The Receptionist

by Janet Groth

  Mailing out rejected cartoons in their own self-addressed stamped envelopes (SASEs) was one of my main tasks in my new position. I also assisted the director, James Geraghty, and his right-hand man, Don Hull. Don was responsible for a fast run-through of the un­solicited submissions, culling out the one in a million that might be bought. He liked to tell the story of the day, soon after he started in 1954, when the office was to undergo its first repainting ever, a new coat of the same noncommittal gray. In preparation for this event, the regulation steel desks were pulled into the center of the room awaiting a painter’s drop cloth. Out tumbled thousands of eight-by-ten sheets of manila sketch paper of the kind most rough drawings were done on. They had been wedged into the perhaps three-and-a-half-inch gap between the desks and the walls, and they had been there for at least three years. Don speculated that they dated from the period in the early fifties when the twenty-three-year-old Truman Capote had spun his wheels in the art department as he waited for fame to come knocking at his door. Instead of going through the tedious process he’d been hired for, Truman had evidently been destroying the envelopes and dumping their contents behind whichever desk he was using at the time. For weeks and months, Don Hull had been left to placate the wailing, indignant callers whose drawings—forever separated from their SASEs—had been doomed to a nonresponse.

  I could not help feeling a pang of sympathy as well as admiration for the ever-thwarted hopefuls whose work I was responsible for shuffling in and out of the slush pile. I tried to give them a week or two at least of hoping against hope before I dropped their efforts into return mail.

  Almost as poignant for me was the knowledge that some measure of disappointment awaited the fifteen or twenty New Yorker artists who came in weekly to learn the fate of their last week’s submissions. Art director James Geraghty, editor William Shawn, and layout chief Carmine Peppe met every Monday and went over the roughs (preliminary sketches) supplied by the regular contributors. It would be their thumbs-up or -down that would set the mood, merry or glum, among the Tuesday lunchers with Geraghty or the Wednesday lunchers with Geraghty’s surrogate, Frank Modell, a cartoonist himself.

  A year or so ago, The New York Times ran a feature in its Sunday City section on the Tuesday lunches ritually engaged in by the New Yorker cartoonists. The names and faces were different and the restaurant was different, but the sense of crisis underlying the super­ficially casual air at the lunch table was the same—the undercurrent of nervous energy as each ego put itself on the line to amuse, or fail to amuse. Each career fluttered in the uptick of a sale or the downtick of a rejection or, more commonly, a mix of the two.

  All just the same.

  Small wonder that they were, in the main, a restive bunch. Short on self-confidence, long on nervous laughter.

  The atmosphere in the anteroom of Mr. Geraghty’s office on Tuesdays matched the descriptions Woody Allen, Carl Reiner, and others have given of the gag writer’s room at NBC when preparing for Sid Caesar’s Caesar’s Hour, a sixty-minute show produced weekly in the 1950s before a live audience. It was the atmosphere reflected in the 1982 film about those comedy shows, My Favorite Year, with Peter O’Toole. The recent NBC drama Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, too, attempted to capture the seriously funny panic reactions induced while providing amusement on demand—giddiness, nausea, head banging, and crying jags being about the usual range. There is a lot of throwing up involved in comedy, it seems.

  After seeing a favored few artists in private audience each Tuesday, Jim G. would come striding out of his office, ready to pretend that he and all those he’d left cooling their heels in the anteroom would enjoy the forthcoming lunch in a spirit of undiluted bonhomie. Helen Hokinson being dead and Roz Chast yet to come onboard, all of those attending were men, and most were hefting the considerable burdens of a house and a family in Connecticut. Trying to be funny with bill collectors in the wings often placed super­human demands upon the human psyche.

  Up close as I was for those six months in the art department, I never quite got over the sense that I was among the walking wounded. I came to understand that the various remedies of drink, nicotine, and other pain-deadening drugs were being consumed by these artists more in a medicinal than a Rabelaisian spirit. Their doctors, if not they, were convinced that they needed the dosages administered simply to hold these delicate plants together. Tremors of limbs born of too much—or too little—alcohol; slouches; and vacant stares should the plant be over- (or under-) medicated were, I learned, pretty much the norm. One way or another, the New Yorker artists all bore witness to the strain on the human body that creative types undergo. No matter how hard I laughed, how much I admired, how I sympathized, I could never forget or ignore the pain. Maybe it was just a variation on the pain of Everyman, but in my eyes it gave those funny men a heroic patina that intensified the moments I spent in their company.

