Cast of Characters

by Thomas Vinciguerra

  Among many other affectations, Terry would sternly warn uninitiated staff members, “Never say hello to Mr. Ross.” Stevenson took this advice a little too seriously. “I didn’t know what Mr. Ross looked like, so I selected the most important-looking man I could find, and avoided speaking to him.” E. J. Kahn did so as well; in his case, he thought Packard was Ross and didn’t realize his mistake for three days.

  Terry made up for her foibles by toiling sixty to seventy-five hours a week, frequently on trivial tasks that no other administrator would have taken on. Just before Christmas 1939, White (who called her a “maid-of-all-work”) sent her fifteen dollars to buy a Brooks Brothers sweater for Katharine’s daughter Nancy and sheepishly inquired by way of thanks, “I have asked a man who makes pears, in Oregon, to send you a box for Christmas, with my love and greetings. Do you like pears?” Thurber instructed her before he took an extended leave, “God only knows who will use my typewriter while I am gone. But I don’t want no blue ribbin [sic] in it. If they dont [sic] want black, let em [sic] eat cake. I want it kept covered too. Will you kind of ask people to be kind to this old machine, which is now in excellent shape.” When the publisher John Farrar sent Gibbs a long and breathless request that he contribute to a volume called The Bedroom Companion, about “the hazards of man’s life among womankind,” Gibbs gave Terry the letter with a cover note that read simply, “Please lose this.”

  Her efficiency could be grating. “Miss Terry perhaps would be a little trying to a man of more spirit than I have,” Gibbs complained to Katharine. “She is in and out of here all the time, jogging my memory about things I ought to have done. I think it is something they teach them in secretarial school: ‘He may try to put things off, but keep everlastingly at him. Be tactful!’ She is also always monkeying around with the papers in my baskets and I wish there was something in there that would bite her but there isn’t.” Even that would not necessarily have chastened her; she once divested a couple of tough office boys of a length of pipe and a blackjack. So complete was her control of office protocol that the staff once sent her this collective memo, with innumerable strikeouts and insertions:

  PETITION TO MISS TERRY

  We, the undersigned, object to the new paperclips—the ones that look like waterbugs [sic]. In elaborate tests shown that it takes just f ur [sic] times as long to attach them as it did the old paperclips—the ones that look like worms. It was also shown that it is impossible for a nervous man to attach one to a thin sheet of paper without everything wrinkling up, including the operator. The whole thing of course boils down into whether it is important to tear editors or manuscripts [.]

  Terry may have been a consummate office manager, but Ross found himself for the first decade or so of The New Yorker’s existence in dire need of an all-powerful, all-efficient managing editor. This “dehumanized figure, disguised as a man,” as Thurber described him, was the “Jesus”—a corruption of “genius” and/or a nod to Ross’s tendency to spout “Jesus!” in exasperation over trouble of any sort. Approximately two dozen Jesuses populated the magazine’s first six years alone. None of them ever met Ross’s lofty expectations.

  The pattern was set with the very first jobholder, Ralph McAllister Ingersoll, who would go on to a storied career at Time Inc. and create the newspaper PM. If nothing else, he left The New Yorker with one indisputable legacy:

  It was I who invented—literally—the form of the Talk Department. Not the style, God forbid, nor the polish—but the form: of alternating short essays with anecdotes; inventing the several different essay forms . . . consisting of “visit pieces,” miniature Profiles, dope stories (background pieces to newspapermen) etc.; the whole anecdotal warp and short essay woof to be woven into a disguised but discernible pattern to cover those fields of Metropolitan interest which were our special province: each of the arts, Park Avenue and a touch of Wall Street, the beginnings of what’s known as Café Society, etc.

  But in his five years at the magazine, Ingersoll may have been better remembered for clashing regularly with his boss. “Ingersoll was a great man for system,” Ross said. “If I gave him a thousand dollars a week just to sit in an empty room, before you know it he’d have six people helping him.” Ingersoll suffered a nervous breakdown after working sixteen-hour days for Ross and staunchly defended his record. If Ross was the father of The New Yorker, he insisted, then “I was the mother. It came out of my loins, with all the pain and agony of childbirth and it was my child by an exasperating unholy ghost whose materialization looked like a gargoyle with crew-cut hair.”

