Cast of Characters

by Thomas Vinciguerra

  Gibbs’s prejudices against his contemporaries were cemented by his inclusion in the New York Drama Critics’ Circle. He found their formal gatherings to be pointless, going so far as to skewer the Circle in a casual called “The Jukes Family Revisited” (the title being a reference to the recidivism and mental retardation of the extended and pseudonymous “Juke” family of upstate New York, who were often invoked as a defense of eugenics). Gibbs composed the piece as a broad stage farce and in the opening aired some of his grievances toward the organization:

  The curtain goes up on a scene of unimaginable squalor, in a basement dining room in some second-rate Broadway hotel. There is a long table at the rear of the stage and most of the critics are seated at it, behind a formidable array of glasses and bottles. Two or three of the brothers have collapsed in drunken sleep and several of the others are clearly far from sober. On the walls there are a great many indecent pictures. A young woman, dressed like a French maid in a 1905 farce, fills the critics’ glasses from time to time, often finding it necessary to sit on their laps as she does so. There is a small piano in one corner of the room, at which a typical disorderly-house musician is batting out “Mademoiselle from Armentières.” On the floor, there is a crap game, involving three prominent members—Mr. [Brooks] Atkinson, Mr. [Howard] Barnes, and Mr. [Richard] Watts.

  After a raucous call to order, it is proposed to add to the rolls such unlikely characters as a thirteen-year-old girl and the critics for National Orthodontist and Furtive Detective magazines. At one point, the assembled chant to the tune of “Onward Christian Soldiers” a ditty that begins, “Welcome novice cri-atics/To this den of vice/Brothers, ye are treading/Where things ain’t so nice.” The sardonic touches include ten absurd motions, e.g., “Each critic who is paid more than five hundred dollars a week shall be entitled to one full extra vote” and “Any critic not personally acquainted with Henry L. Mencken shall be penalized one whole vote.”

  Nor did Gibbs consider his fellow members to be good company. Louis Kronenberger of PM (a “correct and literate” type, Gibbs allowed, whose “active social conscience makes it difficult for him to approve wholeheartedly of any product without a serious purpose”) recalled a memorable scene to this effect: “While having an altogether placid conversation with two fellow members, Gibbs suddenly drew himself up, said to one of them, ‘I will not be talked to like that!’ and then to the other, ‘How dare you insult my wife, sir!’ and, not staying for an answer, flung out of the private dining-room door and, clattering down the stairs, escaped from what had obviously bored him beyond endurance.”

  Despite his frequent contempt for the Circle, Gibbs did from time to time find common cause with them. One occasion was the 1943 opening of Maxwell Anderson’s Truckline Café, with a cast that included Karl Malden, Marlon Brando, Kevin McCarthy, and Frank Overton. The reviews were scathing. Ward Morehouse of the Sun called it Anderson’s “worst play in nearly a quarter of a century of valiant service as a dramatist”; in the Daily News, John Chapman thought it “the worst play I have seen since I have been in the reviewing business.” The wounded producers, Harold Clurman and Elia Kazan, closed the production almost immediately—but not before taking out a large protest ad in The New York Times. In it, they raged against the “group of men who are hired to report the events of our stage and who more and more are acquiring powers which, as a group, they are not qualified to exercise.” The diatribe, which combined a defense of the play with an attack on the “blackout of all taste except the taste of these men,” went on for some five hundred words. Gibbs spoke up for the Circle in his own left-handed way. “I’d say offhand that there are only about three newspaper reviewers here who are competent to write about anything,” he said, “but it is absolutely absurd to make an issue out of this play, which has no merit whatsoever.”

  A rather more serious incident took place a few months hence when Gibbs joined Rascoe, Nathan, and Stark Young of The New Republic in quitting the group for reasons that remain obscure; it seems there was a fierce internal brouhaha over the kind of exclusivity that Gibbs would later send up in his Jukes Family sketch. Adding to the drama, Joseph Wood Krutch of The Nation stepped down to take a year’s leave of absence, and Robert Garland immediately resigned when he was officially elected to the group to fill one of the slots. About four months after his resignation, though, Gibbs rejoined the Circle. Having been implored by Howard Barnes to return, he replied with customary nonchalance, “Why not?”