  Of course, I now see that this excess of fellow feeling for the artists was exactly what scuttled my chances of making a go of it there. My predecessor, a woman I shall call Brenda, who had been Jim Geraghty’s most successful assistant in the past, set the mold. British wit, a hint of military spit and polish, razor-tongued ripostes, and pull-up-your-socks dismissals were that slender lady’s hallmark. She thought nothing of going to bed with the boss, bullying him for money to buy a new winter coat, or bandying insults and wisecracks with the boys while turning a deaf ear to their pleas for second looks at this week’s roughs.

  The previous winter, Brenda had gone skiing in Gstaad with a married banker, also a Brit. Discovering that she preferred the banker and the skiing in Gstaad to the care and feeding of New Yorker cartoonists, she wired that come April she would no longer be at her desk. And so I was brought in to fill the job. But where Brenda was hard, I was soft; where she was ruthless, I was wimpy; where she was what Jim Geraghty wanted, I was unquestionably not. So when, after six months, I had the poor judgment to take my first vacation—a month’s grand tour of Europe—I was ambushed. I came back to find a beaming Mr. Geraghty asking if I did not think it “super” that Brenda had changed her mind about joining the jet set. She was reclaiming her old post, while I was to be sent back down to the eighteenth floor where I’d come from. This proved to be nothing more than a well-intentioned ruse. Brenda soon decamped for Portillo, and another girl was quietly brought in.

  That I didn’t see this coming shows how little I understood about the workings of power on any level. Oh, I knew that Mr. Geraghty and I were not warming to each other (he remained Mr. Geraghty throughout our association), but I certainly had no clue that that was the whole ball game. While failing miserably to win the favor of my boss, I was made something of a pet by the artists. Frank Modell, a noted ladies’ man, took me to lunch at Del Pezzo’s and seemed content to be the affable cheerleader of my love life. Warren Miller and William Steig, on a postprandial stroll through the Village, were tickled to learn that my pals and I at the University of Minnesota used to serve drinks on Steig napkins captioned “People are no damned good.” Anatol Kovarsky, a cover artist, spent a chummy evening with me in Washington Square taking in a chamber concert, and Arthur Getz hired me to sit for him for some paintings he was doing for a gallery show. I later turned up on one of his covers. I was the girl with her hair up and her topknot surrounded by fake pearls in the box office of a movie theater—which delighted my pop, for we used to own and operate a movie house.

  Mr. Getz was wonderful during those posing sessions. Very patient and professional, he insisted that I use his box-seat ticket for Giselle, being danced by the Royal Ballet at the Met the very day of our last sit. He was going to stay on at his studio and finish the picture we had begun together. When the end came, he alone of all the artists wrote me a note saying he was sorry things had not turned out better for me.

  Little did Arthur Getz or Geraghty or any of them know just how badly they had turned out. It was not until much later in my tenure at The New Yorker that a bright summer intern from Smith
College brought me face-to-face with a chapter in my history over which I had drawn a veil. The period I had chosen to forget was 1959–1960, round about the time I was sent back in dudgeon from the art department to my receptionist’s chair. The Smithie, Ivy Eberhart by name, who covered for me on my lunch hours, adopted me as a kind of mentor. One afternoon, in 1972, she hovered at my desk, clearly wishing to ask me something. “Do you by any chance know a cartoonist named Evan Simm? Because he has been asking me out and I think I have made a foolish mistake in saying yes on several occasions.” Thus, innocently, did Ivy become the cracker of my memory vault. I think all I said to her at the time was something like, “Yes, I do know him, and my advice to you is to have as little as possible to do with him. He’s bad news.”

