Cast of Characters

by Thomas Vinciguerra

  A typical “Comment” entry of his during this period attempted to debunk the idea that countries were inevitable, organic constructs:

  Neither the Russian people nor the American people nor any people have as yet seen the essentially fictitious character of the nation. The nation still persists in people’s minds as a tangible, solid, living and breathing thing, capable of doing and thinking, feeling and believing, having and enjoying. But the nation is not that at all. A nation is a state of mind. . . . [T]here is no such thing as Russia—unless you are satisfied with a bear. . . . There is no such thing as the U.S.—unless you are satisfied with an uncle.

  In writing this way, White fretted that he was going too far with his opinions. The largely apolitical Ross offered reassurance, albeit more along editorial than ideological lines. “I say dismiss any fear that you might make the magazine a crank publication,” the editor told his resident idealist. He called White’s squibs “the most eloquent things you have ever written and magnificent. My viewpoint is that if the people of the earth don’t get a new set-up, they are being offered a very remarkable line of writing and thinking anyhow.” On that basis White in 1946 accepted an offer from Houghton Mifflin to publish a collection of his editorials. Reviewing the result, The Wild Flag, in Partisan Review, Robert Warshow said that the author “has good will and intelligence, and he is trying to live up to his responsibilities as a citizen.”

  Unfortunately, as history proved, White’s earnest efforts went nowhere. He later admitted to “eating some of the words” in The Wild Flag and would come to regard it as “a little uninformed and half-baked.” He had written his pieces before China turned Red, and he realized that in their naïveté, he and other do-gooders “had no conception at that time of what the Soviet Union would do.” Nonetheless, he would continue to stress the need for cooperation. “I don’t think there’s an independent country any more,” he said. “All are interdependent.”

  For the moment, interdependence was elusive. The prevailing ethos was one of anxiety laced, when possible, with black humor, as the longtime New Yorker secretary Tom Gorman signaled to the staff:

  The Civil Defense Organization of this building will hold a practice evacuation at exactly 3 P.M. on Wednesday, February 28, 1951. At that time whistles will be blown. Please leave your offices immediately and gather in front of the elevators. The operators have been instructed to take 20th Floor personnel to the 10th Floor. Of course, there will be the usual trumpet solos and other entertainment during the descent.

  As they had during the prelude to World War II, individual contributors reacted in their own ways. Identifying himself with Eisenhower, Thurber thought it “rather foolish to hold the respect we do for ex-Communists, that is, people who once tried to overthrow the Government” [sic]. But he made clear his distress that excessive worry about the Red menace was hampering free expression: “If we don’t stop suspecting all writers, it will be a severe blow to our culture. I think all writers, even the innocent ones, are scared. There’s guilt by association, guilt by excoriation, there’s guilt by everything the politicians invent. . . . [W]e’re living in the most frightened country in the world.”

  In late 1947 White won widespread approval for publicly opposing the firing of the Hollywood Ten. His prewar “genteel, hand-wringing style” had been “about half-Thurber and half-Zasu Pitts,” wrote the Springfield, Ohio, Sun. Now, said the newspaper, “this talented fellow looks a lot better in his shirtsleeves, out in the arena, than he ever did in his Brooks Brothers jacket, dreamily sniffing the carnation in his lapel.” At this time as well, White published in the New York Herald Tribune one of his most famous declarations of conscience, which began,

  I am a party of one, and I live in an age of fear. Nothing lately has unsettled my party and raised my fears so much as your editorial on Thanksgiving Day, suggesting that employees should be required to state their beliefs in order to hold their jobs. The idea is inconsistent with our Constitutional theory and has been stubbornly opposed by watchful men since the early days of the Republic.

  Even Gibbs, whose politics were as hard to pin down as Ross’s, signed his name—along with about forty others, ranging from Norman Cousins to Helen Hayes—to a statement by Americans for Democratic Action that opposed Communism and hysteria alike.

