Cast of Characters

by Thomas Vinciguerra

  Costello’s, located first at the corner of Third Avenue and 44th Street and then next door at 699 Third Avenue—under the shadow of the El—was a forum for “some of the best arguments” in New York City, the journalist Charles McCabe recalled after presenting the place with a copy of The World Almanac:

  I remember one about what the “B” in Rutherford B. Hayes stood for. This one was settled when Dick Maney, a theatrical press agent, entered the joint. . . . One day I asked Tim Costello, who with his brother ran the place, why he didn’t invest a half buck in the invaluable reference book of which we are speaking. Tim was visibly taken aback. “What!” he said indignantly, “and have them settle all those arguments?” There spoke the true Irish tradesman. All Tim thought of was selling spirits and beer, and prolonged arguments increased his income. Having a “World Almanac” in his pub would in his view be in the same category as the return of Prohibition.

  One of the major celebrants of Costello’s was the writer John McNulty, who published a series of short stories about the place and its offbeat denizens without ever quite identifying it, employing such euphemisms as “this gin mill on Third Avenue” and “this place on Third Avenue.” His contributions were often rambling yarns with titles almost as long and shaggy as the stories themselves, e.g., “Barkeep Won’t Let Anybody at All Shove This Handyman Around” and “They’d Have Taken Him If He Was Only a Torso.” Thurber wrote an affectionate introduction to his collected stories, which were gathered under the title The World of John McNulty.

  Thurber made his own literal impression on Costello’s—on its walls, in the form of his customary doodles. Among them were three rabbits chasing a Thurber dog downhill and a Thurber Woman tackling a Thurber Man. So flattered was Costello by this artistry and its consequent publicity that he ordered that the place was never to close as long as Thurber was there. This could be rather tiresome to the staff when he stumbled in at two or three in the morning, “prepared to talk and sing until dawn.” When Costello moved his establishment around the corner in 1949, he transported the wallboard with particular care.‡

  Just as popular as Costello’s, if not more so, was Bleeck’s (pronounced “Blake’s”) at 213 West 40th Street. It was the de facto retreat for the Herald Tribune, which had an employees’ entrance just a few feet away. When a Trib man said, “I’m going downstairs,” he meant he was on his way to Bleeck’s. So close were the two institutions that “when the presses rolled, the walls of Bleeck’s trembled symbiotically, and reporters and editors would leave their martinis on the bar and go upstairs to check their stories in print. Their drinks would be waiting when they got back.”

  The owner, John (“Jack” or, less frequently, “Dutch”) Bleeck, was born in St. Louis in 1880 and made his way east via boxcar at age twenty. He opened his place in 1925 and, under the pretense of legality and with a dubious dispensation from Albany, christened it the Artist and Writers’ Club. It soon acquired about six thousand members, all of them men; the only female allowed was a cat called Minnie. When Prohibition ended, Bleeck tried to keep things stag. But after customers began patronizing coed establishments, costing him an average of five hundred dollars a month, he relented. In 1934, when the first anonymous woman entered Bleeck’s, one charter member muttered, “There’ll be mayonnaise on the steaks next week.”

  Actually, the only major change in the place was in its name. It was rechristened the “Artist and Writers’ Restaurant (Formerly Club),” leading many to call it “The Formerly Club.” Its name notwithstanding, Bleeck’s remained a mainly male citadel, its clientele comprising not only writers and editors but actors, publishers, painters, cartoonists, publicists, singers, and all manner of those somehow associated with the arts and letters—so much so that it was commonly known as a latter-day Mermaid Tavern.

