When not at work, Ross was keeping to himself in Room 806 at the Algonquin. He had his mail and most of his meals sent up, though he ate little. He was still smoking, and he seemed preoccupied and irritable. One of his few pleasures was the company of James and Helen Thurber, who by coincidence were also staying at the hotel at this time. This afforded Ross and Thurber the welcome opportunity to get reacquainted. Though he was synonymous with The New Yorker to most people, Thurber had actually left the regular staff in 1936 to become a freelancer, and he divided most of his time between rural northwestern Connecticut and Bermuda. Given this distance, not to mention his soaring celebrity and failing eyesight, he had less and less direct contact with Ross. Even then, if their communications weren’t about Thurber’s stories or drawings, they tended to revolve around his complaints that Talk wasn’t funny anymore, or that the magazine wasn’t paying him enough. Still, he had always been one of those few people who could walk into Ross’s office and instantly have him laughing, and now they could rekindle this happier side of their relationship. But for the first time Thurber could appreciate how really sick his friend was. Ross did not tell him it was cancer, but Thurber said he guessed as much, partly because of the editor’s wrecked appetite. One evening when the Thurbers called on him in his room, they found him eating “dinner”—sardines, right out of the can. “It’s practically the only thing I can taste,” he told them.
Ross’s complexion was wan, but otherwise the radiation hadn’t materially affected his appearance. With his sparkling eyes and crow-black hair, he still looked years younger than his age. He was telling friends that he was fine, feeling better, perhaps eighty-five percent back to normal. Yet he continued to cough up discharge, sometimes for an hour or two at a stretch, which kept him awake nights and as a result fatigued his days. By Thanksgiving weekend, even as he was being sued for abandonment, he was heading back to Boston for more tests.
First Ross stopped off in Saratoga to see Frank Sullivan and Wesley Gilson, then briefly dropped in on Patty in Vermont. It had been several months since she had seen him, and she remained unaware of his true condition. Her father tried to be blasé about the trip to Lahey, though from his demeanor she sensed that this time he was unusually nervous. He told her not to worry, he would be back in New York in a few weeks.
In the meantime, Walter Winchell had latched on to the separation suit, and in the December 3 Mirror he put his inimitable spin on it: “Mrs. Harold Ross, wife of The New Yorker editor, according to intimates, was forced to go to court to get money to eat; Ross cut off all charge accounts, including groceries, to starve her into accepting his terms. Every time the case was to be heard—Our Hero ran up to Lahey’s Clinic (Boston) and reported ill—so he didn’t have to read the N.Y. papers about it.… Mrs. Ross was Ariane Allen, former actress, and one of the most beautiful women in the land.… It was Mrs. Ross the literary gagmen meant—when they quipped: ‘One day she’ll be the most popular widow in town.’ ”
Ariane later said she was scandalized by this item, and Ross’s colleagues considered it a hateful all-time low, even for Winchell. But its target was too preoccupied to care. He was at Lahey by then, getting more bad news. It appeared that while the radiation may have mitigated the bronchial lesion, as intended, the doctors now feared that the cancer had metastasized to the lungs. To know for certain what they were dealing with, they would have to cut him open. Exploratory surgery was scheduled for Thursday, December 6, at New England Baptist Hospital.
Back at The New Yorker a few key people were informed that some sort of surgical procedure was occurring that day, but its true nature was kept from them, and they were led to believe it was just another in Ross’s continuum of treatments. Many friends were concerned enough to call, from Dave Chasen to Jane Grant, but Ross assured them that there was no cause for alarm. Patty didn’t even know there would be an operation. Ross phoned her at about this time, she recalled, but said nothing about it. Their conversation was testy; he seemed upset, even angry, as if she had done something wrong, but she didn’t know what it could be.
Truax, of course, knew why Ross was irritable, and he came up from New York to be by his friend’s side in the days leading up to the operation. They talked, played cribbage, and generally tried to keep their minds off the surgery. Truax would later report that the editor faced his uncertain predicament bravely and with dignity, but at the same time compiled a list of sundry matters he wanted Truax to take care of should things go badly.
