by Joshua Zeitz
For the next five years or so, he kicked around New York, where he edited the house journal for the American Legion, a newly formed, archconservative veterans’ outfit. It was an odd vocational choice for a man who would soon be known as the nation’s leading arbiter of sophistication.
But New York was the nerve center of American arts and letters. From virtually every farm town in America, a stream of young, untested writers, artists, and muses was flooding the city: Sinclair Lewis … Edna St. Vincent Millay … John Dos Passos … Jean Toomer … Van Wyck Brooks … F. Scott Fitzgerald … Thomas Wolfe … Cole Porter … Al Jolson. If you were smart, if you were ambitious, if you could write, draw, paint, compose a tune, or spin a good story, New York was the place to be in 1919. Certainly, Harold Ross thought so. The city proved good to him.
In 1920, he married Jane Grant, a reporter and onetime vocalist. Together they bought side-by-side brownstones in Hell’s Kitchen on West Forty-seventh Street, knocked down the adjoining wall, and began hosting all-night fetes that soon attracted some of New York’s most celebrated purveyors of art and literature.
Part of the draw was surely their 625-square-foot living room—larger than some New York apartments and furnished with two working fireplaces and a piano on which George Gershwin publicly tested his composition “Rhapsody in Blue.” More than that, Ross and Grant were popular with the rising smart set because they were exactly like so many other up-and-coming cultural leaders of the 1920s. They weren’t city people by birth or even by temperament. They were from the hinterlands. They were outsiders looking in.
Soon enough, the soirees on West Forty-seventh began making the city’s society pages. Ross’s reputation really soared in 1920 when he and a group of other fledgling writers began lunching together regularly at the Algonquin Hotel.10 At the time, they had no idea that the weekly rendezvous would make them famous.
By the time Ross and his friends stumbled across the hotel’s dining room—renowned for its Tokay grape salad, lemon layer cake, and cherry cobbler—the Algonquin was already a venerable New York institution. Booth Tarkington and Harry Leon Wilson had penned the last act of The Man from Home in one of its guest rooms; and celebrities as diverse as the Barrymores and Frank Craven were known to frequent its lobby.
Several times each week, Harold Ross and Jane Grant, along with a revolving cast of theater and literary figures, strolled through the Algonquin’s famous antechamber and into one of its two dining rooms. Some members of the circle, like Alexander Woollcott, a popular writer for the New-York Tribune, and Franklin Adams, a columnist for the New York World, had worked with Ross on Stars and Stripes. Others, like Dorothy Parker, Robert Benchley, and Robert Sherwood, were editors for Condé Nast’s Vanity Fair. Rounding off the new lunch clique were John Peter Toohey and Murdock Pemberton, two prominent New York “press agents”—a relatively new job category that presaged the modern-day entertainment industry publicist. In mid-1919, the hotel’s manager moved the group to a circular table in the center of the Rose Room, and the famous “Algonquin Round Table” was born.
In later years, the Round Table was commonly remembered as a venue for highbrow discussions of highbrow ideas—the intellectual nerve center of 1920s America.11 It wasn’t so. As Ross admitted to the notorious Baltimore wit H. L. Mencken, “I never heard any literary discussion or any discussion of any other art—just the usual personalities of some people getting together, and a lot of wisecracks, and quoting of further wisecracks.”
Scott Fitzgerald’s close friend from Princeton, Edmund Wilson, who began his distinguished literary career at Harold Ross’s New Yorker, was dismissive of the Round Table. Its participants “all came from the suburbs and ‘provinces,’ and a sort of tone was set … deriving from the provincial upbringing of people who had been taught a certain kind of gentility, who had played the same games and who had read the same children’s books—all of which they were now able to mock from a level of New York sophistication.”
Wilson’s dissent notwithstanding, the endless string of ripostes emanating from the Rose Room often was clever—especially those jibes popularly attributed to Dorothy Parker, who at age twenty-seven had just finished a stint as theater critic for Vanity Fair and was about to embark on a broader career as a poet, pundit, humorist, and essayist.12 Routinely, she slid into her seat at the Round Table, ordered a dish that she let go cold, and fired off an endless string of one-liners designed to dazzle her male colleagues. “If all those sweet young things present at the Yale prom were laid end to end,” went one of her famous quips, “I wouldn’t be at all surprised.”
