by Lillian Ross
MR. CALDER does this sort of thing on the side. He is a serious sculptor, the son of a serious sculptor, A. Stirling Calder, who most recently did the I. Miller marbles, Mary Pickford, Marilyn Miller, and so on. That shows how serious he is. The son can even do serious things with his beloved medium, wire. Two seasons ago he had a one-man show of caricatures and portraits in wire at Weyhe’s gallery. His penetrating portrait of Calvin Coolidge shocked onlookers and gained considerable renown. His ballet-dancers (the serious ones, not the common circus women) are miracles of lightness and grace. For these he uses nothing but wire, which he bends with pincers and nippers. It was hard at first to interest toy-manufacturers in his lions, bears, etc. As a matter of fact he couldn’t interest any of the old-line, suspicious toy-makers. It was a manufacturing concern of another sort, out in Oshkosh, which finally took a chance and made up some of the animals from the Calder pattern. As we said, they are selling heavily.
1929
ISADORA’S BROTHER — E. B. White
RAYMOND DUNCAN is in town with the idea of starting a branch of his academy here. He serves tea every afternoon in his studio in West Seventy-fifth Street, surrounded by his fabrics, his poems, his shepherdess, and his disciples. Reclining on a couch, he talks with you about the future, which he believes must be prepared for by throwing off the past and learning to perform the simple motions of life, such as digging and making sandals. His poems are five dollars, his “Eternal Beauty” is two dollars, and his fabrics run from four dollars on up. The couch is very hard.
The little brother of Isadora is getting on in years, and looks more like a witch than a shepherd. His long gray locks are held back by a ribbon, his tunic flows classically from his shoulders, and his chubby little arms that have woven so many yards of piece goods look rather flabby and old. After years of tending donkeys and goats on the Acropolis with Penelope, organizing refugees, rebuilding a city in Albania, weaving rugs, digging holes, dyeing linen, writing poems, and administering academies and temples of arts, always clinging tight to the immortal and somewhat elusive spirit of his inspired sister, he is still hopeful. He hasn’t had on a pair of pants in nineteen years, man and boy.
While we were reclining with him, doing our best to look like a goatherd despite our sack suit, a lady entered the room and asked him “if it would brutalize him if she suggested a cup of tea.” “My dear Julia,” he replied, “the whole world is trying to brutalize me.”
Brute that we were, we drank the tea, bought a small doily, and departed, our sandals clinking merrily along the pave.
1929
1930s
SOUP OF THE EVENING — Robert M. Coates and Geoffrey Hellman
WHEN the late August Belmont felt particularly expansive, he would drop in at Walter T. Smith’s turtle shop in Front Street near the Fulton Market, pick out a few hundred terrapin from the tanks, and send them to his friends, the Rothschilds. That was in the turtle’s heyday. Every hotel featured green-turtle soup; no banquet was complete without terrapin. Mr. Smith supplied them all—the famous Bradley Martin ball, the Waldorf opening, Delmonico’s, Sherry’s. Nowadays, Mr. Smith feels, much of the old epicurean gusto has departed; though he still handles more than half a million pounds of turtles a year, he thinks it is nowhere near enough for a city the size of this. In proportion to population, it is far less than when he started business, fifty-two years ago.
Prohibition is largely responsible. Both terrapin and green turtle must be cooked in sherry, and this has wiped them off most menus. They are still, however, much in demand for banquets, and he sells a good deal to clubs: the Metropolitan, the University, the Racquet and Tennis, as well as the Brook, which makes a specialty of terrapin, and the Union Club, to which he has furnished turtles for forty years. He still has a few private customers, gourmets all, who come down to the shop and pick out their turtles themselves. The terrapin are caught in the marshes along the coast from Long Island to Georgia, shipped in water, and kept in tanks in the shop. Green turtles come from the Caribbean and the Gulf of Mexico. They are caught along the shore when they come in to lay their eggs in the sand, or in nets anchored over their feeding beds. They can live a long time out of water, however. In the shop, they are laid in rows, on their backs, in a large room where the dealers can inspect them. The best ones range from seventy-five to two hundred and fifty pounds. Really big ones he sends to the Aquarium. Once he got a rare albino terrapin from Louisiana, with pink eyes and a gleaming white shell. He sent it to the Zoölogical Garden in San Diego. He enjoys his business, and, though now he no longer follows it actively, he often comes in from Long Island to look things over and finger a turtle’s flipper. He loves a good terrapin stew, and considers green-turtle soup, properly prepared, the king of all soups. You can feed it to a three-months-old baby, he says.
