There was only one problem: Hale was married to one Taylor Scott Hardin, and the couple had a child, a baby boy named Mark. The marriage was admittedly rocky, and Gibbs spilled much ink trying to persuade Hale to leave her husband for him. Hale and Hardin did eventually divorce, in 1936; she would marry again, to the Time Inc. writer and editor Charles Wertenbaker, then to the University of Virginia English professor Fredson Thayer Bowers.
But she did not wed Gibbs. Sometime in the spring of 1933, Hale determined that she would try to make her union with Hardin work. She seems to have insisted that she and Gibbs separate for a year, making no promises about what would happen when the twelve months were up. The news devastated him:
Darling, I’ve spent two days now just on the edge of putting my head down and howling like a dog. Everything seems to be in some damn kind of conspiracy to make it worse. The telephone has been ringing every ten minutes and I always answer it just as hopefully, and every book or paper I pick up has something in it that brings me right back to you again. . . . I just sat here and made up lists of the things that aren’t going to be any more—no more having you walk into speakeasies, mostly legs, to meet me for lunch, no more little bed that falls apart in the night (there ought to be an Indian word for that), no more taxi-rides when I could kiss you. . . . Oh darling whatever happens, I’m so damn glad that you have slept with me, and I have something to remember.
Not long after Hale parted with Gibbs, O’Hara introduced the heartbroken writer to the last of his three wives. Elinor Mead Sherwin was born on May 15, 1904. Her lineage, if not as quite glitteringly Social Register as Gibbs’s, was nonetheless distinguished. She was distantly related to the Sherwins of Sherwin-Williams paint fame and had been given her middle name after William Rutherford Mead, of the architectural giants McKim, Mead & White, to whom her family was also dimly tied. Her father, Harold, was an architect himself, specializing in woodworking. (Elinor would quaintly refer to him as being “in trade.”) After attending Rye Seminary and graduating from the Brearley School, she entered Wellesley in 1922. There she spent little more than a year, dropping out because she hated the food and was uninterested in such offerings as the required course in Biblical History 101. For a while she made a living as an actress in silent films. Thin, pretty, and slightly toothy, she was so captivating that a Hollywood producer reportedly named a seventy-foot schooner for her. Returning to Manhattan, she worked as a model, being paid in clothes.
In her off-hours she milled with a shifting group of bored socialites, dissipated literati, and assorted hangers-on. One was Alec Waugh, the older brother of Evelyn Waugh and already a prolific and respected author in his own right. In the grim winter of 1930–31, he found himself entertaining “honorable intentions” toward Elinor—intentions he claims she did not reciprocate because she was “unsatisfactorily entangled with a married man. I did not reach second base.”# Still, during their elusive courtship he wrote a slim volume of barely disguised reminiscences, one chapter of which he devoted to his fascination with her:
A love story, to be typical of New York, would not so much have to show the impact on a foreign mentality of a girl who typified the city’s life, as [of] the city itself that would direct the course of a man’s love for her.
In its way, it would probably be a conventional enough story; there would be the conventional chance meeting in a friend’s house; the start in the man’s side as there walked into the room in a green dress, a girl in the early twenties, very slim, and slight and townlike and the thought that came to him: “That’s some one terribly pretty,” he says. “I must talk to her.”
Her voice is low pitched and to an English ear difficult to follow. They are discussing the theatre, and he tells her that no, he has never seen Hamlet. She smiles at that and her smile is friendly.
“Now what do you think I was asking you,” she said.
“What I thought about John Barrymore.”
She laughed, “I was asking you if you didn’t think one saw plays better from the balcony.”
“I suppose that you’ve heard as much of my conversation as I’ve heard of yours.”
“Haven’t you heard much of mine?”
“About one sentence in every four.”
And they laugh together and the laugh is a bond between them. And they talk easily and lightly, conscious of kinship and attraction, as though they had been friends for years. “She’s nice,” he thinks, “and sweet and real.” And he looks across the room at her as she stands beside the man who has brought her to the party, and a queer feeling of jealousy twitches him.
