O’Dwyer was lonely because he was without a wife (a widower through his first term, he had yet to begin courting the former model who would become the second Mrs. O’Dwyer). Ross was lonely because he still had one.
It was plain from the outset that Ross and Ariane’s marriage had been manufactured not in heaven but in some other, nether region. Daphne Hellman Shih, who was close to Ariane, said her friend’s charm wore off quickly for Ross, and his irritation with her was palpable early on. “Ross got more and more nervous during those times, I guess because of the ulcers,” she said. “He was thoroughly impatient with Ariane. She would be wringing her hands, complaining because she couldn’t make the servants do what she wanted, that sort of thing.” Patricia Ross said it seemed that her father and Ariane were seldom together, and she never saw any tenderness between them, as she did between her mother and Tim Wilkinson (whose marriage lasted until his death).
In certain ways, Ross tried to be a dutiful husband, even a sweet one. When one of Ariane’s young nieces appeared to have serious heart trouble, Ross, clearly touched by her predicament, prevailed on Mencken to arrange for the child to be seen by a top specialist at Johns Hopkins. On the other hand, he loathed most of the adults in Ariane’s family—which didn’t keep them from coming to Stamford for weeks and months at a stretch. At such times he tried hard not to be overtly rude; he simply ignored them.
The fact was that Ross was never comfortable in a traditional domestic setting, and his marriages were progressively more dysfunctional. One symptom of his fissured relationship with Ariane was what Patricia characterized as their “nightmare” dinner parties. At least once a week Ross would arrive home from work to find to his dismay that Ariane had invited guests to dinner. In such cases his initial reaction often was to refuse to attend altogether, but then he would have a change of heart, don old, mismatched clothing, muss his hair, jut a cigarette from his bottom lip, come down the stairs to startle his guests and feign surprise: “Goddammit, I forgot you were coming over!” At dinner, he might start up a game of solitaire or work on a crossword puzzle right at the table as Ariane’s guests conversed. Patricia said she learned to eat fast because invariably this would lead to some kind of scene. If this sometimes astonished first-time guests, regulars like Mrs. Borglum paid them no mind and just kept eating.
Such behavior might have seemed lifted from the latest Moss Hart–George S. Kaufman farce if not for its more disturbing underpinnings. A guest remembers another dinner party, one where O’Dwyer was present but Ariane was not, at which Ross suddenly got angry and turned all his wife’s pictures to the wall. In legal papers filed near the end of Ross’s life, Ariane charged that things deteriorated to the point where Ross insisted she not speak to him at break fast; if she had anything important to tell him, she should leave a note on his desk. “There was a standing rule that I could not discuss ‘trivia’ with him,” she said in her suit. “And by his definition ‘trivia’ consisted of everything I tried to say to him.”
By the late Forties the rift was so obvious that the Rosses weren’t bothering to hide it from friends. For instance, in the spring of 1948 they stopped in Saratoga, en route to visiting Patty at school, to see Frank Sullivan. The drive was so unpleasant that upon their arrival Ariane announced her intention to seek a divorce, and Ross, noted Sullivan, “had something of the same idea.” There were a few trial separations between the two, and some separate vacations. That summer, Ross became upset when Ariane stayed in Europe longer than she had said, and so he took off for the West without her.
Elizabeth Paepcke, the doyenne of Aspen, Colorado, and a friend of Ross’s, recalled seeing the couple on several occasions at about this time and thinking that the marriage was clearly tenuous. Ross had come to know Mrs. Paepcke and her industrialist husband, Walter, who together transformed Aspen from mining town to glittering resort community and cultural center. He enjoyed them both, even if he was appalled by some of their notions for Aspen, like a grand Goethe bicentennial festival. “Their gay plans curled my hair into small ringlets,” he wrote Elmer Davis. “I knew they were going to stink up the old place. Making Aspen cultural is one of the greatest profanities of modern times.” But another part of Ross was proud of Aspen’s “discovery” by the rest of the world, and he was a regular visitor in the late Forties. On one such occasion, Mrs. Paepcke recalled, she came across a tipsy Ariane in the bar of the Hotel Jerome, her arm around a cowboy, saying to him, “Thank God we can relax.”
