Bartlett's Book of Anecdotes

by Clifton Fadiman

  3 Giving a group of Russian diplomats a tour of New York, she took them to the Independence Day parade. A group of uniformed youth went by, and she was asked, “Military?” “Boy Scouts,” she said. Next, an impressive gang of men marched past. “Military?” “No,” she said. “Fire department.” When a car drove past holding just a few older men who sat uncomfortably in rather threadbare old uniforms, she turned to her guests and said, “Military.”

  4 In 1946, a year after the death of her husband, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Eleanor was approached by an admirer who gushed over her importance to the world. “I’m so glad I never feel important,” Roosevelt responded kindly. “It does complicate life.”

  ROOSEVELT, Franklin Delano (1882–1945), US statesman; 32d President of the United States (1933–45).

  1 As a small boy Roosevelt was introduced to President Cleveland. Cleveland put his hand on the child’s head and said, “I’m making a strange wish for you, little man, a wish I suppose no else would make. I wish for you that you may never be President of the United States.”

  2 In 1885, as a three-year-old, Roosevelt was returning on the ship Germanic when a storm broke out, leaking water into the cabins. His mother wrapped a fur coat about him, saying, “Poor little boy, if he must go down, he is going down warm.”

  3 FDR appointed Frances Perkins as secretary of labor — the first woman to hold a cabinet office — over the heads of several men who had been suggested for the position by labor leaders. The trade unionists, opposed as always to the idea of a woman’s holding real power, had a stormy meeting with the President about the appointment. According to a Washington story current at the time, Mrs. Roosevelt sympathized with her husband over the confrontation. “That’s all right,” he replied. “I’d rather have trouble with them for an hour than trouble with you for the rest of my life.”

  4 The novelist Fannie Hurst wanted to surprise FDR with the change in her appearance since she had been on a diet. She managed to slip unannounced into his office. The President looked up as she entered, then gestured for her to turn around in front of him. When she completed the turn, he commented, “The Hurst may have changed, but it’s the same old fanny.”

  5 Eleanor Roosevelt was particularly fond of sweetbreads. In one week they appeared on the White House menu no fewer than six times. The President eventually complained in a note to his wife: “I am getting to the point where my stomach rebels, and this does not help my relations with foreign powers. I bit two of them today.”

  6 The many details which an inaugural committee must cope with in a short time in-evitably produce a few mistakes. Thus FDR, in 1937, received an invitation to his own inauguration.

  Through the White House social bureau he solemnly sent word that the press of official business would keep him away. Then, relenting, he sent a further note in his own handwriting: “I have rearranged my engagements and think I may be able to go. Will know definitely January 19. F.D.R.”

  7 Roosevelt found the polite small talk of social functions at the White House somewhat tedious. He maintained that those present on such occasions rarely paid much attention to what was said to them. To illustrate the point, he would sometimes amuse himself by greeting guests with the words, “I murdered my grandmother this morning.” The response was invariably one of polite approval. On one occasion, however, the President happened upon an attentive listener. On hearing Roosevelt’s outrageous remark, the guest replied diplomatically, “I’m sure she had it coming to her.”

  8 In 1938 Roosevelt was invited to address the Daughters of the American Revolution. His speech began, “My fellow immigrants …”

  9 One morning the President asked his secretary to take down a brief message to Congress. As he dictated every word, including punctuation marks, she wrote out, “Yesterday, December 7, 1941, a date which will live in world history, the United States was suddenly and deliberately attacked …” After the five-hundred-word message was typed, she returned it to Roosevelt, who, while conducting other business simultaneously, made only one change, crossing out “world history” and replacing it with “infamy.”

  10 After a long and exhausting Gridiron Club dinner, he was asked how he composed his mind in order to get to sleep. “It’s very easy,” he said. “I coast down the hills at Hyde Park in the snow, and then I walk slowly up. I know every curve.”

  11 Roosevelt was visited by a clergyman at Hyde Park. As the two men were discussing a book, Roosevelt descended from his wheelchair, crawled across the floor to get a book, put it between his teeth, and crawled back to his chair. When the clergyman asked why he had not asked for help, Roosevelt said, “I felt I had to do it to show that I could.”