It was this sort of innate, effortless charm that led Gibbs to meet and wed her within a matter of a few months. For the third and last time, he married on impulse, scurrying up to Stamford for the occasion on October 14, 1933, once again before a justice of the peace.
For twenty-five years, Gibbs and Elinor remained devoted to each other. His world-weary cynicism perfectly matched her natural irreverence, which was so saucy that her nickname was “Flip.” On one occasion when a friend was admiring sea gulls, Elinor replied, “Yes, the little darlings will peck your eye out.” When Gibbs’s niece, Sarah, had her first child, Elinor insisted that the baby not be proffered to her: “Don’t hand her to me—I’m always afraid their heads will fall off!” They had two children, Wolcott, Jr. (known as “Tony” because he resembled the nephew of a nurse of his at New York Hospital), in 1935, and Janet in 1939.
The marriage was far from perfect. There were whispers of mutual infidelity. When he became the magazine’s theater critic, Gibbs would sometimes go to opening nights with actresses when Elinor couldn’t accompany him; he was particularly devoted to one Susan Douglas, a tiny woman who had been born Zuzka Zenta Bursteinová in Vienna. By the same token, O’Hara asserted that Elinor was the mistress of Gibbs’s good friend, the playwright and New Yorker contributor Sam Behrman. When Benchley died, Elinor’s grief was so great that it was thought they must have been romantically involved.
As the years went by, the union cooled. “They lived in the same house,” recalled a childhood friend of Janet, “but beyond that it wasn’t much.” An adult acquaintance went so far as to call their relationship “quite strange.” But at its base was a genuinely sustaining love of a kind Gibbs had never known. Once when he was left in New York without Elinor, he dispatched to her a poignant mixture of domestic detail and heartfelt longing:
I think I’ve done everything you told me, too. Herta [the maid] has taken the money to your mother, and is giving kitty the pills, and will take her up to the doctors Wednesday. The money envelopes look a little peculiar, sort of running over and mixed up, but I haven’t investigated them very carefully. There is nothing serious though, except the state of mind, which is what they call booze-gloom. This passes. I miss you and love you more than anything in the world, darling. What an enormous bed!
* Harold Winney, who eventually became Ross’s personal secretary, ended up embezzling more than $70,000 from him and committing suicide.
† In his review, titled “Washington Irving Slipped Here,” Gibbs dismissed the musical without particular rancor or invective. He called it “pretty” and “melodious” but mainly “dull.” He did say that the songs and dances, for which Maloney was not responsible, were “often first-rate.”
‡ Helen Stark, the magazine’s longtime librarian, never recalled seeing Thurber in the company of any woman except his mother.
§ McKelway married his first wife, Lois Little, the sister of the United Press correspondent Herbert Little, in 1925. His second wife was Estelle Cassidy, whom he married in 1929. His fourth and fifth marriages will be discussed presently.
¶ Details of the breakup, including its exact date, are elusive; neither Gibbs nor Helen discussed the subject. Indeed, their children from their subsequent unions were unaware of the names of their parents’ first spouses until this author informed them. Helen subsequently married Howard Powers, the manager of a Cadillac dealership in Broo
klyn; together they had two sons. One of them, after providing critical biographical information about his mother, resisted further contact. Helen died in 1985.
# Waugh’s great-nephew, Alexander, disputes this: “My great-uncle Alec was a sex maniac so I have no doubt that he performed some injustice upon poor Mrs. Gibbs.”
CHAPTER 6
“AN OFFENSE TO THE EAR”
One of the most important pronouncements that Ross wrote in his original prospectus for The New Yorker was “It will hate bunk.” That last word was one that Gibbs would frequently use in his own copy. Reviewing William Saroyan’s The Beautiful People, he summed up by calling it a play “which I strongly suspect of being largely the bunk.” For Ross and his crew, any sort of soft-pedaling of the truth as an informed author saw it was anathema to honest journalism.
