My Ears Are Bent

by Joseph Mitchell

  Some people—Gertrude Stein, Emma Goldman, Gilda Gray, Eleanor Holm and Peter J. McGuinness, Sheriff of Brooklyn, are an assortment—can unload enough quotes for a story at any hour of the day or night. (Gilda Gray, the Polish shimmy-shaker, is nice. Once I went up to see her about a rumored engagement to some scion or other. She sensed there was no particular story in that and told me instead about a visit she made to the convent in Milwaukee in which she was educated. She had lunch with the nuns and before they sat down to eat she gave them a few movements of the black bottom, a dance from the twenties. “I gave the sisters a few tosses just for old time’s sake,” said Miss Gray. “They sure did enjoy it.”) Two classes of humans whose quotes are always amusing are frustrated, spiteful old actresses on the down grade and people with phobias, especially people who predict the end of the world. (There used to be a disappointed man named Robert Reidt out on Long Island who was always going up on a hilltop near East Patchogue with his family to await destruction. Predicting the end of the world was an obsession with him. One dull day I called him up to ask if he had any advance information on the crack of doom and the telephone operator said, “Mr. Reidt’s telephone has been disconnected.”) A woman whose conversation was always unpremeditated was the late Mary Louise Cecilia (Texas) Guinan. Once I went with her to Flushing where she and her “Gang of Twenty Beautiful Guinan Girls” were filling a vaudeville engagement. We rode out in her bullet-proof limousine, an automobile previously owned by Larry Fay, the cutthroat. Someone was planning to produce a play based on the life of Aimee Semple McPherson and Miss Guinan had been asked to play the lead. I remarked that Mrs. McPherson certainly would sue the producer. “That,” said Miss Guinan, “is no skin off my ass.”

  I am pleased when an interview starts off like that. I admire the imagery in vulgar conversation. I wish newspapers had courage enough to print conversation just as it issues forth, relevant obscenity and all. Some of Mayor La Guardia’s most apt epigrams, for example, cannot be printed in any New York newspaper. If a reporter tries to get anything unusually hearty in a story some copyreader or other will trim it out. There are scores of admirable copyreaders on New York newspapers, but most of them seem to be too bored to give much of a damn about anything. They don’t have to be censored; they willingly censor themselves. They appear to prefer the nasty genteelism to the exact word; they will cut the word “belly” out of your copy and write in the nauseating word “tummy.” I have seen a pimp referred to as “a representative of the vice ring.” On the newspaper for which I work the reporters write “raped” and it always comes out “criminally attacked.” Also, copy-readers appear to like tinsel words, words such as “petite.” Day after day in one newspaper I have seen Lottie Coll referred to as “the petite gun-girl,” and Lottie is as big as Jack Dempsey and twice as tough. A good copyreader would rip a word like “petite” off a sheet of copy just on general principles. Once I covered a political rally at which a tipsy statesman cursed his opponent for fifteen violent minutes. His profanity was so vigorous I expected it to leave cavities in his teeth. I used some of his milder remarks in my story, but the copyreader cut it out and wrote in, “Commissioner Etcetera declared that his opponent was not aware of the issues.” There is no fury which can equal the black fury which bubbles up in a reporter when he sees his name signed to a story which has been castrated by a copyreader or one of the officials on the city desk.

  The least interesting people to interview for an afternoon newspaper are the ones who probably should be the most interesting, industrial leaders, automobile manufacturers, Wall Street financiers, oil and steel czars, people like that. They either chew your ears off with nonsense about how they are self-made (“When I landed in this country all I had was seventeen cents and a poppyseed roll and now I am chairman of the board”) or they sit around and look gloomy. After painfully interviewing one of those gentlemen you go down in the elevator and walk into the street and see the pretty girls, the pretty working girls, with their jolly breasts bouncing about under their dresses and you are relieved; you feel as if you had escaped from a tomb in which the worms were just beginning their work; you feel that it would be better to cheat, lie, steal, stick up drugstores or stretch out dead drunk in the gutter than to end up like one of those industrial leaders with a face that looks like a bowl of cold oatmeal. Next down the list are society women. I rank them with the jimsonweed and the vermiform appendix; I cannot see any reason for their existence. Also, they have bad manners. In the line of duty I have had dealings with scores of drunken dowagers and gawky, concupiscent debutantes and it is my belief that the society women of the United States have the worst manners of any women in the world; coffeepot waitresses are gracious in comparison.

