The Fun of It: Stories from The Talk of the Town (Modern Library Paperbacks)

by Lillian Ross

  Rivera seldom has a photograph or a sketch of anything to go by, painting even steam shovels, disc harrows, etc., from memory. “Some of them wouldn’t work,” a follower of his told us, “but machinery in a painting doesn’t have to work.” Occasionally, however, the painter makes a miniature sketch of a fresco he is about to begin; sometimes, even, he uses one exactly the size of the projected fresco, pinning it to a wall where he can look at it. We saw one of these, an idea he got from a visit to No. 1 Wall Street. Rivera was much impressed by the great money vaults down there. This sketch, a completed fresco now, we suppose, showed the vaults, with all their gold, at the bottom of the drawing. On the street level, just above, were hundreds of unemployed, lying asleep, or worrying. Above them towered the skyscrapers of the financial region.

  The exhibition, planned for a month, may last two. Thirty-five thousand people saw the Matisse show and more are expected for Rivera’s. When it’s over, the frescoes will be sold. It’ll cost plenty to move them, if you live far.

  When he is working at night, Diego sometimes varies his milk diet with a spot of coffee. He doesn’t smoke, because ashes might get into the plaster, and besides you can’t smoke and keep both hands busy with paints and brushes. Enthusiasts usually stayed until four o’clock in the cold room, watching their idol. After they left he sometimes slept for fifteen minutes, sitting in a chair, then got up and went to work again. We met a lady who, a year or so ago, sat with Rivera on a scaffold in Mexico City for nineteen hours. At the end of that time, night having given way to morning and morning to afternoon, she got up and started down the ladder. Rivera looked surprised and injured, and remarked sadly: “I have begun to bore you.”

  1931

  INAUGURAL BLUES — James Thurber and Harold Ross

  AN early robin that accompanied Mrs. Roosevelt on her dress-buying tour last week tells us some of the things that happened. At Milgrim’s, a cop was waiting when the First Lady–elect arrived. He hadn’t been sent for; the doorman had told him of the expected visit and he thought he had better stick around.

  Mrs. Roosevelt, accompanied by her secretary, Miss Helen Johnson, met her daughter, Mrs. Dall; a friend, Mrs. Rosenman, wife of a Supreme Court justice; and Mr. Milgrim in a private room on the third floor. Half a dozen models showed off evening gowns. Mrs. Roosevelt and Mrs. Dall each bought one. Then a black-lace-and-chiffon dress was brought in, occasioning “oh”s and “ah”s. Mrs. Roosevelt and her daughter both wanted it. They both called chiffon “cheefong.” “Now Mummy, don’t forget that I get first chance at this,” said Mrs. Dall. Mrs. Roosevelt said, “Why don’t you get it in some other color, Sis, and I could have it in black.” Sis said, “But Mummy, I need an all-round black dress. My all-round black dress is all gone.” The subject was dropped for a while, but later settled quite simply. “I’ll take it in black,” Mrs. Roosevelt said quietly. Mr. Milgrim held up a black-wool dress with piqué collars and cuffs. “For you, Mrs. Dall?” he asked. She said, “Ugh, no! That’s for Mother. I hate those cuffs and collars.” Next, everyone moiled over a tan-and-gold brocade evening dress proposed for Mrs. Roosevelt. Mrs. Dall said tan would never do, and asked if they had the dress in blue and gold. While this was being hunted up, the same thing was shown in red and gold. Mrs. Roosevelt liked it but the others were against it. The blue and gold arrived and the others all liked it but Mrs. Roosevelt didn’t. Well, in the end they let the whole thing go. They’re probably still talking about it, though.

  Mrs. Dall now started to buy a flock of gowns for herself, and at this point Mrs. Roosevelt brought up the question of price. It was all whispery and embarrassing. Finally, Mrs. Roosevelt called a figure to Mrs. Dall in French. There was some conversation between the two in French—although the others in the room looked as if they might know French—and the matter was settled.

  That same afternoon, Mrs. Roosevelt bought her afternoon inaugural outfit at Arnold Constable. Velvety-finish stuff, girls, of Eleanor blue, which used to be Periwinkle blue but was renamed in honor of Mrs. Roosevelt. The collar of the dress comes high in back with crisscross drapery in front of the blouse. The coat, made of the same material in navy blue, is three-quarters length and hangs loose from the neck; it has a soft, fluffy collar and a tie. The hat, also navy blue, is to have a brim, although Mrs. Roosevelt usually wears turbans.

