Man in Profile

by Thomas Kunkel

  The focus of these gatherings, hosted by men’s clubs and political organizations, is beef and beer. Beefsteaks had been around for decades, part of the Tammany tradition. A typical beefsteak in those earlier times would feature perfectly aged steaks, all you can eat, complemented by platters of double-rib lamp chops and lamb kidneys—no utensils permitted. In his story, Mitchell visits with Sidney Wertheimer, the master butcher behind many of the city’s best beefsteaks, as he prepares another feast. “In the old days they didn’t even use tables and chairs,” he says. “They sat on beer crates and ate off the tops of beer barrels. You’d be surprised how much fun that was. Somehow it made old men feel young again. And they’d drink beer out of cans, or growlers. Those beefsteaks were run in halls or the cellars or back rooms of big saloons. There was always sawdust on the floor. Sometimes they had one in a bowling alley. They would cover the alleys with tarpaulin and set the boxes and barrels in the aisles. The men ate with their fingers. They never served potatoes in those days. Too filling. They take up room that rightfully belongs to meat and beer.”

  The subsequent verging of Prohibition and women’s suffrage caused the beefsteaks to go co-ed, and as a result they became considerably more refined, at least outwardly. Tuxedos, shrimp-cocktail appetizers, and actual silverware became de rigueur; the traditional oompah bands gave way to dance orchestras. A lot of the old-timers found these civilizing influences unfortunate—as, clearly, did Mitchell. A strain of wistfulness runs through the story like the marbling in Sidney Wertheimer’s steaks.

  This nostalgic overtone would become a Mitchell signature. A similar, if more overt, example can be found in “Obituary of a Gin Mill,” published in January of 1939. Mitchell revisits the once-loud and rowdy speakeasy of “Bar and Grill,” which has subsequently relocated six blocks away and, in the process, gone respectable. Mitchell admits that walking by the old location makes him lonesome. And the new iteration has made “The House”—the proprietor, Dick—miserable. Now he finds himself running a “big, classy place with a chromium and glass-brick front, a neon sign in four colors, a mahogany bar, a row of chromium bar stools with red-leather seats like those in uptown cocktail lounges, a kitchen full of gleaming copper pots, a moody chef who once worked in Moneta’s, a printed menu with French all over it, and seven new brands of Scotch,” Mitchell writes. The writer can bear the changes, sort of, until the day he notices that Dick’s renowned turtle livers are listed on the menu as Pâté de Foie de Tortue Verte: “Until I saw those pretentious words I never fully realized how dead and gone were the days when Dick was the plain-spoken proprietor of a dirty, lawless, back-street gin mill. I am aware that it is childish, but sometimes, leaning against the spick-and-span new bar, I am overcome by nostalgia for the gutter.”

  That nostalgia—to the extent a thirty-year-old can be genuinely nostalgic—was tied to Mitchell’s near-obsession, cultivated over a decade pounding pavement for newspapers, with the city’s “lowlife,” as that class was known around the editorial offices of The New Yorker. The nostalgia also reflects a sense of romance about the drinking life that many young people have before they witness, or experience themselves, its darker consequences. This propensity was something Mitchell was already beginning to see in himself after his encounter with Franz Boas. Nonetheless, such material remained popular with readers and editors, and a high percentage of the stories Mitchell wrote in 1939 feature drunks. There is Peggy, a bitter, brandy-swilling beauty who terrorizes a little girl in “Goodbye, Shirley Temple.” Or Mike, struggling with his six-week-old sobriety, whose tumble off the wagon Mitchell chronicles in heartbreaking detail in “Sunday Night Was a Dangerous Night.” (“Eating his steak and potatoes, Mike felt at ease. The atmosphere of the barroom, the bickering of the men at the bar, the beer smell comforted him.”)