——
For some years Wolcott Gibbs had understudied Robert Benchley as The New Yorker’s drama critic, and in 1940, when the latter quit, he took over the job full-time. Though never one for formal correspondence, Gibbs felt an initial obligation to answer all those readers, thoughtful and otherwise, who wrote in critiquing his critiques. For the first month or so, these replies were polite and somewhat detailed, rebutting the readers point by point. By the second month, the letters were becoming more perfunctory, but were still personal. By the third, he had instructed a clerk to answer all such mail with this note: “Dear Sir [or Madam]: You may be right. Sincerely, Wolcott Gibbs.”
Gibbs was a small, thin man who usually had little to say. This wasn’t aloofness, merely another congenital case of New Yorker shyness. “He was a person who was almost incapable of uttering an opinion without clearing his throat first, which to me is sort of a symptom of insecurity about expressing yourself,” said Gibbs’s son, Tony, who himself became a New Yorker writer and editor. “But he never cleared his throat on the page, as many writers do.”
If Gibbs seemed outwardly fragile, in reality he was tough and wiry, not to mention an editor and writer of uncanny range. Ross stood in near awe of him. “Maybe he doesn’t like anything,” he would say, “but he can do anything.” This was not hyperbolic praise. For Ross Gibbs cranked out short stories, Comment, theater criticism, even the occasional controversial Profile, such as the Luce piece or his 1940 surgical strike on Thomas Dewey, then New York’s crime-busting district attorney, whom Gibbs portrayed as a smug, nervy wunderkind (John Bainbridge contributed the reporting).
But if Gibbs was Ross’s most versatile lieutenant, he was perhaps his most dependable too. He could and did grouse about The New Yorker, but unlike Thurber or the Whites, he never left it. Partly this was because he lacked Thurber’s confidence and White’s need to prove himself outside the magazine, and partly because he never quite got over stumbling onto such good fortune. But his willingness to remain ensconced in that “velvet womb” (Tony Gibbs’s phrase) as a “paragrapher for a twenty-cent magazine” (as the autobiographical protagonist in Gibbs’s 1950 play Season in the Sun put it) fueled his low self-esteem and further darkened his already bleak outlook. Gibbs knew he possessed the kind of talent to make more “serious” literary statements—besides, pesky friends like O’Hara constantly reminded him of it—but he had neither the drive nor the inclination to write the Great American Novel. He didn’t think he had anything that “important” to say. Yet this presumed underachievement nagged at him, with the result that he tended to trivialize his New Yorker output. This was unfortunate, since producing as much top-quality work, on deadline and in such diverse incarnations, as Gibbs did for thirty years was a towering accomplishment.
Unlike his colleagues, Gibbs never got much further from Forty-third Street than his oceanside cottage at Fire Island, his refuge on warm weekends. There he would fish, or simply fix a pitcher of cocktails and sit out in the sun and roast. In the summer his skin would turn so brown, and his blond hair and mustache so thoroughly white, that his sparring partner Russell Maloney once quipped that he looked like a photographic negative.
Edmund Wilson described him another way. Gibbs, he said, “glided past like a ghost, and we never spoke. His eyes always seemed to be closed.” There was something undeniably ethereal about the man. Before a show, he would shrink far down into his seat, as if to disappear. He was self-conscious about being recognized, but perhaps a touch self
-conscious too about what he was doing there. “I’ve always felt that play criticism was a silly occupation for a grown man,” he said.
As a critic, Gibbs did most of his writing at his apartment. When he was composing, he would pace the length of his large bedroom deep in concentration, back and forth, with Lucky Strikes burning in ashtrays at either end of the room. When he typed he used only three fingers, the others having been broken in a nasty Prohibition-era tumble down a flight of stairs. Early each evening he would slip out of his preferred daytime wear, a salmon terry-cloth bathrobe, into a suit (or dinner jacket for a major opening) and head to the theater. When Tony was a very young schoolboy, he was assigned to report to his classmates on what his father did for a living. The boy realized he didn’t know, so one evening as his father was preparing to leave he asked him. “Well, think about it for a second,” Gibbs replied. “I go out to work at night and I don’t come back till after you are in bed. What do you think I do? I’m a burglar.” (This information, dutifully passed along to Tony’s class, provoked an irate call to Gibbs from the principal’s office.)
