Genius in Disguise

by Thomas Kunkel

  Ross and Dave Chasen vacationing in Aspen. (Courtesy of Patricia Ross Honcoop)

  At around this same time Ross startled Patty one day by declaring, apropos of nothing in particular, “I think I believe in God—in fact, I do.” Coming from a man whose only recent brush with organized religion had been to accompany his daughter to a church service at her school, where he promptly fell asleep and began to snore, this was a remarkable declaration. When Patty pressed him to elaborate, her father declined, saying only that he had come around to this point of view over the course of a long life, as people often will.

  That autumn Ross left Ariane—on September 29, a Friday, the day after the Broadway premiere of Season in the Sun (a coincidence, apparently). She would continue to reside at 375 Park, while he took a suite at the Berkshire Hotel at Fifty-second and Madison. It is not known if any single incident prompted his departure. As usual, he said little if anything about it to colleagues, and Patty, having just begun a new school year at the Country School in Woodstock, Vermont, and therefore seldom around, was privy to no special blowup. What is clear is that Ross wanted an end to the marriage. He had brought up the subject of divorce many times, but Ariane had always resisted (though when Ross insisted she get an attorney a few months before he left, she did). Additionally, for the entire preceding year Ross had had Truax’s associate at The New Yorker, Milton Greenstein, combing through his convoluted finances, tracking where every dollar in the household was going. In moving out, Ross doubtless had the prenuptial agreement in mind too, with its stipulation that if he and Ariane were living apart for any reason, her trust-fund stipend would be restricted.

  Ariane would later tell Ross’s friends that she was miserable during this separation, and that she continued to hope for a reconciliation. She also said that while it was plain Ross eventually intended to divorce her, he had promised to keep her whole financially. He urged her to remain in the expensive apartment and carefully log her expenses, Ariane said; he would see to it that she was reimbursed. During this period, it appeared that their contacts, if not exactly pleasant, were at least cordial.

  By the beginning of 1951, then, about the only happy development in Ross’s life was witnessing the fruition of an unlikely publishing project he had dreamed up years earlier. Back during the war, when he came under Sara Jordan’s care for his ulcers, he was amazed to discover that he could again enjoy many foods he thought he had given up forever—lobster, for instance—as long as they were properly prepared. This had given him a brainstorm, and he prevailed on Dr. Jordan, who was also an accomplished cook, and The New Yorker’s food editor, Sheila Hibben, to collaborate on a cookbook devoted to people with ulcers, colitis, chronic indigestion, and other gastrointestinal ailments. It had taken a long time to pull the project together, but now the book, Good Food for Bad Stomachs, was being readied for publication. Good Food contained five hundred appealing but dietarily correct recipes and a conspicuous introduction by H. W. Ross. It was the first piece he had written for public consumption, at least with his name attached, since World War I, which assured that Good Food got widespread attention when it came out in the summer of 1951.

  “I write as a duodenum-scarred veteran of many years of guerrilla service in the Hydrochloric War,” Ross confessed, launching into a piece that was half personal essay, half explanation. He was not pleased with the introduction—as always, he was feeling rushed when he wrote it—and in places it does seem more forced than Ross the editor would have been comfortable with in a New Yorker piece. Still, he put his point across with self-effacing humor and obvious empathy for his fellow sufferers. The introduction explained how he arrived at the idea for the book after having dinner one evening with Dr. Jordan. When it came time for dessert, Ross, as usual, intended to play it safe with the fruit compote.

  To my astonishment Dr. Jordan suggested that I have meringue glacée. Now meringue glacée has a French name, which is bad, and it is an ornamental concoction, which is bad. It sounds and looks evil. The meringue constituents of it look, in fact, almost as evil as a couple of macaroons, which are made of almonds, which are oily, and hence evil. Dr. Jordan revealed that meringue is made from the whites of eggs and sugar—no harm in a barrel of it. I had meringue glacée that evening, and although I regard it as essentially a sissy proposition and nothing for a full-grown man to lose his head over, I have it now and then when I’m in the ulcer victim’s nearest approach to a devil-may-care mood.