  Next, Mrs. Roosevelt went to Le Mouchoir, a shop on Madison Avenue around the corner from her home on Sixty-fifth Street, and picked out five dresses, all of various shades of blue. One, an afternoon dress, was of powder-blue silk. Mrs. Roosevelt referred to it as her “hand-shaking dress.”

  1933

  LONG RANGE — Wolcott Gibbs

  THE Tippenhauer Weather Service, 2–4 Stone Street, will forecast the weather for you three years in advance, making a sucker out of the government, which refuses to guess more than forty-eight hours ahead, and keeps hedging on that. The government is inclined to treat the Tippenhauer brothers (there are two, Louis and Henry) with a certain amount of detachment, calling them visionary, but at the moment they have more than two hundred clients around New York who take them seriously. The biggest customer is the Metropolitan Golf Association, which signed up a few weeks ago for one hundred and fifty affiliated clubs. They paid $360 for six months, getting one-month-in-the-future predictions. Consolidated Gas pays $125 a year for forecasts of the metropolitan weather six months ahead; the North German Lloyd pays $25 a year for predictions one month ahead; the University Club takes it on the same basis; Percy Rockefeller has been a subscriber since 1929 (six-months-in-the-future service). Weber & Heilbroner are another. Obviously, the gas company is interested because heat and cold affect gas consumption, Weber & Heilbroner because the weather influences the sale of Palm Beach suits, and so on. It’s hard to tell why Mr. Rockefeller or the University Club cares. Just want to be on the inside of things, probably.

  The service consists mostly of a big chart full of enough graphs to floor Einstein. We didn’t bother to try to make sense out of it, although Henry Tippenhauer, whom we went to see, says it’s simple enough. In a nutshell, he says, the weather on earth varies with the movement of neighboring planets, so all you have to do is watch things up there and you’ll know what to expect in New York, or anywhere else on earth. It’s not quite as easy as that, really, because comets are likely to show up in the solar system, monkeying up calculations.

  The Tippenhauer system was perfected in Haiti during the war, which Louis spent as an interned enemy alien. He was imprisoned until seven months after the Armistice, which ruined him financially but enabled him to work out his theory. When he was liberated, he announced he was prepared to forecast weather for any point on the earth’s surface as far as three years in the future. He began issuing forecasts a month ahead and worked up a nice little business, Haitians feeling strongly about the weather. In 1925, his brother Henry came here from Germany and established a Tippenhauer office. Louis stayed in Haiti and still does, using the astronomical equipment of the Observatory of Jesuit Priests in Port-au-Prince. He mails his findings to Henry here each week, and Henry has them printed and mailed to clients. There has been no profit yet from this office, but Henry says there will be.

  The Tippenhauers estimate their present accuracy to be between seventy-five and eighty-five percent, and hope to pull it up to ninety before long. They haven’t had any commercial inquiries yet for a prediction three years in advance. People aren’t interested in the weather more than a year ahead, Henry says, a little sadly.

  1933

  HIGH HATS — Joseph Mitchell, Charles Cooke, James Thurber, and Harold Ross

  FORTY years ago, when Max Fluegelman was an apprentice of fourteen, there were more than five hundred silk-hat makers in New York. Now there are only about twenty in the entire country; and fifteen of these work for Mr. Fluegelman, who is head man of the silk-hat world. I. S. Wyatt, one of the hatters in his shop, at 848 Sixth Avenue, is eighty and still turns out a mighty nice hat.

  Ever since
the nineties, the top-hat business has been going down. Even by present-day standards, business has been dullish for years, except for a brief spurt a few seasons back when college boys went in for them. Last year, Mr. Fluegelman, to stir up trade, went down to City Hall and gave a topper to the first June groom. He got a modest mention for it, but was annoyed the rest of the summer by Tammany men who came in wanting free hats. He offered them hats at cost, but they just went off grumbling. This June, he tried again. The groom (Alex Freirich, 7눕) got his picture in the papers, but Mr. Fluegelman wasn’t mentioned. So he’ll never do that again.