  As was the case with Costello’s, the decor, described as “early Butte, Montana,” was not designed to impress. “The tables and chairs were battered dark oak and the walls a particularly ugly shade of brown, darkened by years of exposure to billowing cigar smoke,” said Leslie Midgley. “It was grand.” The bar itself was a staggering forty-two feet long; along the wall facing it was a single row of small tables devoid of tablecloths. Just past this arrangement were two dining rooms separated by a partition, in front of which stood a suit of armor that once belonged to the nearby Metropolitan Opera. Perhaps to keep it erect, it was filled with cement, and many a boisterous drunk broke his knuckles on it. Above the bar was a stuffed fish caught by J. P. Morgan off Newport. Other odd memorabilia included a radiogram sent by the Times reporter Russell Owen from the South Pole during Admiral Byrd’s first Antarctic expedition and a painting by the Trib cartoonist Clare Briggs that depicted a golfer lifting his glass on the nineteenth hole. Radios and jukeboxes were verboten, as were certain foods. Heavy German fare like sauerbraten, red cabbage, and potato pancakes were Bleeck’s staples; anyone who wanted to indulge in French fries or ice cream was curtly informed to patronize Schrafft’s, down the street.

  The booming, florid-faced, white-haired Bleeck was devoted to his patrons. He was especially pleased when it began raining around dinnertime, which encouraged them to linger. His “subterranean grotto” had only one window that looked out onto the bottom of a twelve-story airshaft, an arrangement that he used to his advantage, as Nunnally Johnson attested: “Jack fixed up a kind of shower bath effect over this one window and would turn it on around 5 or 5:30, whereupon the customers would glance toward the window, see the downpour and decide to have another until the shower passed over.”

  Bleeck probably didn’t need the fake rain. When his clients were in his care, time stood still, much to the consternation of many wives; whenever they would ring up to ask where their husbands were, the standard response was, “He just left.” But Richard Maney’s feisty wife, Betty, was not easily put off. Once, when her husband did not come home for his evening meal of cherrystone clams and bluefish, she stomped over to Bleeck’s, put it before him, and announced, “All right, Mohamet, here’s your dinner.” When Maney declined to eat, she began lugging the clams and fish to bewildered customers at the surrounding tables, “suggesting to them both items were better than anything on the menu, and could be had for a fraction of what Bleeck would ask.”

  “Bleeck’s, when you analyze it, is very much like a front line dug-out—the noise, the dogged courage of the men holding on till zero hour, the fits of hysteria, the sitting around in sullen gloom,” said Thurber. One New Yorker editor stood on a table and, denouncing Isaac Newton, declared that he would fly to the men’s room. Only quick intervention kept him from breaking his neck. There was organized horseplay as well: the regulars enjoyed their own form of the Dead Pool, which they called “The Ghoul Pool” and “The Grim Reaper’s Sweepstakes.” For two dollars apiece, participants would draw one of a hundred names of celebrities “who were either aged or likely to die through violence,” for a payout of two hundred dollars, two or three times a week as they expired. Darts, too, were popular, until Gibbs boasted that by using a mirror, he could score bull’s-eyes by throwing them over his back. But after he nearly skewered a relative of Saturday Evening Post editor George Horace Lorimer, the game was played no more.

  Far more pervasive than the Ghoul Pool or darts was the match game, “one of the daffiest pastimes ever devised by man for his own confusion.” The idea was simple, based on guessing how many matches—from zero to three—the other players were holding in their closed hands. But the execution could quickly become complex and expensive, as Maney recalled:

  Each of the fanatics guesses at the total of matches concealed in all the visible fists. If seven are playing, the possibilities range from nothing to 21. The player guessing the correct number is eliminated. Further rounds with further eliminations continue until but two players are left. The finalists play best two out of three guesses. The doomed man then pays each of his jeering opponents the sum fixed at the start, usually compounding his fiscal folly by buying a round of
drinks. The flaw in the game, by any mathematical standard known to Einstein, Euclid or Copernicus, is that with seven playing, a competitor can lose as much in one game as he can win in six.

  This childish nonsense was so addictive that it spawned its own subculture. Stanley Walker, the Trib’s legendary city editor, once played a hundred straight games to see if there was an advantage to going first or last. (He found a slight advantage to the former.) A few of the game’s better practitioners toyed with the notion of making a career of it. Some were good enough that they attributed their success to clairvoyance; others, less successful, resorted to voodoo in an attempt to turn their fortunes. Lucius Beebe would play with his own solid gold matches, complete with diamond heads. For less well-heeled players, Bleeck would distribute thousands of sets of plastic matches at Christmastime. When the bar closed at four in the morning, diehard matchers would sometimes continue their game on the sidewalk. When John Lardner died and was laid out, Pogo cartoonist Walt Kelly put three matches in his hand.

