by Lillian Ross
Reassured, our man went to hear Mlle. Piaf a couple of nights later, and turned up at the office the next morning radiant. “The best number she did,” he said, “was where an accordionist goes off to the war and gets killed. His sweetheart listens to the music of another accordion and goes nuts. Then there is one about a woman tourist who has one big night with a sailor in a port where the ship stops, and the sailor goes off on another ship and gets drowned. For an encore, she sang that old honey about the woman who falls in love with a Foreign Legion soldier—she hasn’t even had time to learn his name—and he gets killed and they bury him under the warm sand. I haven’t had such a good time in years.”
1947
LIVE MERCHANDISE — Herbert Warren Wind and Spencer Klaw
PLAIN old reliable Gimbel’s is now selling live ponies, and we’ve been down and looked over the stock and had a talk with Gimbel’s plain old reliable pet-buyer, Mr. Henry Fried, whom we found vigilantly at his post in the pet shop, on the eighth floor, fondly eying a sleepy-looking little black-and-white pony named Cinderella. With negligible prompting, Mr. Fried told us that Gimbel’s has the largest pet shop in the country and that it was the first department store to sell pedigreed dogs, back in 1935. “Practically speaking,” said Mr. Fried, “we’re the first department store to sell ponies, too.” He lowered his voice, and continued, “I think Macy’s did have one or two ponies in its Barnyard Shop during the war, but, pshaw, they didn’t amount to anything. This is a major merchandising operation.”
Gimbel’s, Fried said, got the idea of selling ponies from a man named Clark Garvey, who made the rounds of the pony farms early this fall taking options on ponies until he figured he’d cornered eighty-five per cent of this year’s output, or approximately six thousand ponies. Gimbel’s made a deal with Garvey for an option on twenty-five hundred ponies, with the understanding that for the time being he wouldn’t let any other local store, including Macy’s, put his ponies on sale. The ponies are mostly shipped, in good-sized crates, straight from the farm to the customer, but Gimbel’s keeps fifteen or so on hand in a Brooklyn stable for quick suburban delivery, and one will always be on display at the store. For $349, F.O.B. New York, a customer gets a Shetland or Welsh pony (the Welsh ponies run a trifle larger than the Shetlands), a halter, a prefabricated wooden stable that seemed to us about the size of an upright piano, a health certificate signed by a veterinarian, and a money-back guarantee that the pony won’t get the staggers or drop dead for at least thirty days.
The first pony to be installed in the pet shop was a red Shetland named Pinto, who arrived shortly before Thanksgiving and was placed in the charge of an elderly groom who had been specially hired to keep a high gloss on the merchandise. Gimbel’s hadn’t yet got around to advertising ponies when a man who had come into the store for a Schick razor saw Pinto and bought him on the spot. Cinderella was moved in from Brooklyn to take Pinto’s place, an ad appeared in the papers, and the next day a hundred people turned up to get further details. Most prospective metropolitan purchasers aren’t sure whether they can legally keep a pony on their premises. As a rule, Fried told us, anyone with an acre or more is in the clear, but people who live on small lots in the suburbs are likely to find that zoning regulations forbid the keeping of livestock. Some buyers are taking ponies without stables ($249), with the intention of boarding them out. Twenty-seven ponies were sold during the first week, along with several pony carts ($249 per cart), which was regarded as an auspicious start.
Cinderella attracted considerable attention at the store, and, as a matter of fact, moved out of stock the day after we were down to see her; Mr. Fried called us up to tell us about it. Meanwhile, one man had dropped by every day at lunchtime with a couple of red apples for her, and children had to be forcibly prevented from feeding her bubble gum. A buyer may specify the breed, color, and size of pony he wants, and if he wishes to look at some in addition to the sample on hand, he may go over to the stable in Brooklyn. The questions most frequently asked about ponies at Gimbel’s are: What do you feed a pony? (Ans.: Hay, salt, and, if he’s worked hard, some oats and some bran.) How much does his food cost? (Ans.: Ten to thirty cents a day, according to how active he is.) Will he be uncomfortably cold in an unheated stable? (Ans.: No. The colder the better for a pony.) Is he gentle and well trained? (Ans.: Yes, for both riding and driving.) How much of a load can a pony pull? (Ans.: Four or five children, if they’re not too large.) How do you clean his teeth? (Ans.: With a sponge.)