  Still, that summer of 1939 Mitchell escaped the bars long enough to take New Yorker readers for the first of what would be many guided excursions to the city’s docks and waterways. In “A Mess of Clams,” Mitchell rides the Jennie Tucker, “a battered, stripped-down, 38-foot sloop powered with a motor the Captain took out of an old Chrysler.” The Jennie Tucker is a buy-boat of the clam-shipping firm Still & Clock, which purchases the day’s work of clammers who extract the littleneck and cherrystone clams found in New York restaurants and the Fulton Fish Market from the black mud of Long Island bays. After introducing his readers to Captain Archie M. Clock, Mitchell tells us a pertinent bit about himself. He was starting to do this more often now in setting up certain stories; the effect was to come across as less a narrator than an amiable travel companion. “I sat down on the bucket and told [Captain Clock] that one Sunday afternoon in August, 1937, I placed third in a clam-eating tournament at a Block Island clambake, eating eighty-four cherries,” he writes. “I told him that I regard this as one of the few worth-while achievements of my life.” The two men later share forty-three cherrystone clams only minutes removed from the muck.

  When the valves were pried apart, the rich clam liquor dribbled out. The flesh of the cherries was a delicate pink. On the cups of some of the shells were splotches of deep purple; Indians used to hack such splotches out of clamshells for wampum. Fresh from the coal black mud and uncontaminated by ketchup or sauce, they were the best clams I had ever eaten.

  “A Mess of Clams” also represented Mitchell’s first mention in The New Yorker of the Fulton Fish Market, and in fact the story sets the table for some of Mitchell’s most memorable characters, including the “seafoodetarian” Hugh Flood, who would appear just a few years later.

  —

  By early 1940, Mitchell had not only passed his probationary period but was developing into what Ross might well have considered an exemplar of a Fact writer—a lovely and clean stylist, and someone who brought plenty of fresh characters to the magazine. Having gained confidence with longer-form writing, and fully enjoying his reportorial freedom, Mitchell began to modulate his manic production, putting more time into his reporting and letting the stories get progressively lengthier and more layered. He also finally stopped his flirtation with short fiction. But at the same time, he was utilizing commonly employed fictional techniques in his factual Profiles and Reporter pieces. Rather than marching his stories forward in the prosaic fashion of conventional magazine journalism, which was then little more than glorified newspaper writing, Mitchell instead tended to unspool them novelistically, often ending up in places a reader could scarcely have predicted at the outset. More and more he was letting his subjects reveal their stories—and character—in long monologues. He eschewed black-and-white protagonists and embraced those who inhabited the grays. Endings were seldom tidy. And his sense of irony, always acute in real life, turns up more regularly on the page.

  Indeed, in the half dozen Fact articles he published in 1940, Mitchell produced a string of some of the most memorable characters of his career: these included “Lady Olga,” his Profile of a bearded lady in the circus sideshows; “Mazie,” a Profile of the charitable owner of a Bowery movie theater; “Santa Claus Smith of Riga, Latvia, Europe,” an edgy account of a charismatic, check-kiting hobo; and “The Old House at Home,” his long love letter to McSorley’s.

  Careful followers of Mitchell’s career might have recognized several of these, as they represented a revisiting from when he had written about them in the World-Telegram. “For quite a while, the people I wrote about here [at The New Yorker] were people I had [written about] on the newspaper, like Mazie and Commodore Dutch and [piano prodigy Philippa] Schuyler,” Mitchell would explain. “A lot of the people I knew on the newspapers, I wanted to write more about and here was the opportunity.”

  Mazie is a good case in point. Mazie “ran a movie theater and I wrote about her for the World-Telegram and I would go by there,” Mitchell recalled late in his life. “I got to know her more and more without her being aware I did. Stopping by there on occasion and talking to her—nothing special. When I came [to The New Yorker] I had a background I could draw on.�
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  Mazie P. Gordon is the brassy, benevolent owner of the Venice Theatre, a seedy “dime house” at the edge of the Bowery that served as a sort of shelter for the down-and-out, providing refuge for drunks and the emotionally unstable for the length of “two features, a newsreel, a cartoon, a short, and a serial episode.” Mazie, whom Mitchell once described as a latter-day “Wife of Bath” character, spends long days in the Venice’s ticket booth and then at night roams the Bowery, passing out nickels and dimes and tending to the comfort and welfare of the bums who inhabit its shadowy alleys.