  This social consciousness may have been laudable, but it was not exactly consistent with The New Yorker’s ostensible focus on gaiety and satire. Part of this was due to the passage of time; the magazine had been born in a raucous age more than twenty years earlier. On many an occasion, Thurber publicly regretted the accelerating absence of jocular writers like Frank Sullivan, Ogden Nash, S. J. Perelman, Dorothy Parker, and Corey Ford. “No one has come along to take their place,” he complained. “The depression did something to us. The kids became serious after 1930. The colleges don’t turn out men who write humor.”

  His ever more irascible comments in this vein, while not always well received by his colleagues, could not be entirely dismissed. Ross himself moaned to Nash, as The New Yorker was on the cusp of its twenty-fifth anniversary, that “not one (or more than one or two at the outside) humorous writers” of any note had lately emerged: “I don’t know whether it’s the New Deal or Communist infiltration or the law of averages, or what, but I do know that if I’d known how little talent was going to develop I’d have got into some other line of work years ago.”

  Ross did his best to serve the God of humor and the Caesar of seriousness. In one of his few public appearances during this interval, he managed to appease both simultaneously. In 1949, finding himself with some frequency in Grand Central Terminal as he commuted to and from Stamford, he backed a New Yorker campaign that opposed the airing of commercial broadcasts and music over the facility’s public address system. This quixotic crusade inspired many protests to the New York State Public Service Commission about the broadcasts and culminated in a widely covered public hearing shortly before Christmas. Turned out nattily in a necktie monogrammed with his initials, Ross as the star witness characterized himself as an “editor of an adult comic book.” As a transcript reveals, he remained more than capable of humbling the mighty by mocking them.

  Q: Would you like to give your impression of the advertising by this public-address system?

  A: In the first place, I think it is a semi-swindle. No person can think of two things at the same time. You try to read a newspaper and that thing is going, and you don’t hear that, either; so these advertisers are being largely swindled. You don’t hear anything distinctly; there is just a ringing in your ears.

  Q: Why is that? Because of the volume of tone or the quality of sound?

  A: I am no radio engineer. The New York Central seems to be able to run trains, but they do not seem to be able to run their elevators or a radio system.

  Q: Do you find that in different parts of the station the radio volume varies?

  A: It varies, but it is all bad. As to the employees there, I I [sic] would like to advocate one thing, and that is a secret vote of the employees in the Terminal who must be going slowly nuts there, and I also think that the Fact Finder ought to be examined. He found that 84.7 per cent [sic]—whatever it is—love this kiddie stuff. There is an organization I am told about in our place, called Datum Diggers, who found that 86.8 per cent [sic] do not like it.

  The broadcasts were discontinued not long afterward, even though Ross thought his testimony “practically incoherent” and wished he had been better prepared.

  There was joshing to be had on other fronts. In his casual “Preposterous Parables: The Decline of Sport,” White predicted that by 1975 spectator pastimes like football games, horse racing, and boxing would be vaporized by such events as a deranged shooting spree and a mass crash-up on one of the country’s emerging superhighways. Gibbs applauded this mordant contribution while despairing its atypical appearance:

  Your sports parable is a very fine piece, though quite a shock since I had an idea humor was supposed t
o be against the rules around here. The moral climate is against it. Right at this minute there is a son of a bitch down the hall (Bainbridge) writing a thirty-two part profile of Stalin, and somewhere east of th [sic] water cooler Liebling is trying to beat a little social consciousness into the Wayward Press department, and somebody else is writing a short story beginning “Cress Delahunty, who was thirteen years old but looked awful, asked her mother if she sould [sic] stay all night with her friend Irma in a sump hole.”

  Quite apart from postwar politics, the core of The New Yorker crew found itself confronting personal considerations that often kept them from writing in a lighthearted manner. For one thing, there were health issues.

  It was inevitable that by the war years, the New Yorker’s guiding lights would not be exempt from physical maladies. White had already had a vague “nervous crack-up” in the summer of 1943; he cured it mainly by taking showers, drinking dry sherry, working with hand tools, and playing old records until there was “no wax left in the grooves.” But the following March he “decided to go to a doctor about my head, as there seems to be a kite caught in the branches somewhere.” At the beginning of 1945, he complained about how it had taken eighteen months to get rid of certain “mice in the subconscious.” Reflecting her affinity with her husband, Katharine underwent a spell of depression just as Andy was having his own; in her case, the main underlying problem was a hysterectomy. Ross’s ulcers became legend; they were bad enough that a drink for him was a rarity. So foul was his potent medication, Amphojel, that he diluted it with the cream that his assistant Dan Pinck regularly purchased.