  By late 1926 Ingersoll had eased himself into a slot as a senior editor or “Jesus emeritus,” as he called it. It was around this time that Ross hired Thurber to take his place—that is, if Thurber can be believed. A chronic exaggerator, he spun yarns generally designed to elevate his profile or embellish his misfortunes. In subsequent retellings, Thurber would play up his centrality and duration as the Jesus. He might well not have held the job at all; he was likelier Sunday editor, charged with getting late reviews into print and making sure that last-minute snafus were rectified.

  But Gibbs, while admitting that the stories about Thurber’s office conduct were “manifold, peculiar, and perhaps as much as fifty percent true,” distinctly remembered him in the Jesus slot. “I know that he was employed as managing editor in 1926, a job for which he was about as adequately equipped as he would have been for dentistry,” he wrote. “This was because Harold Ross felt that he needed an editor, having far too many writers around as it was.” Whatever Thurber’s exact title, Gibbs admired his peculiar ideas about administrative procedure: “Every evening on his way across the street for a drink at the Algonquin, he would take the day’s accumulated memoranda, telling him what to do tomorrow, out of his pocket, tear them up, and drop them in the gutter. It is a commentary on the rather casual methods of the magazine that this worked very nicely for quite a while.”

  Such future eminences as Ogden Nash and James M. Cain occupied the slot for varying durations. The brief tenure of the latter proved memorable. “It was a lively, stormy time,” said Katharine White. “Cain was not an administrator and therefore tried to set up all sorts of crazy devices, such as tagging the boards of cards of fiction, memoirs, humorous essays, poetry and verse bought and in our ‘bank’ of manuscript and proof to be scheduled. He did it by color—red for very timely, Green for ‘Soon,’ and Yellow for any time. The joke was that Raymond Holden, who was to watch over administering this timeliness matter, was color-blind and could not tell red from green.”

  Nor did Cain take to Ross personally. “In this otherwise courteous man, so easy in conversation, there lurked something peculiar, a streak of self-consciousness, or shyness, or social kinkiness, that was anything but easy, and was in fact downright wacky,” Cain recalled. That wackiness, Cain found, infected the entire operation. It was in “a chronic state of paralysis,” filled with “incompetent secretaries, girls with poor gifts to start with, little training and less experience, whom The New Yorker had loaded up with by a policy of paying too little.” When Cain suggested that Ross simply hire better secretaries, Ross—who somehow regarded them as less than human by definition—refused. “If I told him I had leprosy,” Cain remembered, “I couldn’t have gotten a more hostile reaction.”

  It was typical of Ross. Cain considered him “a problem child in the office [,] perpetually creating the chaos he wanted to cure.” The last straw came when Ross promised John O’Hara a thousand-dollar advance without telling Cain about it. Cain exploded and, in an agonized conversation with himself that evening at home, he asked, “What in the hell are you doing this goddamn job for anyway?” He later admitted, “[On] my last days on The New Yorker I was going somewhat mental.”

  Cain was also vexed by the talented writer Geoffrey T. Hellman, who would briefly quit The New Yorker to work for Fortune in the early 1930s. The proximate issue was Hellman’s apparent dismissal following some personnel-related misunderstandings. M
ore generally, the brouhaha reflected the frenetic goings-on within Ross’s budding shop. The Hellman-Cain correspondence reflects a confounding mutual tenacity and animosity. Cain drew first blood:

  You seem to be under the impression that you are the victim of injustice, or something, and I don’t think that is true. You were not fired in the ordinary sense, but declined to do the only work that was here for you. . . .

  Hellman returned fire the next day with a detailed response that included:

  To sum up this whole dreary business: I am still under the impression that I was quite definitely fired without cause; that some time later I was, out of charity or whatnot, offered the job I had when I first came to The New Yorker, involving work less congenial and less well paid than that which I had been doing for the last five or six months; work, in short, which I undertook two years ago in the encouraged expectation that, well done, it would lead to an editorial job; and that naturally I refused it. There was no question of my “preferring to quit,” as you say; at the time of my dismissal I had no choice, Ross’s only offer having been one to do free lance work—meaningless, as you know; I merely declined a later offer to take an inferior job, designed as a method of letting me out easily.