  12 In 1944 Roosevelt decided to try for an unprecedented fourth term. When criticized by the Republicans for his decision, he joked, “The first twelve years are the hardest.”

  ROOSEVELT, Theodore (1858–1919), US statesman; 26th President of the United States (1901–09).

  1 During his time as a rancher, Roosevelt and one of his cowpunchers, riding over the range, lassoed a maverick, a two-year-old steer that had never been branded. They lit a fire then and there and prepared the branding irons. The part of the range they were on was claimed by Gregor Lang, one of Roosevelt’s neighbors. According to the rule among cattlemen the steer therefore belonged to Lang, having been found on his land. As the cowboy applied the brand, Roosevelt said, “Wait, it should be Lang’s brand, a thistle.”

  “That’s all right, boss,” said the cowboy, continuing to apply the brand.

  “But you’re putting on my brand.”

  “That’s right,” said the man, “I always put on the boss’s brand.”

  “Drop that iron,” said Roosevelt, “and get back to the ranch and get out. I don’t need you anymore.”

  The cowboy protested, but Roosevelt was adamant. “A man who will steal for me will steal from me,” he declared. So the cowboy went, and the story spread all over the Badlands.

  2 When the hotel in which Vice President Roosevelt was staying caught fire, he was ordered down to the lobby with the other guests. After some time, prevented from returning to his room, he protested: “But I’m the vice president!”

  “Oh, that’s different,” said the hotel official. Then, as Teddy started up the stairs, “Wait a minute. What are you vice president of?”

  “Why, of the United States, of course!” “Then get the hell back down there. I thought you were vice president of this hotel!”

  3 Before retiring to bed, Roosevelt and his friend the naturalist William Beebe would go out and look at the skies, searching for a tiny patch of light near the constellation of Pegasus. “That is the Spiral Galaxy in Andromeda,” they would chant. “It is as large as our Milky Way. It is one of a hundred million galaxies. It consists of one hundred billion suns, each larger than our sun.” Then Roosevelt would turn to his companion and say, “Now I think we are small enough. Let’s go to bed.”

  4 Some of Roosevelt’s critics complained of his tendency to introduce moral issues in matters where none existed. Speaker of the House Thomas B. Reed once told Roosevelt, “If there is one thing more than another for which I admire you, Theodore, it is your original discovery of the Ten Commandments.”

  5 Shot in the chest in an assassination attempt in October 1912, Roosevelt was determined to carry on with the speech he had been about to make. “I will deliver this speech or die, one or the other,” he declared.

  6 Shortly before he left the White House, Roosevelt, planning a big-game hunting trip to Africa, heard that a famous white hunter was visiting Washington. He invited the man to come along and give him some advice. After a two-hour tête-à-tête the hunter came out of the President’s office looking dazed. “What did you tell the President?” someone asked idly. “My name,” said the bemused visitor. “After that he did all the talking.”

  ROOSEVELT, Theodore, Jr. (1887–1944), US soldier, explorer, and politician, the son of President Theodore Roosevelt.

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sp; 1 Roosevelt had arranged to meet his wife’s train. Arriving at the railroad station at the appointed time, he was dismayed to see the train speed past the platform without stopping. His wife waved anxiously from the rear car, tossing out an envelope as she passed her husband. Roosevelt retrieved the envelope with some difficulty and was amused to read the following message: “Dear Ted: This train doesn’t stop here.”

  ROOT, Elihu (1845–1937), US lawyer and statesman who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1912.

  1 When a frail old man in his eighties, Root was frequently visited by Sol M. Linowitz, who used to read to him. One day Root asked the young man what he wanted to do in life. Linowitz replied, “I’m not sure. Maybe be a rabbi or perhaps a lawyer.” Root’s reply was immediate: “Be a lawyer. A lawyer needs twice as much religion as a rabbi.”

  ROPS, Félicien (1833–98), French painter, engraver, and lithographer.

