to gossip and drink. On occasion they were even known to gamble. Among the most welcoming of these establishments was Bleeck’s (pronounced “Blake’s”), a onetime speakeasy that went legitimate with the repeal of Prohibition.

  This night, as most nights, there is a “match game” under way in the cramped back room. A bemused Joseph Mitchell—still in one piece after his flirtation with mortality in Cleveland—takes it all in from a small peanut gallery that’s formed up just behind the long table of a dozen or so players. Among these are Walker and Beebe and past and present staffers from the Herald Tribune, as well as a sizable cohort from The New Yorker—McKelway, Thurber, Alva Johnston, Wolcott Gibbs, John O’Hara, and John Lardner. Then there is the lone woman at the table, a petite, fetching blonde named Ann Honeycutt. As night wears on, the barbs sharpen and carom around the room. Mitchell observes the lady and nods in approval as she gives it to the boys as good as she gets.

  Bleeck’s was located on West 40th Street between Seventh and Eighth Avenues. Conveniently enough, it was right out the back door of the old Herald Tribune building, on 41st Street, which meant that Bleeck’s for years effectively doubled as an auxiliary newsroom for the paper’s staff. And it remained a popular hangout even for those, like Mitchell and McKelway and Johnston, who had moved on to other places. Some editors wouldn’t have wanted temptation residing quite so close to their reporters, but Walker didn’t mind. “It was a hell of a lot better to know that your good men were probably there,” he explained, “than in assorted bedrooms from Staten Island to Speonk.”

  By the mid-thirties, the match game at Bleeck’s was almost as much a New York institution as the bar itself. In the game, each player got three matchsticks. With both hands behind their backs, players decided if they would hold three, two, one, or no matches. They then presented a closed fist on the table, and, in clockwise order, each player guessed how many total matches were being held by the entire group. The person guessing the correct number was excused, and this continued until there remained only the loser, who was obligated to buy drinks for the lot. The match game was useful because it could accommodate any number of people and could be played in various stages of sobriety. It also provided a good excuse to drink into the wee hours (Bleeck’s stayed open until 4:00 A.M.), and with the attendant side wagering and blue commentary, it was just as much fun to watch as to play.

  At Bleeck’s, as at McSorley’s, women had been kept out for many years, but that barrier finally fell in the early thirties. And Ann Honeycutt—“Honey,” as she was known to all—had helped bring it down. It was a role she was used to playing.

  Born in tiny Plain Dealing, Louisiana, Honeycutt made her way to New York in 1923 and immediately set about reinventing herself. She became friends with fellow Confederate expat Walker, and with his entrée she was soon a regular at the bars frequented by the city’s newspapermen. At speakeasies like Tony’s, she also fell in with the circle of the talented (and then mostly single) young men who were helping Harold Ross build his new magazine. Though she had been in New York only a little longer than many of them, she came across very much as a “woman about town,” in Mitchell’s recollection. She reveled in the liberation New York afforded, and that uninhibited enjoyment was part of her strong appeal to men. Honeycutt herself spoke about the thrill of being young in the city, in that golden time between the wars. “My memories of that period are all speakeasy memories…. [Y]ou got out of the home, you walked out the door and you were free.”

  With her vivacious personality and quick wit—Mitchell would later say that some of the lines credited to Dorothy Parker were actually Honeycutt’s—she was catnip to the New Yorker men. She occasionally dated Gibbs. Thurber fell head over heels in love with her and wooed her for years, though unsuccessfully. (He was doubly wounded when she instead wed the charming McKelway, whom Thurber admired in every other way; the marriage, however, was short-lived.) In the thirties and early forties, Honeycutt spent so much time in the company of New Yorker staffers that Ross sometimes forgot that she didn’t work for him, too, to the point that he assigned her stories to write. Charles (“Chip”) McGrath, who many years later was deputy editor of The New Yorker under William Shawn, called Honeycutt “a Molly Bloom figure to a whole generation of writers and artists and editors.”

  They loved her because she was beautiful and she was funny. But mostly they loved her because, unlike most women of their acquaintance, she seemed one of them. Whether it was drinking with them or fighting with them, Honeycutt held her own. She got plenty of practice, too, particularly in her long and complicated relationship with Thurber.

  Already having lost most of his sight because of a boyhood accident, Thurber grew bitter when he drank, and he drank a lot. It was not uncommon for him to sail into rages, like the one Honeycutt recalled for Thurber’s biographe
r, Burton Bernstein. They were at “21,” and Thurber “slapped me from across the table,” she said. “So I threw a glass of Scotch right back at him. We were thrown out, but we finished the fight on the sidewalk. It was like that in those days.”

  Professionally, too, Honeycutt made her way in what was largely a man’s world. Having gotten her foot in the door at CBS as a singer, she worked her way up to become a radio-program producer. She was an accomplished writer, as well, and in 1939 she would turn out a delightful book about how to raise dogs in the city, a work whose popularity was enhanced considerably by its illustrations—Thurber’s inimitable canines.

  Walker introduced Honeycutt to Mitchell, and she liked the lean, laconic Carolinian from the start, in part for the same reason so many women gravitated to Mitchell: He listened to them. He was genuinely interested in their careers, their opinions, their lives. But for Honeycutt, who had grown up with a peripatetic father and who seemed ineluctably drawn to unreliable men, Mitchell was dependability itself. If he said he would do something for her, he did, and this was the foundation for what became a close friendship. Though Honeycutt was seven years older than Mitchell, he was fascinated by how her backstory seemed to mirror his own—two displaced Southerners, kindred spirits trying to break away from their pasts and prove their mettle on the toughest stage there was. As he got older, in fact, Mitchell grew obsessed with the synchronicity of their lives, a connection he wanted to somehow document and devoted much of the rest of his life to futilely chasing.

  With Mitchell spending ever more time with the New Yorker crowd, the temptation grew to make a professional change. He craved more time to work on good stories than his paper—any paper, really—could afford. He longed to write more substantive, and narrative, articles. And he wanted to surround himself with people who took the calling as seriously as he did. The more his own craft improved, the more dim his view became of the reporters who were joining the World-Telegram from other “Scripps-Howard towns” and who, in his eyes, weren’t willing to put in the time or effort New York truly required of a reporter—the kind of investment Walker had asked of him when he first arrived. “The reporters on the [World-Telegram] were geniuses from Akron and Cleveland and Toledo and places like that,” Mitchell wrote years later in his journal. “Instead of getting to know the city, as soon as they got here they moved to Rye or Orange or some other suburban place, and they knew hardly anything about the city. Most of the time, it was a hollow newspaper, exposing sheriffs, and the like of that. I really never gave a damn. [The corporate motto] Give Light and the People Will Find Their Way of the Scripps-Howard papers…the sanctimoniousness.”