  Politicians, as a rule, make work easy for the reporter. Some of them are so entertaining you can write about them under water. (Herbert Hoover is not in this class. He is the gloomy kind. I have interviewed him twice and both times his face kept reminding me of the face of a fat baby troubled by gas pains.) It is perhaps an ugly commentary on the American press, but the function of the interviewer on most newspapers is to entertain, not to shed light. For his purposes, men like Huey Long and Hyman Schorenstein, a Brooklyn district leader who is reputed to be unable to read or write, are made to order. An interviewer soon begins to judge public figures on the basis of their entertainment value, overlooking their true importance. It is not easy to get an interview with Professor Franz Boas, the greatest anthropologist in the world, across a city desk, but a mild interview with Oom the Omnipotent will hit the bottom of page one under a two-column head. Also, the American press will string along with the fatuous, attacking only the weak and the eccentric. Even the semicolons are pompous on Nicholas Murray Butler’s mimeographed statements, but the papers nail them to the front page practically every Monday morning in the year. If Nicholas Murray Butler and Peter J. McGuinness made the same identical statement the papers would treat Mr. Butler with a gigantic amount of respect but Pete would be treated as a yap who should keep his mouth shut. It is safe to write accurately only about the nuts and the bums. When a public figure does something ridiculous reporters may then write about him accurately. J. P. Morgan was always treated with elaborate respect until he played rock-a-bye-baby with a lady midget; then the newspapers were not afraid of him any more.

  Huey Long, as I say, was made to order. Any barely literate reporter could write an epic about him. The last time I saw him he was sitting up in bed in the Waldorf-Astoria with a hangover. He had on a pair of baby-blue pajamas and he was yawning and scratching his toes. There were three reporters in the room asking him questions. To every question he would say, “It’s a lie,” and laugh throatily. Then he sat on the edge of the bed, groaning, and told a long incoherent story about a relative of his who kept a saloon. The politician most lavish with incoherent quotes, however, was former Mayor John P. O’Brien of New York City. It was worth money to hear him orate. Once I heard him speak to a gathering of women and he said, “During the week I have momentous matters to attend to. I meet great people and I must go here and there to make up the addenda that goes with being Mayor of the city. Therefore when I come here to this great forum and see before me flowers and buds, ladies, girls and widows, emotion is just running riot with me.” Another time he got to his feet and said, “Mr. President, and may I say, brothers? When I get in a room with chairs I get the fraternal spirit.” Once he addressed the Ohio Society and he read a poem, sighed and said, “I yearn now and then for the dear old river or for some Bohemia where you can get away from the stress of it all.” I have seen a puzzled audience staring at him, wondering what he was getting at. One night I listened to him tell about the time he almost slid off the tailboard of a furniture van and I was so fascinated by the words tumbling out of his mouth that I forgot to take notes. After his speech I went up to a stenographer he had brought there himself and got him to read me off a hunk of the oration. We printed the story next day and two of his campaign managers ca
me around and said I made the whole thing up and threatened to sue for $150,000.

