Bobbed Hair and Bathtub Gin

by Marion Meade

  White’s fellow judges, it turned out, had their own ideas about the best novel of 1924, and after numerous letters had passed back and forth, the panel agreed on three finalists: So Big, Balisand, and Plumes.

  Balisand, like the other novels of Joseph Hergesheimer, portrayed decadence among the rich. Its author (along with James Branch Cabell) was considered the dean of American letters, and it was to Hergesheimer that a respectful Sinclair Lewis had dedicated Main Street. Plumes was a war novel by Laurence Stallings, co-author of the successful Broadway play What Price Glory? He and Edna fraternized with the Round Table crowd and attended the same parties, and both had allowed Harold Ross to use their names as window dressing on the editorial board of his new magazine, but otherwise they had nothing in common. Edna wrote about farmers, as if war had never happened, whereas Stallings, who got his leg blown off at the Battle of Belleau Wood, specialized in war. (Plumes would be turned into one of the greatest of all silent films, The Big Parade, starring John Gilbert.)

  The chances of So Big winning were slim, not because Edna’s competition was a pair of blood-and-guts males, but because only twice previously had the winning title also been a bestseller. From his desk at the Emporia Gazette, Edna’s self-appointed fairy godfather made it his business to see this happened a third time.

  Over the next four months White became shameless in manipulating his fellow jurors, along with the Pulitzer overseer. When the jury became deadlocked, and considered omitting the fiction award, he scolded the judges about wasting the prize money. He also suggested splitting the award between two of the entries (So Big and Balisand), an option that no previous jury had been permitted. In the end, thanks to White’s determined lobbying, So Big won by default.

  Following in the footsteps of Edith Wharton, Willa Cather, and Margaret Wilson, Edna was the fourth woman to be chosen. She was careful to mask her satisfaction and announced that the prize money would be turned over to the Authors’ League fund for needy writers. Equally restrained in private, she brushed off her triumph by insisting she had no use for prizes but felt “pleased to have been the fortunate one this year.” (Knowing Bill White’s fingerprints were all over the award may have dampened her elation a bit.)

  A Pulitzer did not guarantee respect, as Edna soon found out. Days after the prize was announced, the New York Times carried a derogatory item, about a Chicago society wedding, which claimed—inaccurately—that the bride and groom served as models for So Big’s main characters. Edna Ferber, the article went on to say, made the couple’s acquaintance while convalescing at the bride’s home “after having had her nose straightened.” Such slurs were best left ignored.

  BY THE TIME Edna won her Pulitzer, Minick had opened on Broadway to enthusiastic reviews. Just about the only critics to pan the play were Edna and George’s Round Table friends. An “interesting” play in which no character “came fully to life” was the verdict of Heywood Broun, while Aleck, who could be vituperative in the extreme, pronounced it “utter trash” for his Sun readers. Regardless, Minick ran 141 performances, followed by road-company and London productions, as well as a movie starring Warner Baxter.

  But by now Edna had lost interest in Broadway because she stumbled, quite accidentally, on the subject for her next book. This time it was not a character, not even a story, but a setting. From Winthrop Ames she learned that a showboat was, as the name implied, a floating theater that tied up at towns along the river and whose acting company lived and worked on board. Fifty years earlier theatrical boats were commonplace along many rivers, especially the Mississippi, but Ames doubted if any still existed. Their era had ended long ago.

  A few days after Minick opened, Edna left New York and rode the train south until she reached eastern North Carolina, where it was still summer. In the town of Washington she hired a car and driver for the thirty-mile trip to a landing on the Pamlico River, where she’d heard that a showboat was docked.

  Luckily, the James Adams Floating Palace Theatre was still there. Pulling up to the gangplank, she called out to a man standing on the lower deck. “My name is Edna Ferber,” she said. She had come from New York because she wanted to write about a showboat.

  The man stepped forward. Was she the same Edna Ferber who’d written the Emma McChesney stories? The same Edna Ferber who’d written So Big?

  To Edna’s disappointment, the showboat season had just ended. She would have to go home and come back in the spring.