Clever friends telling clever—and self-referential—jokes over lunch would never have caught fire had not the key players all been connected in some way or another to the press. New York in the 1920s was at the center of a nationwide information revolution. It was home to Madison Avenue, the advertising industry’s informal headquarters; it boasted twelve daily newspapers and dozens of magazines that reached regional as well as national audiences; it had just recently displaced Boston as the capital of American publishing and was home to every major literary house from Doubleday, Harper, and Scribner’s to Knopf and Viking. By the end of the decade, it would also surface as the hub of American radio broadcasting.
In such a thoroughly wired city, any journalist with enough cunning and the right contacts could bend America’s news cycle to his own will. Which was exactly what the Algonquin Round Table did. Fame didn’t find them per se. They hunted it down.
Ross and his friends were skilled promoters. Within a few weeks of their first lunch, Adams and Woollcott began reporting the Round Table’s wit in their own gossip columns; Toohey and Pemberton fed still more tales, particularly of Dorothy Parker’s quick repartee, to friends in various editorial departments. Frank Case, the Algonquin’s manager and part owner, quietly paid off city columnists to publish “overheard” witticisms from within the cavernous reach of his own hotel.
This almost shameless promotional collaboration quickly transformed the Round Table participants into parlor-set headliners. By the mid-1920s, tourists were dropping by the Algonquin around lunchtime just to steal a glimpse of New York’s allegedly sharpest minds.
Ross and Grant understood how capricious and fleeting was their fame. Building on their reputation, in 1924 they raised $45,000 to start a new magazine, The New Yorker. Their advertising prospectus announced that the New Yorker’s “general tenor will be one of gaiety, wit and satire”—similar to the climate of the Round Table. “It will not be what is commonly called highbrow or radical,” the pamphlet continued, setting the magazine apart from venerable publications like Harper’s and The Nation but placing it within the broader currents of 1920s culture. “It will be what is commonly called sophisticated, in that it will assume a reasonable degree of enlightenment on the part of the reader.” Above all, “The New Yorker will be the magazine which is not edited for the old lady in Dubuque.13 It will not be concerned in what she is thinking about. This is not meant in any disrespect, but The New Yorker is a magazine avowedly published for a metropolitan audience.…”
In February 1925, the first issue of Ross’s bold new magazine hit the stands. By the summer, with advertising sales plummeting and circulation figures at a standstill, the magazine came close to folding. It was around that time that Herman Mankiewicz told Ross about Lois Long.
9
MISS JAZZ AGE
LOIS LONG WAS just twenty-three years old and barely three years out of Vassar when Harold Ross called her up to arrange a job interview. She was from the placid suburb of Stanford, Connecticut, the daughter of a Congregationalist minister who moonlighted as a lithographer. Long grew up in a quiet neighborhood where fathers caught the seven o’clock train into the city and the six thirty-five back each night and mothers clipped articles from Good Housekeeping.
Despite her quiet upbringing, nothing about Lois Long was domesticated. Peering over the heaps of copy that were strewn over Ross’s desk at the
frenzied office on West Forty-fifth Street, she could only break into a sly grin when the famously misogynistic editor asked, with no small measure of condescension, “What can you do for this magazine?”
Ross might have been a male chauvinist, but he was also a brilliant judge of talent. It didn’t take him more than a few minutes to realize that Lois Long was an asset. She could give The New Yorker a pulse.
Brendan Gill, who served on the magazine’s editorial staff for many years, remembered her as “the most dashing figure on The New Yorker in the early days.1 Ross was often uncertain of what he wanted the magazine to be … but [he] never doubted that the ideal New Yorker writer, to say nothing of the ideal New Yorker reader, would be someone as like Lois Long as possible. He felt himself an outsider in New York and something of a hayseed, and in his eyes Miss Long was the embodiment of the glamorous insider.”
