by Janet Groth
I deemed it part of my job to “make nice” with everyone. Miss Kael and I had a jolly time sharing a table and some stiff manhattans at her first anniversary party. When Penelope’s nanny Christine had dental appointments and couldn’t look after Penelope’s six-going-on-seven-year-old daughter, Nolan—her daughter with the playwright of Look Back in Anger, John Osborne—Nolie sat at my desk and spent many an afternoon with me. She was very independent and didn’t require much in the way of attention, but I suppose it was those afternoons that led to my attending her seventh birthday party. It was held in the spacious digs Penelope had at that time on Central Park West. The adults present sipped Black Velvets (a combination of Guinness and champagne), and they were a starry bunch—Maggie Smith, Betty Comden, and Adolph Green, among others. Woody Allen sat with the children on the floor in front of the screen when we all watched a thirty-three-millimeter cut of Young Frankenstein. Long before the days of the flat-screen or the DVD.
But Nolan Osborne was only one of a number of eighteenth-floor offspring in whose lives I played a part. Perhaps it was the distance in miles from my own family that led to my closeness with the children of my “charges” at The New Yorker. Alice Trillin thought it would be good for her daughters, Sarah and Abigail, to experience some of the domestic rites surrounding Christmas among Christians, so she arranged to bring them up to my apartment (I was living on Eighty-Fifth Street in Yorkville at the time) to roll out, decorate, and bake ginger cookies with me. We used my grandma’s recipe and put on white icing and red-and-green sprinkles. Sarah did the trees, Abigail the Santas, and I finished up with the stars. We did the same thing the next Easter with eggs and dye, using wax crayons to print our names on the eggs we decorated. I knew, to a greater or lesser extent, the children of a number of eighteenth-floor writers: Dwight’s sons, Nicholas and Michael Macdonald; Richard Rovere’s daughter, Ann; and of course my pals the Kahn boys. I also knew Bernard Taper’s sons, Mark and Philip, quite well and went up to the Rudolf Steiner School to watch them in a puppet show they wrote, costumed, and directed.
One of the things I appreciated most about the receptionist job was the way it expanded to allow me to try on a half dozen or so alternate lives. There is something special about the responsibilities that rest with a house sitter, I discovered. No one, not the best friends of the writers involved, not even the nosy dinner guest taking an illicit peak into the medicine cabinet, ever gets a more inside view of the writers’ lives than the person given their keys while they are away. Certainly whenever I was that person my house-sitting duties became a sacred trust. In return, I felt that, along with the new closeness I felt to the owners, it gave me a privilege few people ever have—to slip into the artifacts of another kind of life and try it on for size.
Thanks to Tony and Margot Bailey, I know what it is like to live in a historic landmark on the corner of Royal Hill in London’s Greenwich postal zone SE10, only a stone’s throw from the Greenwich Pier, where the Cutty Sark was on display in dry dock and where the Royal Naval Hospital and the Royal Observatory flank the bottom and top of a majestic sweep of lovely English lawn. In the Bailey home I was getting a peep into a gracious living style from Georgian times, translated into a cozier, domestic scale. I loved the peach-colored two-story entrance hall and the little studio off to one side, where Margot kept her paints, her huge potted moose plant, a good few of her paintings, and her favorite P. G. Wodehouse Penguins. I loved taking the Bailey springer spaniel, Daisy, out for her exercise twice a day in Greenwich Park, loved watching Daisy’s ears sail out perpendicular to her brown-and-white body as she topped the park’s green benches and bounded over beds of roses and impatiens, rushing to answer my call and to snuffle up the dog biscuit (pace Mrs. Parker) that was her treat for being such a good girl. The Bailey cat, a neutered ginger male, was suitably imperious and aloof, and the final member of the menagerie, Rocket, was a tortoise with its name in white on its venerable back. Rocket lived under the rhododendron in the back garden and came out for cucumber, lettuce, and other greens daily around five.
The Bailey kitchen was a delight, too, one wall bearing a large amber reproduction of the Bayeux Tapestry, and the opposite wall, open cupboards full of blue-and-white export china, with the wall above the windows a bright, definite red. Upstairs in the large, light master bedroom, I admired the little Rembrandt sketch in brown pen and ink. (Tony began his interest in artist biographies writing pieces about Rembrandt for The New Yorker and turned them into two books. He went on to write about other artists, finally producing books on Vermeer, Turner, and Constable, with Velázquez soon to come.)
