The Whites found that wartime had made the office a very different place than they remembered. White told his brother, “The New Yorker is a worse madhouse than ever now, on account of the departure of everybody for the wars, leaving only the senile, the psychoneurotic, the maimed, the halt, and the goofy to get out the magazine. There is hardly a hormone left in the place.” This last was probably an oblique, if biologically inaccurate, reference to the most conspicuous change at The New Yorker; women were everywhere, doing everything from clerking to Talk reporting, filling roles that heretofore had been almost exclusively male. It was not a development that Ross had been happy about. “Nobody knows what war is unless he goes through [one] in a magazine with lady editorial assistants,” Ross told Frank Sullivan. It wasn’t merely a question of trust for Ross; with more women around, “hanky-panky” was sure to follow, and in no time the office would be a festering “hot love hole.” With all his other troubles, he simply didn’t have the energy to play summer camp director, keeping the boys and girls at shouting distance from one another. As usual, he adapted—though in this instance The New Yorker, like all American businesses during the war, had little choice—and for his trouble was amply rewarded. Wartime reporting hires like Andy Logan, Lillian Ross, Roseanne Smith and Scottie Fitzgerald Lanahan (daughter of F. Scott and Zelda) quickly demonstrated to his satisfaction that the practice of good journalism had nothing to do with gender after all. He even took on a woman in one of the magazine’s most sensitive positions, that of his private secretary. In 1944, when it became apparent that the incumbent, William Walden, was about to be lost to the Army, Ross inquired whether he had any ideas for a replacement. Walden asked if Ross might consider his wife, Harriet. The editor knew Mrs. Walden had no secretarial skills at the time, but he also knew that the family, which had a small child, could use the money, so all he asked was, “Is she active?” He needn’t have worried. Harriet Walden was a hardworking and valued confidante to Ross for four years, until she left to have another child. On her last night, Ross walked into the small anteroom where she sat, took off his battered hat, bowed deeply, and said, “You’re a loss to American industry, Mrs. Walden.”
——
Though he had been in no hurry for the united states to enter the war, once the country was committed Ross suspected the fighting would be relatively quick and the casualties modest, at least by World War I standards. By January of 1943, he already had artists working on “victory” covers. One can appreciate that he did not want to be caught unprepared, but even allowing for long-range planning, this kind of optimism was unjustified, and evaporated quickly.
Happily, Ross was a far more astute assessor of editorial than military capability. As he and Shawn saw it, the world, through no fault of their own, had become The New Yorker’s beat. Now they were overseeing the most penetrating and literate reporting of the war. Dispatches arrived from all points of the globe, written from every conceivable angle, stories whose only common denominator was that they were interesting and impeccably told. New Yorker readers learned what it was like to be in a sealed troop transport in the Mediterranean, aboard a battleship off Saipan, and in the Plexiglas nose of a B-17. Sometimes these pieces were written from the point of view of the combatants, sometimes that of the correspondents themselves. Their settings ranged from London bomb shelters to a Pennsylvania bomb factory, the characters from Marshal Pétain to the mayor of a Sicilian village who had migrated back to the island from Philadelphia. Nor were they confined to text. Navy ensign Saul Steinberg—Ross had used his pull to get the Romanian-born artist naturalized and into the service—contributed Reporter-like portfolios from outposts in China and India.
