by Lillian Ross
THE HIGH PLACE — James Thurber
ONE minute we are comfortably reading the “Idylls of the King” and the next thing we know we are climbing up scaffolding. Last week it was the Empire State Building, to which we were lured from our Tennyson, out of a preposterous desire to climb to a point where we could kiss the Chrysler Building goodbye and report the sensation to our earthbound readers.
It was a pleasant day and the outside of the building was shining in the sun. You’ve noticed that gleam. It is obtained by the use of “Allegheny metal,” an alloy of iron and chrome-nickel tougher than aluminum, lighter than steel, and calculated to glitter seven years without cleaning. Just now it represents the bright face of danger. Inside the building, seven thousand workmen chevy you about. High-voltage coils have to be stepped around. Elevators take you by fits and starts as high as the seventy-eighth floor; from there you have to walk. (These elevators, by the way, will go at a speed of a thousand feet a minute in the completed building, this by special dispensation of the building commission, which has never permitted elevators to go that fast before.)
If we counted right we got to the eighty-first floor, from which point the apple-vendors looked like midgets selling red peppermint hearts. Al Smith recently went that high, looked down, and decided he was high enough. He likes to have walls around him. It had been planned to have Mr. Smith go up to the tiptop of the steelwork, when it is completed around Thanksgiving Day, and put a golden bolt in the last beam, but chances are he won’t. Even the steelworkers themselves felt a bit jittery when they got to the eighty-fifth floor, and asked for a bonus. They got it. There have been few accidents on the job. Steel was hoisted up on the inside, a new idea to avoid endangering passersby. The schedule was so carefully timed that a minute or two after a steel beam arrived from Pittsburgh by way of Weehawken, it was on its way up to its appointed place. It represents the fastest job of steel construction on record. The men wanted to celebrate this and asked Al Smith, when he was there, if they could build a hundred-and-twenty-foot brown derby and stick it on top of the mooring mast for a while. He was too modest to allow this.
The mooring mast, the builders say, is no publicity stunt, no ornament to be set on top of the building for beauty’s sake. So they say. It will cost a hundred and twenty thousand dollars. The topmost room in the building will be in the mooring mast and will hold fifty people easily and staunchly. The roof of it will also hold fifty people and sometime next spring these fifty will be balloon-moorers, for plans are being made to anchor a Zeppelin to the mast next May or June—the ZRS-4, a thousand-footer, now being built by Goodyear. The dirigible will drop a grappling hook to the roof, draw up a mooring line, and then (if all goes well) the moorers will drag the ship down by a winch on the roof. Passengers will exit into the tower through a door in the airship’s nose. Anyway, that’s the plan. Sightseers can’t use the mast; there’ll be a glassed-in observation-room for them on the roof of the eighty-fifth floor. The last office floor will be the eightieth—and will be occupied by the Messrs. Smith, Raskob, Pierre du Pont, and Louis G. Kaufman.
The Empire State is sunk in solid rock; three hundred thousand tons were removed and the building will weigh only half of that. Safe, you see. As for the old Waldorf, most of it rests today at the bottom of the ocean. The building was so toughly constructed that it cost nine hundred thousand dollars to tear it down. Usually wreckers pay for the privilege and make money on what they salvage, but much of the Waldorf had to be ruined to knock it loose, and the ruins were towed to sea in barges and dumped.
1930
TRIVIA — E. B. White and Harold Ross
CHAPLIN took cover as soon as he got to town and didn’t go many places while he was here. He didn’t have an automobile; rode mostly in cabs. He would have gone to the opening of his picture in a cab if someone had not hired a livery car for him. He was gleeful at the success of the film, to the first showing of which he took Constance Collier, the actress, his old friend. She invited him to the première of “Peter Ibbetson,” the opera, of which she was co-librettist, next day but he didn’t go. He doesn’t like opera. He went out to Mrs. Hearst’s on Long Island for the weekend instead. He didn’t talk about anything much but his movie while here, although he did talk about the soldiers’ bonus once: got into a hot argument with C. E. Mitchell, the banker, about it at a dinner party. Chaplin said the bonus ought to be paid, Mitchell said it would just aggravate conditions. Chaplin is still pretty much of a radical. He’s still English, too, in citizenship, and pretty much in spirit. Quite a few hours here were spent fixing up his papers so he could get back into the country again. He wouldn’t sail on anything but an English boat. When he learned that Major Campbell, the racing driver, had booked passage on the same ship he offered to defer his departure so as not to divide Campbell’s welcome in England. He finally went on the same boat when he learned Campbell was disembarking at Southampton instead of Plymouth.