An exploration of the Bailey linen cupboard, which occupied a prominent large-doored spot opposite the upstairs bath, was an education in itself in how much work it must be to run a household with a husband and three daughters. Noting the occasional darned spot in the all-white towels, I admired Margot’s Yorkshire frugality as she kept the same ones going year after year. She chose good quality to begin with, rough cotton terry, scratchy but pure. No noncotton threads need apply.
It was nice, going around Greenwich, from the shops on the high street, to the greengrocer, to the bakery across the road, until the clerks knew me to speak to and pass the time of day. Nice, too, to frequent the neighboring pub for the occasional cheese-and-pickle sandwich in the garden in the rear. It was almost like living an English life of the kind so well drawn in the Christie, Marsh, and Sayers mysteries I often went to sleep with. By the same token, the six weeks I’d spent living in rooms at Exeter College, Oxford, dining in Hall, and having coffee in the Common Room had given me a glimpse of English university life. I owed that glimpse not to a house-sit but to a course I took in English linguistic history the summer of 1966—the summer of the county ball.
My Italian adventure came the year I spent from November through April in Cortona, Tuscany. I was house-sitting a restored fifteenth-century farmhouse for the writer Ann Cornelisen, a wonderful gig I was put on to by my Talk of the Town chum Jane Boutwell. Built of local stone, it nestled up against the tower of a grand edifice known simply as the Palazzone. My Christmas cards that year had the best return address ever, and I loved feeling my way into the life, modern and medieval, still to be sensed among the stones of the interior stairway, the walk-in fireplace, and the giant white porcelain bathtub. Hand-painted crockery, homegrown wine and olive oil, free-range eggs and chickens were all laid on. I luxuriated in having the house cleaned and my clothes and cooking done for me by a contadina of leathery skin and a near-toothless but beaming smile. Those Cortona days were magic. I was sorry I couldn’t share them with every one of the people I loved.
In New York, while still going to the office daily, I several times moved my stuff to Calvin and Alice Trillin’s house on Grove Street to keep it safely lived in while the family was away. At work, Bud’s office was messy, even to the point of decrepitude. Bud (as Calvin Trillin was known around the office) covered an old studio couch in brown corduroy and then covered that in hundreds of regional and community newspapers he collected as he gathered stories for his Letters from America series. But at home, where Alice (whom he called “the conscience of Grove Street”) was also the decorator, all was a symphony of tasteful, unpretentious comfort with American colonial touches. There I found that Alice and the girls were in evidence all around me just as they appeared in Bud’s references to them in his food pieces, later gathered in books like Alice, Let’s Eat and American Fried. I’d been to the American Fried book party held in the Central Park Zoo, and there were amazing things to eat, all deep fried and spread out on checkered tablecloths within roaring distance of the zoo cats. Back on Grove Street, the Trillin freezer held a full cache of wondrous bagels, which meant I didn’t have to go out on Sunday mornings in the rain.
Jane Kramer has written about fabulous Thanksgiving dinners she has served in distant places around the world and in her West Side digs in Manhattan. I know the New York digs firsthand from a summer when I house-sa
t and dog-sat for the family dog. Romeo was a large Normandy sheepdog called a Bouvier des Flandres, who spoke only French. My own French improved that summer, at least in the imperative mode. As I worked on “Assieds-toi, Romeo!” (sit), “Romeo, arrête!” (stay), and “Viens ici, Romeo!” (come here), I got acquainted with a New York subculture of dog walkers on the dog runs of the park.
Much later, Jane’s fond recall of the idiosyncrasies of her two-oven stove—frequently on the blink—brought back memories of my own timid tryouts of some simple summer meals in the best-equipped kitchen I’d ever seen. Think Julia Child plus Mario Batali. Jane was living part of the year in Paris, and accustomed to French cuisine, she’d brought back duplicates of every piece of equipment she’d need for those dishes in America, then did the same with the pots and utensils from the summer house in Todi. All that, and my needs seldom stretched beyond a pot for pasta and a pair of salad tongs.
