Genius in Disguise

by Thomas Kunkel

  All this amounted to an incredible education for Ross. He became intimately familiar with the production, personnel, and advertising demands of a big publication. Naturally hardheaded and sometimes abrasive, he learned something about the requisite diplomacy of command, especially since he had to manage both up (with army censors and the general staff) and down (with his own staff and readers) at the same time. He began to indulge his finickiness about grammar and punctuation; that Christmas as a present he gave Winterich a page of commas. Most significant, he began to see the possibilities of some unfamiliar journalistic forms. Because The Stars and Stripes was a weekly, it had to find ways to distinguish itself from its hard-news-oriented daily competitors. One way was to exploit their inherent superficiality, so features, personality pieces and substantial behind-the-scenes stories all became part of the paper’s menu, with a high premium placed on storytelling. In other words, for the first time Ross was encountering story forms that in a few years he would resurrect and polish at The New Yorker.

  About this time Ross learned one other useful thing about himself: inside the editor lurked a bit of the entrepreneur. Many of the American units in France produced their own publications, as Ross had The Spiker. They all published jokes, and they all piled up in The Stars and Stripes offices. Why not cull the best of them, he wondered, put them into an anthology, and sell it to the troops for a franc? (Twenty-five years later, interestingly, he would excoriate DeWitt Wallace for doing basically the same thing with the Reader’s Digest.) Ross put the idea to Winterich, who said it was crazy and also found the notion of selling soldiers their own jokes vaguely repugnant, so Ross set to cutting and pasting on his own. In the space of a few nights he had produced the pamphlet, which he called Yank Talk. There remained some hurdles. For one thing, since the pamphlet was to be typeset in a French printshop, he had to borrow English quote marks from the newspaper that printed The Stars and Stripes, then safely return them each night. For another, he had to set up a dummy French firm, the Lafayette Publishing Company, to skirt army regulations against engaging in trade. And beyond that, would anyone buy it? To his astonishment, and that of just about everyone familiar with the scheme, the Red Cross was so taken with Yank Talk that it ordered fifty thousand copies. Ross’s windfall, after paying off expenses and investors, was twenty thousand francs.

  A few weeks later, Ross was chatting with New York Times correspondent Walter Duranty, who casually suggested that the franc was on the verge of “going to hell.” Since he still had some seventeen thousand francs on deposit, an alarmed Ross pressed Duranty for particulars. The next day he withdrew the francs and hurried to the army post office, where he asked that they be converted to dollars—they amounted to nearly $3,100—and sent home in a money order.

  “Oh, I can’t do that,” said the clerk. “The maximum permitted is one hundred dollars.”

  Though Ross was accused of selling doughboys their own jokes, his Yank Talk was a huge success.

  So Ross patiently spent the next few hours filling out thirty-one money orders. A few days later the franc started going to hell.

  The men of The Stars and Stripes were as anxious to get home as everyone else, and they were irked at the army’s insistence that the paper continue publishing. But at last their discharge papers came through, effective April 30, and for the next two weeks they saw France in style. Ross bought himself a snappy gray suit, and wrote home that “although my stock of shirts, ties, etc. isn’t very large yet I’m able to put up a pretty good appearance on the boulevard. Have bought myself a cane and am cutting a wide swath.” The boys lazed in the cafés, took in the racetrack, and saw something of the south of France. This last was as they made their way to Marseilles, where they would embark for home. Through a friend in the shipping business back in San Francisco, Ross had arranged passage for himself, Woollcott, Winterich, and Baldridge on a freighter bound for New York by way of North Africa, Gibraltar, Portugal, and the Azores.

  This would have to do in lieu of Ross’s South Seas odyssey, because he had made a career decision: he would be returning to New York after all. Not long before, the Butterick Publishing Company, which produced the popular Delineator magazine, had approached him about the idea of publishing a postwar version of The Stars and Stripes, a magazine aimed at returning veterans. He agreed to edit the publication (annual salary ten thousand dollars), and in turn signed up Winterich as managing editor and the other cohorts as contributors. Originally, Butterick apparently intended to appropriate the unprotected Stars and Stripes name, but the staff objected strongly to anyone in the private sector doing this. Ross in particular feared that hucksters would exploit the Stars and Stripes name, and he argued that the army should reserve it in case the paper ever had to be resurrected. Through military channels he even appealed to Congress, which, while sympathetic, took no action. Even so, Butterick changed its mind and decided to call its new magazine The Home Sector.