He has thousands of feet of film left over from “City Lights,” much of which he thinks he can work into future pictures. He works that way, builds things up gradually. The suicide gag in the present picture had been in his mind ten years. The rap he took at “sound” and speech-making was the first time he had ever gone seriously satirical. He makes a new mustache out of hair crêpe every time he acts. His property shoes are the largest he can buy in a shoestore, run over several times by an automobile. That’s all there is to these. He saw but one show here, the Noël Coward one. After the performance he decided to go with Coward and others to a party at Katharine Cornell’s. He’s always casual in his social activities; is miserable if he has two or three engagements ahead. In California he lives casually, associating almost exclusively with a small number of picture people. He has given up smoking entirely and drinking almost entirely. Thinks one ought to around forty. In general he’s apprehensive of people and everything; keeps his money in half a dozen banks scattered around the world—Toronto, Berlin, Paris, New York. His wealth, all other things are secondary to his picture-making. His expenditures are modest. Fifty thousand a year would easily cover his cost of living. The scene in which the sidewalk elevator rose and descended wasn’t as difficult in the taking as it may have seemed. He had an indicator behind the camera which went up and down with the platform and he knew where the elevator was all the time.
1931
TEX AND ELLA — James Thurber and Harold Ross
ONLY one of the Wendel sisters is left: Miss Ella, who is eighty-one years old. She owns about a hundred million dollars’ worth of New York real estate and lives alone in that silent, mournful old residence at Thirty-ninth and Fifth Avenue—the Wendel house. For years the three Wendel sisters lived there, mice-like, working a miracle of solitude in the heart of the city’s traffic and trade. The death of Miss Georgiana in 1929 left Miss Ella all alone. One supposed the old house would be more mysterious than ever, that the world would never see the one old lady stirring outside it. Certainly nobody would have dreamed that Miss Ella would one night step out and visit, of all places, Texas Guinan’s night club. Take a firm grip on your chair arm while we tell you that this, however, is exactly what, one night, she did. Here’s how the strange visit came to pass:
Miss Guinan writes a column for the Graphic and a few weeks ago she printed in it an open letter addressed to Miss Ella Wendel, addressed, indeed, informally, just to “Dear Ella.” It was a cheerful, impudent, teasing letter. Miss Guinan asked Ella why she didn’t have a telephone put in, why she didn’t try out the new invention, the electric light, why she didn’t come on up to her night club some night and have a good time—chatter like that. A day or two after the column was printed an old gentleman who looked as if he had stepped out of the eighteen-eighties, as indeed he probably had, appeared at the night club. He announced himself as Miss Wendel’s attorney. At this point you could, of course, have knocked Miss Guinan down with a quill pen, she was so astonished—and frightened. She thought she was going to be sued for libel. The
old gentleman from out of the past explained that Miss Wendel had read the open letter and had decided to accept the invitation. Personally he deprecated the whole affair, had tried to dissuade her, but she had made up her mind and that was that. He felt it incumbent upon him to convey to Miss—ah—Guinan her acceptance. Miss Guinan managed to keep ahold of herself and said she was very happy. A date for Miss Wendel’s appearance was then set.
On the great night Miss Wendel appeared, accompanied by her emissary, another old gentleman, and another old lady. All were over eighty. Miss Wendel wore a sable coat and a diamond hair ornament. They arrived at nine-thirty but Miss Guinan and her troupe happened to be on hand then as they were making a radio broadcast. The four old people sat through this, deeply interested, and they remained on for the regular show later. It was two A.M. before they bowed their way out of the uproar.