Back on eighteen, the coffee and tea and cocoa on offer at a hot plate in the hall was run by me not as a concession but as my home kitchen. I spent hours one Christmas agonizing over which coffee mugs I could afford to buy to present to my favorites, five denizens of the floor—all men. There was the senior editor William Knapp; the staff writers Bernard Taper, Jack Kahn, and Kevin Wallace; and the art department’s caption editor, the comic novelist Peter De Vries.
Bill Knapp, a great wearer of suits, had the look of one of those bankers who Jack had suggested in his memoir could reasonably be expected to turn in at the yacht club on West Forty-Fourth. He probably should have worked out more, and his high color was not a sign of ruddy good health. I think it was those hours he spent giving sensitive editorial strokes to Bob Shaplen’s Letters from Southeast Asia. The copy came in close to deadline; again and again, Bill missed his train to Greens Farms Road in Westport to stay and get it ready for print. I let him buy me a lunch or a drink from time to time because I knew it gave him pleasure to flirt with me in an uptight wasp way and I was too weak to deny him, and myself, that boost.
Bernard Taper, whose profile subjects included Balanchine and Pablo Casals, flirted more outrageously—he was, after all, a handsome fellow, the son of a well-connected California family, and his Jewish mother, like many a Jewish mother before her, had raised her son to believe he was a king. A nice king, but with royal prerogatives. I was not so inclined to accept those invitations because Tape, as we called him, had a wife named Phyllis who was my chum. As the not-as-handsome spouse—her best feature was a glowing smile—Phyllis seemed both brainy and vulnerable, and I sensed that Tape was the center of her emotional life. That may have been true of Peggy Knapp up in Westport as well, but she was a whiskey-voiced woman with plenty of confident swagger and I didn’t feel as protective of her.
Jack Kahn was one of the few people in the office who called Mr. Shawn “Bill.” They went way back together, to the days when Shawn edited Jack’s dispatches from Europe during World War II.
After Harold Ross died and Shawn became editor in chief, a formality descended over his editorship that made it extremely difficult for even six-footers like Bob Shaplen to be anything but deferential in their dealings with him. Jack knew it pissed off his mates down on eighteen when he stopped in their doorways to announce casually that he was on his way up to nineteen to “see Bill.” So he did it every time. This gave him a gleeful kind of boyish pleasure, but I think it also cost him. Some resentment came his way because of it, and his reputation took some rather cruel and easy hits when he sold a three-part piece on Coca-Cola, and then went on to sell three-parters on corn, wheat, and ultimately the foodstuffs of the world. The other boys were not amused.
But then, as a short and feisty bantamweight, Jack had fought his way out of rougher playgrounds than theirs, and he had the last laugh. Over the course of his fifty-six years at the magazine, he saw many more of his own pieces get into print than did anyone else—amounting to three million words, all told. He also published a number of books, including not one but two on his favorite subject: About the New Yorker and Me: A Sentimental Journey (1979) and Year of Change: More About the New Yorker and Me (1988).
Five feet five, trim and tanned, with crinkly, sandy hair and crinkly eyes—the eyes were blue with amber lights—Jack was both a man’s man and a great favorite with women as well. The son of the well-known New York architect Ely Jacques Kahn, Jack was as close to being a charter member of the New York Jewish elite (written about in Stephen Birmingham’s Our Crowd), as you get, but had less side than anybody on the floor. Feisty, yes; snooty, no.
I liked Jack a lot and got along well with both Ginny and Ellie, as his second wife Eleanor was called. It was Ellie who saw to it that I was invited to their big annual cocktail party and even bigger New Year’s Eve parties. These were laid-back but amply catered affairs where one might gaze around the room and see the likes of Teddy White, Walter Cronkite, a Broadway actress or two, and of course Jack’s illustrious sisters, the painter Olivia Kahn and Joan Kahn, who had her own mystery imprint at Harper.
When Jack learned that I would be leaving the magazine to take an assistant professorship at the University of Cincinnati, he went to considerable lengths to “launch” me in Cincinnati society. I was an overnight guest of his and Ellie’s at the Kahn place in Truro. Jack baked one of his famous clam pies—or six of them, more like—hosting a large group of regular summer residents on the Cape who hailed from Cincinnati, people who served on the symphony board and represented the A-list of the Cincinnati social scene, all of whom had me round for dinner when I got out to my new home. It was a typically warm gesture from a warm and lovely man.