Chinese customers are numerous at Mr. Smith’s, buying diamond-back terrapin which, it seems, the Chinese pharmacopoeia has down as a cure for all ailments from sore tooth to lung trouble. Before the shop a sign dangles incongruously, advertising terrapin in Chinese characters—pronounced “gim ten guoy.”
1930
CORSETS DE LUXE — Geoffrey Hellman
WHENEVER Mae West needs a new corset for something like “Diamond Lil” she goes to Mme. Binner’s in Fifth Avenue at Fifty-eighth Street. Many, many people needing corsets go to Mme. Binner. She started on her career in Vienna. At the age of eleven she took to making corsets, to pass the time away. After coming to this country, in the early eighties, she was a lone—but a loud—voice in the wilderness, pointing out the horrors of the hourglass corset. Women clients who insisted on having them she sent to doctors for X-rays, to show them what a mess tight corsets made of their ribs. The grateful doctors sent clients to Mme. Binner, who made them light sensible corsets. At present, they say, she has two thousand customers, including such women as Mrs. Charles Steele, Mrs. Seth Thomas, Mrs. John D. Rockefeller, Jr., Mrs. Elbridge Gerry, and Mrs. Thomas Lamont. Some ladies buy ten or a dozen corsets at a time. Mme. Binner also has a few men customers who have curvature of the spine or who need artificial support while recovering from an operation. For them she designs special corsets. She is also the inventor of the detached brassière and—probably more important—she was the first person to think of attaching garters to corsets. Before that garters had just wandered around with no real home.
The first gartered corset was made for Lillian Russell, who was so enchanted with it she became a regular customer, later ordering from Mme. Binner the most expensive corset ever made. It cost thirty-nine hundred dollars—fourteen hundred dollars for the corset proper and twenty-five hundred dollars for the garters, which had diamond buckles. Once, when her house in Long Island burned down, Miss Russell’s first cry after her escape was, “My support! My support!” “Your what?” demanded a fireman. “My corset!” shrieked Miss Russell. It was at about this time that Anna Held came to Mme. Binner with an offer of one hundred dollars for every inch taken off her waist. It cost her quite a bit. Mme. Binner fixes up any number of opera stars. This is the devil of a job, because of the sisterhood’s inclination toward rotundity.
Mme. Binner is short, dark, and vivacious. She lives in town with her twenty-three-year-old son, who is an art director in the movies. He designed his mother’s present establishment, a modern affair of silver, orchid, and green. Summers Mme. Binner goes to Carlsbad and takes mud baths with Frieda Hempel and Ganna Walska. She is very psychic. She once went to Evangeline Adams to learn if she should sell some real estate, and as soon as she came in, Miss Adams said, “Are you in this business also?” The corset-maker and her late husband, a Neapolitan, were among Caruso’s best friends. Often he would come to dinner and they would cook spaghetti together in the kitchen. When Caruso sang Mme. Binner always went to the opera and applauded longer than anybody else, which was no mean feat.
Mme. Binner thinks the long dresses will tend to dignify conversation, that women won’t say the things they used to say in short dre
sses.