  When Mitchell sketched Mazie in the newspaper (and reprinted it in My Ears Are Bent), the piece ran to a little over one thousand words. When she reappeared in The New Yorker just a few years later, the piece was seven thousand. She was the same person but not the same subject. “In My Ears Are Bent Mazie is indeed a curiosity: a bosomy blonde Jewish woman in her forties, rumored to have been a burlesque girl in her youth, now a tough-talking version of Mother Teresa,” literary critic Noel Perrin would observe in 1983. But later, in The New Yorker, “she is a complete person. You get both a much fuller—and a wildly funny—account of the way she operates the movie theater, and the story of her life. A brilliant sketch has turned into a portrait full of light and shadow.”

  For instance, Mazie’s policy toward disruptive drunks in her theater warrants just a few lines in the newspaper account:

  Sometimes a bum goes in at 10 o’clock in the morning, and at midnight he is still there, sleeping in his seat, snoring as if he owned the joint. Mazie does not mind, but if one begins to yell derisively at the actors on the screen, giving them good advice, she goes in and pulls him out by the slack of his worn pants.

  The magazine article offers a much more vivid—and amusing—rendering:

  Now and then, in the Venice, a stiff throws his head back and begins to snore so blatantly that he can be heard all over the place, especially during tense moments in the picture. When this happens, or when one of the drunks gets into a bellowing mood, the women and children in the reserved section stamp on the floor and chant, “Mazie! Mazie! We want Mazie!” The instant this chant goes up, the matron hastens out to the lobby and raps on the side window of Mazie’s cage. Mazie locks the cash drawer, grabs a bludgeon she keeps around, made of a couple of copies of True Romances rolled up tightly and held together by rubber bands, and strides into the theatre. As she goes down the aisle, peering this way and that, women and children jump to their feet, point fingers in the direction of the offender, and cry, “There he is, Mazie! There he is!” Mazie gives the man a resounding whack on the head with her bludgeon and keeps on whacking him until he seems willing to behave. Between blows, she threatens him with worse punishment. Her threats are fierce and not altogether coherent. “Outa here on a stretcher!” she yells. “Knock your eyeballs out! Big baboon! Every tooth in your head! Bone in your body!” The women and children enjoy this, particularly if Mazie gets the wrong man, as she sometimes does.

  Mazie sat in the ticket booth, a dog in her lap, every day from midmorning until 11:00 P.M.—conducting business, chatting with visitors, passing out change to shaky bums—and Mitchell, it seems, was there to witness all of it. Then every night after work, Mitchell writes, “she makes a Samaritan tour of the Bowery.” And, again, Mitchell is there.

  He was a witness who saw what he saw, not always what he wanted to see and certainly not what he expected to see. But he never patronized, never judged. No matter how downtrodden his characters might be, no matter how laid low by misfortune, Mitchell lent them a fundamental decency and humanity. They might be different from you or me, he seems to say, but they have their dignity.

  Readers loved characters like Mazie. So, too, did Ross, although it took him longer, perhaps, to warm up to the odder of Mitchell’s oddballs—or, more important, to figure out precisely how they “fit” into his carefully tailored magazine of sophistication. Ross “had a view of those people,” Mitchell told Norman Sims. His term for them was “lowlifes,” and in general Ross paid rather less for such Profiles than for so-called “highlifes,” those being entertainers or other swells. Then again, he did recognize that Mitchell was cultivating new terrain—essentially inventing what Ross finally and inimitably came to classify as the “highlife-lowlife” piece.

  Another memorably rendered highlife-lowlife was Mitchell’s 1940 portrait of Jane Barnell, the bearded lady known professionally as Lady Olga. Barnell has spent almost the entirety of her sixty-nine years barnstorming the country with one circus or another. But the main point of the story—and what gives it its resonant poignancy—is the effort she makes to try to achieve something like a normal domesticity. Her greatest desire, in fact, is to one day work as a stenographer. Yet she knows this isn’t really possible; as Mitchell says, she “long ago…learned there is no place in the world outside of a sideshow for a bearded lady.” Mitchell tells her tale, as he did Mazie’s, in prose that is straightforward, detailed, unflinching—and without a hint of pity, which Barnell doesn’t want in any case. She takes a defiant pride in her work and even in the labels others insist on applying to her and her sideshow friends. The Profile ends in one of the most famous lines of Mitchell’s career. “If the truth was known,” Barnell tells him, “we’re all freaks together.”