  Seventy-one issues of The Stars and Stripes were published in all, and at a profit, it turned out, of $700,000. The staff was adamant that the money go to the orphan fund, but the Judge Advocate General’s office determined instead that by law the money must be returned to the U.S. Treasury. Ross and company appealed to Congress on this question too, but again to no avail.

  This disappointment notwithstanding, it had been a heady two years for Private H. W. Ross. His work had been praised by President Wilson and General Pershing. He could truthfully be called “the most widely known private in the American Expeditionary Forces.” Promotions and commendations had been proffered, and resolutely ducked. Yet even Ross must have been stirred when his commanding officer, Major Mark Watson, recommended him for the prestigious Distinguished Service Medal. Ross didn’t get it—the DSM seldom was conferred to men below the rank of colonel—but Watson contended that his work “stood out so conspicuously as to entitle [him] to special mention above even the admirable work performed by [his] associates.”

  On May 15 Ross and entourage sailed from Marseilles. Jane Grant, still entertaining the occupation troops, would follow two months later. The freighter put in at the Algerian port of Oran to take on coal, but a longshoremen’s strike kept it there five days. At a bazaar the group bought some inexpensive bathing suits, broadly striped in pink and baby blue. “Clad in these,” Woollcott wrote later, “both Ross and I aroused unfavorable comment as we sported in the waves of the gulf of Mers el Kebir.”

  CHAPTER 4

  NEW YORKER

  The grandest non sequitur of New York’s young 1923 season played out on a cool Sunday evening late in September. A crowd that looked to be dressed for a Broadway opening was instead piling into a party in the middle of Hell’s Kitchen. Musicians, actresses, newspaper columnists—people who otherwise wouldn’t be caught dead here, lest they be caught dead—turned up by the score at the double brownstone on West Forty-seventh Street, just beyond Ninth Avenue. In truth, the area’s most violent days were behind it, but the notoriety remained; more trepidatious guests had the option of being led into the rough neighborhood by guides from Times Square. In front of the building, a carousel provided by Harpo Marx and Dorothy Parker occupied the local urchins who otherwise might pelt the glitterati with insults or worse. Down the street, the ever-helpful Charlie MacArthur passed out invitations to strangers. Inside, the revelers were gambling and gamboling, fueled by good bootleg liquor. And for their further amusement there were theatrical travesties. Woollcott, after threatening to boycott his own party in a fit of pique over the guest list, was the hit of the evening as he played Nurse to Peggy Wood’s Juliet. After a full year of demolition, construction, and exasperation, the communal house owned by Ross, Jane Grant, Woollcott, and their friend Hawley Truax was at last being warmed in style.

  Of necessity, Ross and Jane had become urban pioneers long before the concept was fashionable. In the summer of 1922, fed up with temporary living arrangements, they wanted their own home. Like everyone else who has ever lived in Manhattan, all
they wanted was a place with lots of space, close to work, and cheap. Given the postwar housing crunch, that pretty well narrowed their options. Truax, an old friend and Hamilton College classmate of Woollcott’s, was a lawyer who had gone into the real estate business. He had been scouting around in Ross and Jane’s behalf and eventually found the side-by-side tenement buildings in Hell’s Kitchen, at 412 and 414 West Forty-seventh. Ross and Jane paid $17,000 for the filthy, rickety properties, with a metamorphosis in mind: to fuse them magically into a single stylish cooperative. In turn the couple sold one-fourth interests to Woollcott and Truax, who would also live there. Two other small apartments would be let to friends.