At about one o’clock on Thursday, not long before the surgery was to begin, Ross telephoned George S. Kaufman, who he had learned was in Boston trying out a new show. “I’m up here to end this thing, and it may end me, too,” Ross told him. “But that’s better than going on this way. God bless you. I’m half under the anesthetic now.”
As Ross had intimated to his friend, when the surgeons opened his chest they were confronted by their worst fear—a large mass of cancer in his right lung. The lung was removed, but Ross’s heart failed. It was about half past six in the evening, and he never came out of the anesthetic.
——
William Shawn and his wife were to have dinner that night with the Philip Hamburgers. Mrs. Shawn was already at their apartment, and they were waiting for her husband, assuming that as usual something had come up to keep him at the office. Then the phone rang; it was Shawn, asking to speak with Cecille. She went into another room to take the call, and a few minutes later came out, ashen. “Take me home,” she asked Hamburger. “Mr. Ross has just died.”
Within hours, several of Ross’s aides, including Louis Forster and Leo Hofeller, were at Shawn’s apartment to begin disseminating the shocking bulletin—to the Whites, to Thurber, to Gibbs, to Lobrano, to dozens of others. On hearing the news, some gathered in bars for impromptu wakes; others came to the Shawns’ apartment, not knowing what else to do with themselves. Among these was S. N. Behrman, who had the distinction of being the last writer to be personally edited by Ross. At the Algonquin one evening just before the editor left for Boston, he was helping Behrman rework a Profile of a man named Gabriel Pascal, a colorful Hungarian adventurer who somehow had persuaded George Bernard Shaw to give him the exclusive rights to film his plays. Behrman had been noodling with the piece for years, but the temperamental Pascal was still balking at seeing it published. Ross, however, was enchanted by the very idea of the story—a highlife-lowlife if ever there was one—and that night he and Behrman were having another go at it.
At the apartment, Behrman was so overcome that he couldn’t stop wailing, and finally Shawn asked Forster to see him safely home. As it happened, the playwright was one of Forster’s idols, and so the younger man remembered their taxi ride that night as almost surreal. Through his tears, Behrman told Forster many stories of Ross, none more poignant than about the first time he ever had a piece accepted by The New Yorker, a brief Profile of George Gershwin. The writer was just about to sail for Europe when Ross turned up at the pier. He had come to send Behrman off, and to deliver his check in person.
By nine or ten that night, the news of Ross’s death was on the radio. Coming home with his wife from a party, William Maxwell was driving on the Taconic State Parkway when he heard the report and nearly veered off the road in shock. Ariane Ross had not been listening to the radio. At 11:45, she was awakened by a phone call from a Daily News reporter, who asked if he could have a comment from her about the death of her husband. Caught off guard and still smarting from the Winchell item, Ariane assumed the call was a spiteful practical joke and started to hang up. “Please believe me, Mrs. Ross,” the reporter pleaded, “it was just on the eleven-thirty news—Mr. Ross died at six-thirty this afternoon.”
Ariane immediately phoned the hospital for confirmation. The head nurse was startled: “Oh, Mrs. Ross, haven’t you been told?” According to Ariane, the hospital had expected Truax to notify her, but in the confusion they hadn’t spoken.
Up at the Woodstock Country School, the housemother
at Patty’s dormitory did hear the report. Patty was still up, busy with chores. The older woman didn’t want to alarm the girl, and didn’t think it was her place to tell her in any case. Still, she didn’t want Patty to hear by accident, so she rounded up all the girls and told them that because they had exams the next day they were to turn off their radios. The next morning one of Patty’s friends, one who had not been in the dorm the night before, telephoned to tell Patty how sorry she was. “About what?” Patty asked. Her friend was puzzled. “Why, about your father,” she said. “Haven’t you heard?”