One of her colleagues wrote that Lois Long was “the most dashing figure on The New Yorker in the early days.”
The year before, following a brief stint as a low-level copywriter at Vogue and several failed stabs at a stage career, Long had stumbled her way into Dorothy Parker’s old job as theater critic at Vanity Fair.2 But she was better known as a girl about town. Living in a cramped apartment on Manhattan’s fashionable East Side, Long and her roommate, the actress Kay Francis, threw exclusive soirees and passed their evenings gliding from one smart nightclub to another.
What she had to offer Ross’s magazine was her lifestyle. Like tens of thousands of other single young women in Manhattan, she was living high in the Jazz Age. Unlike most of those women, she was armed with a keen eye for detail, a wicked sense of humor, and razor-sharp prose.
A contemporary described Long as “exceptionally well-constructed, tall, and dark-haired.3 She had striking features embellished by violet-gray eyes.… She had energy in abundance. Her movements and her conversation were supercharged. She could have modeled for Miss Jazz Age.” In an Edward Steichen photograph snapped sometime in the early 1920s, Long struck a fetching pose, with jet black hair bobbed to perfection just above her ears, a thin strand of pearls dangling from her neck, the corners of her mouth turned upward to reveal a wide, toothy grin, a pencil pushed gently to her lips. She smoked; she drank; she stayed out all night. She worked for her own money and made no apologies for her lifestyle. She was the very embodiment of the New Woman. Or so The New Yorker would claim.
Long had been earning $35 a week at Vanity Fair. Ross hired her away at $50—later raised to $75—to pen a regular column on New York nightlife.4 Essentially, Long would be the magazine’s resident flapper journalist. Writing under the pseudonym “Lipstick,” she continued her long nights of drinking, dining, and dancing—all on the magazine’s expense account—and regaled her captive readers with weekly tales of her adventures on the town. She became one of America’s most insightful chroniclers of the new, middle-class woman who seemed to embody the flapper’s spirit and style.
On a typical evening, just as the late-night crowd began crawling out of the midtown theaters and restaurants, amid the glow of electric streetlights and the steady din of car horns and subway rumbles, Long and her friends would catch a taxicab, “start at ‘21,’ and go on to Tony’s after ‘21’ closed.” Both venues were tucked away on West Fifty-second Street, just minutes from the New Yorker’s offices. Occupying an entire mansion, Jack Kriendler and Charlie Berns’s “21” skirted the city’s strict curfew laws, which mandated a two a.m. closing time, by incorporating itself as a “private club,” complete with rooms specially fitted for pedestrian delights like Ping-Pong, mah-jongg, and backgammon.
In reality, anyone with the right connections or calling card could breeze past the winding row of live porters and black lawn-jockey statues that stood guard before the heavy, brass-studded doors of “21.” The club advertised “luncheon at twelve” and “tea at four and until closing.” Lois Long and her friends didn’t go for the tea. “Drinks were a dollar twenty-five,” she explained years later.5 “We thought brandy was the only safe thing to drink, because, we were told, a bootlegger couldn’t fake the smell and taste of cognac.”
Like most other club owners, Jack and Charlie paid a small fortune in protection money to the police, but for contingency purposes—in case an overzealous city commissioner decided it was time to crack down on vice just before a round of municipal elections—the club’s rich stock of wine, champagne, and hard liquor was well hidden behind a faux brick wall that sprang open when the owners inserted a specially fitted wire into a certain crack in the mortar.6
After cavorting at “21,” Long and her friends often made their way uptown to Harlem, the storied center of black cultural life in 1920s New York, which was also a popular nighttime draw among middle-class white New Yorkers. Often, Long and her entourage would arrive uptown after three a.m. and stumble home well after the stock exchange bell sounded the opening of business.7
Incredibly, she stuck to this routine almost every night. And she developed a titanium tolerance for liquor. “If you could make it to the ladies’ room before throwing up,” she chortled, you were “thought to be good at holding your liquor.… It was customary to give two dollars to the cab driver if you threw up in his cab.”8 Which happened from time to time.