  Lady Olga represents one of the earliest manifestations of a Mitchell staple character—the “other.” No doubt the attraction had something to do with Mitchell’s own sense of being an outsider, the farm boy abroad in the big city. And even though he himself grew up with some trappings of privilege—or maybe it was because of that privilege—Mitchell had a lifelong innate connection to the disaffected and downtrodden, and especially the underdog. Whatever the reason, Mitchell “looked at freaks with love and affection and understanding,” said his colleague Philip Hamburger.

  Twenty years after the Lady Olga Profile, a then-emerging photographer named Diane Arbus would call Mitchell one day to talk about the piece, and the two developed a substantive but telephone-only friendship. Arbus later photographed some of the same people Mitchell profiled. In her biography of Arbus, Patricia Bosworth quoted Mitchell as saying, “I urged Diane not to romanticize freaks. I told her that freaks can be boring and ordinary as so-called normal people. I told her what I found interesting about Olga, the bearded lady, was that she yearned to be a stenographer and kept geraniums on her windowsill….” Arbus may have shared Mitchell’s fascination with freaks, but Mitchell accorded them a singular dignity, said Hamburger—something he, at least, didn’t believe Arbus did. As he put it, “The difference between Joe Mitchell’s portrait of a freak and Diane Arbus’s photograph of a freak is the difference between a humanitarian and a nosy-body without a heart.”

  —

  While Mitchell was writing about Bowery angels and gluttonous beefsteaks, another former newspaper reporter was developing a comparable reputation profiling boxers and showmen and charlatan street preachers. Like Mitchell, A. J. (for Abbott Joseph) Liebling was known to friends as Joe, and before long “the two Joes” were in their way doing for The New Yorker what Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig had done for the Yankees. But Mitchell and Liebling were more than colleagues; they were best of friends and kindred literary spirits.

  They met while working at the World-Telegram. “Liebling had read a story I’d written,” Mitchell would recall. “Liebling was a pretty unfriendly guy. Not unfriendly, really, but self-sufficient. A few days after I got on the paper, we were going down the elevator and he said something about the story I’d written, and introduced himself. I’d seen his work before. Anyway, we went up to the corner to the coffee place there and we got to talking. It was amazing how many writers he and I admired.” It turned out that one particular (if now somewhat obscure) influence they shared was a nineteenth-century British writer, George Borrow, much of whose work focused on Europe’s Romany, or gypsy, population. Borrow was “a forerunner of Joe’s and my interest in what they called lowlife at The New Yorker,” Mitchell
would say. “We found a mutual bond in other authors concerned with lowlife—Villon, Rabelais, Sterne, Dostoevsky.”

  Four years older than Mitchell, Liebling joined The New Yorker in 1935. Like the other Joe, he was a prodigious talent, but he had a much harder time making the transition from newspaper to long-form writing than Mitchell would a few years later. Once he did, he turned out some of the most vivid reportage The New Yorker would publish over the next several decades—including gleefully tart press criticism.

  Outwardly, they made for an odd couple. Liebling was as rotund as Mitchell was trim; he was as unkempt as Mitchell was fastidious. Liebling was the native New Yorker to Mitchell’s drawling émigré. When they walked the streets together, Liebling matched Mitchell’s smart fedora with a bowler hat too small for his head. Liebling wrote quickly; Mitchell was deliberate. Mitchell working on a story was a study in quietude and concentration; Liebling would pound on his typewriter and snort with delight, rereading his own handiwork. Then again, he usually had good reason. Few have ever put words to page with as much relish as A. J. Liebling. For instance, in an evisceration of the powerful publisher of the Chicago Tribune, Liebling wrote that Colonel Robert R. McCormick “daily assures Chicagoans that personal violence, national bankruptcy and extinction by guided missiles are the normal expectation of man in Chicagoland…. In compensation for the grim fate in store for them, the Colonel offers Chicagolanders a guarantee that life everywhere else is much worse.” And this wry note on another of his favorite subjects, food: “In the light of what Proust wrote with so mild a stimulus, it is the world’s loss that he did not have a heartier appetite.”