Miss Wendel was interested in everything that went on. Miss Guinan sat at her table for half an hour. The ladies called each other “Tex” and “Ella.” They had a nice chat. In the course of this, Miss Guinan mentioned that she was upset because earlier in the day she had lost a valuable handbag, a present from Larry Fay—whom, we must suppose, Miss Wendel could not place. Ella listened sympathetically, however, and asked what sort of a bag it was. Tex told her in detail. About a week later Miss Guinan received a package—from Ella— containing a little gift. It was a handbag as nearly like the lost one as Miss Wendel had been able to describe it to the bagmaker. It cost around forty-five hundred dollars.
Both the night club and the old house at Thirty-ninth Street have now resumed their usual humdrum existence.
1931
AL — James Thurber
WE haven’t reported on Al Smith for quite a while, and you may wonder what he does with his time now. He spends a lot of it in the solarium of his penthouse in lower Fifth Avenue, smoking. He never lies late, but is always up by eight o’clock. He takes a cold shower, and always sings. Most every morning he phones long distance to Miss Mary Adams Warner, his granddaughter, aged four, in Albany, and they talk over the situation. Now and again she visits the Smith apartment, in which there are always kept, ready and waiting for such small visitors, a crib, toys, and all the other paraphernalia demanded by weekend guests of her age.
Mr. Smith gets to his office at ten o’clock, and the first thing he does is to empty his pockets—coat, trousers, and waistcoat—on top of his desk. He has the habit of making memoranda on small slips of paper all the time, which he tucks away in his pockets. He puts them in a drawer of his desk and later a secretary goes over them with him. He throws the silly ones away, and she files the others.
The former governor gets an average of sixty letters a day, many of them freakish ones—that is, they are addressed simply to “Al, New York,” or to “Smith” (no address at all), or they bear nothing on the envelope except a photograph of Mr. Smith or maybe some famous saying of his. The sender usually incloses a little note in which he merely wonders whether Mr. Smith will receive the letter. Smith spends several hours a day, sometimes, talking things over with the various technicians who are still puttering around the Empire State Building.
His social life is unexciting: mostly he stays home of an evening playing double solitaire with Mrs. S. He goes to musical shows quite often (Joe Cook is his favorite comedian), and is always recognized. Very often some woman or other runs up to him in the lobby and hugs and kisses him, in the name of Democracy. Mr. Smith blushes furiously but is always kind to these women and never knocks them down or anything. Mrs. Smith got him to the opera once this season, but after it was over he said he’d never go again. He won’t go up in an airplane either; he never has been up in one. Swimming is his favorite pastime. Before a big banquet he always goes to the Biltmore and has a Turkish bath. He keeps in constant touch with Mr. Raskob but sees little of Governor Roosevelt. The latter has never requested Mr. Smith’s advice on the conduct of the State’s affairs. When they meet they talk about the weather.
1931
THE FLYING SPOT — James Thurber
THE Jenkins Television Corporation, which makes television sets, has sold about twenty-five hundred of them in the past year and a half. People have them in their homes—engineers, dabblers, optimists, believers in the future of television. A set, as you may know, is like a radio cabinet, dials and all, except that in place of a sound-emitter it has a lens the size of a pie pan. You sit in a chair, twirl the dials, look through the lens, and if all goes well images appear on a screen about eight inches square on the other side of the lens. Sets can be bought at several of the department stores.
The National Broadcasting Company just broadcasts its television signature, WXZ or W4Y, or whatever it is, and sometimes the figure of a cat going round and round in a circle. It keeps using the wave length merely to hold its franchise. Columbia, on the other hand, broadcasts singers and speakers and piano-players every evening. The images are synchronized with sound: you see a tenor’s lips move and hear his voice. That is, if you’ve tuned in properly. Columbia gets five or six fan letters a day. One man in Toronto and another in Chicago wrote that they got New York programs on their sets.
One night last week Columbia broadcast two prizefighters in action, to give its public some idea of what it will be seeing in a few years. With a dozen other people we watched the shadowy images of Benny Leonard and another boxer on the small screen of a receiving set. Only about two people can really see comfortably into the present set; the others have to bend and duck and crane their necks over the lucky ones’ shoulders.