  No reporter can work on interviews constantly without becoming a little batty; sooner or later he will begin hearing the birdies sing. When it gets through with more important matters I think that rotation of jobs should be one of the points taken up by the American Newspaper Guild, the union of newspapermen, of which I am a member and in whose program I believe. When a city editor catches you looking cross-eyed at your notes and wishing black plagues on the head of the inarticulate lulu you have just interviewed he is sometimes nice enough to put you on the street for a while, or on rewrite, or maybe a big story breaks and saves your sanity. Just when you are about to collapse with one of the occupational diseases of the reporter—indigestion, alcoholism, cynicism and Nicholas Murray Butler are a few of them—a big story, a blood-hunt that takes you out of the office, usually breaks.

  I was once saved by the Hauptmann trial. In rapid succession I had interviewed a crooner making a come-back, an injured trapeze performer, the proprietor of a lonely hearts bureau, a student of earthquakes, a woman undertaker, a man who manufactures the fans used by fan dancers, a champion blood donor and Samuel Goldwyn, and had begun to whimper when I got near a typewriter. Then I was sent to Flemington, New Jersey, to write courtroom features during Hauptmann’s trial. The trial was a nightmare to most of the reporters who covered it and before it was over I had begun to talk in the unknown tongue, but at first it was soothing not to have to ask questions but to sit still and listen to those asked by the Attorney General of the State of New Jersey.Compared with most newspaper work a trial is easy to cover—that is, a murder trial; a thing like the Bank of United States trial is another matter. A financial trial is slow torture. At a murder trial you simply sit still and write down what happens. After a reporter has covered features for a while there is nothing like a fast murder trial to get the lead out of his pants. It discourages him from trying to make literature out of every little two-by-four news story; a newspaper can have no bigger nuisance than a reporter who is always trying to write literature.

  My office had at least ten reporters in Flemington through all the addled weeks of the Hauptmann trial—compared with our competitors we were under-staffed—and we covered it better than any other afternoon newspaper. We were able to do so because each night when court adjourned we left the fevered atmosphere of Flemington, where reporters were as enforcedly gregarious as fishing-worms in a can, and did not return until court opened next morning.

  Throughout the trial we lived in Stockton, New Jersey, ten miles or so from Flemington, in a small hotel, the Stockton, which was established in 1832 and which is celebrated for its hearty American grub, things like breasts of chicken with thick slices of red, sugar-cured ham. We took over the establishment and installed a night wire downstairs. The hotel is operated by five brothers and their mother, the Colligans. One of the brothers has a daughter who once won a prize in the Irish Sweepstakes. The hotel is a block from the Delaware River, and the Delaware toting ice is one of the most stirring spectacles I have seen. It makes you feel religious, or patriotic, or something. We used to go down there at night and watch slabs of ice as big as box-cars piling up against the bridge pillars; late at night we could stand on the porch of the hotel and hear the crunch of the ice in the river. There is a canal on each bank of the Delaware and they froze solid and we used to go down with two little sleds owned by the hotel and take belly-whoppers on the ice. Next morning we would eat great stacks of pancakes and Philadelphia scrapple and rashers of Mrs. Colligan’s red ham. I enjoyed the sledding in Stockton; it was the last exercise I had until the following winter, when I got in an airplane wreck near Cleveland after flying over the flooded Ohio River valley.

  The hotel kept its groceries out back in a cave torn out of the side of a hill. In the cave was a big barrel containing 180 red-legged terrapin which William Colligan, the eldest brother, had snatched out of a mountain stream in Sussex County. We had terrapin stew every night for a week, a stew made with sherry. After that we just played with the terrapin; someone would bring an armful of the terrapin into the bar every night. We had a lot of visitors in Stockton. Each weekend our wives came out. One stormy night Thomas Benton, the painter, came out. He had been sent to make sketches at the trial by my newspaper. When he saw our oak fire he pulled off his shoes and sat down in front of it and talked until midnight about the beauty of the United States.