  The bearer of this “bad news” rubric, whom I am calling Evan Simm, was still a young man at the time I first knew him, and one of the lucky few to make it into the Wednesday art meetings. Evan lived the life of a man on a tightrope, dependent from week to week on the all-important meeting. Would one of his roughs be chosen for a finished cartoon? Would he be given an “idea,” at least? Some of the artists on drawing accounts who were better draftsmen than hatchers of jokes would be given ideas to finish that had come in over the transom, the freelance gag writers getting fifty dollars per idea used. There were a few artists in the top tier—Charles Addams and Peter Arno, for example—who were regularly given “Addams” or “Arno” ideas to finish. In Charles Addams’s case, they would feature Gothic mansions or graveyards; in Peter Arno’s, leather banquettes at the Copa with sugar daddies and showgirls in the foreground. Such settings and the humor that went with them were by this time so associated in the public mind with these men that freelancers often cooked up ideas especially for them.

  Most regulars, however, did their own ideas the majority of the time. (It called for a combination of talents rather like those of a composer-lyricist, and it was the rarities, like Cole Porter and Irving Berlin, who managed to be equally prolific at both.) Artists who, like Evan, never stopped trying to be both gag writer and draftsman continued to struggle more or less unsuccessfully to get OKs for their roughs, with their own captions attached, if captions were called for. Such artists were acknowledged to have mastered distinctive drawing styles, producing drawings on a regular basis that “looked right” in the magazine, but they often came to the art gatherings with chips on their shoulders, feeling like second stringers who never got to the plate often enough. Evan was one of these.

  At twenty-eight, he was one of the youngest of the Wednesday regulars. He was a midwesterner who had come east for college. His father held a wartime post in Washington, DC, and Evan, so as not to disrupt his schooling, remained for the duration at home with his mother in Elgin, Illinois. Perhaps because of this, Evan had conceived a yearning for the tonier East. In any case, he got his BA in art at Cornell. Every young man had two years of military service to perform in those years, and Evan chose to do his as an enlistee in the army, where, at his request, he was posted to Japan.

  For an artist, this was a good fit, a rare instance of the army getting the right man in the right place at the right time. Whenever Evan was not drawing for Stars and Stripes—in other words, whenever he was free to leave the base—he spent his time living like a native in a rice-paper house with a Japanese girlfriend. He was quickly absorbed into Japanese life, learning a bit of the language and, as much as a Westerner could, embracing the Japanese sensibility. He loved the food, the beer, the sake, the chopsticks, the shoji screens, the art of bonsai, the game of Go, the novels of Kobo Abe, the films of Akira Kurosawa, the sculptures of Isamu Noguchi. When his hitch was up, he elected to stay on, getting a job as a draftsman in the publicity office of an international company. There, he met a young Austrian woman, Marta, who shared his enthusiasm for all things Japanese.

  The boyhood and adolescence Evan had gone through in Elgin had in many ways sapped his confidence. He was unathletic. He had a kind of awkward, shambling gait. His looks were unprepossessing. His skin was clear, and although his hair was a pleasant honey color in summer and light brown in winter, it lay limp and straight and flopped onto his brow. Nevertheless, he let it grow out of its military buzz cut as soon as he was discharged. He dressed in kimono-like coats when in Japan and continued to dress in soft cotton materials when he went west. He had a wardrobe filled with clean, soft, attractive, and comfortable casual clothes—white button-down shirts or blue cotton work shirts, worn with pressed chinos and deerskin boots. So his skin, hair, and clothes were not the problem. The problem was his face.

  His features were of a comic lumpiness. He had a jug chin, a knobby nose, and a pair of blue eyes that looked too close together and tended to disappear under light brows and lashes that did nothing to mitigate the rest. It was a face that invited teasing on the playground, on the gym floor, and on the parade ground. Evan knew by the time he was thirteen that he was never going to be taken seriously. So, like Lou Costello, Buddy Hackett, and other non-Adonises before him, he decided to protect himself by making the jokes before the other guys got around to it. That defense mechanism got him through the minefield of junior and senior high, but college was tougher. He lost valuable support on account of his father’s long periods away from home. Evan worshipped the guy, but his father seemed happy to do anything and be anywhere but home. Evan’s mother may have been the root cause of this reluctance. She was a mousy-looking woman, and very weird socially.