  UNPLEASANT MEMORIES filled the Fifty-seventh Street apartment where Dottie had lived with Eddie and slashed her wrists. She was never good at keeping house, and the dinky flat had deteriorated alarmingly. It was time to move on. She thought it would be nice for a change to luxuriate in tidy surroundings where she never had to clean up after herself, where she could invite people in for cocktails, buy new lingerie, learn how to change a typewriter ribbon. Perhaps she would somehow manage to housebreak her dog. That spring, she’d transferred her belongings—typewriter, Boston terrier, a few good suits—to a furnished suite at the Gonk, which she had been treating like a home away from home for so long. The beauty of a hotel lay in its safety: the hubbub of chambermaids, the clerks behind the front desk, the certainty of a faux family around her day and night, an orderly, maintenance-free universe. Her suite—a sitting room and tiny bedroom—was spartan, but all she needed, she joked, was room to lay a hat and a few friends.

  Happily ensconced in a new home, with the Rose Room and the Round Table conveniently downstairs, Dottie found herself able to write with more focus and discipline. For most of the year she had been struggling with her play about Bob Benchley and his mistress, Carol Goodner, a comedy in which a suburban husband is tempted to run away with his next-door neighbor. Unfortunately, the first act was the length of War and Peace, and so she was obliged to enlist the services of an experienced playwright to help out with technique. Her collaborator, Elmer Rice, was best known for his drama The Adding Machine and could hardly be called the typical play doctor; in fact, he was being touted as America’s Ibsen. Dottie, properly humble, marveled over her good luck. For an ordinary person—“a small cluck,” as she put it—like herself, working with the great and gifted Elmer Rice just left her “trembling all the time.” She did most of the writing, and when they weren’t working on Close Harmony, the married Rice wanted to have sex, a small price to pay. To friends she confided that Elmer was “the worst fuck I’ve ever had.” (Because she had sampled so few men, her rating had no statistical significance.)

  After a Wilmington tryout, Close Harmony was scheduled to open in New York on the first of December. From her experience as a critic, Dottie knew that launching a play during the Christmas season could be risky, but the producer pooh-poohed her worries. The play would run a year whenever it opened, Arthur Hopkins promised.

  When Hopkins turned out to be right, and Close Harmony met with complete praise from the critics, Dottie wound up throwing herself a party at the Gonk. The second week of the run, she decided to visit the show on a Saturday afternoon and see how everything was going. What fresh hell was this? When she arrived at the theater with Woodrow Wilson on a leash, she found practically every seat empty. Clearly, Arthur Hopkins was not infallible after all, because those admiring reviews had not brought audiences to the box office. Did anybody think to tell her? Not at all. Afterward she sent a grim telegram to Bob Benchley: “CLOSE HARMONY DID A COOL NINETY DOLLARS AT THE MATINEE STOP ASK THE BOYS IN THE BACK ROOM WHAT THEY WILL HAVE.” On Christmas Eve the play closed after twenty-four performances. Why did these things happen to her?

  IN STAMFORD, Connecticut, Ruth Hale purchased an abandoned farm, ninety-seven acres and a lake, and proudly named it Sabine Farm in honor of Horace’s estate in the Sabine Hills outside Rome. It was generally agreed, however, that Ruth was not in her right mind, because her Sabine Farm looked like the Roman poet’s might have after being sacked by the Goths, Gauls, and Vandals. Max Perkins, invited to a cookout, described it to Scott as “a ruin of thickets
, grass-grown roads, broken walls, and decaying orchards.” Invited to visit, Dottie and Aleck shuddered at the sight of a stiff brown toothbrush hanging from a nail on the back porch.

  “In God’s name,” Aleck said, “what do you suppose she does with that?”

  “Rides it on Halloween,” Dottie said.

  Sitting in the parlor with Ruth and some of her friends one night, Dottie was listening to their usual conversation about sewage and sump pumps when a plump brown rat trotted by. Ruth did not notice, nor did she blink when another rat toddled by with a businesslike step. Just then a whole bevy of rats began scooting around as if they owned the premises, but nobody paid the slightest attention. As a native New Yorker, Dottie was unruffled by the sight of cockroaches, but rats were different. While these appeared none too bright, they were big, beefy creatures built like Jack Dempsey. Finally she couldn’t stand it.

