Cast of Characters

by Thomas Vinciguerra

  Even in the first part, which gave a duly respectful nod to Winchell’s reach and power, there were hints of the shredding that was to come:

  When Winchell is talking about himself, he demands the unwavering attention of his listeners. James Cannon, a former sportswriter and one of his closest friends, was in a restaurant one night with his girl and was joined by Winchell. Winchell started to talk about himself. He talked for ten minutes without interruption. Cannon began to wonder if his girl would enjoy the evening more if she had another drink. Keeping his eyes fastened on Winchell’s face so as to appear to be attentive, he said to his girl rapidly, “Honey, you want something?” Winchell stopped in the middle of a sentence and grabbed Cannon’s arm. “Jimmy!” he said reproachfully. “You’re not listening!”

  Winchell read this and the succeeding installments with growing rage. By the fifth installment, McKelway—having tackled everything from Winchell’s impoverished childhood to his “continued friendship with gangsters”—reached the heart of his thesis: Winchell’s newspaper and radio items were often wildly erroneous, even “dreamy.” He cited instance after instance. Contrary to the columnist’s radio dispatch that “Buron Fitts, district attorney of Los Angeles County, is reported to have boarded a ship for an unknown destination,” McKelway found that Fitts “was sitting at the home of a friend with nine Los Angeles judges listening to Winchell’s news broadcast.” Without comment, McKelway recalled a 1937 Winchell item that stated that Hitler and Mussolini were no longer allies. He shot down Winchell’s wild story that E. B. White was the brother of the poet Elinor Wylie.

  Ross himself might have written McKelway’s summation of Winchell’s approach:

  Intrusiveness is the nature of journalism; it is its sharpest and most necessary instrument and it is also its most agonizing responsibility for journalists who choose to accept any responsibility at all. Intrusiveness is journalism’s power and its curse. Only taste and a sincere respect for accuracy can govern the power and remove the curse. Journalism is as complicated and as difficult as that. Winchell has no taste and he has no sincere respect for accuracy. If he had, he could not write gossip.

  This was such explosive stuff that when McKelway sailed to South America on the eve of its publication, it was rumored that he had done so to escape the furor. Winchell responded to the assault with unconcealed malice, repeatedly attacking Ross in his column. Ross outwardly shrugged off the salvos. When Winchell reported that Ross did not wear undershorts, the editor merely stripped off the pair he had on and mailed them to the columnist. When Winchell managed to persuade Sherman Billingsley, the proprietor of his all-important base, the Stork Club, to bar Ross from the establishment, Ross told his staff that the snub was something he was doing “my best to take in my stride.”

  But privately, Ross seethed. “[U]nder the compulsion of violent personal animus,” he said, Winchell was printing “slimy derogatory items” about him. The situation reached a head on June 21, 1942, when the gossip columnist excoriated Ross so viciously on the NBC Blue Network that Ross dispatched a three-page protest to its president, Mark Woods. Transcript in hand, Ross assailed the “vile and slanderous statements you have permitted to be shouted about me over the air waves of the continent”:

  Winchell, in his broadcast, mentioned me, with the shrewd subtlety of the experienced character assassin, in juxtaposition with a group of infamous international heels, including the Nazis and “the Nazi hangman” [Reinhard] Heydrich, William Gerald Bishop, described as accused of trying to promote private armies for the overthrow of the government, Hans Von Stahremberg, the man who “did most of the printing for the German-American Bund and other Nazis” and George Sylvester Viereck.* The Nazis, Heydrich, Bishop, Von Stahremberg, Viereck—and Ross. Traitorous bastards all! Nice stuff, Mr. Woods.

  When it came to tripping up subjects, Ross did not exempt his friends. Such was the case with his old army buddy Alexander Woollcott, who had had a profound influence on the early New Yorker. With its breezy, insider tone, his “Shouts and Murmurs” column was among the magazine’s most popular features, laden with tantalizing stories of sex, murder, and the like. Many of his entries were hoary and ancient. But in the early days, when Ross was sometimes hard pressed for copy, even the proper Katharine White admitted, “Woollcott could be absolutely depended on to produce a page that would be a divertissement for the magazine.”