The fight wasn’t very good. The boxers had to stay inside a space about five feet square and you could see them only from their waists up. Now and then there’d be a clear picture; then the pugilists would appear to be groping in a fog or chasing each other in a tank of milk. Faces and arms dilate and contract and look crazy, like images in those trick mirrors at amusement parks.
Lighting is a major difficulty. For the last round, we went up into the room where the fight was going on. It was about the size of a bathroom and dark. Out of a small glass-enclosed control-room a finger of light plays upon the figures of the performers. If it were allowed to come to a full stop, it would be just a spot as big as a thumbnail, but a disc with sixty holes in it whirls in front of the line of light, scattering it. This light, reflected back from the body of whoever is being televised, is registered, after a lot of little miracles, on the screen of a receiving set. Right now it’s hard to get more than two persons in a picture. Four or five would have to stand back so far that they wouldn’t reflect the light strongly enough. Performers have to be made up like movie actors, with grease paint and lipstick.
1931
OXFORD MAN — Charles Cooke and Harold Ross
WILLIAM FAULKNER, whose violent novels about the darker reaches of the soul have been attracting increasing interest latterly, is now occupying an apartment in Tudor City and will be there until the middle of December. He spends most of his days alone, working on his next novel, which is to be called “Light in August.” It’s about a quarter done. Invitations have poured in on him, but he’s been to only one literary party, one given by his publishers. The usual crowd was there.
Faulkner is very Southern, his “a”s very broad. This is his second visit. He was here four years ago while still obscure. He was born in Oxford, Mississippi, thirty-four years ago and that has been his home ever since. He owns a small cotton plantation and lives on it, with his wife and two children, in a fine old house built in 1818. In 1915 he enlisted in the Canadian air force and went to France. He crashed behind his own lines. He was hanging upside down in his plane with both legs broken when an ambulance got to him. He heard one of the men say: “He’s dead all right,” but had strength enough to deny this. After he recovered he transferred to the American air force. He has a pilot’s license now and sometimes flies a rather wobbly plane owned by a friend in Oxford. After the war he studied about five months in the University of Mississippi, w
hich is at Oxford, and of which his father is secretary. That is the extent of his higher education. In Oxford he spends much time writing. “Ah write when the spirit moves me,” he says, “and the spirit moves me every day.” For relief he fishes, hunts, and bosses the plantation. Only a few of the townspeople know he writes at all; most of them think he’s lazy. The local drugstore ordered several copies of his last novel but didn’t do very well with them. His mother reads every line he writes, but his father doesn’t bother and suspects his son is wasting his time.
1931
THE FRESCOER — James Thurber
DIEGO RIVERA painted his frescoes in a bare and cold room on the sixth floor of the Heckscher Building. We got there at four o’clock one afternoon to see him work. We stayed until six and he hadn’t started in, was still sauntering around. The night before he had got up on his scaffold at seven o’clock and worked until nine in the morning, which is fourteen hours— mostly to get a little detail right. It was a terrifying picture he was working on then, one showing a Mexican Indian dressed in the skin of a jaguar or some such animal, head and all, killing a Spaniard in armor with a stone knife.
Around the walls were larger frescoes, completed on previous nights, all of them scenes from the violent history of Mexico. We were studying one when Rivera walked up and pointed to a spot where a brown he had been using came out thin. “It’s not very good,” he said, amiably. They say he never loses his grinning calm, no matter what goes wrong. He had slept only five hours that day and was just about to put in another night painting on the damp plaster, which was made up of marble dust, lime, and water. The steam heat in the room had to be turned off, as otherwise the compound would have solidified too fast. Painting frescoes is a race against drying, with mistakes and disappointments beyond repair. Rivera’s frescoes, when dry, are as hard as concrete and as heavy. It took six men, while we were there, an hour to move one about seven feet square and three inches thick out of the room and up to the Museum of Modern Art galleries on the twelfth floor. The thing weighed more than a thousand pounds. The bottom of the fresco was slightly chipped in the moving, and the foreman of the haulers was distraught. Not so Rivera. “It’s all right,” he said.