When he got an idea fixed in his head, it usually stayed fixed, and time and truth could not dislodge it. He had decided thirty years ago that Wolcott Gibbs was Alice Duer Miller’s nephew, and the fact that Gibbs was actually her cousin never registered in Ross’s mind, although he was told this fact a dozen times. Gus Lobrano had worked for Town and Country before coming to the New Yorker, but Ross got the notion that he had been on Harper’s Bazaar, and nothing Lobrano said through the years could correct this misconception. Ten years before Lobrano died in 1956, Ross said to him about something, “I suppose you learned that on Harper’s Bazaar.” Gus sighed resignedly and said, “Yes, and it wasn’t easy.”
Harold Ross had an exasperating way of pinning quick tags and labels on people he met, getting them cozily pigeonholed, and sometimes completely wrong. Ben Hecht, for example, was a police reporter at heart, Elmer Davis a corn-belt intellectual, Alan Dunn “the only recluse about town I know.” When Morris Markey, the New Yorker’s first reporter-at-large, was assigned to write a piece about what goes on behind the gates at Grand Central, he had to postpone his visit because of the illness of the station master, but for ten years Ross would say, when someone suggested an assignment for Morris, “He couldn’t get into Grand Central.”
After Ross found out, the hard way, that I was not an administrative editor, he had to think up a tag for me to make my task of writing the “Talk of the Town” department as hard as possible for both of us.
“Thurber’s worked too long on newspapers,” he told somebody. “He can’t write Talk the way I want it. He’ll always write journalese.” I don’t think Ross had ever read anything I had written outside the New Yorker. It wasn’t much at the time, but I did have a scrapbook of unjournalese pieces I had sold to Harper’s “Lion’s Mouth,” the D.A.C. News, Sunset Magazine, and the Sunday World and Herald Tribune. What stuck in Ross’s head was that I had covered City Hall for the Columbus Dispatch, been central Ohio correspondent for the Christian Science Monitor, worked for the Chicago Tribune in France and the Evening Post in New York, and once contributed weekly jottings on Ohio politics to the Wheeling Intelligencer. So it was that in the new Ross-Thurber relationship of editor and rewrite man there were several months of another kind of ordeal, full of thrust and parry, doubt and despair, sound and fury. It wasn’t until the issue of December 24, 1927, after three months of slavery, that a Talk piece of mine appeared which Ross had praised and not rewritten. It was a “personality” piece called “A Friend of Jimmy’s,” about William Seeman, intimate of Mayor Walker, brother-in-law of Rube Goldberg, canner of White Rose salmon, and crony of Harold Ross. It is no more worth bothering with than that old prospectus, and sticks in my mind only as the second turning point in my relationship with Ross.
Every Tuesday Afternoon
THE EARLIEST New Yorker ritual that any oldster can remember was the weekly Tuesday afternoon art meeting. Philip Gordon Wylie was the second person in the history of Harold Ross’s magazine to “hold the artists’ hands,” as the editor always described the task of dealing with artists and their drawings. Before Wylie, there had been a young woman, but, like most women, she made Ross nervous and he asked Wylie to fire her, while he (Ross) was at lunch. Two hours later Ross phoned Wylie to ask if the deed had been done, and he was told the lady had left with two weeks’ salary, and then Ross came back to the office. He never had, to put a blunt point on it, the guts to fire anybody himself, with one exception. In the early thirties, Scudder Middleton, then the official handholder, was emboldened one night at the Players Club to say to Ross, “How am I doing at the office?” and Ross, emboldened by Scotch, snapped, “You’re fired!” Then, to cover his own embarrassment, he blustered that he was going to get Peter Arno on the phone and fire him, too. It was way after midnight, and Ross’s call aroused Arno from sleep. He promptly bawled Ross out and ordered him never to wake him up again.