  At his height, Woollcott was a bona fide literary celebrity. As “The Town Crier” on CBS Radio clanging a bell and declaiming “Hear ye, hear ye!,” he would issue proclamations on current books to rapt listeners. He was a tireless lecturer, appearing occasionally in plays and becoming immortalized as the insufferable Sheridan Whiteside in the Kaufman-Hart classic The Man Who Came to Dinner. “Woollcott was, above all, a personality—a very theatrical personality,” recalled Danton Walker, one of his many secretaries. “His familiar first night entrances—galoshes open and flapping, scarf fluttering in the breeze he created—were frequently more dramatic than what occurred on stage.”

  Eventually, however, the limelight and his own ego corrupted him. He was a shameless name-dropper, plugging the latest celebrity with whom he was fascinated. With little discrimination, he would endorse any product—automobiles, whiskey, tennis rackets—if the check was big enough and if the deal afforded him sufficient exposure. His taste was often downright moronic, perhaps deliberately so. He thought Lizzie Borden “America’s most interesting woman” and the folk rhyme about her ax murders “on the plane with Shakespeare and Sophocles.” Walt Disney’s Dumbo, he said, was “the best achievement yet reached in the Seven Arts since the first white man landed on this continent.” What excited Woollcott, White said, “was so capricious that it occasionally made even his best friends wince.” There also seemed to be no limit to his condescension. “By some miracle you have published a book which is not second rate,” he wrote Bennett Cerf. “Please send me twelve copies at once.”

  The man’s ability to “write literately and fairly well and, above all, turn in clean copy,” Ross conceded, “was very rare.” But the thin-skinned critic hotly resisted editorial changes. He also took a perverse delight in sticking it to Ross. “At a dinner party where both were guests,” said Walker, “Ross complained that his amours were being gossiped about by members of his staff. Woollcott sprang at this: ‘No one,’ he shouted, ‘could tell more about your affairs than you do yourself!’ This so upset Ross that he retired to the bathroom and threw up.”

  Such incidents, combined with Ross’s increasing intolerance for Woollcott’s peculiar prose, made a schism inevitable. Woollcott had become incredibly fussy about extending his deadlines, ever more resistant to editing, and much like O’Hara, consumed with his positioning in the magazine. Ross tried to placate him, to no avail. In 1934, after a showdown about a particularly racy “Shouts” column, Woollcott told Ross he was quitting. Fleischmann supported publishing the column; Ross was unimpressed. “That was, of course, Woollcott’s one hundredth resignation,” he told the publisher. “He always resigns under such circumstances. My opinion was merely that I certainly wouldn’t run his stale and off-color anecdotes if I owned the magazine.” He went on:

  I’ve heard a vast and an alarming lot of complaint about Woollcott’s off-color anecdotes—people cutting them out of the magazine so the children wouldn’t see them and so on—and actually there is damned little doubt in my mind. . . . In any event I don’t think we ought to be bullied into running dirty stories if we don’t want to run them. And I would point out that Woollcott can’t get “five times as much for this stuff anywhere” because, pure as we are, we’re the most liberal magazine he can write for and he can’t print dirty stories anywhere. He doesn’t try it on the radio, either.

  Around this time Woollcott became “forever the deadly enemy of The New Yorker.” Gibbs, meanwhile, had had his own fill of Woollcott. His editorial grudge dated to at least 1927, when he parodied Woollcott’s style in the North Hempstead Record,
employing such phrases as “an attentive but somewhat croupy gathering.” He repeated the stunt in The New Yorker itself in 1935 with “Primo, My Puss,” which he couched as an account of Primo Carnera telling Woollcott how he had lost to Max Baer: “To return, however, to the ostensible purpose of these somewhat desultory memoirs, it was, I think, in the eleventh round of our considerably less than Homeric conflict that Mr. Baer, animated by a sudden and rather repulsive vivacity, visited upon your indignant correspondent a succession of blows which left him, for the moment at least, both breathless and passionately disinclined for further combat.”

  Gibbs was frequently stuck with the thankless task of handling Woollcott’s copy. “He took on this weekly chore when I was on vacation or working from Maine or out sick,” recalled Katharine White. “I guess he had a harder time than I did because Aleck was ruder to men than to women.” By nature direct and terse, Gibbs hated Woollcott’s flaccid style. It was, he said, “sculptured from the very best Jello” and constituted a “terrible detriment of the English language.” Further, “As other men fear and hate the dentist’s drill, Mr. Woollcott is tortured by an unbalanced sentence. Adverbs and adverbial phrases (‘oddly enough’ is his favorite) and tender apostrophes to the reader (‘my blossom, ‘ ‘puss,’ and ‘my little dears’) are judiciously inserted until the magic equilibrium is achieved.”