  Nothing, however, can take away from Mr. Fluegelman his claim to fame and source of great satisfaction: he has made a silk hat for every President since Theodore Roosevelt. The hatter had met Roosevelt when he was Police Commissioner, and when he was elected President, Fluegelman made the inaugural hat. When the current Roosevelt was elected, Fluegelman went up to his New York house and fitted him personally. It was kind of funny. Fluegelman uses a “conform-measurer,” a hellish-looking device with movable wooden flanges. It is placed on the head and the flanges stretch until they take the shape of the skull; then a cork-lined flap on top of the device is snapped down and a lot of spikes mark the shape of the head on a piece of paper. Roosevelt took one look at this thing and told Fluegelman he thought he would wear a soft hat—for the inauguration! Fluegelman was firm. He put the conform-measurer on Roosevelt’s head, set the flanges, pressed the flap, and said sternly, “I have made silk hats for every President since Theodore Roosevelt and you’re going to wear one, too.” “But I really think I’ll wear a soft one,” insisted the President. “I’ll make you one of each,” said the hatter, and he did, but the soft one was of such a frivolous shade of pearl gray that Roosevelt didn’t dare sport it on that dour day when he took the oath.

  The two Roosevelts are the only Presidents Fluegelman saw personally. He got the others’ sizes from secretaries, and skull shapes from photographs. The secretaries of all the Presidents except one wrote thank-you notes to Fluegelman for the hats. The exception was Coolidge. He wrote his own letter. The biggest head was Taft’s, 7¾ oversize, and the smallest Coolidge’s, 7눕. The other head sizes were: Wilson, 7¼; Hoover, 7½; and Harding and the two Roosevelts, 7⅜. Theodore Roosevelt’s head was what the trade calls pear-shaped, as is Franklin’s. All the other Presidents had ovals, except maybe Wilson, who leaned toward pear-shaped. Wilson’s hat, second smallest of the bunch, was too big when he got it and had to be altered. It was this hat, Mr. Fluegelman says, which caused Wilson to remark that Presidents’ heads got smaller after election, not bigger.

  Fluegelman used to make a lot of silk hats of the old stovepipe style for Oscar Hammerstein, who started a vogue for this style among actors. David Warfield used to drop in twice a year for a hat—felt, though, not high silk. “He talked to me in the same soft woice as he was on the stage,” says Mr. Fluegelman, who was born in Roumania. The great silk-hatter has a theory about the falling-off of toppers. He thinks the automobiles did it. Men liked to wear high hats in carriages, but somehow the automobile is no place for them.

  1933

  GREAT MEN — James Thurber

  PROBABLY nobody who has written to Lindbergh asking for his autograph has got one except Mr. Seymour Halpern, age nineteen, of 120-06 Ninety-seventh Avenue, Richmond Hill, Queens. Halp seems to be top autograph-hunter of the Americas. He’s got everybody you ever heard of except King George, the Prince of Wales, and Stalin. “I’ve only written them six times,” he says. He wrote Lindbergh sixteen times, always enclosing a photo of the Colonel to be signed; several were group photos on which everybody shown, except Lindbergh, had put his name. Halpern never got one of them back. Finally, he wrote to the late Senator Morrow and put his problem up to him; Morrow wrote back that Halpern might use his name in writing his son-in-law. The young man did, and the seventeenth photo came back, signed.

  Morrow’s letter was written a week before he died. Young Halpern has had strange experiences that way. Taft signed a group photograph of his Supreme Court only a few days before his last illness; Coolidge, who had already sent the Brooklyn youth various signatures, autographed the week before his death a pen sketch of himself by the young man. Nansen, the explorer, Schnitzler, the author, and Edward T. Sanford, a justice of the Supreme Court under Hughes, all died the day they wrote autographs for Halpern. Clemenceau’s signature was the last thing he ever wrote—Seymour has a note from the Tiger’s secretary saying so. In addition, these other men died within a day or two of writing their names for the young hunter: Joffre, Belasco, Vachel Lindsay, Nicholas Longworth, Nathan Straus, and Knute Rockne. Of course, they represent a small percentage of the notables Halpern has landed—four thousand and some odd—but they were enough to scare Eddie Cantor when, in calling on him, Halpern told about the deaths. Cantor paled for a moment, and then brightened. “Quick,” he said, “here’s George Jessel’s address!”

  Halpern’s biggest thrill came when he got the Pope, who wrote a small message of greeting on his photo. The young man sat right down and wrote Mussolini, who had ignored six or eight previous requests. He told Il Duce he had landed His Holiness, so what? A few weeks later, an attaché of the Italian consulate here called on Halpern (whose home is about an hour’s ride from Manhattan) and asked if he might see the Pope’s autograph. Halpern showed it to him—he keeps his prizes in his bedroom, on the walls, in files, on tables. The visitor scrutinized it closely, and nodded, with a touch of admiration. A few weeks later, Mussolini came across.