  “Does anybody but myself see giant rats in this room?” she said.

  Ruth had been planning to say, “What rats?,” but one look at Dottie’s face changed her mind, and she confessed to enticing the rodents with bread pellets.

  “You sons of bitches!” Dottie wailed.

  That year practically everyone talked about real estate. The Round Tablers moaned how they needed to get out of town on the weekends, how that was the whole trouble with their lives. Moving to the country meant privacy, Ruth declared, although her friends assumed Sabine Farm, with its wood-burning stove, was an excuse to escape the increasingly onerous duties of ministering to party guests on West Eighty-fifth Street. Aleck, dreaming of storage space, was thinking of buying an island in the middle of a remote lake in Vermont, because he had had his fill of living in a town that had no attics, and what was a home without an attic. That sounded ridiculous to Dottie, who owned nothing worth storing. Any place without sidewalks aroused her suspicions, but as luck would have it, she fell in love with a man who lived in Stamford, not far from Sabine Farm.

  Deems Taylor was an accomplished composer of several operettas and an orchestral suite. He also was music editor of the New York World, in fact the country’s leading music critic. Small and blond, with a receding hairline and a crinkly grin, he looked like a cheerful schoolboy, although he was forty. Dottie had known him ten years, ever since, as a fledgling poet, she began submitting light verse to F.P.A.’s column, and Deems, signing himself “SMEED,” was Franks most gifted contributor. The days when Deems and his cat shared a bachelor apartment with Marc Connelly were long past, however. Married twice, he was separated from the actress Mary Kennedy.

  After Dottie’s Boston terrier died, Deems went out of his way to be comforting. As it happened, he was abandoning criticism for full-time composition because the Metropolitan Opera had commissioned him to write an opera. His example encouraged her to make changes in her own professional life, which she considered a failure. Angrily summarizing her writing career in “Song of Perfect Propriety,” she enumerated the lines of work for which she was, temperamentally, qualified: buccaneer, highway robber, anarchist, looter, spy, extortionist, strangler, freelance hangman. And yet she was writing poetry, “as little ladies do.”

  Her mistake was obvious, she supposed. For years she had been pottering along with hors d’oeuvres when she should have been cooking an entrée. What she needed to write was a novel. Without giving up her rooms at the Algonquin, she moved to Fairfield County to live with Deems and began writing. The story was about a wealthy New York family who lives on the Upper West Side, in a brownstone with twelve-foot ceilings and a dark mahogany parlor, and plucks its Irish laundresses right off the boat at Ellis Island. It was about children looking after their widowed father, a millstone selfishly indifferent to the misery he inflicts. It was about Dottie’s life—the years from fourteen to twenty, when she did nothing but care for Henry Rothschild—but also about her brother Harry, a drunkard unable to keep a job who finally runs off and is never seen again.

  Considering her finicky attention to details (writing five words and erasing seven, she joked), progress on the novel was frustratingly slow. Aside from the book, she continued to write humorous pieces for magazines. When some of her friends started a publication, she agreed to help out with donations of verse and criticism. It was strictly a favor. Asking payment from a harebrained stunt that would not last more than a few weeks never occurred to her.

  PEOPLE WERE CONSTANTLY rushing in and out of Jane and Harold’s house in Hell’s Kitchen. After five years they were finally about to launch the first issue of a weekly humor magazine about New York, written not for old ladies in Iowa but for New Yorkers. Through Ross’s association with the Thanatopsis Literary and Inside Straight Club, one of the players had generously put up twenty-five thousand dollars. (He was Raoul Fleischmann, whose family money came from baking goods.) All that remained now was to find the right name.

  Manhattan? Truth? Our Town?

  At the Round Table one day, a press agent who ate there regularly looked up from his plate.

  What was the big fuss? said John Peter Toohey. Wasn’t the magazine about New York? So call it The New Yorker.