1930
PAINTER IN TOWN — Murdock Pemberton and E. B. White
FOR a few days last week, Henri Matisse was in town, but nobody much knew it. He is now sixty, handsome, and looks like a doctor. While here he spent most of his time walking up and down Park Avenue, or looking out of his window in the thirty-first floor of the Ritz Tower. He would like to be ten years younger so he could move to New York, which he describes as “majestic” and whose skyscrapers surprise him because they compose well. He dined at Childs, saw a show or two, sleeping through them, and was taken to the Paramount— that being the one thing in New York he asked to see. There, too, he slept. Once he awoke to see two terrible organs emerging out of the depths. “My God, what’s that?” he asked. The Jesse Crawford family was explained to him, and he went quietly back to sleep.
Mostly, Matisse had a very grand time out of his visit, eating chicken and drinking cocktails, a pleasant relief from his home-life in Nice, where his wife makes him eat only vegetables, no drinks. He went to the Zoo, the Aquarium, and Wall Street, and was let into the Havemeyer collection before the public saw it. He liked the early Corots. He knows little of American artists; at any rate knows by name only two or three who called on him in Paris, but predicts that the great art of the future will be produced in this country, because we’ve got energy and great order.
Matisse came from the north of France, studied to be a lawyer, was admitted to the practice, and then got sick of it. Not having anything better to do for the moment, he bought some brushes and paint and started fooling around with color. His first picture was a study of law books. It was shown in New York last year, a perfectly staid academic thing. His early pictures were all signed Essitam (his name backwards) and soon began to bring eighty dollars each. He says the turning point in his career was the day he put his foot through a canvas instead of selling it for the four hundred francs he knew he could get, to feed the three children he knew he had. After that experience he took more pains with his work and never sent out a canvas that did not entirely please him. Lay people call him “sloppy,” but one picture of his shown recently in the Valentine Gallery was the result of some twelve hundred preliminary sketches. A picture of his now would cost you about sixteen thousand dollars if you could buy it, which you can’t, because he likes to have his pictures around. He is now the acknowledged leader of the French moderns, credited by artists generally as having the best color eye that has glanced at life these many, many years.
Matisse is on his way to the South Seas. He may paint a bit in California and elsewhere on the way. When put on the train for Chicago his friends explained to the porter that he could speak no English. Matisse said he would make out all right, that whenever he got into language difficulties anywhere he would take out his sketch pad and begin drawing. In a very few minutes some woman was certain to come up and speak to him in French.
1930
SEVEREST CRITIC — E. B. White
MR. LOUIS N. FEIPEL, a hazel-eyed scholar, has a job at the Brooklyn Public Library. He is director of publications. Nights, however, he goes home and sits down to a popular novel, slyly taking notes as he reads. When he has finished a book he gathers up his notes and addresses a letter to the author, beginning: “Dear Mr. Lewis, I enjoyed reading your book ‘Dodsworth.’ While doing so I made note of certain points about its editing, typesetting, and proof-reading, which may possibly interest you. . . .” Then follow about two closely spaced pages beginning “Misprints or Editorial Lapses,” going on through “Orthographic Inconsistencies,” and ending with “Miscellaneous,” covering everything from fuzzy pronouns to misplaced subjunctives. The author, on receipt of the letter showing up anywhere from two hundred to four hundred mistakes in his book, usually has to go to bed for a couple of days.
Eventually the author recovers sufficiently to reply. Mr. Feipel has received, in ten years of gratuitous proof-reading, more than three hundred replies— from Arnold Bennett, Galsworthy, Shaw, D. H. Lawrence, Cabell, Norman Douglas, Sherwood Anderson, Max Beerbohm, Ellen Glasgow, William McFee, Santayana, Havelock Ellis, Bertrand Russell, every writing person you can think of. Everybody but Conrad. Conrad maintained an eloquent silence, although Feipel managed to itemize a couple of hundred blobs in “The Nigger of the Narcissus” and “The Rescue.” Shaw called him “the prince of proofreaders,” and Galsworthy humbly promised to mend his ways in the future.