His was not an intellectual’s approach to criticism. Gibbs was more analytical about plays than Benchley, who never pretended to be anything more than a bemused enthusiast, but he employed his predecessor’s straightforward approach: he said what he liked, what he didn’t like, and why. Certainly he was more cynical than Benchley, yet in his way just as entertaining. This toss-off about a feeble mid-Forties production is typical of his style:
Pretty Little Parlor, by Claiborne Foster, was the latest of a rather alarming epidemic of plays about domineering women. Clotilde Hilyard drove her husband to drink, was partially responsible for a double drowning, and was mixed up in various crooked railway deals. She may have been a little excessive. Anyway, the play closed after eight performances. I regret this only on behalf of its star, Stella Adler, an actress I’d like to see around more or less permanently.
Gibbs went to a production expecting not to like it, and was seldom disappointed. This was not, as many theater people maintained, because he was inherently incapable of enjoying anything, for when he did admire a production (or even a good performance in a bad production, as with Stella Adler), he said so, often loudly. But he had two qualities that rankled many theater people: high standards and a compulsion to tell the truth. His considerable influence on Broadway derived less from The New Yorker’s box-office impact, which was probably middling, than from Gibbs’s standing among his fellow critics. Not all his peers liked him—the feeling was mutual—but they knew that he was usually right, and that he didn’t settle for dreck. He helped keep them honest.
Since no good deed goes unpunished, Gibbs’s acerbic reviews earned him recriminations from roughed-up authors and actors, threats to banish him from certain theaters, and countless feuds with owners and producers, perhaps most notably with that egomaniacal genius Jed Harris. On one occasion the League of New York Theatres formally complained to The New Yorker that Gibbs had shown up “unfit” to review a show—that is, drunk. Ross replied that his critic had simply been getting shots for an allergy.
Gibbs’s entertaining theater criticism was only one of the reasons why arguably the late Forties represented The New Yorker at the zenith of its cultural influence. While print was still a dominant medium, no real rival to Ross’s magazine had yet arisen, and television was only beginning to exert its great gravitational pull on the public consciousness. The magazine stood as a unique and powerful beacon. For almost any thinking New Yorker, reading it had become de rigueur; like the Metropolitan Opera, the Times, or the New York City Ballet, it had taken its place as a quintessential New York cultural institution. Moreover, outside the city it was a status symbol, the magazine one left on the coffee table to impress the neighbors.
Its name notwithstanding, The New Yorker’s impact and interests now reached around the world. Ross may have welcomed his reporters back from the war, but they didn’t intend to sit still in New York. Their horizons had been broadened, and with them that of The New Yorker. Beyond “Hiroshima,” the immediate postwar period generated a trove of marvelous pieces, like Philip Hamburger’s dispatch from Argentina on Perón’s reputed harboring of Nazis, Flanner’s “The Beautiful Spoils,” an account of the Third Reich’s plunder of European art, as well as reports out of Nuremberg from her, Rebecca West, and Andy Logan. Even as the war receded in the late Forties and early Fifties, New Yorker datelines read like the itinerary of a restless—and well-heeled—traveler. Flanner was in Capri, Joseph Wechsberg in Warsaw, Alan Moorehead in Sicily, E. J. Kahn, Jr., in Korea. New Yorker reporters were even abroad at home. Richard Rovere established his influential Letter from Washington. Liebling reinvigorated the Wayward Press column and so broadened its scope that he could just as comfortably travel to Chicago to needle the Tribune’s Colonel McCormick as work over the miscreants in his own backyard.
At the same time the magazine was watching the powerful new medium of television, and Ross asked Hamburger to devote a standing department to it. (In The New Yorker’s fine contrarian critical tradition, one of the first pieces Hamburger wrote trashed the man the rest of America had already embraced as “Mr. Television,” Milton Berle.)
Lillian Ross was beginning to work the fertile ground of Hollywood (not to mention writing one of The New Yorker’s most riveting pieces from this period, a scandalous—or so many said—Profile of Ernest Hemingway). Rebecca West traveled to South Carolina for her compelling story on a lynching and Southern justice. Even homebody Joseph Mitchell turned footloose, tracking his “high-steel” Mohawks, the Indians who assembled the skeletons of Manhattan’s skyscrapers, across the St. Lawrence to their tribal home. In a 1949 lament to W. Averell Harriman, Ross was not entirely kidding when he said, “We may sound provincial to you but we seem like the International Gazette to me. We got started on the wide world during the war and can’t quit. Also, the writers got in the habit of traveling. They can always see a story far away, although they can’t see one here.”