  ——

  In the dismal winter of 1951, as flu raced around The New Yorker, the staff was ravaged. To keep up, everyone, including Ross, was putting in long hours altogether too reminiscent of the war. “We’re getting old. The boys have taken to falling down in the hallways and hemorrhaging,” the editor wrote Rebecca West in late February. “We’re thinking of keeping an ambulance parked at the curb, to be in readiness.” As for himself, he said he had been lucky: only a two-day cold, hardly worth complaining about. He offered an upbeat report on Rebecca’s son, Anthony, who had just begun reviewing books for the magazine, but made no mention of Ariane, as he customarily had before their separation.

  A month later, Ross must have thought that the flu bug had finally caught up with him, because he suddenly felt terrible—a severe pain in the chest and a bad cough. In early April, his condition having gotten worse rather than better, he took the train up to Boston for a full examination at the Lahey Clinic. There his doctors concluded he was suffering from pleurisy, a painful inflammation of the lung wall that he had first contracted as a boy. Meanwhile, Ariane decided to come up to see him when she heard he would be at the clinic longer than he had originally said. Doctors told them both that a few months of bed rest in Stamford should put him right. Ariane pleaded with her husband to allow her to oversee his care, but he refused; instead, Ross hired a male nurse and returned to Connecticut without her. She would never see him alive again.

  All that May and June, under the watchful eye of his nurse, Ross spent twenty-two hours a day on his back, and the running of The New Yorker was left to his lieutenants. While his colleagues were anxious about his health, their larger concern was whether he would obey his doctors’ orders and thereby give himself a chance to get well. His track record, after all, was abysmal. He was the kind of patient who was known to sneak out of hospital rooms and crib cigarettes from the janitors—usually getting caught—and he stubbornly refused to stop working. “Expecting Ross to take it easy and not work or worry is like expecting a poodle puppy to stay out of mischief,” a concerned Thurber wrote to Katharine White that May. Yet this time he surprised them all; he actually welcomed the relaxation. He said the grounds at Stamford, in full spring bloom, were “so beautiful and restful that [the] effect is almost hypnotic.” As the bed rest and antibiotics relieved his discomfort and raised his spirits, he took on a little work—reading, letter-writing, some dictation. Mostly, though, he used the forced hiatus to do something he otherwise never found time to do: actually think about The New Yorker. By now the circulation of his magazine was pushing 325,000, and two thirds of this was from outside greater New York. The New Yorker had come to represent less a city than a certain cosmopolitan state of mind, and as such there seemed no limit to its possibilities.

  Ross did indulge in one bit of non-New Yorker business. In mid-June he quietly changed his will, bequeathing his entire estate to Patty. Nothing beyond her entitlement under the prenuptial agreement would be left to Ariane.

  Toward the end of June, feeling better but not wholly recovered, Ross went back to Lahey for a follow-up examination. Dr. Jordan and her colleagues began to suspect that they were dealing with more than pleurisy. They ordered more tests, and this time their diagnosis was chilling: bronchogenic carcinoma, or cancer of the windpipe.

  One can only imagine Ross’s trepidation, for he betrayed little emotion himself. At the time, cancer was even more terrifying than it is today, so feared and misunderstood that it was virtually taboo as a subject of polite conversation. Given hi
s pernicious symptoms and the fact that his father had died of cancer, he almost certainly must have considered the disease at least a possibility; yet all of a sudden here was the terrible confirmation, like a firm slap. Still, it appears he chose to entrust the news to only two other people, Truax and Julius Baer, his personal attorney of twenty years and the man who would be handling any future legal skirmishes with Ariane. Probably for strategic reasons, he didn’t want his wife to know, and he elected not to tell Patty or any other New Yorker colleagues because he didn’t want them to worry about him.