  At one point, though, even as devoted a gamesman as Maney decided he had had enough during a particularly riotous bout involving nine people, including himself and Gibbs. Gibbs was so drunk that he couldn’t recognize his opponents. Still, it befell him to be the first one to venture how many matches all nine participants were clutching. Against all logic and experience, he guessed none. “And before God, he won!” said Johnson. “Not even Ripley would have believed that.” Whereupon Maney bowed out, explaining that “he wouldn’t play in a game subject to miracles.”

  There was a downside to this drinking culture, of course. Some of it is—in retrospect—funny. On an occasion when Packard was cat sitting, he found himself so deeply hung over that he couldn’t be bothered opening a tin of cat food. So he reached into the refrigerator, grabbed a dish of cooked peas, and set it down. The disgusted cat whapped the peas with a paw, sending them across the floor. Gibbs found himself on the floor any number of times; once, when his steak slipped off his plate, he simply swore, bent down, and continued to carve it. Another time, after heckling his nemesis Leonore Lemmon in a nightclub, he ended up practically prostrate. This prompted Lemmon to shout, “Hey, Wolcott! You’re out three days before your magazine.”

  But any such amusement was the exception. Far more often, drinking would lead The New Yorker’s people down miserable paths, as Walter Bernstein discovered during a lunch with three of his colleagues:

  Their talk was keen and witty, but their eyes had the faraway look of drinkers, fixed on some invisible watering hole in the distance. Still, they always heard what you were saying. Sober, they were talented professionals, proud of their craft, not easily fooled. . . . Drunk, they became mean and sloppy and belligerent. One in particular [Richard O. Boyer], a lapsed Catholic, liked to sit in bars and assault convivial clergymen, regardless of denomination. He had an uncanny eye for picking out men of the cloth, even when they were dressed like anyone else. Another [Robert Lewis Taylor] would sit on the porch of his farmhouse, a bottle in one hand and a pistol in the other, and shoot at anyone who crossed his property. Most of the time he missed, which only irritated him further. A third [Croswell Bowen] backed his car out of his garage and ran over his child.

  Sometimes this deviance was on public display. Richard Maney remembered a party that Gibbs and Elinor, along with New Yorker contributor Philip W. Wrenn, Jr., and his wife, gave for several hundred guests on the East Side; the attendees “embraced the flower and chivalry of Bleeck’s and 21.” The gathering was set for the odd hour of nine p.m., by which time any number were already sodden and collapsing. At one point the butler fretted aloud that Sanderson Vanderbilt, who had passed out amid his own vomit under a rosebush, was dead. Upon viewing the sickening scene, Lillian Hellman and Dorothy Parker chorused, “Even a Vanderbilt can throw up and roll in it.”§

  It was at parties like these that McKelway’s particular brand of behavior while inebriated emerged. As Edward Newhouse told it, the charismatic writer had a habit of taking women by the hand and leading them into bedrooms piled high with coats to impregnate them, producing progeny who bore an uncanny resemblance to their illegitimate father. One of these offspring, supposedly, was the guitarist Sandy Bull, who would spend considerable time playing in the Greenwich Village folk scene and with Bob Dylan.

  With the possible exception of Thurber—who could pick fights with or without liquor under his belt—O’Hara may have caused more scenes in his cups than any of his peers. The writer Helen Lawrenson called him “an ugly drunk” and recalled a double date she went on with him, his first wife, Petie, and Gibbs sometime in the early 1930s:

  The four of us started drinking at the O’Haras’ apartment, moved on to a restaurant, and ended at the Algonquin, where John and Wolcott played Ping-Pong for five dollars a game, while Petie and I sat and drank brandy. The more he drank, the nastier John got—to every one of us—and he and Gibbs got in a fight, throwing money at each other until finally Gibbs got up and went out. We thought he had gone to the men’s room. When he didn’t return, John went to look for him and discovered he had left the hotel. John and Petie took me home and I kept thinking, “I bet if I looked like Ruby Keeler, he wouldn’t have walked out on me.”