In the very beginning, the art meeting was attended by Ross, Wylie, and Rea Irvin. The invaluable Irvin, artist, exactor, wit, and sophisticate about town and country, did more to develop the style and excellence of New Yorker drawings and covers than anyone else, and was the main and shining reason that the magazine’s comic art in the first two years was far superior to its humorous prose. At the art meetings, Wylie would hold up the drawings and covers, and Irvin would explain to Ross what was good about them, or wrong, or old, or promising. Rea had done the first cover—the unforgettable dandy with the monocle, known intramurally as Eustace Tilley, a name invented by Corey Ford—and for months it remained the composition most like the sort of thing Ross was after, the sort of thing Rea Irvin spent several hours every Tuesday teaching the “corny-gag editor-hobo” (Wylie’s description) to understand. Ross learned fast, didn’t always see eye to eye with Irvin, often stubbornly had his own way, but was never truly comfortable if his art editor was not at the meetings.
Phil Wylie remembers that Al Frueh did the second cover, and a pretty, shy girl named Barbara Shermund the third one. He recalls, too, the advent of Reginald Marsh, Johan Bull, and Covarrubias, and above all, Curtis Arnoux Peters, a young man not long out of Yale and playing the piano in a jazz orchestra in the West Fifties, who came into the office one day wearing sneakers and carrying a sheaf of drawings signed Peter Arno. Ross was later to write him a note that read, “You’re the greatest artist in the world.” Under Irvin’s supervision and encouragement, other now famous cartoonists began appearing with their work, changed some of it at his quiet suggestion, took his ideas about their future stuff.
One of the last parties Ross ever gave was a cocktail affair at the Barberry Room in honor of Rebecca West, whom he always considered one of the two finest journalists of her sex. The other was Janet (Genêt) Flanner, the New Yorker’s Paris correspondent almost from the start. I remember only one artist at the West party, the late Helen Hokinson, for whom Ross had great admiration and affection. “Artists don’t know anybody and they never go anywhere,” he was still grumbling. “They stay home at night, drinking soft drinks in cold sitting rooms, and watching home movies.” This Ross exaggeration was, and is, certainly applicable to many New Yorker cartoonists, but there were several others who went everywhere and knew everybody. The editor himself was socially close to Arno, Al Frueh, John Held, Jr., Rea Irvin, Gluyas Williams, Rube Goldberg, Wallace Morgan, and Ralph Barton, whose suicide in 1931 was a grievous blow to the editor (“When I called on Barton it was like talking to a man with a gun in his hand”).
One of my 1927 chores, on top of everything else, was that of holding the artists’ hands, but I didn’t like it and was not good at it, and soon told Ross the hell with it. I think my first assignment in this touchy area came when Ross asked me to phone Al Frueh and tell him his caricature of Gene Tunney was not a good likeness. Frueh and I had never met, and when I gave him Ross’s message he said, “You can go to hell,” and hung up on me. Later I got to know and, like the rest of us, to love Al Frueh, who once came upon me in my garage in Connecticut, sitting ten feet in front of my Ford and trying to draw it head on. “You can’t do that, Thurber,” said Frueh, out of his vast knowledge and experience as a draftsman. “You’d better draw it from the side.” I took his advice.
For several months in 1927 I was one of the editors that attended the art meetings, and every now and then after that year I used to drop in as an unofficial observer. In 1929 a sense of order was brought to the meetings by the advent of Miss Daise E. Terry, who comforted Ross by keeping track of covers and drawings (at one time with the assistance of a youngster named Truman Capote). Miss Terry (“She’s vigilant about art,” said Ross) also took down his comments and criticisms, mainly unfavorable, in shorthand. The art meetings began after lunch and often lasted until nearly six o’clock. One week, during the thirties, finished drawings, rough sketches, and typed suggestions reached a total of some twenty-five thousand. “We got a bank of drawings big enough to last two years,” Ross once said, “but there aren’t enough casuals to las
t three weeks.”
In the center of a long table in the art meeting room a drawing board was set up to display the week’s contributions from scores of artists, both sacred cows and unknowns. It was never easy, and still isn’t, for a new artist to break into the New Yorker. Some of those whose names have become well known tried for months, or even longer, sending in dozens of rough sketches week after week. If an unknown’s caption, or sketch, seemed promising, it was often bought and turned over to an established staff cartoonist. Arno usually got the cream of the crop; the wonderful Mary Petty has never worked from any idea except her own; James Reid Parker did most of Helen Hokinson’s captions; and other artists either had their own gagmen or subsisted on original inspiration, fortified by captions and ideas sent in by outsiders or developed by the staff. In the early years, Andy White and I sent to the meeting scores of captions and ideas, some of them for full-page drawings, others for double-page panels for Gluyas Williams and Rea Irvin. If a caption didn’t suit Ross—and he was as finicky about some of them as a woman trying on Easter bonnets—it was given to White to “tinker.” Gibbs and I did tinkering, too, but White was chief tinkerer to the art meeting.