At The New Yorker the usual quiet of the hallways was different that morning, enveloped in profound sorrow. Staffers milled about aimlessly, huddling in twos and threes to talk about Ross and, inevitably, to begin imagining life without him. Now, at a time when magazines are mass-produced like shoes or soft drinks by multinational conglomerates, it seems hard to fathom, but Ross was so much the persona of The New Yorker that people inside and outside the magazine seriously wondered whether it could go on without him. The sadness, like the speculation, wasn’t confined to the office. Ross’s passing was front-page news around the country, and radios blared it around the world. In Paris, Janet Flanner’s devastation—she told Katharine White her sense of loss was “enormous, like losing the top and walls of your house”—was ameliorated only by having so many people, even strangers, cable their regards or send her flowers of condolence. A Roman Catholic brother told Mrs. White that when he heard the news he knelt before an altar and prayed for Ross.
In his corner office on nineteen, Andy White had been at work since early that morning. More or less by common consent, the task fell to him to compose Ross’s obituary for the magazine. A more difficult thing had never been asked of him. He was still in shock himself—privately, he wrote a friend that “K and I … have the sensation of being disembowelled”—and there was little time. Ornery to the very end, Ross died just as the next issue of The New Yorker was about to close. As White admitted in what would turn out to be a warm and vivid tribute, “This is known, in these offices that Ross was so fond of, as a jam. Ross always knew when we were in a jam, and usually got on the phone to offer advice and comfort and support. When our phone rang just now, and in that split second before the mind focusses, we thought, ‘Good! Here it comes!’ But this old connection is broken beyond fixing. The phone has lost its power to explode at the right moment and in the right way.”
Gibbs and many others had drifted in and out of White’s office that morning, offering help and solace, if not seeking the same. Suddenly, from down the corridor near the bank of elevators, rose a primal wailing: “Andy! An-dy!” The voice, getting closer, seemed familiar and strange all at once. “Andy!” A staffer who was there remembers the sound as almost spectral, one of pain, yet tinged with fear. She ran into the hall, and there found Thurber moving slowly down the corridor, hands to the wall, groping his way from doorway to doorway. “Andy!” he called again. By now almost fully blind, Thurber seldom ventured to the magazine, and on such occasions he was never without his wife or someone else to lead him. But now, robbed of his friend and mentor, Thurber had never seemed so vulnerable, so utterly alone. Instinctively he was drawn back to The New Yorker, as was White, as were Gibbs and Shawn and all the rest, like children drawn to their father’s grave.
EPILOGUE
THE ANGEL OF REPOSE
At Four o’clock on a dank December afternoon, the Monday after Ross died, a service in his memory was held at the Frank Campbell Funeral Home, at Eighty-first and Madison. Through the years Frank Campbell’s has more or less made its reputation as a mortuary to the stars (dispatching New York celebrities from Valentino—whose opera hat fell to Ross’s custody, it will be recalled—to John Lennon), but once upon a time, before it moved uptown, it advertised in the city’s subways, “A dignified funeral for $95.” In his last-minute instructions to Truax, Ross specified the simple service, as well as his wish to be cremated. So on that somber afternoon, four hundred mourners, including his sixteen-year-old daughter, his wives, and most of his staff, crowded into the funeral home’s main chapel. Hundreds more spilled into the hall and down the steps outside.
For all their grief, the service itself was strangely impersonal. In a room wall to wall with celebrated writers, actors and politicians, almost anyone present could have, with no more notice than a tap on the shoulder, stood and delivered an eloquent tribute to Ross. The assembled looked to Thurber, to White, to Frank Sullivan, to Ralph Ingersoll, to Helen Hayes or Bennett Cerf, but in their sorrow, and in the confusion of the hastily arranged affair, none of these eminences rose. Instead everyone listened in astonishment as the chaplain of Yale University, a man who had never met Ross, offered a well-intentioned but mawkish eulogy. “He hated all tyrannies,” the cleric intoned, “not least the insidious tyranny of things, and he made us feel that the world of matter or even of atoms is somehow too narrow for any one of us.” After a bit more of this blather, he concluded, “On next February 26, Eustace Tilley will have a slight tear on his monocle and a tremor in his hand.”