  1 Art dealer Ambroise Vollard had occasion to visit Rops a few years before the painter’s death. Rops warned him: “I’m expecting a woman. When the bell rings three times, you must leave by the other end of the studio.” After some time the bell rang as predicted and Vollard took his leave. Glancing behind him as he closed the door, he saw an old housemaid enter the room. “Come now, monsieur,” she said, “it’s time for your tisane” (herbal tea).

  ROSE, Pete (1941–), US baseball player.

  1 “Charlie Hustle” was one of the greatest players in the history of baseball. A veteran of the Phillies and the Reds, he was a leader in the World Series and played five different positions in five different All-Star games. Once his young daughter Fawn asked Rose’s manager Sparky Anderson why her father didn’t get a summer vacation like her friends’ fathers. “Because I need him, dear, “ Anderson replied.

  2 Anderson was awed by Rose’s abilities on the field — he seemed sheer muscle and vitality. Said the manager when trying to describe Rose’s skills, “Pete Rose is the best thing to happen to the game since, well, the game.”

  3 A fellow player once said of Rose, “If I had his head, I’d make a butcher-block coffee table out of it.” When Rose heard this he responded, “Your face would look old, too, if you’d been sliding on it for twenty-three years.”

  4 In August 1985, Rose broke Ty Cobb’s record of 4,191 hits. In the days before, as he closed in on Cobb’s hitherto unbeatable statistic, a reporter asked him if he thought Ty Cobb was looking down on Rose as he chased the record. “From what I hear about the guy,” said Rose, “he may not be up there. He may be down there.”

  5 After his imprisonment for gambling, Rose was invited to appear on the Tonight show. After thanking Doc Severinsen’s orchestra for not playing “Jailhouse Rock,” he mentioned that he had never before been invited to be on the show, despite the many baseball records he had achieved. Said Rose to the audience, “You gotta go to prison to get on this show!”

  ROSS, Harold (1892–1951), US journalist, founder, and for many years editor of The New Yorker.

  1 Shortly after Ross had obtained his discharge from the armed forces at the end of World War I, he met the former war secretary, Newton D. Baker. He and Ross discussed the war at length, and Ross was delighted with the frankness with which Baker covered a wide range of topics. Taking leave of him, Ross remarked, “Well, Mr. Secretary, that cleans up everything except how Joe Higgins was made corporal of my squad.”

  2 Ross launched The New Yorker in 1925 on a shoestring budget. The magazine’s finances continued to be very shaky for some time; its equipment and resources were therefore minimal. When Ross asked Dorothy Parker why she had not come in to do a piece she had promised him, she retorted, “Someone else was using the pencil.”

  3 (Ross’s unavailing but persistent attempts to bring order to the New Yorker offices made life miserable for a series of assistants, who included James Thurber and M. B. Levick.)

  “Levick’s final frantic response to the editor’s demand for a method of keeping track of everything was an enormous sheet of cardboard, six feet by four, divided into at least eight hundred squares, with fine hand lettering in each of them covering all phases of the scheduling of departments and other office rigmaroles. This complicated caricature of System, this concentration of all known procedural facts, hung on a wall of the Talk meeting room until one day it fell down of its own weight. Ross had stared at it now and then without saying a word. When it crashed, he told his secretary, ‘Get rid of that thing.’”

  4 A promising young lad, possibly James Thurber, sought a place on the staff of The New Yorker and Ross hired him. “Don’t be too pleased with yourself,” he warned the new employee, “I hire any damn fool who sticks his nose in here. And don’t think you’ll be starting as a reporter. You’ll begin as managing editor, like everyone else.”

  5 As a practical joke Thurber once rolled a very large water bottle along the corridor past the offices of The New Yorker. Hearing the racket, Ross instructed the new managing editor: “Go and find out what the hell is happening. But don’t tell me.”

  6 For years Harold Ross had The New Yorker’s cover-design character, Eustace Tilley, listed in the Manhattan telephone book. He was delighted when the city authorities eventually sent this imaginary figure a personal-property tax bill.

  7 Ross’s turnout was never very smart. After a winter sports holiday in Connecticut with Franklin P. Adams, someone asked Ross’s host what Ross had looked like tobogganing. “Well, you know what Ross looks like not tobogganing,” said Adams.