  All this made it hard for Evan to find himself as a man, and easy for him to be resentful and somewhat suspicious of the female of the species. But the army worked wonders in forcing upon him a certain amount of male bonding, and Japanese women did the rest. He came out of his tour in Tokyo with confidence in himself, both as a man who could fend for himself in a man’s world, and as a guy who could go after, and get, the prettiest women he met, from the East or the West.

  One of Evan’s chief strategies for coping came from listening to his father’s lessons on how to manipulate people. As a propaganda officer, the senior Simm put together war-bond drives; pro-American, anti-Nazi scripts for Holly­wood films; slogans; posters; and patriotic campaigns of all kinds, designed to sway public opinion, elevate public morale, and keep enthusiasm and support for the war effort at an optimum level. Evan listened with fascination to all this—on his dad’s precious sojourns at home—and picked up tips that he found useful when laying siege to a young woman’s defenses.

  Evan was a realist. He knew that number two would have to try harder. Aggressive courtship was his answer to the glamour boys whose more obvious physical appeal led them barely to exert themselves, knowing that, without their lifting a finger, women would fall all over them. He followed the first request for a date—nearly always refused—with a barrage of requests, until a yes was secured. He then made it his business to come up with interesting places to go and indulge a gift for openhanded expenditure—on food, booze, music, and culture. Excellent entertainment became the signature of an Evan Simm courtship. Evan in full swing seldom left the object of his desire unmoved or unconquered.

  So it was with the popular and vivacious Marta. She was slender, long waisted, even featured, and bright eyed and had a shaft of swinging chestnut hair, a package that was accompanied by swaying hips, a flirtatious smile, charmingly accented English, and a manner that manifested plenty of confidence in all these attributes. Marta was every bit as experienced and sophisticated sexually as Evan and would often slip out of his clutches and into the arms of a waiting Eurasian, European, or Japanese rival if Evan did not work ceaselessly at commandeering her time. She became, finally, a prize he felt he must claim. And so, before her international job assignment in Japan came to an end, he bought an emerald ring (both thought diamonds too clichéd) and dropped to one knee in the classic mode of the marriage proposal. Somehow the ring got accepted before the proposal. It seemed there were going to be conditions that might take weeks, even months, to meet. Marta would need to re
turn to Austria, her native land, make arrangements to get her travel papers in order, pay a long-promised six-month visit to her mother. Then, and only then, would she be ready to join Evan as his betrothed.

  In 1958, Evan reentered the United States, where The New Yorker had, on the strength of the drawings he’d been submitting—and, increasingly, selling—over the previous year, offered him a starter contract. He began attending weekly art gatherings and took a rent-controlled fourth-floor walk-up in the rear of a building near the corner of West Fourth and Bank Streets. He had a lothario of a landlord, Al, whom he idealized and who would come to play a major role in my own life. But I’m getting ahead of myself. Old brownstones lined the streets, and spindly, wire-protected, yet peed-upon ailanthus trees shaded the brownstones. Treasured by the residents were backyards full of gardens, koi ponds, cobblestone paths, bamboo fences, barbecue pits, and little French bistro tables. Evan’s place on the top floor overlooked this pleasant panorama. From a minuscule front hall, it went two steps up to a small library fitted only with a German metal swing lamp and a beanbag chair; the floor-to-ceiling bookcases, filled with a large collection of art books, ran the length of the apartment. The other wall was left with its bricks exposed. Up another step was the bedroom, or, rather, a Japanese open-box canopy frame above a platform bed that made a kind of room of its own.

  Evan, dressed in a navy-and-white kimono, listening to Count Basie’s “Li’l Darlin’,” Billie Holiday, and other jazz records on his Bang and Olufsen turntable, was to all outward appearances at home with the condition of bachelorhood. However, as the days and weeks of his separation from Marta stretched on, he began to cast about for a replacement.

  This is where I come in.

  My affair with Evan Simm began in late spring of 1959 and lasted for less than a year.