1947
RUGGED TIMES — Lillian Ross
WE had a talk the other day with Norman Mailer, whose novel “The Naked and the Dead” has been at the top of the best-seller lists for several months now. We met him at Rinehart & Co., his publishers, in a conference room that had, along with other handy editorial equipment, a well-stocked bar. We’d heard rumors that Mailer was a rough-and-ready young man with a strong antipathy to literary gatherings and neckties, but on the occasion of our encounter he was neatly turned out in gray tweeds, with a striped red-and-white necktie and shined shoes, and he assured us that he doesn’t really have any deep-seated prejudices concerning dress. “Actually,” he said, “I’ve got all the average middle-class fears.” He thinks the assumption that he hasn’t got them grew out of his meeting some of the literati last summer when he was wearing sneakers and an old T shirt. He’d just come from a ball game, and it was a very hot day. “I figured anybody with brains would be trying to keep cool,” he said.
Mailer is a good-looking fellow of twenty-five, with blue eyes, big ears, a soft voice, and a forthright manner. Locating a bottle of Scotch in the bar, he poured a couple of drinks. “If I’m ever going to be an alcoholic,” he said, “I’ll be one by November 2nd, thanks to the rigors of the political campaign. I’ve been making speeches for Wallace. I’ve made eighteen so far and have another dozen ahead of me. I’m not doing this because I like it. All last year, I kept saying that the intellectuals had to immerse themselves in political movements or else they were only shooting their mouths off. Now I am in this spot as a result of shooting my mouth off.” In general, Mailer told us, the success of his novel has caused him to feel uncomfortably like a movie queen. “Whenever I make an appearance,” he said, “I have thirty little girls crowding around asking for my autograph. I think it’s much better when people who read your book don’t know anything about you, even what you look like. I have refused to let Life photograph me. Getting your mug in the papers is one of the shameful ways of making a living, but there aren’t many ways of making a living that aren’t shameful. Everyone keeps asking me if I’ve ever been psychoanalyzed. The answer is no, but maybe I’ll have to be by the end of another five years. These are rough times for little Normie.”
Mailer’s royalties will net him around thirty thousand this year, after taxes, and he plans to bank most of it. He finds apartments depressing and has a suspicion of possessions, so he and his wife live in a thirty-dollar-a-month furnished room in Brooklyn Heights. He figures that his thirty thousand will last at least five years, giving him plenty of time in which to write another book. He was born in Long Branch, New Jersey, but his family moved to Brooklyn when he was one, and that has since been his home. He attended P.S. 161 and Boys High, and entered Harvard at sixteen, intending to study aeronautical engineering. He took only one course in engineering, however, and spent most of his time reading or in bull sessions. In his sophomore year, he won first prize in Story’s college contest with a story entitled “The Greatest Thing in the World.” “About a bum,” he told us. “In the beginning, there’s a whole tzimes about how he’s very hungry and all he’s eating is ketchup. It will probably make a wonderful movie someday.” In the Army, Mailer served as a surveyor in the field artillery, an Intelligence clerk in the cavalry, a wireman in a communications platoon, a cook, and a baker, and volunteered, successfully, for action with a reconnaissance platoon on Luzon. He started writing “The Naked and the Dead” in the summer of 1946, in a cottage outs
ide Provincetown, and took sixteen months to finish it. “I’m slowing down,” he said. “When I was eighteen, I wrote a novel in two or three months. At twenty-one, I wrote another novel, in seven months. Neither of them ever got published.” After turning in the manuscript of “The Naked and the Dead,” he and his wife went off to Paris. “It was wonderful there,” he said. “In Paris, you can just lay down your load and look out at the gray sky. Back here, the crowd is always yelling. It’s like a Roman arena. You have a headache, and you scurry around like a rat, like a character in a Kafka nightmare, eating scallops with last year’s grease on them.”