The attitude was most clearly expressed in the magazine’s reviews. Edmund Wilson was a case in point. He came to The New Yorker after a stellar career at The New Republic and with a reputation for producing such solidly reported, solidly written book-length sociological and historical works as The American Jitters and To the Finland Station. Failing to persuade Ross to establish a purely literary journal with himself, Wilson, as editor, he was instead offered the post of book critic, replacing Clifton Fadiman. Wilson got an office, a secretary, $10,000 a year, and $3,000 for expenses; in return, The New Yorker could boast some of the best literary cachet in the country.
Wilson’s work was perceptive, deeply intelligent, authoritative, and exceptionally well crafted. It could also be devastating. He hated hackwork; he dismissed the novel The Turquoise by Anya Seton as being “as arbitrary, as basically cold and dead, as a scenario for a film” and “arid rubbish, which has not even the rankness of the juicier trash.” Frequently, the object of his venom didn’t even have to be incompetent. “It has happened to me from time to time to run into some person of taste who tells me that I ought to take Somerset Maugham seriously,” he wrote, “yet I have never been able to convince myself that he was anything but second-rate.” He considered the breathless reception of Maugham’s presentation of the original Of Human Bondage manuscript to the Library of Congress “a conspicuous sign of the general decline of our standards.”
Another leading practitioner of the critical put-down was Lois Long. Her “On and Off the Avenue” column covered not only fashion and style but all manner of related subjects with assessments that were often scathing. She dismissed a certain Coty hand lotion as “nothing but rose water and glycerin with a little milk.” When a promoter sent her a tchotchke called “Pair o’ Lipstick,” she told Ross, “It’s lousy and silly, just one of those stunt ideas. Seeing as how I get about twenty-five bottles and jars and junk a week, I have gotten used to trying them out in my own good time.”
Occasionally, Long went too far. She once angered Elizabeth Arden with an impending item about how the cosmetician ostensibly served grapefruit juice to her patrons as a beauty aid. Arden’s attorneys insisted that she did no such thing and threatened to bring action if the paragraphs were published. Ross, who had privately warned Long, “Your emotions must not destroy your conscience and your conscientiousness,” turned the item over to White. He recast it in a more innocuous form in “Comment.”
It was an appropriate move. As White and Thurber had demonstrated amply in “Comment” and “Talk,” The New Yorker derived much of its form from its special brand of elegant arrogance. In time, this poise would permeate the entire magazine. A typical example was a two-part Profile by Matthew Josephson of the banker Leon Fraser. The opening paragraph set the tone:
Leon Fraser is one of New York’s few cases of successful reincarnation. Today president of the classically conservative First National Bank of Wall Street, he began his adult life, while a student and a member of the faculty at Columbia University, as what is now called a liberal and in those days was called, usually within quotation marks, a radical. Along with other members of the Morningside Heights intelligentsia, he used to think that bankers were vulgar. His own ambitions were vaguely literary; he wrote a number of highly unmarketable short stories and did occasional book reviews for the World. In addition, he was strenuously interested in political theory including the theory that something might be the matter with capitalism. As a young political-science instructor, he belonged to the impractical, somewhat threadbare element which was intent on making the world over. His companions were men like the progressive Professor Charles A. Beard; Professor Carlton J. Hayes, who was then practically a Socialist; and Joseph Freeman, who was warming up to become editor of the New Masses. Late in the fall of 1916, several months before the United States entered the first World War, Fraser acquired the reputation of being one of Columbia’s more vocal pacifists, and as a result was eventually eased off the faculty.
This sort of approach—simultaneously impressed, bemused, patronizing, and informed—was unique. As an anonymous New Yorker editor told an annoyed reader, “We seldom make idols of our subjects.”
That operating philosophy was bound to rankle. Even some contributors were not entirely comfortable with the magazine’s posture. Frank Sullivan once confided to White:
I think I may have bothered Ross and Gibbs today. I hope so. This is strictly between ourselves, but I saw them both at Muriel King’s [the] night before last, and listened to them talk for an hour or so, and believe it or not, my dears, they didn’t approve of one single g.d. thing that was mentioned. Really, I wish they could have got a perspective on themselves, and how they sounded. Not unlike a ladies sewing circle composed mainly of virgins, elderly and involuntary virgins. . . . I asked them to try not to be so god damn [sic] supercilious, for the sake of their own mental health, and suggested that theirs was the attitude of a couple of callow sub-editors from the Harvard Lampoon.