I was shocked and sad to read of Jack’s death in 1994 at the age of 77. A bad auto accident, and Ellie had to bear not only his loss but the burden of having been behind the wheel. Ellie is a strong woman, however, and she has borne up bravely in the sometimes difficult role of survivor. She gets finely and fiercely angry when she feels Jack has been underappreciated at the magazine.
Peter De Vries, the author of Comfort Me with Apples and half a dozen other terrific comic novels, was a man of fine instincts. Never willing to fob off gift giving to a salesperson, he always asked for “tips” and, when told I liked Elizabeth Bowen, got me a book by Elizabeth Bowen or, following other tips, an album of lieder or some Monteverdi on Deutsche Grammophon. His and his wife’s agonizing loss of their daughter to leukemia is rendered beautiful in The Blood of the Lamb, and I even liked it in the uneven but wrenching, tragicomic movie with Walter Matthau and Carol Burnett called Pete ’n Tillie. His other daughter, Jan, often sat at my desk and chatted with me while waiting for her dad. A son, Jon, is a good actor who has worked with La MaMa and, aptly enough, in Greek tragedy.
Kevin Wallace, another Californian (he’d been brought onboard by his pal Bernard Taper) wrote a lot of fact pieces for the magazine but very seldom appeared in it. Tall and tawny and well connected in California—like Taper, but on the wasp side—Kevin was totally correct yet flatteringly attentive. He was one of the casualties of Mr. Shawn’s sadomasochistic streak. Shawn, unwilling to confront a writer’s disappointment, would buy long pieces he had no intention of running, let them molder in the “bank,” and allow their authors to twist slowly in the wind. Kevin, battling alcoholism on top of this, managed to stay sober, but I think the strain of it may have cost him his marriage. One winter, to preserve his sanity, he rigged up a photography kit modeled after that used by his idol Ansel Adams. With what I thought great skill, he took pictures of me and anybody else he could talk into it. When we found that both of us were planning to attend the anti–Vietnam War November Moratorium in Washington, he arranged for me to accompany him and his son and daughter—both in their teens—on the ACLU’s chartered bus. There, on a day so cold that we could see our breath, he shot roll after roll of us amid hundreds of thousands of peaceniks. Kevin finally moved back to his native San Francisco—a place his family practically started, and a place where he was once a popular feature writer on t
he Chronicle. But before he made that belated decision, we spent an evening at the Knapps’ country club, where Kevin patiently taught my nearly danceproof feet (and more willing hips) how to rumba.
I thought of these men as quasi–family members. Their affection for me meant the world to me, I did not know why. I suppose they functioned as the brothers, fathers, and husbands of my dreams, and so my Christmas gifts for these five were terribly important. But even I knew it should not matter so much to me that my choice of mugs proved a bad mistake: It was clear I should have gone in for blue, gray, or brown pottery, not the bright ceramic cups on pedestals that screamed California, and Southern California at that. Economy and a momentary lapse of judgment accounted for it, but I suffered greatly as I saw the pained expressions that flitted across the faces of my pets and were as quickly squelched in order to spare my feelings. Nobly, to a man, they stepped up and filled their ghastly vessels of buttercup yellow, persimmon red, pea green, and peacock blue. Men behaving badly? Au contraire.
FRITZ
I ACQUIRED MY NEXT SERIOUS boyfriend indirectly by way of a Talk reporter named Bill Murray. In those days, men who came up to meet New Yorker writers for lunch and arrived early often passed the time chatting with me on my post at the reception desk. Sometimes they even convinced me to go out with them. Murray’s too timely friend Cranston, as I shall call him, wanted to put the world back to rights by proving once and for all that Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle—the source of all that was wrong with the twentieth century—was mathematically incorrect. He was going to do this despite his lack of academic credentials in the field—hadn’t Newton or somebody been without them as well? The pampered son of old-money parents, Cranston may have been certifiable. He was, for sure, bipolar, though he was charming and reasonable enough, when not on his Heisenberg hobbyhorse, and probably had, as he casually informed me, a liberal arts degree from Princeton. He had the tweedy good looks of the Ivy League, to which I had already proved receptive. What’s more, he was a man who didn’t mind a late lunch with a fellow who didn’t mind a late lunch either. When Murray called to say he had been detained on a story and would have to cancel, Cranston asked me to eat with him instead. I went and was sufficiently entertained to accept another date.