  In the intervening year the transformation at 412, the address of record, was as stunning as it had been endless. The cooperative was capacious yet warm, formal yet inviting, a splash of elegance in the middle of a slum. The buildings were renovated with entertaining as much in mind as everyday living, so the common, or shared, spaces—living room, dining room, kitchen—were spacious and comfortably appointed. The big dining room doubled as an afterhours gaming parlor. The living room, twenty-five feet square with fireplaces at either end, was dominated by a secondhand concert grand on which Irving Berlin sometimes entertained and George Gershwin previewed Rhapsody in Blue for a handful of friends. French doors opened onto a small Spanish-style courtyard, with fountain and loggia. Each of the residents had an individual apartment as private quarters. For a while Ross kept a stray cat he called Missus (Frank Adams’s Persian was Mister), but she turned out to be a promiscuous he and broke Ross’s heart.

  Ross called 412 essentially Woollcott’s idea, “an early manifestation of his innkeeping instinct.” Woollcott was born and raised in the Phalanx, an experimental Fourier commune in New Jersey, and indeed all his life arranged to be surrounded by guests, friends, or, in a pinch, mere acolytes. Originally Ross, Jane and Truax had contemplated a simpler arrangement—that is, one without the demanding, temperamental Woollcott. But when Aleck found them out, which they all knew was inevitable, he invited himself into the ménage and took charge of the plans. Thus 412 grew more communal, and decidedly more grandiose.

  Jane agreed to run the household’s domestic affairs, and Truax the finances. The collective arrangement permitted them certain amenities beyond their individual means, like a few servants. They ran through a series of Chinese houseboys—a concession to Ross’s fascination with all things Oriental, a taste he had cultivated in San Francisco—before finding a black couple, Arthur and Marie Treadwell, who would become their permanent butler and cook, respectively. Later their son, Junior, became Woollcott’s valet.

  The denizens of 412 might be living in a slum, but they were doing it in style, which was the important thing. As for the cold, damp discomfort of wartime France—well, that already seemed a lifetime ago.

  The moment Ross had stepped off that freighter from Marseilles, in early June of 1919, he threw himself into The Home Sector. Launching a magazine is round-the-clock, migraine-inducing work, never more so than when, as in this case, there is virtually no lead time. Ross knew that if the returning veteran was The Home Sector’s target, it was best to catch him before the war became just a particularly vivid memory. So with Winterich, his managing editor, Ross took a small apartment on West Eleventh Street in Greenwich Village and set to work.

  Butterick may have forgone the Stars and Stripes name, but in every other way it intended to trade on the paper’s reputation and formula. The cover of the first issue, dated September 20, 1919, announced that the magazine was “Conducted by the Former Editorial Council of [in conspicuous large type] The Stars and Stripes.” Lest anyone miss the point, the headline on its mission statement declared, “By the Same Bunch, for the Same Bunch, in the Same Spirit.” And in that spirit, Ross and Winterich succeeded remarkably in replicating the look and feel of their old paper—succeeded too well, actually. With Baldridge’s trademark illustrations, Woollcott’s recycled battlefield yarns, Wallgren’s cartoons, the comic stories and poetry, there was a musty whiff about The Home Sector from its opening number. For the first and perhaps only time in his life, Ross’s instinct was trailing his audience, not leading it. The five million American veterans had undeniably warm feelings for The Stars and Stripes, but it belonged to a part of their lives that was now thankfully behind them.

  A New Yorker at last: Ross at around age thirty. (Jane Grant Collection, University of Oregon)

  Which is not to say there wasn’t much commendable about The Home Sector; there was. Its forty to forty-eight pages (with a conspicuous dearth of advertising) were well written, thoughtful, and fun. When feeling particularly frisky, it delighted in skewering “Scaredevil” Jack Dempsey, the heavyweight boxing champion, who Ross—a sometime acquaintance of Dempsey’s from their days in Salt Lake—and other veterans believed had ducked the wartime draft. (The merciless ragging convinced Ross’s staff that one day Dempsey would simply turn up and exact his revenge. Capitalizing on the anxiety, Woollcott had a business card printed up with Dempsey’s name, secretly persuaded a secretary to slip it to Ross, and then watched gleefully as all the blood drained from the editor’s face.) In time, perhaps to counterbalance the overly reminiscent quality of the early issues, The Home Sector became a vigorous pulpit for veterans’ issues, something Ross cared about passionately.