Mailer has an uneasy feeling that Dostoevski and Tolstoy, between them, have written everything worth writing, but he nevertheless means to go on turning out novels. He thinks “The Naked and the Dead” must be a failure, because of the number of misinterpretations of it that he has read. “People say it is a novel without hope,” he told us. “Actually, it offers a good deal of hope. I intended it to be a parable about the movement of man through history. I tried to explore the outrageous propositions of cause and effect, of effort and recompense, in a sick society. The book finds man corrupted, confused to the point of helplessness, but it also finds that there are limits beyond which he cannot be pushed, and it finds that even in his corruption and sickness there are yearnings for a better world.”
1948
COCTEAU — Geoffrey Hellman
JEAN COCTEAU, the French poet, novelist, artist, playwright, actor, critic, scenario writer, and motion-picture director, flew here recently to attend the Manhattan première of “The Eagle with Two Heads,” the latest of his films to be released in this country. Advised that his English is limited, and knowing what our French is, we kept an appointment with him, in his hotel suite, with misgiving. Our anxiety was needless. A shapely lady in a green sweater greeted us in English and ushered us into Cocteau’s sitting room, where he stood, poised in a gray flannel suit and beige moccasins, as tense as a man on a tightrope. Another lady, pretty, protective, and wearing a stylish black-plumed hat, sat on a sofa, and a young man with a pad and pencil sat on a chair; both of these responded in English when we were introduced. “Working conditions in France are bad,” Cocteau said, in French. “Film is old, sound equipment is old. We admire Hollywood’s mass-production methods, but we can’t adopt them. We have few specialists—I work like a laborer myself.” The young man with the pad and pencil translated this. “Mr. Cocteau has to do everything with his own hands,” amplified the lady with the hat. “He is his own stage manager,” said the sweatered lady. “It’s like a family,” said the hatted one. “Everyone pitches in.” “He personally fiddles with the lights,” said the interpreter. “Sometimes I sweep the studio out myself,” said Cocteau. “He repairs eyelashes,” said the Sweater. “He goes up and down ladders,” said the Hat. “He supervises all details of costume,” said the Sweater. “He’s like a painter,” said the Hat. “He uses the movies as a vehicle for the soul.” The Sweater gave the Hat a searching look and departed for an adjoining room.
With some valuable help from the interpreter, Cocteau went on to tell us that France is like a large village and that he feels like a peasant bringing his films to New York. “America has always given me courage,” he said, in reference to this country’s reception of such past pictures of his as “Blood of a Poet” and “Beauty and the Beast.” “Hollywood needs a laboratory. An experimenter is hampered there today, because it’s closed to risk. But it’s the risk that pays off.” “His films never lose money,” said the Hat. Cocteau made “The Eagle with Two Heads” and “Les Parents Terribles,” another picture (based on a play he wrote in 1938) that he has just finished, for a French company. He has formed his own company for his next film, which will deal with Orpheus and Eurydice. He lives alone in a small house in the country, near Fontainebleau. “All the young creative people in Paris are interested in the cinema,” he told us. “Here I don’t think they are. The cinema is a great art, but in America they have made an industry out of it.” “It is the modern art,” declared the Hat. “It is very young,” said Cocteau. “What is fifty years in the life of a Muse?” This Muse’s name, he said, is Cinema.
The lady in the sweater returned to the room. Cocteau observed that Cinema often keeps him busy from six in the morning till midnight, that forty of his drawings are being shown at the Hugo Gallery here, and that he lately completed a ten-by-twelve-foot sketch for a Gobelin tapestry of the same size. His subject was Judith bearing the head of Holofernes. It will take three years to weave the tapestry, and it will go to the Louvre. “I deliberately chose an old-fashioned, Beaux-Arts–Prix de Rome theme,” he said, “but my execution was not academic.” “Mr. Cocteau is exceptional,” said the Sweater. The object of her admiration and ours, a delicately featured man of fifty-seven with long, thin fingers, paced about the room as he talked, gesturing with his hands and occasionally coming to rest on a chair, over one arm of which he threw a leg. He wore a brown silk tie with his initials woven on it in cream-colored letters. “Everyone in America seems so youthful,” he said. “They all drink milk, as though they were still near their mothers. No Frenchman drinks milk.”