  In his critic’s capacity, Gibbs was distracted by Broadway personalities outside of the Circle. In the 1940s and the 1950s there existed in Manhattan a unique collection of newspaper columnists who were closely yet nebulously associated with the entertainment world. They breezily dished industry dirt, occasionally reliable commentary, and related items. Their ranks included Ed Sullivan, Earl Wilson, the pseudonymous Cholly Knickerbocker, and of course, Winchell.

  The New Yorker made special sport of one of them, Leonard Lyons, the author of “The Lyons Den” column for the Post; Russell Maloney ripped into him in a 1945 Profile, declaring, “Aside from his immediate relatives, Lyons knows nobody but celebrities.” His tired reportage was widely regarded as untrustworthy. Freddie Packard, with his usual scrupulousness, found some of Lyons’s items to be so vague and absurd that he fired at the columnist a dozen or so specific queries each in two separate casuals, demanding pertinent details. McKelway spoofed the lame tone of “The Lyons Den” in a casual called “The Mare’s Nest.” Among his fictional items was an anecdote that he attributed to Assistant Secretary of Agriculture Grover B. Hill: “Many farmers in recent years have been using a machine that works on much the same principle as the military tank. Called ‘tractors,’ because, working on much the same principle as the military tank, they have potent traction and can cross rough fields, etc.”

  Gibbs tended to stay clear of hack writers, but he could not avoid them entirely. One was Dorothy Kilgallen. Her column “The Voice of Broadway” reached beyond show business to encompass such Winchellian subjects as politics and the mob. Against his better judgment, Gibbs in the early 1940s collaborated with her on a fanciful musical about a “sporty, cosmopolitan” female writer of a daily radio soap opera. Through her dreams, she is transported into the role of Scheherazade. But after a first treatment, Gibbs disentangled himself. When the show’s costume designer, Miles White, ran into Gibbs at the Algonquin and asked how things were going, Gibbs explained that he had been forced to throw up his hands over the troublesome project. “I can sum up the whole show in one phrase,” he said. “It’s the phrase that Miss Kilgallen opened every one of our story conferences with: ‘Wouldn’t it be cute if . . .’ ”‡

  On the other hand, Gibbs had respect and even a strange affection for Lucius Beebe, who owned several newspapers around the country and wrote a chatty, amiable society column called “This New York” for the Herald Tribune. His interest in Beebe extended beyond the fact that Beebe’s first name was that of his, Gibbs’s, late father. Both were born in 1902. Both had attended the Roxbury School. Both had had problems with college; Beebe was thrown out of Yale after he hurled an empty bottle at the stage of the Hyperion Theatre in New Haven and roared, “I am Professor Tweedy of the Yale Divinity School!”

  Despite this fracas, Beebe managed to transfer from Yale to Harvard, with President James Angell of the former supposedly telling President Abbott Lawrence Lowell of the latter, “I apologize for sending you such a bad potato.” As Gibbs had been a prankster at Hill, so Beebe was one at Harvard. According to legend, he circulated a ballot to see if it would be worth trading President Lowell and three professors for “a good running backfield.” The motion, drawing more 2,300 responses, failed by only seven votes.

  Both Gibbs and Beebe were fascinated by railroads. But whereas Gibbs had been a mere brakeman on the LIRR, the wealthy Beebe personally owned two plush pieces of rolling stock, the Gold Coast and the Virginia City. The latter was a “pretty toy, a jewel box, a dream
on wheels,” said Gibbs. It was “ninety-three feet long, weighs a hundred and eighty-five thousand pounds, and consists of a twenty-three-foot observation-drawing room, three master staterooms (each with its own toilet facilities), a small Turkish bath, a dining room seating eight, a galley with a fifty-bottle wine cellar, an extra seven-hundred-pound refrigerator on the forward platform, and crew quarters for two.” The whole rig was wired for music and equipped with three telephones for outside communication. When Beebe welcomed visitors aboard, he would cry, “Welcome to Walden Pond!”

  Beebe was an aesthete supreme, and Gibbs was particularly taken with his sartorial self-indulgence. At any given time Beebe owned about forty suits, ten of them formal outfits (“I would no more think of appearing in a restaurant in the evening out of dinner dress than I would in swimming shorts”). He had a mink-lined, astrakhan-collared dress coat that he insured for $3,000. For a ten-day visit to Hollywood, his wardrobe included seventy-two shirts. His accoutrements included three gold cigarette cases worth some $700 apiece, a cashmere sapphire cabochon ring worth $1,200, and a platinum watch that cost $1,000. He was, Gibbs said, “menacingly well-groomed.” For his part, Beebe understood Gibbs perfectly; he called him “a fiend in human form.”