At the New Yorker’s ragtag headquarters, with papers, magazines, and metal filing cabinets strewn about as if at random, where writers were always coming and going, where confusion reigned supreme, and where staff members habitually pilfered one another’s desks, typewriters, and office supplies, Long quickly emerged as a commanding presence. She wasn’t above sauntering into work at three or four in the morning when, remarkably, even at that late (or early) hour there were always editors still laboring away over their manuscripts.
Fresh from a night on the town, dressed to the nines, and flush from hours of heavy drinking, Long managed consistently to leave the key to her enclosed cubicle at home and amused her colleagues by kicking off her heels, climbing in stocking feet onto the doorknob of her workstation, and hoisting herself over the demipartition wall.9 In hot weather, she’d casually strip down to her slip and clack away at her typewriter.
Because its offices were interspersed among several levels of a building owned by Raoul Fleischmann, Ross’s wealthy friend and founding publisher of The New Yorker, Long and her assistant were initially installed at opposite ends of the floor. After weeks of collaborating by telephone, to the amusement of everyone but Harold Ross, they donned roller skates and whirled back and forth between their desks, bobbing and weaving between overstuffed trash cans, abandoned cigarette stubs, and small mounds of stray pencil shavings. Finally, out of pure exasperation, Ross moved them both to a vacant restroom.
Many years later, another staff member evoked a disparaging image of Lois Long, seated before her typewriter “in her Lilly Daché hats, with a cigarette dangling from her mouth, laughing at her own jokes as she banged them out for her column.”10 The problem with this picture—one that probably held as true for 1925 as for 1968, when Long was closing her lengthy career at The New Yorker—is that her writing was funny.
“I always miss all the real excitement,” she typically complained, “and it isn’t fair.11 Here I go plodding around, in my conscientious, girlish way, to all kinds of places at all hours of the night with escorts only reasonably adept at the art of bar-room fighting, and nothing ever happens to me.… I was at the Owl on Saturday and on Tuesday, and what did the nasty gunmen do but hold the place up on Monday night. It simply isn’t fair.… All in all, I feel very badly about the whole thing.”
Laced with precisely this sort of dry humor, the typical installment of “Tables for Two,” Long’s weekly column, brilliantly captured the distinctive sound and feel of the Jazz Age in all its frivolity, bluster, and melodrama.
“Just before staging a complete collapse, with definite indications of rigor mortis, galloping Charleston, and the chronic mirages of a home in the country,” Long wrote in one of her early co
lumns, “I wish to go on record as saying that, everything considered, this HAS been a week!12”
From attending the debut of County Fair—a popular theme club on East Ninth Street, decorated in gold and scarlet and featuring authentic grandstand boxes doubling for booths, a dance floor encircled by a white picket fence, and kiddie cars drawn straight from an honest-to-God state fairgrounds—to the opening on election night of the Nineteenth Hole Club—another theme venue, fashioned after a golf course—to afternoon tea dancing at the Lorraine Grill—an old standard, but a disappointment, as “the old place is not the same,” too many “middle-aged businessmen amusing themselves between leaving the office and catching the 6:35 for New Rochelle”—Lipstick gave her readers a bird’s-eye view of a week in the life of the New Woman.
Or did she? As a magazine writer earning upward of $3,900 per year, Long fell comfortably in the upper middle class and belonged to an elite 14 percent of women workers who were professionals. Hers was an uncommon experience.
Most working women in the 1920s toiled at less glamorous and remunerative jobs—nearly a third as domestic servants, the rest as clerical workers, factory workers, store clerks, and farmers.13 They sweated behind department store counters, typewriters, and sewing machines; they earned lower wages than men who did the same work (saleswomen earned less than half of what salesmen brought home); and they faced grim prospects for career advancement.14
Yet by the end of the 1920s, almost four of every ten working women qualified as white-collar. Their jobs demanded that they dress fashionably, groom themselves carefully, and stay abreast of aesthetic and cultural trends. At ornate department stores, downtown law firms, advertising agencies, and government offices, they brushed shoulders with professional men (and some professional women) and learned to identify as middle class, even when the cost of a middle-class lifestyle far outstripped their salaries.