  Surgery was weighed, but Ross’s doctors instead opted for a still relatively novel procedure, radiation therapy. A lifelong skeptic of technology, Ross had his doubts but agreed. His general anxiety may be inferred from the fact that while he had never been one to keep a personal journal, he now bought a daybook with the apparent intention of documenting his upcoming ordeal. Throughout his sickness, he would be intrigued by its parallels with the more public affliction of George VI of England, whose own cancerous condition was never revealed to him. In coming months, when people inquired about his condition, Ross liked to grumble that he was suffering from “the same damn thing as the king of England.” On July 10, 1951, the day before he was to begin the radiation series, the first note he scribbled in his journal said, “Didn’t have chance of surgery, as king of England did, whether his C or not. He and I same period, same experiences, except me to bed, he to walk moors of Scotland.”

  On July 12, the day of the second treatment, Ross’s pessimism was more apparent. According to notes in the journal, he rhetorically asked Dr. Jordan, “This is the only straw I have to clutch at, isn’t it?” While she took pains to assure him of the efficacy of radiation, he noted to himself that this was “a great deal to swallow.”

  Ross’s bleak mood was also evident in the fact that at around this time he apparently instructed Baer to tell Ariane not to contact him anymore. According to his wife’s letters recounting this period, Baer also said that his client was cutting off her charge accounts and would send her no more money except what a court might order. Soon thereafter, Ariane wrote, she was mortified one day at Gristede’s when the embarrassed manager pulled her aside and showed her a letter from her husband closing her account. Ross’s own records tend to support Ariane’s recollections, indicating that at around this time, while he continued to write checks to cover their joint taxes, Ariane’s phone bill, her rent, and some other basic expenses, he stopped sending her any money directly. She was stunned by this turn of events, and would later attribute his actions to his fear, and to the sway of Baer, whom she came to despise.

  Over the next eight weeks, Ross underwent thirty-nine radiation treatments, the last one on September 7. Beyond the first few cryptic entries, he noted only a sporadic countdown of his treatments in his journal. That it was a dreadful experience, however, there can be no doubt. For one thing, he was desperately alone. At the Boston Ritz-Carlton, where he stayed when he wasn’t at the hospital, his only companion was his male nurse, who ate three meals a day with him, kept poking him with thermometers, and slept in the next room. Outwardly he tried to remain upbeat and nonchalant, telling friends that the pleurisy had abscessed and that a special treatment for it was keeping him in Boston. Apparently no one found this overly suspicious, which is not surprising given Ross’s medical history. With his ubiquitous “suitcase full of pills,” as one relative put it, he was widely regarded as a minor-league hypochondriac in any case. Besides, he had been through so many hospitalizations for his ulcers that this stay, while longer than usual, didn’t seem much out of the ordinary, and certainly didn’t suggest anything grave.

  Finally, in mid-September, after having been away from The New Yorker for five months, Ross returned to work. With all the rest, he actually felt better than he had in some time. Still, a poignant update he sent to White reveals that he had the past very much on his mind:

  I am back at work on a break-in, gradual basis. I am reading Newsbreaks and Talk anecdotes and doing a couple of other small things. The Newsbreaks are a pleasure. Through the years, they have remained my only weekly pleasure.

  Pls. note Packard’s note below this and decide how you want the item headed. Packard’s first two sentences seem to contradict each other flatly, but you’ll get what he means.

  I marked English quote marks into this, instead of stetting the French quotes. For one thing, I doubt if Nast has French quotes on hand for the Linotype machines, and if he hasn’t he would have to borrow them from a French printer here. I was in the reverse of this situation once and know how tough it can be. I undertook to get out a black market publication in Paris during the First World War and made a deal with an American Army printing company (soldiers) to do the composition. They were glad to earn some money and worked cheap. The only thing was, there weren’t any English quote marks in the French print shop in which they were stationed and did their work, and my copy was full of quotes. I had to provide English quotes. I had drag with the foreman of the composing room of the Daily Mail, which printed the Stars and Stripes, upon which I was then employed, and he would lend me, for the daylight hours, the quote marks from the Daily Mail’s machines. I had to have them back by dusk for use at the Daily Mail plant, or the Daily Mail wouldn’t get to press. The French print shop was in the outskirts of Paris, twelve miles about from the Daily Mail plant, and for ten days I had to make two trips a day between the two places, delivering and recovering twelve small slivers of metal. I have never been the same since.