No phone calls were ever put through to the meeting room on Tuesday afternoon, and only three or four of us could enter unannounced and watch without upsetting Ross. A dozen years ago I began writing a play about Ross and the New Yorker, a comedy whose three acts took place in the art room. When I showed the first draft of Act I to a famous man of the Broadway theater he said, “I have a sense of isolation about that meeting room, as if the characters were marooned there and there was nobody else in the building. There must have been people in the other offices on the floor, but I don’t feel them.”
There were plenty of people outside that quarantined room, surging about the offices and up and down the corridors. If there was an unusual racket of some kind, Ross would say to Miss Terry, “Go out and stop that, and don’t tell me what it was.” Once it was a workman with a pneumatic drill, who had begun tearing up the floor of the reception room. The area he was ripping up had been marked off by chalk lines. I think Ross wanted a staircase put through to the floor below. The work was not supposed to start until after office hours, but the man with the drill had begun too soon, not realizing that the magazine’s working day was from ten to six. According to Ralph Ingersoll, I increased the racket by banging metal wastebaskets up and down the halls, as a form of protest. Miss Terry managed to quiet the drill and me, and to clear the corridors of bystanders.
Ross at one time had his own office soundproofed and thought of extending the system to the art meeting room, but someone at Riggs Sanitarium, where he had spent a couple of weeks resting up from the wrangle and jangle of life, advised him against it. Ross told White and me when he came back, “ ‘You can exclude noise by soundproofing your mind,’ this man said. You don’t hear racket if you know how to concentrate. Soundproofing walls is catering to weakness.” One summer day, to demonstrate how this theory worked, he called me into his office. “They’re putting up a building on the corner,” he said, “and there must be twenty automatic drills going right now.” He dismissed this tiny irritation with a jaunty wave of his hand and began discussing some office problem that annoyed him. Suddenly he whirled and bawled at the racket outside, “Stop that!”
The art meeting always began with the display of finished covers in color, one at a time. They were bought and scheduled six months in advance, so that in June we were studying Christmas covers. Ross sat on the edge of a chair several feet away from the table, leaning forward, the fingers of his left hand spread upon his chest, his right hand holding a white knitting needle which he used for a pointer. Miss Terry remembers the day he brought it in, having picked it up nobody knows where. She later bought a dozen more of them, so everybody could have one. Ross liked to have a lot of everything he needed, for nothing irritated him so much as not to be able to put his hand instantly on what he wanted. There was always a full carton of Camels, for instance, in the drawer of the long table, and it was kept replenished by his secretary, like the carton in the drawer of his office table. For a while he had used a pencil as a pointer, but he was afraid of marking up the drawings. Then he tried a ruler, but the goddam thing wasn’t right, and fate directed him to the knitting needles that solved this little problem.
He became, I think, by far the most painstaking, meticulous, hairsplitting detail-criticizer the world of editing has known. “Take this down,” he would say to Miss Terry, and he would dictate a note of complaint to the creator of the drawing or cover under consideration. The memory of some of his “sharpshooting”—I don’t know who applied the word, but it was perfect—will last as long as the magazine, and perhaps even longer. I cannot vouch for the truth of his query about a drawing of two elephants gazing at one of their offspring with the caption, “It’s about time to tell Junior the facts of life,” but, valid or apocryphal, it has passed into legend. “Which elephant is talking?” he is supposed to have asked. I was on hand, though, when he pointed his needle at a butler in a Thanksgiving cover depicting a Park Avenue family at table, and snarled, “That isn’t a butler, it’s a banker.” Suddenly, the figure was, to all of us, a banker in disguise, and Ross dictated a note asking the artist to “make a real butler out of this fellow.” He once complained of a blue sky, “There never was a sky like that.” It is not true, as rumor has it, that he said, “It’s delft, or Alice, or some goddam shade.” The only blues Ross could have known are light, sky, and navy.
