One of the clearest pictures in my mental memory book of the old days is that of Ross pounding away on his typewriter, trying, by speed and finger power, to get facility and felicity into his writing of Talk. “It should be like dinner-table conversation,” he used to repeat, but although he could be an entertaining dinner-table conversationalist, he was unable to hammer it into written prose. This was because he became an unreal Ross when he tried writing for the magazine, a strained and artificial personality, completely different from the undisguised and articulate one that still breathes in almost every line of the thousands of personal letters he wrote. He simply was not a New Yorker writer, never got better at it, and in the thirties gave it up, although he persisted in sticking into my copy now and then such pet expressions of his as “and such” and “otherwise.” His “and such” spots old “Talk of the Town” pieces like flyspecks. It was his idea of achieving ease. In one story, “The studio walls are hung with oils and watercolors, with here and there a gouache and silverpoint” became “The studio walls are hung with oils and watercolors, and such.” His sense of rhythm, often orally effective, failed him on the typed page.
Sometimes I secretly rewrote his clumsier rewrites of my Talk pieces and faked his R, which every piece of copy had to bear when it went to the printers. He was capable of awkward sentences that would have made him bellow if he had found them in someone else’s copy; such a prize monstrosity, for instance, as “A man in a brown suit named Jones came into the room.” Once he hastily changed “colloid” to “collide,” and I sent him a note of reproof and told him to look up the word in the dictionary. He did and wrote back, “It’s a hell of a complicated world.” Our clashes over Talk, frequent and lengthy in the beginning, gradually quieted down with his increasing interest in other departments of the magazine. But the late twenties were full of scraps between us. When, as something of an expert on the haunts of O. Henry in his beloved Bagdad-on-the-Subway, I wrote that he had last lived at the Hotel Caledonia, 28 West 26th Street, Ross yelled that I was wrong. F.P.A. had told him that it was the Hotel Chelsea, and to Ross the great Frank Adams was infallible. He sent a reporter to City Hall to check the vital statistics on Porter, William Sidney, and then slouched into my room to say grudgingly, “Okay on the Caledonia, Thurber,” not so much pleased that I had been right as sorry that Adams had been wrong. If I was a man who lost things, and he was sure I was, he couldn’t understand how the hell I could get facts straight.
The harassed editor, always beset by anxieties, worried about the rigor mortis of formula in “Talk of the Town” style, the repetition of “a gentleman of our acquaintance,” “a man we know,” “a Park Avenue lady,” and such. Anecdotes, of which we have printed thousands, many of them flat, some of them memorable, were like mosquitoes that pestered him continually. “Nobody in this whole goddam city seems to say anything funny except taxi drivers, children, and colored maids.” “We get too damn many about telephones and Macy’s.” And he would stick up a notice on the bulletin board beseeching everybody to turn in some fresh anecdotes. Once he paced for days, off and on, wondering what to do about a story my brother had sent in from Columbus, Ohio, dealing with Calvin Coolidge. It seemed that Mr. Coolidge had lost a nightgown in a Pullman sleeper and had written the company asking that it be returned or that he be reimbursed for his loss. This one never did reach print, because Ross could not figure out how to “hang it,” that is, how to account for our knowing about a fact that had originated in the Near Far West.
With rue my heart is laden for one anecdote printed in Talk. It reported an incident that occurred during a convention of monumentalists, or tombstone cutters, in White Plains. A local member of the craft had shown off his own handiwork during a tour of a cemetery with a visiting headstonist. As they left the cemetery, a whistling boy walked past them. “Son of that big granite job I showed you back there,” said the White Plains man. Ross loved it and ruined it with his rewrite. He not only dragged Rotary into it, for no good reason, but tinkered clumsily with the pay-off line, so that it came out: “Son of that big granite and iron job I showed you back there.” Ross had turned a deaf ear to the speech and, for all I know, may also have found out that there is always some ironwork in a granite monument.
When another superior anecdote was sent in—it is still known around the office to old-timers as the “grison anecdote”—I rewrote it and commanded Ross not to touch a single word. He read it, brought it into my office, said it was swell, looked as sad as if he had just lost a friend, and said, “Can’t I please put a comma after ‘My God’?” That comma, the record shows, is there. Here is the grison anecdote:
The Harold Wilcoxes, of Nutley, New Jersey, have a grison, which they keep in a cage on their porch. A grison is a very odd-looking South American weasel-like carnivore. The other day a house-to-house salesman for a certain brand of dainty soap rang the bell (without noticing the grison) and Mrs. Wilcox answered. He launched right into his well-rehearsed praises of the soap, in the course of which he finally did see the grison. He blanched, but kept right on: “It preserves the fine texture of the most delicate skin and lends a lasting and radiant rosiness to the complexion my God, what is that thing?”
One day in 1931 Ross came into my office to say, after a lot of silent pacing, “Are we important?” The voice was not that of the man who had kept repeating a year before, “We’re getting grim.” I didn’t encourage his implied ambition for higher things and longer pieces, but said, “We’re just a fifteen-cent magazine.” He left the room without saying anything, but half an hour later stuck his head in my door again. “I don’t think so,” he said, and went away.