  I don’t know why I pause to tell you this. I should be writing my life, which is full of such oddities.

  In the meantime, for its convenience, and possibly for its pleasant memories, Ross had taken up residence in a suite of rooms that The New Yorker maintained across Forty-fourth Street at the Algonquin.

  ——

  The last time Ariane spoke with Ross was just after Labor Day. All summer she had been in a state of near panic. She knew he was sick, but she couldn’t seem to obtain any details. Her phone calls were always intercepted, and her letters only provoked more warnings from Baer. According to Ariane, her lawyer pleaded with her to start legal proceedings against her husband, but she refused to consider the idea until she knew he was well again. She still believed that his illness, whatever it was, had bent his judgment, and that once he recovered he would soften. Then one day she called Stamford and was surprised when Ross actually answered the phone himself. She asked after his health, and Ross assured her he was “completely cured.” She then asked why he had treated her in such a hurtful fashion. When he offered no reply, she told him that she didn’t want to go to court but that he seemed to be pushing her in that direction, with all the ugly publicity it implied. Ross said he would talk to Baer about her financial situation and get back to her; instead, it was Baer who called her, scolded her, and reiterated the hard line.

  Ariane did not try to contact Ross again. She checked with The New Yorker to make sure he was in fact back at work, and then on October 4 filed suit against him in New York State Supreme Court (despite the name, a lower court). She accused Ross and the other trustee of her fund, an attorney named Jules Englander, of fiduciary irresponsibility. The suit alleged that eighty-six thousand dollars from the account that Ariane said she was entitled to had gone to Ross instead, in violation of the trust. She said that Ross and Englander had “negligently and wastefully managed” the trust and had failed to apprise her of their actions. She also sought reimbursement of seventeen thousand dollars in expenses incurred in the year since he had left.

  Ross’s attorneys responded by trying to get him removed as a defendant, but a judge refused. Then on November 21, Ariane filed a separation suit in the same court, charging Ross with abandonment and seeking five hundred dollars a week in alimony and five thousand dollars for legal fees. November 21 was the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, a date Ariane said was chosen in the hope that the suit would be overlooked in the preholiday hubbub. It wasn’t;
reporters sniffed it out and short news items appeared in the Thanksgiving newspapers. The suit could not have surprised Ross, for it certainly appeared that his strategy had been to provoke Ariane into making the first legal move, but in any event it got his attention. That Friday, his own records show, he released to Ariane twenty-one thousand dollars from the trust fund.

  As if cancer and the public evisceration of his marriage weren’t distraction enough, Ross was now visited by a third plague nearly as vexing in his view as the first two: official, book-length celebrity. In late October, Doubleday brought out a biography of Ross written by Dale Kramer, a journeyman who had been one of the coauthors of the much-maligned Harper’s profile of Ross back in 1943. The editor had been aware of the book project for more than a year, and thoroughly deplored it. He had declined to cooperate with Kramer, as had most of his New Yorker colleagues. There were even rumors that he approached the publishers in an effort to derail the book. Afterward E. B. White said that Ross hadn’t tried to stop it, only to protest what he considered its underhanded evolution—from a broad book about humor to one focusing on The New Yorker to one focusing on him. When Ross and The New Yorker finally appeared, all its subject had to say about it was that “I never read a book that starts with the word ‘it’ ”—which Kramer’s did. The New Yorker’s institutional opinion was nearly as perfunctory; in a one-paragraph review, it dismissed the book as superficial, inadequate in distributing credit, and short on energy. Charitably the review added, “It is only fair to note that this is probably because Mr. Kramer got very little cooperation from members of the staff, who had no confidence in such an undertaking by an outsider. Whatever the cause, it is a conspicuously uninformed work, though a kindly intentioned one, and it makes most of the editors and contributors around the place seem as cute as performing fox terriers.” The word was that Ross wrote the capsule review himself, which is just possible. There was also an in-house contest for the most succinct critique. White won, calling Ross and The New Yorker simply “an industrial romance.”