  To which Cain volleyed back:

  Let us get this thing clear: Within a day or so my coming to The New Yorker you came into Ross’s office, and you and Ross and I had a talk. Ross explained to you that my coming meant a readjustment of the Talk department. I was going to handle it, he told you, and he asked you whether you wanted to be a reporter. Salary, so far as I recall, was not mentioned as we didn’t get that far. You said you didn’t want to be a reporter. You wanted to be an executive at $150 a week. . . .

  You were not fired at all. You were offered a kind of work you were able to do at the salary you would be drawing. You would not take it. That is the whole story. . . .

  This correspondence becomes more and more absurd. I write you this detailed letter chiefly for the sake of a record.

  This particular poison pen correspondence would eventually be resolved by Hellman’s quick return to The New Yorker. Though he would annoy Ross as much about issues of pay and reimbursement as he did Cain about his actual employment, he would become among the magazine’s most loyal and prolific employees. Cain, by contrast, undertook no such peacemaking. Years after he left the magazine and achieved fame with The Postman Always Rings Twice, Gibbs solicited him to contribute to the magazine. With memories of his editorial purgatory still fresh, Cain refused:

  On the whole, I would rather be dead. You see, by the time I thought up a list of ideas and submitted them and found out the one I liked Ross didn’t like, and then wrote one up and sent it on and then got it back again with 32 numbered objections from Mrs. White, and then rewrote it and sent it back, then considered the proposal to buy the facts from me for $50 and have Andy White rewrite it, and finally it came out as a “Reporter” piece by Markey—I would probably be dead anyway.

  By far the most important Jesus came via Joel Sayre, an old friend of Thurber’s. “Honest to Jesus, Kay, I do wish you’d take him under your wing,” he wrote to Katharine White. “He’s the best un-magazine-published writer I know, a great guy, and needs money terribly.”

  Sayre’s friend was a tall, broad-shouldered charmer of a newspaperman named St. Clair McKelway. Joining the staff in 1933, he began contributing “Talk” items, Profiles, and “Reporter at Large” stories. His subjects were equally famous (the dancer Bill “Bojangles” Robinson) and undistinguished (a local woman who had abandoned her twin baby girls, one in a subway lavatory and one in a church vestibule). Almost from the start, he demonstrated editing prowess as well. When Katharine White asked him to fix up a piece, she found he did so “exactly as it should have been done.” Thus informed that McKelway could turn other people’s copy around, Ross told the young reporter, “If you can, it’s God-damned unusual!”

  Toward the end of 1936, McKelway agreed to Ross’s request that he take on the “Jesus” slot, provided he was paid fifteen thousand dollars annually and hold the job for only three years. Most important, McKelway also insisted that the blurry administrative border between the magazine’s departments of fiction and fact be clearly established, with himself responsible only for the latter. Secure in his fiefdom, McKelway set about recruiting and training some of The New Yorker’s most prolific and familiar names, including Joseph Mitchell, Philip Hamburger, Brendan Gill, and E. J. Kahn, Jr. It was McKelway who helped A. J. Liebling transform his first major New Yorker effort, a hopelessly disorganized Profile of the messianic preacher Father Divine, into a masterful two-part article, meriting a joint byline. It was McKelway, too, who installed two highly qualified assistants, Sanderson Vanderbilt and William Shawn.

  Handsome, with trim facial hair, McKelway was a dapper dresser and debonair to a fault. “He was Mr. Congeniality,” said the writer and editor Gardner Botsford, “giving out assignments apologetically, like a man forced to bring up business affairs at a cocktail party.” He might also have been the most soft-spoken member of the staff. “An awful lot of speech was lost in that sandy moustache!” said the short-story writer Edward Newhouse.