The Talk meetings grew wearisome in the end and ran down like an old clock and stopped. “Thurber and White are sulky or surly or silent,” Ross once told somebody, “and we’re not getting anywhere.”
Once, at meeting’s end Ross said to me, “Have you got anything else to bring up, Thurber?” and I said I had, and I brought it up, and it turned out the others had just been discussing it. “Thurber is the greatest unlistener I know,” Ross later complained. Then there was the day, very near the end, when I wrote doggerel during a meeting and shoved it across to White. Ross had figured I was making notes on something he had said, but the thing got into the magazine, I can’t remember why, and there it is in the files, entitled “Bachelor Burton.” It runs like this:
Allen Lewis Brooksy Burton
Went to buy himself a curtain,
Called on Greenburg, Moe, and Mintz,
Bought a hundred yards of chintz
Stamped with owls and all star-spangled,
Tried to hang it, fell, and strangled.
My eight years of wandering the city for Talk ended in 1935, and my last visit piece was about a melancholy stroll along 14th Street a few days before Christmas that year. It ends like this: “We missed this year the vendors of those old-fashioned German Christmas cards with the tinsel snow and the rich colors. There used to be several of them around, and a sad man who played ‘O Little Town of Bethlehem’ on a flute. Nobody seemed to know what had become of them.” Most of the personalities of the Crazy Years between Lindbergh’s flight and Hitler’s heyday are dead and gone, and I had forgotten most of the tinsel snow and the colorful trivialities I gathered for “Talk of the Town” so long ago until I looked them up in the files the other day. There was a lot of stuff to hold the interest of the Gee Whiz Guy: Ely Culbertson pondering for forty-three minutes before playing a certain card in his celebrated bridge match with Sidney Lenz; the signature of Count Felix von Luckner, fourteen inches long and two inches high, in an enormous guest book; and an item about the thirty-six-ton meteorite that Admiral Peary brought back from Greenland and presented to the Museum of Natural History. “Geezus!” said Ross. “I hope they were expecting it.”
There was always something to catch and hold his eager interest in the foibles, frailties, and wonders of human nature. When a certain toothpaste’s “Beware of Pi
nk Toothbrush” campaign was on, it pleased but did not surprise him when we found out that a drugstore on Broadway had received more than forty requests for pink toothbrushes in one week. He was also tremendously amused when the Schrafft restaurants stopped selling Lucky Strikes because of the far-flung slogan, “Reach for a Lucky instead of a sweet,” only to discover, at the end of the year, that the sale of all kinds of sweets had gone up, not down, as the result of the cigarette advertising.
There were, also, many things that made him scowl and fret. One week I nodded, and rewrote an anecdote that someone had stolen from Homer’s Odyssey, one about the weary seafarer who starts walking inland with an oar over his shoulder and says he is going to keep going until he comes to a land where nobody knows what the thing is for, and there he will settle down. “Now Thurber’s falling for anecdotes a thousand years old,” Ross complained, after some classical scholar had written in about it. But I also caught several old ones that Ross had sent me to rewrite, among them the one about the little colored girl called Femily who, her parents told a visitor, had been named by the family doctor. The name which the doctor had put on the birth certificate was, as you may know, Female. Everybody knows now the story of the woman at the zoo who asked the caretaker, “Is that a male or a female hippopotamus?” to which the man replied, “Madam, I don’t see how that could interest anybody except another hippopotamus.” It was Harold Ross who brought that anecdote into my office, and it was the New Yorker that printed it first. Everybody in town stopped him and told him stories, and he became an expert in telling the old from the new. And how, in those years, he loved a fact—a great big glittering exclusive fact! When the King of Siam was operated on for cataract in 1933, Ross wanted to know if I could find out how much he had paid the great surgeon who performed the operation. He said it was rumored around town that the amount was as high as a hundred thousand dollars. It wasn’t until about seven years later that I brought him this particular fact, and laid it on his desk. The chamberlain of the king had inquired of the surgeon’s secretary what was the largest fee a commoner had ever paid him and was told the answer was ten thousand dollars. Thereupon the chamberlain wrote out a check for twenty thousand dollars and gave it to the secretary. The fact fascinated Ross, but the story was cold and seven years old, and he wouldn’t use it.
Ross gradually lost his high interest in “Talk of the Town,” but the best of it, carefully selected, would be a valuable record of the Wonderful Town in the bizarre second quarter of this century. In 1950 I wanted to write for Talk two or three pieces about Houdini, but Ross wrote me that he didn’t want to “piddle Houdini away on Talk of the Town.” This was the epitaph for the old journalistic department as I had known it. Four years earlier he had written me a letter that clearly reveals the dying of an old passion of his. It begins “Dear Jim.” (Ross rarely called men by their first names in talking to them in the office, but he often used first names in letters, and at social gatherings at his apartment, and otherwhere. Like me, both White and Gibbs were always a little surprised by the intimate salutation, and once Gibbs was disturbed. He had been in the hospital for several weeks, and Ross had visited him there. “I was about to have a third of my right lung taken out,” Gibbs wrote me, “and, as I know now, without a very good chance of surviving the operation. He came to see me the afternoon before they were going to work on me, and he called me Wolcott, pronouncing it almost right, and I swear to God it was the first time it really occurred to me that I might be going to die. I called him Harold back, but it was quite an effort in my condition.”) Here is the Ross letter, dated November 12, 1946:
The fault with Talk is mainly ideas. When you were doing the rewrite, we were getting better ideas. Shawn (peerless as an idea man) was on the job, and if I do say it myself, I was sparking some too. I was younger then. I’ve been very uneasy about the idea end of Talk for some time, now that the war is over and things aren’t so obvious. I look over the ideas every week and am discouraged. If you should know of a man who can spark ideas, there’s a job open for him, God knows.