  Gibbs, never exactly robust, was sick as well. For much of the first half of 1947, he was hospitalized for lung problems related to his heavy smoking; the diagnoses ranged from pneumonia to tuberculosis. His condition was so severe that when one physician examined his dark X-ray, he thought he was looking at a photographic negative. Still, Gibbs continued to dispatch correspondence to the office. “I’ll close now,” he wrote to Lobrano, “as somebody wants to look down my throat.” It was finally determined that he was suffering from pleurisy. The treatment was brutal: just to get a scope into Gibbs’s lungs required pulling some of his teeth. The surgeons ended up taking out two of his ribs, leaving him lopsided enough that afterward he sometimes wore suits tailored with extra padding; the scar extended from his rib cage to the back of his shoulder blade. But the radical procedure worked. “The spot was the size of an orange,” Gibbs reported, “[and] now is the size of a lime.”

  Ross was happy to provide him with some respite. “Do not bother your beautiful head with financial worries,” the editor told him. “Don’t give it a second thought.”† For his feeding and care, Ross got his money’s worth. Despite his illness Gibbs managed to publish a casual, “Where Was I?,” which made sport of his recovery: “I’ve still got a little deficiency. You know, on the hemoglobin. Couple of million or so. Hardly worth mentioning.” Not much later he offered up a sequel of sorts, “Mewow, Mewow, Mewow,” wherein he described a postconvalescent reunion with Janet that was both gossipy and poignant. “Dear Daddy!” she exclaims in welcoming him back from the hospital. “Goodness I love you so!”

  McKelway also had his struggles with the flesh. Although he shook off his jungle fever, he found himself convalescing in a hospital in Pasadena a good year beyond war’s end with a leftover insect infestation. “The damned things are like tapeworms, each being from five to ten inches in length,” he informed Lobrano, “and they have been sitting down there in my intestines eating expensive food and drinking light wines and beer for God knows how long, evidently since Guam.”

  Nobody had more heartbreaking bouts with bad health than Thurber. His need to draw, to write, to communicate, was soul defining. As his eyesight dissolved, he talked ever more and literally reached out, his hands insistently twitching and feeling as if they were antennae. With Helen’s help, he managed well enough, and his sensitivity to his surroundings, both physical and emotional, was keenly attuned. “He was the least blind blind man I ever knew, and the most independent,” said Katharine. “He should be given great tribute for that.”

  There was, however, only so much he could navigate. On those occasions when Thurber dropped by the office, he required special attention and handling. He sometimes resisted it, as Frank Modell recalled upon espying him one day while everyone was at lunch:

  He had a manuscript under his arm, and he was going right to a stairway. And I was thinking only of me, which was usual: “If I sit here and let this million-dollar talent fall down the stairs and kill himself, they’re all going to say, ‘Why the hell didn’t you help him?’ ” So I said, “I’d better do something; I can’t just stand there.” . . . So I went up to him, like the nice good boy that I am, and touched his elbow and said, “Mr. Thurber, might I help you?” And he said, “Get out of here, you sons of bitches!” Down the steps he went, like a bunch of plastic dishes, the manuscript flying all over the place. And he didn’t hurt himself at all. But I was standing up there with tears in my eyes.

  Walter Bernstein found himself similarly positioned, albeit more successfully. Following a lunch at the Algonquin, a preoccupied Ross somehow left Thurber in the middle of the street. Bernstein seized the initiative and pulled the million-dollar talent out of harm’s way.