Footloose correspondent: Philip Hamburger interviews Dwight Eisenhower in his Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, office. (From the collection of Philip Hamburger)
To a great extent Ross’s globe-trotting reporters were only trying to reflect the neurotic new age, and certainly the same was true of his fiction contributors. Once again there were grumbles from some old New Yorker hands that the combination of “serious” journalism and “grim” fiction was conspiring to squeeze all the fun out of the magazine. Gibbs said to White in the fall of 1947, “Your sports parable is a very fine piece, though quite a shock since I had an idea humor was supposed to be against the rules around here. The moral climate is against it. Right at this minute there is a son of a bitch down the hall writing a thirty-two-part Profile of Stalin, and somewhere east of the water cooler Liebling is trying to beat a little social consciousness into the Wayward Press department, and somebody else is writing a short story beginning ‘Cress Delahanty, who was thirteen years old but looked awful, asked her mother if she could stay all night with her friend Irma in a sump hole.’ ”
This last was an unsubtle jab at Jessamyn West, who did in fact write a Cress Delahanty story called “The Sump Hole,” and who represented a new generation of fiction writers imparting an even starker realism to the pages of the magazine. They were audacious talents: Mary McCarthy (whose 1944 story “The Weeds,” at ten thousand words, was easily the longest fiction piece the magazine had run to date), Niccolò Tucci, Jean Stafford, Shirley Hazzard. But none of them was more original than a precocious young man named J. D. Salinger.
Actually, Salinger’s New Yorker career was nearly aborted before it began. In 1941, when he was just twenty-two and had already collected several rejections from the magazine, Salinger had his first story purchased by The New Yorker. Called “A Slight Rebellion Off Madison,” it concerned a prep-school runaway, an irresistible young man named Holden Caulfield, who would resurface in The Catcher in the Rye. Before “Rebell
ion” made it into print, however, Pearl Harbor intervened, and with the war on, the editors felt the story would come across as irrelevant and unfunny, so they held it—for five years. It finally appeared in December 1946, in the back of the book. Even there, Salinger’s talent jumped off the page, and within several years he was steadily contributing such stories as “A Perfect Day for Bananafish” (one of the strange Glass-family pieces) and “For Esmé—with Love and Squalor.”
Another virtuosic newcomer to The New Yorker was the Russian writer Vladimir Nabokov, who was brought to the magazine’s attention by Edmund Wilson. He had written some poetry for The New Yorker, but his early prose pieces, which began in 1948, took a prodigious amount of work on Katharine White’s part. His syntax required some ironing, and he was partial to queer or archaic words that no one recognized. “Edmund Wilson once explained this … by saying I must remember that Nabokov learned most of his English vocabulary by studying the Unabridged Oxford English Dictionary,” Mrs. White noted years later. This was just the sort of thing that exasperated Ross, and when he heard that Nabokov had been approached by Cornell about teaching, he told Mrs. White, “I may cut my throat.” Nevertheless, he was enchanted by Nabokov’s warm, detailed evocations of his aristocratic childhood in Russia. For his part, the writer was delighted that Ross “hit it off so well with the ghost of my past,” but he shouldn’t have been surprised. Not only were Nabokov’s stories beautifully rendered, but Ross always had a soft spot for personal history, which is one reason the genre flourished in The New Yorker—from Thurber and Clarence Day through Sally Benson (whose reminiscences became the basis for Meet Me in St. Louis) and Ruth McKenney (My Sister Eileen) to the various autobiographical pieces of H. L. Mencken.
Mrs. White worked closely not only with Nabokov but with McCarthy, Stafford, Kay Boyle, and many other of The New Yorker’s top contributors. Since her return to the office in 1943, she and Lobrano had settled into an uneasy détente. They were two strong people, and it was awkward for both to have the onetime boss-subordinate roles reversed. Given the delicate situation, Ross wasn’t always as sensitive as he might have been. “Ross would sometimes consult me for an opinion on a manuscript after Lobrano had sent it to him,” Mrs. White remembered. “Sometimes I would agree with Lobrano’s opinion and sometimes not, and this must have been very trying for him, but it was not my fault. For the most part, our opinions coincided, and we had many, many happy times together during that period.” That she overstated how genial the situation was is indicative of how earnestly the fiction editors tried to play down their differences. But the tension was real, and Edward Newhouse and others close to Lobrano say that he was frustrated by the arrangement. While he would never have been so gauche as to say as much, Newhouse said, “he managed to communicate a faint distaste for her.”
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