  In retrospect, The Home Sector is most interesting from a genealogical standpoint, as it contained many New Yorker precursors. First there is the format itself: a weekly magazine blending the serious and the comic, reportage and reminiscence, book reviews and opinion, with cartoons throughout. Its “editorial” pages suggest the later “Notes and Comment” of E. B. White, in that they offer opinions on eight or ten miscellaneous subjects in a light though hardly trivial vein. In the third issue Ross introduced a department called “Casuals,” his term for those distinctive short-storylets or life sketches (three hundred to five hundred words, thereabouts) that would become so familiar in the The New Yorker. The magazine’s covers, too, in time got away from strictly military themes to broader subjects and began featuring artwork that was more stylized, impressionistic, and whimsical. Several of the covers—a man and a woman in enigmatic embrace; a sidewalk-level view of a craps game; a John Held, Jr., view of the galaxy—might easily have made early New Yorker covers. If The New Yorker was still five years into the future, The Home Sector offered ample evidence that Ross was already giving it, or at least its formula, a great deal of thought.

  What little spare time Ross had he devoted to rekindling his relationship with Jane. The two had corresponded in those few months when Jane stayed behind in France, but her letters were curiously noncommittal. She had never intended to become so serious about Ross, and she decided to use the physical separation to add some emotional distance as well. Impishly, she even slipped back into New York without telling Ross she was coming. When he found out from a mutual friend, he was in a dark humor for weeks.

  Jane returned to the Times, which assigned her to cover hotel news, and resumed a busy social life. Once Ross got over his pique, he doggedly tried to resume the courtship, only to find that Jane always seemed to be otherwise engaged any night he asked her out. After one such rebuff he blurted, “Goddammit, it’s a pretty howdy-do when I have to date you three weeks in advance!” After another, he simply asked, “Don’t you ever buy your own dinner?”

  As in Paris, however, Ross rose to the competition. He blandished Jane with flowers, candy, and childlike notes of love. He tried to persuade her of their innate compatibility, and when he was in persuasion mode, a friend said, “his words hit the listener like hail in a high wind.” He became, in short, as irresistible as a homely, gap-toothed man can be—though it must be said that his rubbery face was always redeemed by those mischievous hazel-brown eyes. Soon the two were seeing each other steadily again. They went to the theater, which they both enjoyed, and even the Philharmonic, where Jane would listen intently to the music while a bored Ross surveyed t
he house and estimated the theater’s take. Sometimes she cooked meals for him and Winterich. On weekends the two might visit Coney Island or take long walks through Chinatown and the Lower East Side, or along the waterfront. Slowly, deliberately, Jane began to unlock New York for the insatiably curious Ross. His infatuation with the woman and the city advanced in lockstep.

  In his delightful 1949 monograph Here Is New York, E. B. White contends there are three New Yorks: that of the native, who takes the city for granted; of the commuter, who sees only narrow, unchanging pieces of it; and of the settler, who comes to New York on a kind of quest. This last New York is the greatest of the three, he says, because it is the settlers who give the city its passion and lend it achievement. “Each embraces New York with the intense excitement of first love, each absorbs New York with the fresh eyes of an adventurer, each generates heat and light to dwarf the Consolidated Edison Company.” White may have had any number of New Yorker colleagues in mind when he wrote these words, but they were true of Ross most of all. For the rest of his life the man from Aspen was an outsider set loose in New York, exhilarated, intimidated, and appalled by turns at what he saw, but never, ever bored. It would prove to be a felicitous match: a city constantly revealing itself, and a man who couldn’t stop watching.

  Of course Ross’s timing was impeccable, what with Edith Wharton’s New York giving way to Scott Fitzgerald’s. In the Twenties, the postwar, Prohibition generation was ready to raise some hell, and New York was obliging. Speculators on Wall Street, Jimmy Walker at Tammany. Dempsey-Tunney (twice). Ruth, Gehrig, Meusel, and Lazzeri on Murderer’s Row. American literature and painting were newly ascendant, nightclubs were stomping, jazz was raging, and Broadway was king. Skyscrapers rose up like steel sequoias; at their feet, speakeasies sprouted like so many mushrooms—thousands in midtown alone, clustered mostly between Fifth and Sixth avenues. “It was an intimate world of young people,” suggested Charles Baskerville, “trying to create, and have, a happy life.”