Beyond being inventive and informative, The New Yorker’s war articles had real power. The magazine’s writers, like the men and women they covered, were young, brave, and completely committed to the cause, which infused their work with energy and passion, and because they were on the scene for the most part, they conveyed authority. The best New Yorker war pieces had the full-bodied, three-dimensional quality of literature, with none of the stale whiff of accounts reconstructed from military briefings. They dealt with real people caught in dreadful, exhilarating, even amusing circumstances. After John Lardner went ashore with the Allies at Anzio, he sent back a report about life in the middle of this dangerous and claustrophobic beachhead and related how his British hosts drafted him for a delicate mission:
There was a certain amount of wine to be had from a merchant who slid back into the deserted village of Nettunia shortly after we landed and unearthed his stock, which the Germans had failed to find. In connection with it I had my most discouraging experience since the night twelve small Arab boys conspired, with sensational success, to pick my pocket of five hundred dollars in Algiers. Captain Mason wanted wine because other units on the beachhead had wine and he felt he owed it to us. Besides, there was little water to spare from washing and cooking, and the field-ration, or “compo,” tea was poor stuff He loaded two vast, empty demijohns into the back seat of a jeep. These vessels were laced stoutly in straw and each accommodated sixty litres. I drove the jeep into town, because the deal was one that had to be made through American channels, in an American beachhead area. Negotiations were concluded for twenty-four hundred lire, or twenty-four dollars, cash down. I tipped the loaders three Chelsea, or front-line, cigarettes apiece and drove back with a high heart. Ten yards from home I hit a sharp ditch in the yard, which caused the starboard demijohn to disintegrate with a noise like the crack of a rifle. The floor of the jeep was immediately four inches deep in wine, and the tipple of the country shot through gaps in the sides like a cataract. The other correspondents and the enlisted men came out of our farmhouse and stood around in a circle, taking a lively interest in the plight of four fat, white earthworms beside the car, who stiffened, after stubborn resistance, and passed out. Captain Mason also appeared, and I cast an uneasy glance at him. The captain looked things over silently. The wine supply was close to his heart, but there was something about my position, apparently, which put him in mind of Harry the Horse or Nicely Nicely, if not both, for he scratched his chin and burst out laughing. “This is one of the droll episodes of the war,” he announced. He then supervised the unloading of the remaining demijohn, taking care to see that I kept some distance away from the operation.
A different kind of personal note suffused “Cross-Channel Trip,” Liebling’s masterly three-part account of the invasion of Normandy and one of the best examples of The New Yorker’s approach to the war. In it, Liebling whittled down the almost unimaginably large D-Day operation to human perspective—that of the men aboard his LCIL (for Landing Craft, Infantry, Large), a floating box that would dump upwards of five hundred men onto the beach. As it happened, Liebling’s ship was one of the first to go in at Omaha Beach, and his brisk, understated account was punctuated by the kind of detail the newspapers usually didn’t go in for—like how the deck of the LCIL turned sticky with a mixture of blood and condensed milk when fragments from a German shell simultaneously hit several crewmen and some stray boxes of rations. But Liebling was equally effective when dealing with the fearful quiet. The entire first installment, in fact, was given over to stage-setting. He introduced the four-man complement of officers, then his motley shipmates, waiting for days to sail and warding off the dread by playing cards and engaging in nervous banter. At one point he discussed the ship’s coxswain, a long-legged Coast Guardsman from Mississippi whom Liebling had befriended because the fellow aspired to be a newspaperman after the war. Liebling knew the young man, as the coxswain, would be the first one off the craft as it landed. His perilous job would be to run a guideline from the ship to shore and anchor it; this was what the other soldiers would follow. “I asked the boy what he was going to wear when he went into the water with the line,” Liebling wrote, “and he said just swimming trunks and a tin hat. He said he was a fair swimmer.”
In the second part, the invasion got under way, and w
ithin hours the LCIL was heading straight into the beach under withering enemy fire. Rather than trying to paint the whole apocalyptic picture, Liebling instead stuck to the frantic action immediately around him. Just as its last soldier was away, the LCIL took a shell, and with it the aforementioned casualties. Retreating to its staging area, the ship unloaded its wounded and awaited further instruction:
As the hours went by and we weren’t ordered to do anything, it became evident that our bit of beach wasn’t doing well, for we had expected, after delivering our first load on shore, to be employed in ferrying other troops from transports to the beach, which the beach-battalion boys and engineers would in the meantime have been helping to clear. Other LCILs of our flotilla were also lying idle. We saw one of them being towed, and then we saw her capsize. Three others, we heard, were lying up on one strip of beach, burned. Landing craft are reckoned expendable. [Lieutenant] Rigg came down from the bridge and, seeing me, said, “The beach is closed to LCILs now. Only small boats going in. Wish they’d thought of that earlier. We lost three good men.”