1949
COLE PORTER — Geoffrey Hellman
WE called on Cole Porter at his air-conditioned Waldorf Towers suite the other afternoon and found him spruce in a lightweight, vestless gray sharkskin suit, a black silk tie, a giant red carnation, and white cotton socks. “I go through life in paper clothes, in icy rooms,” he said. “I never wear an overcoat. My wife, who has an apartment across the corridor, puts on a fur coat when she comes in here.” Mr. Porter advised us that his white socks, habitual daytime accessories with him, are worn in memory of his grandfather, J. O. Cole, a West Virginia mining-and-timber bigwig, who always wore white socks, and that he and Mrs. Porter have separate apartments not only because of different tastes in temperatures but because of different hours. He works best after midnight, and often auditions people and plays the piano until early in the morning. Of late, a couple of nights a week, he has been on hand at the Columbia Records studio while the cast (other than the dancers) of “Kiss Me, Kate” has been recording an album of the show’s songs (other than the first-act finale). This will require both sides of six twelve-inch records. The recordings start at twelve-fifteen and often run till four, the Columbia people providing sandwiches and hot chocolate. “I watch the lyrics for occasional lapses,” Mr. Porter said, “and supervise cuts that have to be made so as to combine two numbers on one side, and so forth.” The lyrics, some of which have been bowdlerized on the air, will be presented in their pristine shape in the album, except that “her goddamned nose” has been modified to “her doggone nose.” One night, the recording was held up for nearly an hour because of a strange, adventitious sound, detectable only on the records, which was finally traced to a harp pedal in want of oiling.
Porter, a small man, sat like Humpty Dumpty on a big green sofa during our talk. Although he walks with a cane, he has recovered astonishingly well from the shattering accident he had in 1937, when a horse he was riding on Long Island fell on him. He has had more than thirty operations on his legs. “Dr. John J. Moorhead saved my life,” he said. “He made me go back to work when I was still under drugs, and he encouraged me to take cruises to the Caribbean— I love travelling—when I had to be landed in ports in a lifeboat and then pushed around in a wheelchair.” Porter wrote the lyrics for “Leave It to Me” in 1938, when he was still practically bedridden. He gets some of his best ideas while shaving, dressing, or being driven in a car. “I’ve never known such a nice company as that of ‘Kiss Me, Kate,’ ” he said. “No troubles, no fights.” He is going to California next week to start auditioning for a second “Kiss Me, Kate” company, which—if all goes well—will open in San Francisco in July, move to Los Angeles in August and to Dallas in September, and settle down in Chicago in October. “They’re having that mysterious thing they call the Texas Centennial in Dallas,” he said.
“They have it every year.”
Mr. Porter’s living room is animated by a well-mannered black dog named Pépin le Bref—a schipperke, presented to him by Merle Oberon—and is hung with paintings by artists ranging from Dali to Grandma Moses. Grandma Moses lives not far from a place Porter owns near Williamstown, Massachusetts, where he has a library of several thousand classical records. The Porters go there many weekends and have been friends of Grandma Moses since the time, a decade ago, when they bought some of her paintings for five dollars each. Porter is a Yale man, and the author of “Bingo” and “Bulldog,” as all who witnessed a 1946 movie based (roughly) on his life know, but he regards most Yale graduates as colossal bores, exempting from this indictment only his brothers in Scroll and Key, a fashionable senior society. “We used to meet two evenings a week,” he said, “and, according to tradition, were supposed to march straight home, in formation, afterward. We changed all that the year I joined. Instead of going home, we marched to the Taft Hotel, where we listened to the dance orchestra.”