  It may have been inevitable that McKelway enter journalism. His namesake great-uncle had been editor of the Brooklyn Eagle, and his brother Benjamin would go on to be editor of the Washington Star and the Associated Press. His father, Rev. Alexander Jeffrey McKelway, one of a number of Presbyterian ministers on both sides of his family, had been editor of both the North Carolina Presbyterian and the Charlotte News. Using these platforms, he became an early and tireless opponent of child labor. By the time his fifth and youngest child, St. Clair, was born in 1905 in Charlotte, North Carolina, he had largely given up the pulpit to become the southern secretary of the National Child Labor Committee. In that capacity, he helped push through some of the nation’s earliest anti–child labor legislation. This struck the young McKelway as “rankly paradoxical,” given that his upright relatives expected him to chop wood, dry dishes, and perform other household chores from an early age.

  “The general idea was that a child would be given small doses of work when he was still in rompers so that he would eventually become a helpless work addict like Old Testament laborers,” he recalled. “Like most children, I enjoyed daydreaming, and this delightful pastime was continually being interrupted by some grown Presbyterian.”

  Like Gibbs, McKelway lost his father early on. Rev. McKelway was only fifty-two, and St. Clair only thirteen, when he died of a heart attack in 1918. The death was especially haunting because at the time the family home in Washington, D.C., was under a six-week quarantine, with St. Clair suffering from scarlet fever. The place was practically deserted, all of his siblings being either in the army or having been sent away for the duration. When mother gently informed son, “God has taken him,” he didn’t cry. Nor did he weep at the funeral or the interment. But when the family pet, a Boston terrier named Bessie, greeted him joyfully after having not seen him during his illness, he broke down.

  The academic indifference that Gibbs experienced as an adolescent similarly took hold of McKelway. He began cutting classes at Western High School and, with money earned through some pretty thefts, ran away to Florida when he was just fourteen. There he supported himself for a few months working as a stevedore on the Jacksonville docks and working as an all-night counterman at a restaurant in St. Augustine, which he thought “a great place to study human nature.” Returning to Washington, he told his mother flat out that he was tired of school and was ready to earn a living. Surprisingly, she acceded.

  Working through a series of minor jobs at the Washington Herald, the teenaged McKelway itched to become a reporter. He got his chance in the summer of 1922 when his managing editor told him to dig up a feature story at the zoo. He quickly found that Jack, a white male cockatoo from Malaya, had just died of old age, and that he and his mate, Jill, had been in the habit of pecking at each other, “their wings outsprea
d and flapping.” The editor seized on this angle, and the next day on page three there appeared McKelway’s first professional effort under the headline COCKATOO AT ZOO KILLS MATE; KEEPER PUTS HER IN SOLITARY.

  Just seventeen, McKelway embarked on a vagabond journalistic course somewhat like the one undertaken by Ross. Within the next few years, he would be either a reporter or editor on the Chicago Tribune, the Philadelphia Daily News, the New York World and the New York Herald Tribune. Ultimately he commenced an around-the-world trip that came to a stop in 1930 in Siam, where he became editor-in-chief of the Bangkok Daily Mail, a late-afternoon publication geared toward the resident British and American colonies. It was the personal property of King Prajadhipok, and McKelway was paid his salary in gold. When not engaged in “graceful muckraking” he gave frequent dinner parties for both the international and the American communities and played a variety of sports, including polo with his own pony.

  While McKelway was in Bangkok the Siamese revolution of 1932 erupted on June 24, ending nearly seven hundred years of absolute monarchical rule. In the Mail, McKelway praised the cleanliness of the coup in prose that could be read as either gushing or, more likely, bemused: “Not a single measure that would ensure the preventions of bloodshed, violence or disorder was overlooked in the meticulous plan that was carried out. The soldiers were trained to a fine point of discipline so that not only did they act with marvelous precision and dispatch but they refrained from a too-exuberant enthusiasm even when they saw that their long dreamed of plan was at last a success.” On the afternoon of the takeover, he was the first foreigner admitted to the provisional government headquarters. In dispatches to the Herald Tribune, McKelway extolled the revolutionaries as reform-minded, idealistic, and incorruptible: “The leaders of the movement ride to the Throne Hall on their own motorbicycles [sic] or in their own motor cars, though each prince in custody has dozens of fine cars which might have been seized.” These subtleties were lost on the populace; when the country’s first permanent constitution was adopted that December, they asked, “Who is this Mr. Constitution?”