  Thurber’s infirmity made him downright irritable. He picked fights indiscriminately. By one account, he never quite forgave Gibbs for failing to visit him during any of his eye operations because Gibbs was “so goddam sensitive” about hospitals. And so Thurber struck back in his casual “The Cane in the Corridor.” Casting himself as “Joe Fletcher,” fresh out of the operating theater, Thurber contemplates revenge on “George Minturn”—i.e., Gibbs—in a scenario whereby Minturn is hospitalized. To make Minturn miserable, Fletcher visits him every day for the six weeks of his convalescence, during which time the latter is unable to escape Fletcher’s annoying company. At one point Fletcher even lambastes Minturn because he does not feel sorry for his, Fletcher’s, cane of the title; Fletcher refers to it as “poor tap-tap.”

  There was another reason for Thurber’s mental state—he was beginning to suffer from severe hyperthyroidism. Undiagnosed at first, the condition had the effect of making him unreasonably vicious, even borderline paranoid. When The New Yorker printed John McNulty’s “Back Where I Had Never Been,” Thurber lashed out at Ross, surprised by its very publication: “The surprise comes from the fact that it was not run through our formidable prose machine, in a desperate and dedicated Ross-Shawn attempt to make it sound like everybody else. . . . The machine has left almost no differences in tongue or temperament or style.” He resisted editorial changes and accused his British publisher, Hamish Hamilton, of “tampering with my books.” A visit to his Bermuda friends Ronald and Jane Williams was a disaster. “Ordinarily Ronnie and Jim enjoyed their fights,” said Jane, “but at dinner during his bad periods, I didn’t dare serve the Jell-O; I knew it would be thrown.”

  Happily, the right diagnosis and combination of drugs did Thurber some good, and he apologized accordingly. Even during the worst of his ordeals, there was a chuckle or two to be had. When Ross gave a book party for Rebecca West following the publication of her monumental volume about Yugoslavia, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, someone knocked over a table. Following the crash and the ensuing silence, Ross called out, “Is that you, Thurber?” On another occasion, Ross and Thurber found themselves as hemorrhoidal customers of the same proctologist.

  “The doctor would have them undress,” said the physician Melvin Hershkowitz, having heard the tale directly from Ross, “turn around, bend over, and would then identify them by name, according to the pattern of their rectal anatomy.”

  The downturn in New Yorker jokiness was not merely a symptom of the Cold War climate or personal health. The voices that had begun to plumb their literary potential in the 1930s continued to do so, their work growing ever more varied and individual. They could not always fit into Ross
’s “adult comic book.”

  St. Clair McKelway was a case in point. He did not return immediately to The New Yorker following his discharge. Instead, he spent some time with Gibbs on Fire Island (HOPE YOU GET SOME GOOD REST AND SUN, Shawn wired him shortly after Japan’s formal surrender) and ran into Sam and Bella Spewak, the husband-and-wife team who had just devised the book for Kiss Me Kate. They suggested he try writing for Hollywood and set him up with their agent. Two days later he was off for California.

  From the start, McKelway’s time in the movies was inconclusive and frustrating; he found it “more like carpentry, interesting but not quite gripping” and practically “like a continuation of the war.” He worked first for Columbia, where his labors “consisted largely of spicing up with additional dialogue and other appropriate condiments a number of scripts which it seemed to me had already been spiced and seasoned far beyond their capacity as vehicles of public entertainment.” After seven weeks, he decamped to join Leo McCarey at RKO in writing a vehicle for Ingrid Bergman, Jimmy Stewart, and Charles Boyer. “I wound up after two weeks with a determination to do the story of Adam and Eve, with Bergman and Stewart. In such a script, obviously, there was no part for Boyer.”

  He returned to Columbia to craft a barely recognizable version of The Front Page in which the action was moved from Chicago to Brazil, the hard-boiled editor Walter Burns was transformed into a theatrical producer, and whiz reporter Hildy Johnson was “transmuted into a shapely girl dancer.” From there he went to Triangle Productions and Sleep, My Love, a psychological thriller with Bob Cummings, Claudette Colbert, and Don Ameche. “Production was frequently halted while all of us engaged in prolonged debate as to whether it was more in keeping, say, for a character to say: ‘How do you do?’ ‘How are you?’ or just ‘Hi?’ ”