“Which three?” I asked. “I know about Rocky and Bill.”
“The coxswain is gone,” Bunny said. I remembered the coxswain, the earnest young fellow who wanted to be a newspaperman.…
“Couldn’t he get back?” I asked.
“He couldn’t get anywhere,” Rigg answered. “He had just stepped off the ramp when he disintegrated. He must have stepped right into an H.E. shell. Cox was a good lad. We’d recommended him for officers’ school.” Rigg walked away for the inevitable cup of coffee, shaking his big tawny head.
The progress of the Allies in the spring of 1944 had only intensified the desire of David Lardner, son of Ring and brother of John, to get overseas somehow. The popular young reporter was capably handling an array of duties for The New Yorker; he wrote movie reviews, a sports department, and, after E. J. Kahn was drafted, the Tables for Two column. Turned down for active duty because of his eyesight, he steadily campaigned to go to war as a correspondent, but Ross and Shawn were reluctant. Not only was he especially valuable on The New Yorker’s depleted staff, but John had already been in and out of harm’s way, and another brother, Jim, had died fighting for the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War. Ross, who had been close to Ring, feared imposing more tragedy on the family. Besides, The New Yorker already was using all the battlefield accreditations it was entitled to.
However, Lardner would not be dissuaded, and finally The New Yorker reluctantly gave him a leave of absence to enroll with the Office of War Information, with the understanding that if he managed to get credentialed independently, the magazine would use his material. The resourceful Lardner got his combat accreditation in no time, and by early October he had bounded into Luxembourg, a bona fide war correspondent. On October 10 he filed a Letter from Luxembourg, which appeared in The New Yorker dated October 21. But on the evening of October 19 Ross’s worst fear materialized. Returning from a visit to Aachen, Lardner was riding in a jeep with no running lights which veered off the road and hit a pile of mines that GIs had earlier cleared from the area. The driver was killed instantly in the explosion; Lardner died hours later of a head injury before he could get into surgery.
A despondent Ross called on Gibbs to write a brief obituary. In closing, Gibbs wrote, “We have never printed a paragraph with deeper regret than we print this one.” The word “regret,” at Thurber’s suggestion, was changed to “sorrow,” and that was how the notice ran in the issue of October 28. Three years later, when The New Yorker published its magnificent anthology of war pieces, the book was dedicated to the memory of David Lardner.
——
Back in the summer of 1940, on what would turn out to be the last long getaway before the war consumed him, Ross had spent three weeks out west, visiting Colorado, Salt Lake, and then Los Angeles. At Chasen’s one night, Dave Chasen, Nunnally Johnson, Ross, and his companion, a beautiful blonde named Ariane Allen, closed down the restaurant and on a lark decided to go back to Johnson’s for a post-midnight swim. “We were no more in the house,” wrote Johnson, then a bachelor, “than Miss Allen proposed an evening of utter abandon—nude bathing—and such were her high spirits and my hysteria that in less than a twinkling she and I were splashing around together in the deep end.” After a few moments, the two revelers realized that Chasen and Ross hadn’t joined them—were, in fact, “pacing up and down, discussing the parsley situation,” with Ross clearly not pleased about the high jinks in the pool.
“Both Miss Allen and I were immediately cooled off by the sight of this business consultation and its disapproving implications,” Johnson continued, “and so we climbed out of the pool (gallantly I let her go first) and presently all four of us, fully clad, were delving into the matter of parsley. And that little girl—I gasped and turned crimson with shame when I read about it—was presently Mrs. Ross. I had no idea!”
Ariane Allen just prior to her marriage to Ross in 1940. (Pach Bros.)
Nearly a year into his second divorce, Ross had found himself another golden beauty half his age, and, as Johnson was so abashed to learn, the vivacious young woman indeed was about to become Ross’s fiancée.
Ariane Allen was born and raised in Texas, but her family had since moved to Beverly Hills, where her father dealt in real estate. She attended Barnard College, where she studied drama, and graduated from the University of Texas. In 1938 she left California for New York, hoping to find work on the stage, but by the time she met Ross she had managed to land only bit parts in a few movies and one Broadway play, and was spending more time modeling for artists and magazine illustrators.