  Thus it was that Gibbs suggested to Ross, some four years after Woollcott had published his last “Shouts” column, that The New Yorker should undertake a Profile that would constitute a takedown of the egotistical raconteur. Woollcott, who for all his ostensible worldliness was easily hoodwinked, enthusiastically agreed. He invited Gibbs to come up to Neshobe Island, his retreat in the middle of Lake Bomoseen in Vermont, to get “the flavor of his personality.” The eight-acre atoll was the site of storied croquet tournaments, nude swimming, parlor games, and other mandatory, full-throated activities with many of the Algonquin crowd. Many guests reveled in the experience. Others found Neshobe to be purgatory. “I was up there once and got claustrophobia, in spite of my analysis,” Frank Sullivan recalled. For his part, Gibbs declined Woollcott’s hospitality. REGRET CANT GET TO YOUR LAKE BUT HAVE MY OWN LIFE TO LIVE, he telegraphed.

  As Gibbs exhumed Woollcott’s past and scrutinized his present, he and his subject became quite entangled. Sullivan recalled dining with them some three months before the piece was published:

  High spot of the evening came when Aleck let loose one of his benevolent diatribes on Gibbs. He had been talking about himself, but every once in a while he would ask Gibbs a question quite casually and pretty soon, without Gibbs being aware of it, he was in possession of a complete history of Gibbs’ life including that first marriage to the brakeman’s daughter in Long Island.† Then Gibbs said something that displeased Aleck and the latter cut loose on him, reciting a litany of the shortcomings of his life, all highly accurate and easily remembered because they had just been painlessly imparted to Aleck by Gibbs himself. The look that came over Gibbs was worth the price of the dinner (which was paid for by Aleck anyhow), I must admit. . . . Gibbs says he likes Aleck. I don’t know whether that bodes well for the profile or not.

  The result—titled “Big Nemo”—was a thorough dissection. Gibbs did not stint on Woollcott’s many personal kindnesses and tender heart. But he also dwelt at length on his improbable, even preposterous, life story. Gibbs conveyed his fractured rearing on the Phalanx commune in New Jersey. He noted his “bizarre” attendance at Hamilton, where he routinely “wore corduroy trousers and a turtle-necked sweater and topped them off with a jubilant red fez.” He related his conduct under fire in the Great War: “Other men dropped where they were, but Mr. Woollcott weighed close to two hundred pounds exclusive of hardware and his descent was gradual and majestic, like a slowly kneeling camel. Even when he had got safely down, he was still far from flat, and it is one of the miracles of the war that he came through it unperforated.” Describing Woollcott’s civilian appearance in evening clothes—complete with “a broad-brimmed black hat and flowing cape, carrying a heavy, silver-headed cane”—Gibbs adjudged that “on the whole he looked very much like Dracula.”

  He recounted Woollcott’s slapdash journalism. “There could be no question that the Times’ new man could write very nicely, though in a strangely lacy and intricate fashion, but as a reporter he was exasperating,” Gibbs wrote. “He wasn’t exactly hostile to facts, but he was apathetic about them.” Woollcott was “sentimental, partisan, and maddeningly positive about everything even before he had been a critic long enough to know much about anything.”

  Gibbs also disclosed one of the more embarrassing episodes of his subject’s career. It stemmed from an ostensible fan letter written by two elderly sisters in the vicinity of Albany. Though nearly destitute, they still owned a radio and on it they regularly listened to Woollcott, regarding him as “about the best thing in the world.” Moved by the flattery, Woollcott serenaded the sisters over the airwaves by having the studio orchestra play songs like “Home Sweet Home” and “Old Folks at Home.” Alas, it was not long before Woollcott was informed that both sisters had died within a week or so of each other. Woollcott earnestly sent forth inquiries about their identities, relatives, and any other relevant information. He came up empty, and no wonder: the unlikely yarn had all been an elaborate hoax, Gibbs reported, hatched by “a brooding author whose book Mr. Woollcott had dismissed too arrogantly as tripe.”