In putting down everything within sight, Ross may not have exactly been endearing. Nor might he be considered wholly objective. Still, he hated bunk as he saw it, and he tried to combat it through trenchant writing. His bullheaded bluntness would lead him and his crew into innumerable conflicts.
One of these arose with the publication of a Profile of the New York Mirror gossip columnist and radio fixture Walter Winchell. Written by St. Clair McKelway, it ran in a staggering six parts from June 15 through July 20, 1940. Winchell, an admirer of The New Yorker, had had no idea that what Ross and McKelway had in mind was not merely a Profile of a colorful personality but a condemnation of the whole gossip industry, as evidenced by the man who was arguably its most prominent practitioner. He had therefore agreed to be interviewed. “I had an unexpectedly long and free talk with Winchell last night,” McKelway told his legman on the Profile, John Bainbridge, late in 1939. “He is all for the piece, and apparently is prepared to talk his head off as soon as I am prepared to listen.”
Winchell did indeed talk his head off to McKelway over the ensuing months. In the meantime, Bainbridge dug into the tiresome task of determining the accuracy of his reportage. Aided by his wife, he did so through semiscientific means, taking as a sampling Winchell’s five Monday columns for the month of April. There were 239 items, separated by Winchell’s trademark three-period ellipses. Of these, 108 were “blind”—that is, no names were mentioned—and were therefore uncheckable. Bainbridge made every attempt to reach the subjects of the remaining 131. Among those he queried were Jimmy Durante, Al Smith, U.S. Senate Rules Committee chairman M. M. Neely, Rudy Vallee, Attorney General Robert Jackson, Beatrice Straight, Franz Boas, Louis Armstrong, Erich von Stroheim, French ambassador René Doynel de Saint-Quentin, George Raft, Martha Raye, Franchot Tone, and the chief of the Miami police. Responses poured back. Bainbridge found that sometimes Winchell got his facts straight. “The statement ‘Ethel Merman has purchased a beer baron’s yacht,’ made by Mr. Winchell in his column, is quite correct,” the diva informed him.
But others refuted Winchell’s sloppy reporting. In one column he announced, “The real reason [Leopold] Stokowski is feuding with The T
heatre Authority is that its agent shouted at him: ‘How do you know? Some day they may have to run a benefit for you, and then you will need us!’ ” The conductor replied,
The statement of which you write is completely untrue. I have never had any “feud” with Theatre Authority. I have never had any dealings with them of any kind. No agent from them has ever “shouted” anything at me. There never has been any question of my conducting a benefit for the Theatre Authority. I belong to the American Federation of Musicians but I do not belong to the Theatre Authority because I am not an actor but a musician.
Claudette Colbert’s publicity people told Bainbridge that “the item regarding separation rumors on the actress and her physician-husband falls into your classification ‘c’—that is, completely inaccurate.” The secretary to the Japanese ambassador told Bainbridge that a Winchell item about his boss was “completely inaccurate and groundless.”
Bainbridge did the math on the 131 checkable items. It turned out that 53 were accurate, 24 were partially inaccurate, and devastatingly, 54 were completely inaccurate. “A large number of the flat statements Winchell makes in his column and on the radio are impossible to prove or disprove,” McKelway acknowledged. Nonetheless, he wrote, based on the sampling, “Winchell was not quite half right in the month of April.”
Armed with interviews, supporting material, and raw data, McKel-way retreated to the Foundation Inn in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, a sanitarium, to dry out and write his series. “This is a good place,” he told Ross. “It would have benefited Winchell in his youth, I think.” He emerged with a triumph. “There’s no use taking up your time with an encomium,” Shawn told Ross after reading McKelway’s results. “A magnificent piece, and that’s all there is to it.” He knew, though, that there would be a backlash: “God help McK and The New Yorker after publication.” Ross was uncharacteristically ambivalent about the tenor of the investigation. “My instinct is for blood, and more blood,” he told Shawn. “But I think McK’s alalytical [sic] tone here is the treatment. Probably far more effective than serious bitterness.”
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