It isn’t true that there are many reporters. At the moment, we are weak there too, unless two or three absolutely new men should develop a flair, like Charles Cooke’s (he also was peerless). We’ve had a couple of very good girls, but one got married and left town, and the other has gone on to working on longer pieces. We use reporters on long pieces more than we used to, but no more on Talk, I think, except for people trying out. We’re trying to find young talent of all kinds and it’s hard. And as to the writing, no one writer is making it a principal interest now, and I think that makes a difference. All the boys are doing Talk along with other things. Give me you, Shawn, and Cooke and I’ll get out a Talk department. . . . It’s up to God to send some young talent around this place, and He’s been neglecting the job. That’s the trouble.
When Ross wrote that, Bill Shawn, now editor of the New Yorker, was top man on the totem pole and remained there the rest of Ross’s life, thus setting a world’s endurance record. It was characteristic of H. W. Ross to forget that the two idea men in my day were Ralph Ingersoll and Bernard A. Bergman, who were never excelled, that Russel Crouse and Bob Coates had been two of the earliest and ablest Talk writers, and that the remarkable Haydie Eames Yates had been one of the first and liveliest reporters. Once, thirty years ago, I incorporated a line of her notes intact in one of my rewrites and sent it on to Ross. It was about a certain colorful celebrity and reported simply: “His love life seems as mixed up as a dog’s breakfast.” Ross blue-penciled it, of course, but the phrase remained a part of office lingo. As the years rode by, the love life of more and more New Yorker people became as mixed up as a dog’s breakfast—but that’s another story for another time.
Russel (“Buck”) Crouse had been doing most of the Talk rewrite when I joined the staff. He would attend the Talk meetings, and then take a folder of stuff home with him to do in his spare time. As conductor of a column on the Evening Post called “Left at the Post” he had a job he didn’t want to give up for the full-time anonymity of Talk, which in those days was signed “The New Yorkers.” When Ross piled most of the Talk rewrite on me, in addition to my other work, he decided to save money by letting Crouse go and, as often happened, he did this while Crouse was on vacation. It wasn’t until Buck came back and called at the office for his weekly folder of data that he found out that he wasn’t going to do Talk any more. “I phoned Ross and asked him why he hadn’t let me know I was out,” Crouse says, “and Ross said, ‘I was too embarrassed.’ ”
Buck Crouse had started two New Yorker departments, “That Was New York” and “They Were New Yorkers,” and he had astounded Ross one day by telling him there were too many profiles about big successful Americans, and there ought to be one about a failure. Ross glared at him and said, “You’re crazy,” but Crouse turned in a profile of a typical Bowery derelict, and Ross read it and liked it and printed it. That was H. W. Ross—the editor who said you were crazy one day and then agreed with you the next.
Charles H. Cooke’s career on the New Yorker was unique, which means it was like everybody else’s, only different. The time of each of us there was peculiar in its own way, to come as close to definition as may be. Cooke was hired by Ingersoll at thirty-five dollars a week, worked twelve years, day and night, and never got more than sixty dollars. He turned in some twelve hundred Talk stories. No other reporter ever equaled his energy, or came close to his output. To Ross, whom he has called “the irascible, lovable genius,” he was, more than most other men, a prize and a puzzle, a person to praise one day and lash out at the next. “I’m surrounded by piano players,” Ross once said to me. “Why we haven’t got a piano in this joint I’ll never know.” He meant not only Cooke, who wrote a book on piano playing, but Peter Arno, a real professional; Shawn, who once played a piano in a place in Montmartre; John McNulty, who had been a pianist in a silent movie theater; and Andy White, a parlor performer on the keys.
Cooke ha
s sent me a long, fascinating summary of his Talk experiences, and the places he visited and the men he interviewed would make a book in itself, a book he has now and then started to write, but given up for the dozens of other activities he has crammed into his life, as novelist, short story writer, lieutenant-colonel in the Air Corps, and researcher in Washington. After the war, he wanted to get back on the New Yorker, but Ross told him, “I long ago decided not to keep any reporter for more than five years.” What he meant by that I’ll never know. Cooke had been a peerless reporter for him for twelve years. I’ll never know, either, why he told Cooke, in 1946, he was going to give him the job of Talk editor, and then didn’t do it. This happened at one of the many times when Ross admonished God for not sending him just such a man as Charles Cooke. Maybe Cooke will solve it all when he gets around to his own history of the New Yorker, and I hope he does.
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