  8 Hemingway’s Death in the Afternoon was reviewed for The New Yorker by critic Robert M. Coates. After he had read the review, Ross telephoned Coates in the country and said, “Woollcott tells me there’s a hell of a bad word in the book — bathroom stuff.” Coates asked what the word was. “I can’t tell you over the phone,” said Ross.

  9 (Peter De Vries tells the story of Ross at an art meeting during which sketches were selected for possible inclusion in The New Yorker.)

  “The cover on the board showed a Model T driving along a dusty country road, and Ross turned his sharpshooting eye on it for a full two minutes. ‘Take this down, Miss Terry,’ he said. ‘Better dust.’”

  10 Many of Ross’s New Yorker writers were lured away to Hollywood. When John Mc-Nulty headed west, Ross bade him farewell with what Thurber describes as “a memorable tagline”: “Well, God bless you, Mc-Nulty, goddamn it.”

  11 A rival cartoonist once grumbled to Ross, “Why do you reject my drawings and print stuff by that fifth-rate artist, Thurber?”

  “Third-rate,” corrected Ross.

  12 On December 11, 1936, King Edward VIII of Great Britain broadcast to the world his historic “the woman I love” abdication speech. At a cocktail party in New York, the polished Noël Coward and the unbuttoned Harold Ross listened to the broadcast. Ross burst into uncontrollable laughter. Coward, an Establishment man to his fingertips, was shocked, and he reproved Ross for this unseemly exhibition. Ross would have none of it. “You mean,” he said incredulously, “the king of England runs away with an old American hooker and that ain’t funny?”

  13 When Ross asked writer Ring Lardner how he wrote his short stories, Lardner replied that he wrote a few words or phrases very widely spaced apart on a piece of paper and then went back to fill in the blank spots.

  ROSSETTI, Dante Gabriel (1828–82), British painter and poet.

  1 Rossetti announced that he wanted to buy an elephant, and, when his friends asked what on earth for, he replied, “So I can teach it to wash the windows of my house.” When they still seemed puzzled, he added, “Then everyone would stare and say, ‘That elephant is washing the windows of the house in which lives Dante Gabriel Rossetti, the famous artist.’ ”

  2 When Rossetti’s beautiful wife, Elizabeth Siddal, killed herself with an overdose of laudanum in 1862, just two years after their marriage, Rossetti’s grief was overwhelming. Most of his poems had been written for her or to her. At her burial he wrapped the little book containing the unique copies of these
poems in her long golden hair and consigned them to the grave with her. As the years passed, Rossetti began to think with regret of the poems that he had lost, concluding that it was pointless to leave some of the finest works he had produced to molder in the grave with the dead. After much business to obtain permission, the grave was opened and the book retrieved. Its contents, with a few additions, were published in 1870 under the title Poems, and the book was immediately successful.

  3 The negotiations on behalf of the Liverpool art gallery to buy Rossetti’s great picture Dante’s Dream seemed likely to be abortive when Rossetti discovered that one of the intermediaries was a critic who he considered had insulted him. A third party, called in to make peace, succeeded in convincing Rossetti that the man was “quite a good fellow at bottom.” Rossetti observed afterward, “I did not mention that if he came here he had better take care that the place at which he was a good fellow did not get kicked.”

  ROSSINI, Gioacchino Antonio (1792–1868), Italian composer.

  1 Jacques François Halévy, another popular composer, was driven nearly to distraction by an organ-grinder who had stationed himself outside his window and was busy grinding out the hit tunes from his rival’s Barber of Seville. Halévy went out and said to the man, “I will give you one louis d’or if you will go to Rossini’s lodgings and play one of my tunes outside his window.” The organ-grinder smiled. “But, monsieur, M. Rossini has paid me two louis d’or to play his music outside your window.”

  2 In a Paris music store in 1856 Rossini encountered the celebrated music theorist and scholar François-Joseph Fétis. On the counter was displayed Fétis’s Treatise on Counterpoint and Fugue. “Must all this be learned?” inquired Rossini, gesturing toward the volume. “Not at all,” replied Fétis. “You yourself are the living proof to the contrary.”