On another day, he doubted that the windows of the United Nations Building were anything like those shown in a drawing, and he ordered that a photographer be sent to take pictures of the windows. My favorite of all his complaints, in a career of thousands of them, was reported to me by Peter De Vries, who for years attended the art meetings and still helps go through the “rough basket,” skimming off the best of hundreds or thousands of sketches. The cover on the board showed a Model T driving along a dusty country road, and Ross turned his sharpshooting eye on it for a full two minutes. “Take this down, Miss Terry,” he said. “Better dust.”
Idea drawings, as they were called to distinguish them from captionless spots, were raked by Ross’s sharpshooting fire from the wording of the captions to the postures and expressions of the figures and the shape and arrangement of furniture or trees, or whatever else was in them. Sometimes it seemed to me and the rest of us that Ross was bent on wringing the humor out of a drawing by his petulant objections to details. This attitude reminds me of Gibbs’s celebrated single-sentence criticism of Max Eastman’s book, The Enjoyment of Laughter, whose advance proofs Ross had asked him to read. Gibbs wrote in a memo to Ross: “It seems to me Eastman has got American humor down and broken its arm.”
Ross rarely laughed outright at anything. His face would light up, or his torso would undergo a spasm of amusement, but he was not at the art meeting for pleasure. Selecting drawings was serious business, a part of the week’s drudgery, and the back of his mind ever held the premonition that nothing was going to be funny. Just as he searched writers’ copy for such expressions as Dorothy Parker’s office-celebrated “like shot through a goose,” he scanned drawings for phallic symbols and such, and once found one, he thought, in a hat I had drawn on a man in one of my covers. He was imagining things, but I had to change it anyway.
The most prudish neighbor woman in H. L. Mencken’s Bible belt could not have taken exception to any New Yorker drawing I can remember, including Arno’s husbands and wives in bed and the series he did of a man and a woman on, or near, a porch swing in what was intended to be a compromising clinch, the while they talked such passionless words as “Have you read any good books lately?” Arno’s first conception of this entanglement was warm without being torrid, it seemed to me, but it gave Ross the galloping jumps, and under his coaching and coaxing Arno finally drew a couple approximately as sexually involved as a husband and his sister-in-law at a christening.
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nbsp; One realistic detail of the kind that upset Ross was overlooked by him and the others, out of understandable ignorance. It was a Garrett Price that was published in the issue of December 20, 1930, and it showed a young woman on an operating table saying to a young surgeon entering the room, “Why, Henry Whipple, I thought you were still in medical college!” The scrub nurse in the drawing is holding a tray upon which lies what is known to the surgical profession as a double-spoon curette, an instrument used in, as Ross might put it, you know what. Wylie later wrote Ross kidding him about this, but if old Afraid-of-the-Functional exploded, I didn’t hear about it. For one thing, the scene was what he called “clinical,” which took some of the curse off the realistic and functional. However, he did direct Scudder Middleton to ask Price, “Were you trying to put something over on us?” Price is not that kind of man or artist, and just the other day he told me that his father was a doctor and he had drawn the curette from memory of instruments in his father’s office. “I didn’t know what it was for,” he said on the phone (like many other famous New Yorker artists, Garrett Price is one I’ve never met).
Every drawing was a task for Ross, and a few were real problems. It took courage for a humorous magazine to publish the grim Reginald Marsh that showed a woman holding up her little child so that, over the heads of an assembled crowd, it could witness a lynching. Among the submissions that were too much for Ross was a full page of two Arab fighters leaving a field upon which bodies are scattered, one of the Arabs saying, “Some of my best friends are Jews,” and there was another, whose central figures were two divinity students, their eyes bright with recognition, walking toward each other in Grand Central Station with outstretched hands, above the caption “Well, Judas Priest!” I substitute the name for that of the deity because I share Ross’s deep conviction that major blasphemies have no place in comedy. Ross hated to lose this drawing, though, and he sent it to White for tinkering. Andy tinkered it into a line that he told Ross comfortingly would not offend the church. It was “Well, I’ll be a son-of-a-bitch!” Ross chuckled about that all day and then sent White a memo reading, “No, but I’m afraid it would offend American mothers.”
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