  O’Hara eventually quit this sort of behavior after a perforated ulcer rendered him semiconscious on a bathroom floor and he nearly bled to death; he was put on a regimen of bland foods that consisted mainly of mashed potatoes and steak juice. It was, he said, “a hell of a way for booze to treat me after I’ve been so kind to it.” Not long afterward, following the death of his second wife, Belle, he poured a bottle of whiskey into the sink and never took another drink for the rest of his life. Curiously, the prim Katharine White remarked, “I think he wrote better when he was drinking than he did later. His subject matter and style seemed fresher then.”

  Unlike O’Hara, Gibbs never stopped. “There is no such thing as one martini,” he would say, and he proved it. The effects of alcohol on him varied. Sometimes his speech would simply become rambling and disjointed. At other times, he would literally fall down, marking his fragile corpus with myriad bruises and scars. Edith Iglauer Daly, the wife of Philip Hamburger, personally witnessed one such incident at her apartment. “He actually did fall over, I can see it yet, he was so drunk. That whole generation of The New Yorker seemed to me to be drinking all the time; I felt I was running a kind of salon every Sunday afternoon in our apartment on East End.”

  Nancy and Bunny Stern’s daughter, Susan, once encountered Gibbs passed out in her parents’ duplex on East 95th Street as she was getting ready for school. “He faded into the couch. He didn’t move. I remember taking a wide berth around him.” This accorded with the recollections of David Cort. “At a party Gibbs was good for about two hours,” he said. “After that he didn’t fight, he dissolved, and had to be carried.” Frequently, after a bout with the bottle, Gibbs would fall asleep smoking in bed, in an echo of his casual “Wit’s End.” According to Beebe, he managed to nearly immolate himself one night, but the night operator of his building refused to contact the fire department, thinking his panicky call was a joke. The truth was likelier less colorful. “Occasionally he would burn himself,” said Tony. “A typical cigarette burn between his fingers. And you really have to be out cold not to notice that.”

  It was no way to live, and yet Gibbs somehow thought booze was a necessary personality lubricant—even essential to his central identity. “Most of the time I lie on the sofa and think about you and what a God damn [sic] bore I’ll be when I’ve been sober for six months,” he told Nancy Hale. He once wrote a casual called “A Man May Be Down” in which his alter ego, a fellow named Munson, goes on the wagon. Munson’s appetite, health, finances, appearance, and love life all improve dramatically. Unfortunately, “[t]he gift of repartee left Munson the day he drank his last Martini.” Munson, Gibbs observes, “was outrageous at times—a liar and a bankrupt and the enemy of order—but I liked him. He was a man living on a volcano who
had no confidence in any tomorrow, and he gave you and the moment all he had. The new Munson, this sepia changeling with the hard stomach, leaves me cold.”

  For the most part, his inebriation somehow did not interfere with his work. “Gibbs would quite often come to the theater drunk, and I would say, now how is he going to write a review of this?” remembered his colleague Henry Hewes. “But sure enough when the review came out it was all there. He was aware of everything.” Jane, his wife, had similar recollections. “I’d say, ‘Oh my God, he’s going to sleep’ and I’d miss some of the play because he fascinated me. But his review would come out and he’d be right on the ticket.”

  The calls were sometimes close. Gibbs was so blind on the opening night of The Crucible, said the play’s assistant press agent, Merle Debuskey, “he had to be carried into his seat.” The irate producer, Kermit Bloomgarden, complained to Jim Proctor, the head press agent, “He can’t possibly review the play. You have to talk to him.” Proctor reluctantly called Gibbs; the critic interrupted him to say, “Jimmy, tell Kermit not to worry. It’ll be a rave.” And it was.