  A cadre of publicists and press agents fed Gibbs’s Broadway chroniclers—from Beebe to Sullivan—a steady diet of tickets, interviews, and exclusives. The best known was Richard Maney, whom Gibbs called “the most prosperous gnome of the lot.” Jack Gould of The New York Times estimated that Maney could “spout Elizabethanisms by the hour and recite Shakespeare even longer.” He had a dispassion about his work to which Gibbs could relate. “Press agentry is no business for people with nerves,” Maney once said. “But it can be a gay life for one with detachment, with sympathy for the deranged and with an understanding of why the theater’s children behave the way they do.” Gibbs admired Maney’s ability to treat his own people “with the genial condescension of an Irish cop addressing a Fifth Avenue doorman.” The condescension was not always so genial; from time to time Maney would tear into a client with the dreaded sneer, “You actor, you!”

  Gibbs was also taken with Maney because he had a passion for fly-fishing and Gibbs, as a devotee of the sand and surf, loved to cast his reel. He published a typically barbed yet smiling Profile about Maney in 1941; the title, “The Customer Is Always Wrong,” hinted at the treatment. He quoted Maney as once saying that “All female stars have one thing in common: after you stand on your head to arrange an interview, they break the date because they have to go and get their hair washed.” The press agent was featured several times on the NBC radio show Information, Please, moderated by Clifton Fadiman; calling his appearances “cerebral ambushes,” Maney remembered, “My most hair-raising moment came when, casting a furtive look at the studio audience, I caught the eye of Wolcott Gibbs, The New Yorker’s critic and bon vivant. Mr. Gibbs leered at me like a hyena from the front row, and whirled his forefingers about his ear in a circular movement.”

  Yet Maney respected Gibbs. He thought him “a perfectionist, a stickler for syntax and symmetry and sentence structure” and a master stylist who was “pained by the prose of many of his fellows.”

  * Gibbs’s work habits caused Tony embarrassment of another sort when he was about seven and was assigned a classroom report on what his father did for a living. “I had not the foggiest notion, so I came home and asked. And he said, ‘Well, what do you think I do? I get dressed up and I go to work at night and I come back long after you’re in bed.’ I couldn’t come up with anything. So he said, ‘A burglar.’ ” A naïve Tony duly conveyed this information at school, causing something of an uproar.

  † One of Gibbs’s preferred restaurants was an Italian establishment called Zucca’s on West 49th Street. Rita Zucca, the daughter of the proprietor, gained notoriety as one of the fascist propagandists during World War II, known as “Axis Sally.”

  ‡ Other writers, including Sidney Sheldon, replaced Gibbs, but there was no saving the production, which opened as Dream with Music in 1944 and ran for only twenty-eight performances. On opening night, the acclaimed ballerina Vera Zorina slipped and fell onstage. Two scenes later, during a tender interlude between her and her lover, there was a power failure. The stage manager tried to compensate by holding a flashlight over the heads of the infatuated partners, at which point the audience began giggling and the house lights were suddenly restored. Sheldon called it “probably the most disastrous opening in the history of Broadway.” Gibbs agreed with a friend that the fiasco was an example “not of good taste or bad taste but simply of no taste at all.”

  CHAPTER 9

  “I AM A CHILD OF THE SUN”

  As World War II approached and materialized, and The New Yorker became not merely an editorial jester but a reliable literary and journalistic institution, the extracurricular diversions of its crew generally diminished. The end of the forbidden pleasures of Prohibition, coupled with the growing Depression, tended to put a crimp on hijinks in general. Increasingly rare were such occasions when the likes of Edmund Wilson, John Chapin Mosher, Peter Arno, Lois Long, the Whites, and similar company would gather at Louise Bogan’s place in Tudor City, where her husband, Raymond Holden, poured what was reported to be the best bathtub gin in town. “O those wonderful summer evenings when the cream of New York literary life played craps on my floor,” lamented Bogan in 1939, “and I was hard put to choose between the charms of Scudder Middleton, Ogden Nash, and Wolcott Gibbs!”