  Incredibly, upon receipt of the first set of proofs, Woollcott telegrammed Gibbs YOU HAVE MADE ME VERY HAPPY WITH CERTAIN RESERVATIONS. He did dispatch a nine-page letter pointing out any number of factual errors and what he regarded as misinterpretations. Nonetheless, Woollcott acceded that Gibbs had rightly pointed up his many foibles: “I have on my conscience certain sins of omission which the years do not offace [sic] and for which I expect to pay in hell. They were the result of indolence, contemptible cowardice and black-hearted selfishness.”

  When the three-part series appeared in March and April 1939, Woollcott was characteristically pleased by the publicity. His friends were not fooled. Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne were so outraged by Gibbs’s treatment that they canceled their subscription to the magazine. It took time, but Woollcott gradually became aware that he had been had. He was especially distressed by Gibbs’s detailed recounting of the malefactions of an old army associate, Seth Bailey (disguised in print as “Sergeant Quirt”), a swindler on a grand scale. A naïve Woollcott had defended Bailey to the hilt, even pledging that “he would personally redeem every dollar’s worth of false checks that could be shown to have originated with his virtuous friend.” Confronted with several thousand dollars’ worth of proof that Bailey was indeed a con man, “Mr. Woollcott was obliged to retract his offer and leave the Sergeant to the mercy of the State of California.”

  The Profile served as an excuse for a full Woollcott break with The New Yorker. After it appeared, he never printed another word in the magazine. And yet there followed a bizarre and protracted minuet of attempted and failed reconciliations. In 1942 Woollcott wrote Ross, “I’ve tried by tender and conscientious nursing to keep my grudge against you alive, but I find it has died on me.”

  Actually, it didn’t; when Ross responded that he would be happy to visit him if he were up for it, Woollcott abruptly declined, citing the considerable “lying, cruelty and treachery” that accompanied the writing of the Profile. “For how much of this you were responsible and how much Gibbs, I am not sure,” Woollcott fumed, “but as long as I live I could never talk across a dinner table with you or even play a game of cribbage without wondering.”

  Some months later Ross tried to mend the breach, assuring Woollcott that “I would be glad, God knows, to answer any questions you care to ask” in regard to Gibbs’s handiwork. Woollcott could not have cared less. “To me you are no longer a faithless friend,” he wrote from Neshobe. “To me you are dead. Hoping and believing I will soon be the same, I remain your quondam crony.” At “2
1” one evening, Woollcott literally refused to shake hands with Ross “and asked him to leave before he really started to tear loose on him.”

  After Woollcott’s death in January 1943, Ross tried to puzzle out his complex friend. “All the time Alec wrote for us he was a trial—something of a nuisance and an embarrassment,” he told Woollcott’s biographer, Samuel Hopkins Adams. “We had to fight to keep him printable, and he was harder to deal with than a Gila monster, which he sometimes resembled.”

  Even in death, Woollcott haunted Ross. Following his demise, the Algonquin donated to the Authors’ Workshop for Veterans “a particularly monstrous lounging sofa” that Woollcott had favored, hoping that it might inspire the writing organization to new spiritual heights. When the workshop was forced to move to smaller quarters in 1947, a representative wrote Ross to ask if The New Yorker would be interested in having the furniture, humorously suggesting that Woollcott’s ghost would accompany it. The answer was no: “We don’t want any additional ghosts stalking the hall.”

  Perhaps the best-known debunking in which Ross engaged—and certainly the project that not only made Gibbs’s name but would define his reputation—was a 1936 parody of Time magazine that doubled as a Profile of its maximum editor and publisher, Henry R. Luce.

  The burgeoning Time Inc. enterprise was riding high in 1936. The year before, the corporation’s net profits had topped out at almost two and a quarter million dollars. Its holdings included Fortune magazine and the March of Time radio broadcasts and newsreels. The company would soon bring out the phenomenally successful picture magazine Life. Time itself, founded just two years before The New Yorker and instantly identifiable by its red-bordered cover, had become something of a national institution, with a circulation of 640,000. Its newsmagazine format—a comprehensive digest of national and international affairs, drawn mainly from newspapers across the country and supplemented by a small but growing network of correspondents—was revolutionary.