The bald, unconcerned manner in which Mr. Feipel lists the mistakes must be very galling. His letters (he types them himself and makes no mistakes in typing) merely list the inconsistencies, without comment. Like this:
apple-tree (195) apple tree (7)
well-known (80) well kept (158)
Where a point of English usage is involved, he uses a question mark, to show he’s open to reason:
adam’s apple ? should be Adam’s apple
And he concludes with a long list of words and phrases headed: “Are the following as you intended them, or should we emend them as indicated?”
Lady authors, we have heard, are the most deeply stricken by the receipt of a Feipel letter. Many authors have offered him large sums to go over manuscripts of forthcoming books, but he likes his job in the Brooklyn Library. In a few cases he has acceded—he has read scripts for Fannie Hurst, Llewelyn and John Powys, and Francis Hackett. He is deadly serious about his hobby—hopes to clear things up generally. He thinks books are better than they used to be but now even the average well-printed book has one hundred and fifty mistakes.
We expect a letter from him ourself, about this little story.
1930
ANGEL — James Thurber
HOWARD HUGHES, who spent four million dollars, his own money, making “Hell’s Angels,” sat alone in the balcony during the première at the Criterion. He didn’t come downstairs for the hoopla during the intermission. His name is up in big red lights on Broadway, but he is shy about meeting people. He wouldn’t be interviewed or photographed when he arrived here— he has sat for only one picture since he hit the movie world like a comet three or four years ago.
In appearance the young millionaire, not yet twenty-six, reminds people of Lindbergh, being six feet three, lanky, and gifted with a becoming uneasiness in the limelight. He is reputed to be shrewd and commanding in business conferences. He spends most of his time in planes and laboratories, however. He is an eminent sound engineer, and an expert with the camera. In a private laboratory in Hollywood he monkeys with devices for improving lenses, lighting, noises, etc., and also tinkers with an idea for a new steam automobile.
Hughes perhaps inherited his mechanical bent. His father was a big tool manufacturer in Texas who also made a lot in oil. He died when Howard was twenty and left him the works. The restless young man promptly turned the industry over to associates and took a flyer in the movies, financing a picture which returned big profits. Following this he went into the movies in earnest, spending money lavishly. His pictures were not only profitable but good. “The Racket” was one of them. He’d always had a dream of glorifying the World War aviators in such a spectacle as had never been seen before, and he worked it out on a scale that appalled producers of the old, one-million-dollar school.
You’ve read about how he leased counties, rounded up authentic wartime planes in Europe, hired and organized a staff of approximately two hundred fliers, built on the lot a dirigible half the size of the Los Angeles. It took a year and cost a million to make the Zeppelin shots alone. No miniatures were used; tricks were employed to get only a comparatively few effects, such as the clouds into which the Zeppelin rides. Bewildered by the task of commanding nearly a hundred airplanes in maneuvers as dangerous as those of actual warfare, the director Hughes had hired gave up. Hughes took over the job himself. He piloted his own plane to direct the scenes in the air. It took eighteen months to complete them. Hughes has been a licensed pilot since he was twenty-one.
Three men—perhaps we should say only three men—were killed during the
making of the picture. They say that if you look close enough during the shots of the thrilling “dogfight” between fifty or more planes, you can see one of them, a small trailing thread of smoke in the background, plunging ten thousand feet. Another man was killed in a collision between two planes. He was equipped with a parachute, as were all the fliers, but didn’t get loose in time to jump. The man in the other plane made it. The third fatality was due to the failure of one of the German Fokkers attacking the big bomber.
The picture was started in pre-talkie days and the on-the-ground part of it, including a plot which doesn’t amount to much, had to be retaken. The air scenes, however, were made later, with sound, and didn’t have to be redone.
Hughes next plans to do some all-color pictures. He has bought the rights to “The Front Page” and to “Queer People,” a novel satirizing Hollywood life. Nobody reads or buys stories for him. He does it himself. He rarely writes letters, using the long-distance telephone instead. He has put in as many as twenty calls to Los Angeles in one afternoon during his stay here.
1930