Ariane Allen was a friendly and flirtatious woman with a talent for charming men—particularly older men of means, it was said. She also had a tendency to talk all the time, whether or not she had anything to say, yet there was an undeniable sweetness about her, an attractiveness in her fresh, uninhibited manner. In her own way she was just as much at home at “21” or the Trocadero as Ross was. Geoffrey Hellman remembered one evening at El Morocco, when Ross and Ariane were still engaged. Her sister was there, and Hellman rounded out the foursome. Since Ross would sooner be caught in church than on a dance floor, it was left to the accommodating Hellman to partner the Allen girls, by turns, all evening. When he thanked Ross at evening’s end, he replied, “Don’t thank me, Hellman. Next time I’ll give you twenty dollars.”
It was another curious pairing for Ross, yet his friends detected that the relationship was more than a flirtation. Sure enough, on November 10, 1940, Ross, in what was by now becoming something of a habit, suddenly and discreetly slipped out of town to get married. This time it was a Sunday afternoon civil ceremony outside Elizabeth, New Jersey. Ross had just turned forty-eight; Ariane was twenty-five.
That Ross felt a certain ambivalence about being a married man again was apparent immediately. That Monday he came to work as usual, and was joined in the elevator by Kip Orr, who had read of the surprise wedding in that morning’s paper. When he congratulated Ross, the editor glared at him and said, “Fuck you.”
There is no question that Ross cared for Ariane, but given his immutable Victorian streak, it seems likely he married her as much as anything to legitimize their affair. Many of his friends would always regard Jane Grant as Ross’s one true love, an intellectual and spiritual match whom he had foolishly pushed away. Still, they generally liked Ariane too, and her affection for him appeared authentic enough. If some considered her a gold digger, or perhaps more accurately what today is called a trophy wife, they tended to point the finger less at her than at him. “No pretty woman like that is to blame when an intelligent man, as ugly as he is brilliant like Ross, takes advantage of his appetite for prettiness and argues her into marrying him,” Janet Flanner would say of the unlikely union.
For her part, Jane Grant had gotten on with her personal life too. In 1939 she married an editor at Fortune, William Harris, with whom she would later found a nationally respected plan
t nursery, White Flower Farm. For now, however, she was still trying to cultivate The New Yorker, and during the war she came up with a brilliant idea that would prove to have a huge positive impact on the magazine’s bottom line.
After the initial panic following Pearl Harbor, the magazine’s business stabilized. Revenue had picked up markedly by the spring of 1943 (“Advertisers are running around town looking for a place to put their ads,” Ross told White in wonderment); total revenues for that year would climb a whopping thirty-three percent, and in 1944 they topped four million dollars for the first time. Business became too good: squeezed by the wartime excess-profits tax and paper rationing, the magazine actually had to take steps to suppress its circulation. In early 1943 it started cutting back on newsstand deliveries, and later it stopped taking new subscriptions. Even so, the numbers built inexorably. Circulation, around 170,000 at the time of Pearl Harbor, would reach 260,000 by the end of 1945.
Jane had been an expert “networker” decades before the concept became popular, and some of her most useful contacts were top military officials. After consulting some of these, she proposed in the spring of 1943 that The New Yorker start publishing a “pony,” or downsized, version of the magazine for distribution to the armed forces. Time and Newsweek already were doing it. It would be a terrific promotion for the magazine, she argued, and just might ease their paper problems, which the extra advertising had only made more acute. Fleischmann was cool to the idea (no doubt still smarting from the fact that largely thanks to Jane he had nearly lost his job in the shareholder revolt). Ross had reservations too. He feared it meant more work, and he worried about the appearance of pushing an idea by his ex-wife. But Ik Shuman came to her rescue. He recognized the tremendous possibilities in the idea and persuaded the two principals to give it a try as long as it meant more paper for the magazine. Shuman dealt with the internal details, and Jane took on the military red tape.
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