  True, there was still horseplay to be had. When Tallulah Bankhead was starring in The Skin of Our Teeth in the early 1940s, she decided to cap a revel at four a.m. by bringing her friends back to her place at the Elysee Hotel. Present were Gibbs; his good friend the former Herald Tribune sportswriter John Lardner, who would do many nonsports pieces for The New Yorker; Cole Porter; Stanley Walker; and the future CBS News producer Leslie Midgley. “When we all trooped into the lobby long after closing time,” Midgley recalled, “Tallulah stalked up to the desk clerk and waved toward the closed door of the Monkey Bar. ‘Open the bar,’ she thundered. And I do mean thundered.” Without saying a word, the clerk unlocked the bar, and the interlopers helped themselves. “It was an exhibition of raw power. The hotel could have lost its liquor license by serving booze at that hour, but the clerk knew he didn’t have a chance.”

  But by this time, things had begun to settle down. When contributors encountered Ross in the middle to late 1930s, he had “virtually none of the manic attributes that amazed and cowed their counterparts from the middle and late Twenties.” In Manhattan he maintained well-appointed digs on Park Avenue and other fashionable addresses. He found himself adjusting to middle age with all its trappings, buying a weekend place on Wire Hill Road in Stamford, whose grounds would eventually grow to 157 acres. There he would come to relish private time with his only child, Patty, and engage in such decorous activities as playing solitaire and listening to the radio news.

  As he could, he would retreat to Aspen and its environs for fishing and pure relaxation. His impulse, vaguely tied to a desire to revisit his past, was typically idiosyncratic. “I’m going to Colorado, or somewhere near there; I don’t quite know yet,” he told Katharine White at one point. “I won’t fly. Not by a damned site [sic].” And in one of his few successful non–New Yorker business ventures, he invested heavily in his friend Dave Chasen’s famous restaurant in Beverly Hills. There he hobnobbed respectably with celebrities and writers alike, his solid financial backing and physical presence eventually being celebrated with an oil portrait of him upstairs in a private dining space called, appropriately, “The New Yorker Room.”

  Gibbs captured this kind of advancing maturity well in his Profile of Woollcott, when he reflected on the demise of the Algonquin mob: “Hollywood got some of them and others moved to Connecticut, partly to escape the New York state income tax and partly under the sad old delusion that a man can write far more rapidly and beautifully while raising his own vegetables. T
hose who didn’t move away were by now temperamentally unfit for the old close association, since there is nothing more enervating to the artist than the daily society of a lot of people who are just as famous as he is.”

  White, of course, had already made his move in a major way. Far less gregarious than his compatriots to begin with, he also had a working farm to run in Maine.

  I carry dry shavings by the truckload (I now own a truck), cordwood from the woodyard, rugs to the dry cleaner, and old cedar fence-rails for building yoke fences. I am always carrying something—a burdensome life, but kind of soothing. My sheep are soothing, too. They come up out of the pasture at this time of year and stand around in the barn, and that is very soothing to me, to see sheep standing around, waiting. Quite a few of my ewes look as though they would have early lambs, and all are thrifty. I have begun graining them—feeding out a mixture of five parts oats, three parts whole corn, one part bran, and one part linseed oil meal. I am as fussy with a mixture like that as with a mixture of gin and French vermouth. My poultry operations have expanded considerably since you were here: I have a large laying house and a flock of would-be layers that turned and bit me in mid season.

  His homespun efforts were not always successful. “The missus, who is a New England girl and thrifty, personally put up 71 jars of strawberry jam before she discovered nobody much ate it in the family,” he wrote Gibbs. “Yesterday we picked the cherries off the cherry tree, following close on the heels of the robins, and last night, ate the pie, so you see it’s hand to mouth all right.” The Whites had to contend with everything from freezing farmhouse water pipes to the encroachment of various forms of vermin. Though hardly cut off from civilization, they were rather removed from it. It was nine miles to the grocery store, 23 miles to the train, 47 miles to the Frances Fox Institute (where Katharine got her hair washed), and a 56-mile round-trip excursion to the movies. White made it back to New York periodically, but the sorts of activities that had defined Corey Ford’s time of laughter were now infrequent. Katharine, never entirely as enamored of rural life as was Andy, nonetheless adjusted to and even embraced it. She found a love of gardening, helped her husband in his various farm-related activities despite periodic health problems, and derived considerable satisfaction from continuing to deal with contributors from afar.