  After dinner each night we had to leave the crowd in the bar—there were two bars in the hotel; one for the local farmers, one for the guests of the hotel—and go upstairs and write our “overnights,” stories written to run only until the trial got under way next day. That is, they would run in the Home and Twelve O’Clock editions and be thrown out of the Night. Everybody used one room, a big room with a fireplace in it, and by 10 P.M. the room would be full of cursing reporters whacking out nonsense on portable typewriters. Wesley Price, who acted as a sort of walking city editor during the trial, would go from typewriter to typewriter, snatching out takes of copy. He would look at the stuff, groan, and send it down, sheet by sheet, to the sleepy telegraph operator he had stationed in the hotel office. Girls from Trenton and Philadelphia used to come to Stockton at night and they would stand in the door and interrupt us to ask if we believed Hauptmann was guilty. One of our photographers would screw flash bulbs in the sockets in the bathroom and when one of the Trenton tramps went in we would hear her scream when she switched on the light and got the full blast of the high-powered bulb right in her eyes. One of our reporters, Sutherland Denlinger, used to sing spirituals and military songs while working. He got so he could sing “Tiddly Winks God Damn” and write an analysis of the previous day’s testimony at the same time.

  We kept the typewriters going sometimes until 3 A.M., stepping out on the upstairs porch at intervals to watch the snow piling up in the peaceful, deserted village street. 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. I am callous enough to remember, however, that the trial gave me respite from the city room and a lot of country air and country food. It was a mess, but I had fun covering it, and there will never be anything like it again, God willing. That is the way I feel about many of the stories I have worked on.

  CHAPTER II

  Drunks

  1. BAR AND GRILL

  Within a few blocks of virtually every large newspaper in the United States except The Christian Science Monitor there is a saloon haunted by reporters, a saloon which also functions as a bank, as a sanitarium, as a gymnasium and sometimes as a home. Dick’s Bar and Grill is such a place. It is sometimes possible to see more amazing sights in fifteen minutes in Dick’s—especially on a night when Jim Howard, the rewrite man, finds it difficult to roll anything but five aces in one, or on a night when the city editor of the greatest afternoon newspaper in the United States imitates a tree frog, or on a night when Louie, the bartender who likes Chinese food, describes his last square meal at Tingyatsak’s, or on a night when Elmer Roessner, the feature editor, gets on all fours to locate a die he has rolled into the fantastic debris behind the bar—than it is in an entire performance of the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus.

  While I never drink anything stronger than Mox
ie, I often go into Dick’s to observe life, a subject in which I have been deeply interested since childhood. This place is down on a narrow street near the Brooklyn Bridge; it is one of those places with a twitchy neon sign, a bar which sags here and there, possibly because it was moved in and out of several speakeasies during prohibition, and a grimy window on which are stuck greasy cardboard signs advertising specials, such as “Special Today. Chicken Pot Pie. Bread & Butter. 35c.” There are a big bowl of fresh roasted peanuts and a bottle of mulligan on the bar, and the tile floor is littered with peanut hulls and cigarette ends and bologna rinds from the free lunch. The cook uses olive oil for frying, and he burns a lot of it during the day. On damp days the place smells like a stable, and there is a legend in the neighborhood that truck-drivers in the street outside have to restrain their horses from entering.

  The proprietor, Dick, is a sad-eyed and broad-beamed Italian who often shakes his fat, hairy fists at the fly-specked ceiling and screams, “I am being crucified.” He hates all his customers, but he is liberal with credit and has a cigar box under the bar full of tabs. If he is feeling good, he slides the bottle toward the customer every third drink and says, “This is on me.”

  One time Dorothy Hall, a society reporter, took Dick with her to the Beaux Arts Ball. The costumes were supposed to be Oriental, and she got him a eunuch costume. She told him to speak nothing but Italian and introduced him as a big Italian nobleman from Naples. He danced with Elsa Maxwell, who was dressed as a Grand Eunuch.

  “She sure did have good manners,” he said later.

  When he buys a newspaper, he spreads it out on the bar and looks for girls in bathing suits. When he finds one he likes, he says, “My God! Look at this baby. My God! This baby has everything. My God! I would die for her.”