  The New Yorker’s angel, bored with the baking business, was pleased to be involved with “these amusing and interesting people.” Harold Ross impressed Raoul Fleischmann as “an enthusiastic wild sort of player” who was “something to see in action” at the poker table (and presumably just as dynamic in business). Unable to do enough for Ross, Raoul offered him free office space in a building he owned on West Forty-fifth, but much of the editing and proofing took place in Hell’s Kitchen. Several days before the first issue reached the newsstands, Frank Adams stopped by the house. The New Yorker stank, he said, an opinion he repeated a few days later in the Conning Tower. “Sunday February 15. To H. Ross’s, and he shewed me a copy of The New Yorker, which is to be issued on Tuesday, but most of it seemed too frothy for my liking,” he wrote, before going on to relate how he found himself in a restaurant without his wallet and had to borrow money for the check, a matter of greater importance.

  That Frank himself had written some of those frothy sketches did not alter the fact that he was right. The magazine looked amateurish. Its humor was sophomoric. In short, it turned out an unqualified mess. Raoul Fleischmann, embarrassed, wished he had never laid eyes on Harold Ross.

  ON WINTER EVENINGS, as she walked home from her job at the Times, Jane checked newsstands to see how the magazine was selling. Judging by the stacks, it wasn’t. “It is difficult to describe my despair,” she later recalled. In the following weeks, as circulation kept sliding, the smell of defeat “hung all around us.”

  At the outset Harold received help from some of his Round Table friends—Ferber, Broun, Parker, Woollcott, Connelly, Kaufman—all of whom lent creditability to the project by allowing him to use their names on his editorial board, but it was nothing more than window dressing. Edna, for example, sniffing failure, would not allow him to publish any of her writing and withdrew her name. The one who did the most was Dottie, who for the first several issues contributed humor, verse, and theater reviews under the byline “Last Night.” Harold was happy to get her. In trying to develop an editorial mood for the book, one that might duplicate the Round Table wit—sharp, funny, and bad—he came up with the idea of a staple department he called “Talk of the Town,” which he wanted to read like sophisticated, amusing dinner-table conversation. There were few people whose ordinary table talk effortlessly got more laughs than Dottie’s. (Bunny had compiled a guest list for an ideal party and put her name near the top.) As Harold knew, she could not only talk it but write it, good New York vernacular prose that sounded easy, articulate, and terrifically funny. To be sure, whatever she gave him was a throwaway, tossed off in a spare moment, but since she was not being paid, he could hardly complain.

  At a poker game one night, at the apartment of Herbert Swope, Harold won a few dollars. As he and Jane were pulling on their coats, another player began to taunt him for leaving when he was ahead and for allowi
ng “a skirt” to push him around. To Harold those were fighting words. Without thinking, he took off his coat and returned to the table, and Jane went home by herself.

  Next morning she noticed him weaving drunkenly across Forty-seventh Street, looking “more bent than usual.” After he’d fallen into bed, she fished from his pockets IOUs that totaled thirty thousand dollars, more than their personal investment in the magazine. She felt sick and “disgraced,” but what could she say to a man for whom everything was a personal tragedy anyway? Once he sobered up, she suggested there was “nothing left for us to do but commit suicide.”

  Actually, there were those who wanted to kill him. One of them must have been Raoul Fleischmann, whose twenty-five-thousand-dollar investment was gone.

  WHEN DOTTIE and Frank Adams came by to pick up Edna on Sunday morning, they were planning to drive out into the country and lunch at an inn. There was no way Dottie was going to be happy spending the day in an automobile with Edna, but she agreed to the outing for Franks sake. It had been an unpleasant year for him: Minna filed for a New York divorce, after the standard adultery charade in a hotel room, and he had promised to pay a monstrous amount of alimony. His bachelorhood was short-lived, however; he and Esther Root were going to be married in six weeks.

  At the Prasada, Dottie expected to find Edna dressed and ready to go. But when she crept out of her bedroom in pajamas and slippers, it was plain she had changed her mind. Over her nightclothes was draped a bed jacket bedecked in pink feathers. What kind of getup was that? Dottie wondered. The last time she saw anything like it was on the stage of the Winter Garden pasted to the backside of a Follies girl.