No one who heard it ever quite forgot the peculiar incongruity of the eulogist and the eulogized. It is not clear exactly who retained the Yale man, though Julius Baer later confided to Thurber that he had stepped in to help Ariane with the arrangements because he feared she would make the service private. In any case, White’s view was that the real tribute that day was the almost unnerving silence that preceded the service. Only Ross, White said, could have gotten “such a bunch of normally noisy and disorderly people [to sit] so quietly, so respectfully, and so completely forlorn.”
Six weeks later—a very anxious six weeks for the New Yorker staff—Raoul Fleischmann appointed William Shawn editor of the magazine. There is no real question that this was what Ross intended to happen. Some New Yorker people, especially some of the fiction contributors, thought Gus Lobrano might get the job, and he was badly disappointed when he didn’t. But to almost everyone who worked at Forty-third Street and saw how the magazine functioned, Ross’s second-in-command was the obvious and rightful heir. Privately Shawn thought so too, though Ross never told him as much. Indeed, despite the “succession” clause in his employment contract, it appears that Ross never formally committed himself to a replacement, however conspicuously and carefully he may have groomed Shawn. Nonetheless, those close to both Ross and Truax believed that the editor expressed his intention to his longtime confidant, meaning it to be passed along to Fleischmann.
Still, the magazine’s staff, and Shawn himself, were unsettled by the delay. There is some reason to believe that Fleischmann took so long because he did not fully share the conventional wisdom about Shawn. In the collected papers of Ralph Ingersoll there is a cryptic note from this period summarizing a briefing Ingersoll or an associate received from the publisher about The New Yorker’s finances. According to the note, Fleischmann was moving slowly on appointing a new editor because of a “violence of personal feelings.” There is no elaboration, but it should be remembered that as tragic as Ross’s death was, it handed Fleischmann the one thing he had wanted for almost two decades: the chance to appoint his own editor. He knew Shawn very well—well enough to respect his vast talents, but also well enough to have seen his odd side, and to size him up as a strong-willed disciple who almost certainly would brook no more business-side input than Ross had. These factors may help explain why Fleischmann thought long and hard before capitulating to Ross, even in death, for the last time.
Meanwhile, Ariane was challenging Ross’s will in a Connecticut probate court. At the time of his death his net worth appears to have been in the neighborhood of half a million dollars. This comprised cash, securities, insurance benefits, Ariane’s prenuptial trust, a trust for Patty, and the Stamford home and grounds, whose value in 1952 was estimated at $131,000. The legal wrangling would take six full years, featuring a veritable conga line of attorneys—for Ariane, for Patty, for the Ross estate, for Ariane’s trust, even for
Chasen, who saw a parking lot that Ross still owned figure in the dispute. In the end, after all the claims and counterclaims, a compromise was struck that awarded roughly a third of the money to Ariane, a third to Patty—and a third, naturally, to the lawyers.
After the probate was finally resolved, Ariane remarried. The groom was Sir John Leigh, scion of a wealthy English family that Ariane had gotten to know in the Forties. Sir John doted on her and surrounded her with servants. Brief news accounts of the nuptials noted that his father, a longtime member of Parliament, had amassed a fortune in cotton. Raoul Fleischmann clipped one such story and sent it to Katharine White with the note, “Thus again is virtue rewarded!”
——
In 1954, writing to White, Thurber said, “I read a garble not long ago for ‘angle of repose’ which came out angel of repose, a mighty good angel to have around these days. Angle of repose is usually applied to an angle that will let go at the slightest disturbance, causing landslides, filling up Culebra Cut, and making it necessary to start work all over again. The angel of repose, on the other hand, keeps the balance secure with nothing more than a cheerful word or an unauthorized proof sent through the mails.… As you and I know, H. W. Ross had dealings with the angel of repose and was good at the cheerful word of praise.…”
Genius in Disguise Page 44