  One of Halpern’s stunts is to make sketches of great men from their photographs and send them to be signed. Queen Helen kept one of young Michael, the boy King, and the Kaiser kept the one of himself, each sending an autographed photo instead. This sketch trick also landed Einstein, Shaw (who wrote under the drawing, “Have I deserved this?”), and Franklin Roosevelt. Halpern called on Roosevelt when the latter was Governor. Roosevelt was tickled with the likeness of himself, and showed it to Mrs. R. and to the butler, both of whom were pleasant about it. Then he started to write “To my young friend” on the drawing, but couldn’t remember whether “friend” was spelled “ie” or “ei.” He asked Halpern, who didn’t know either, so then he wrote it “ie” and looked it up in a dictionary to make sure. He was right.

  Once when Greta Garbo was here, Halpern barged into her hotel and somehow or other got to see her. She wasn’t seeing young men then, being afraid they were noosepapermen, but she talked to Halpern for half an hour. He was so flustered he left without getting her autograph. He had, however, an interview he could have sold anywhere, but he didn’t think of that. To trap the intellectuals, the canny Halpern usually writes them asking how they account for their success. This system fetched Professor John Dewey and Dr. George Santayana; they both wrote conscientious pieces for him on success. All authors are pushovers, anyway. Halpern has never failed to land an author yet.

  Halpern even got a dog, the late Rin Tin Tin. The animal’s owner dipped the right front paw into some ink and pressed the paw on one of Rin’s photographs.

  1933

  THE BLUES MAN — James Thurber

  OUR mention of Ferde Grofé reminded us that we should look up W. C. Handy, who, as everybody is supposed to know, wrote the “St. Louis Blues.” He is playing around vaudeville theatres in the East now, in an act composed of old-timers. In his late fifties, he is a tall, sturdy, nearly bald Negro. He plays in the act for fun, as he doesn’t need the money, having done very well.

  In his teens, Handy was water boy for a gang of laborers building a dam at Muscle Shoals. On the side he played a trumpet in a band, and before he was twenty he got up a Negro quartet and they started out to sing their way to the World’s Fair in Chicago. When they got there, they found the Fair had been postponed for a year, so they sang their way to St. Louis and disbanded. Handy walked the streets for two weeks looking for work, and then wandered down to Alabama and got a real position, musical director of th
e State Agricultural and Mechanical College, at Huntsville. “It bored me,” he says. Finally he joined up with a minstrel company for six dollars a week, played the cornet in the parades, the bass viol in the pit, and led a quartet on the stage. In 1903, he had a nine-piece band of his own down in Mississippi. It was there that he first took down the notes of one of those mournful songs which Negroes had been singing all over the deep South for decades. “Gwine take morphine an’ die, gwine take morphine an’ die, gwine take morphine an’ die,” one of the most familiar of them ran. It was Handy who first called these songs “blues.” They differed from spirituals in that they were not for group singing and they were based on some murder or scandal, or simply the singer’s personal misery.

  In 1906, the restless Mr. Handy was in Memphis, where he organized a fifty-five-piece band. When a man named Crump ran for mayor of the city, he hired Handy’s band to play on street corners for him. Handy wrote a song for the campaign called “Mr. Crump.” It wasn’t flattering—the last line ’lowed that Mr. Crump could go ketch hisself some air—but Mr. Crump was elected. The song caught on in Memphis, and in 1912 Handy brought out a thousand copies, with the title “The Memphis Blues” and no words. He tried to sell it to New York publishers, but couldn’t until a daring man gave him a hundred dollars for all rights to it. The republication of this song, with new words, marked the beginning of the great blues phase the country has gone through. In 1914, Handy wrote his masterpiece, “St. Louis Blues.” More records of this song have been sold than of any other, and Handy’s own music company, on Broadway, sells fifty thousand copies of it a year in sheet music. In 1919, his “Yellow Dog Blues,” written four years before, sold more than a million when Victor brought it out on a record. In all, he’s written around sixty blues songs, his latest last year: “Way Down South Where the Blues Begin.” Royalties keep coming to him from the radio, talkies, and vaudeville. When his vaudeville act played the Paradise Theatre in the Bronx a few weeks ago, a singer in another act did “St. Louis Blues,” and in the movie running on the same bill an actress sang the opening line of it: “I hate to see de evenin’ sun go down.”