Somebody has asked me, “Do you think the New Yorker was successful because of, or in spite of, Harold Ross?” The answer is: The New Yorker was created out of the friction produced by Ross Positive and Ross Negative. He tried, and failed, to make an executive editor out of me, and wanted to do the same thing to Gibbs. This was Ross Negative at its worst. He had the good sense, from the first, to let White alone. This was Ross Positive at its most perceptive. He got from this one trio, in the end, the “productivity” he was after from the very first. How much productivity he lost, through the years, because of the mixture in him of the perspicacious, the perverse, and the preposterous, nobody could ever measure. The files of the magazine, during his years as editor, are the only dependable record of Harold Wallace Ross Positive and Negative. My own conclusions are, at best, only one man’s footnotes, personal and debatable.
“Sex Is an Incident”
ONE lovely day in October, 1933, Harold Ross, the unimperturbable editor of the New Yorker, went running to Katharine White, his office confidante in times of emotional crises, with a new and wild alarm: “Now Thurber’s playing with dolls!” What had scared him could have been figured out quickly and calmly by a lesser man, a man untrained in the difficult art of how to approach everything the hard way. My daughter’s second birthday was coming up, and I had bought her a big, beautifully dressed French doll. One of the girls at the office had taken it out of its box to show to the others, and had then set it up on my desk with its arms extended toward the door. Ross, banging into the office, deeply worried by the state of the world, or a comma, or something, had come face to face with what he regarded as new evidence that I was getting curiouser and curiouser, and likely to stop writing for his magazine any minute.
Mrs. White had a much easier time allaying his fears about me that day than she had had four years before when Ross lurched into her office one morning wailing, “Now Thurber’s going with actresses!” My private life, like that of everybody else on the magazine, was a constant concern and puzzle to Ross. Married in 1922, separated in 1929, later reunited, and then divorced, and married again to a second wife, I was too much for Ross to keep track of, and my status at any moment disturbed him. The night before he plopped his new worry into Katharine’s lap, he had seen me at Tony’s with an actress, but only one actress, and had sat down at our table. My companion, who didn’t like to drink, had a glass of lemonade on the table in front of her, but Ross, gesticulating recklessly, knocked it over. Then he ordered the lady another lemonade and knocked that over, too. This is not exaggeration, but simply the cold, damp facts.
Sex, in or near the office, in any guise or context, frightened Ross. Sex was, to him, an ominous and omnibus word that could mean anything from the first meeting of a man and a woman, through marriage and the rearing of children, to extra-marital relations, divorce, and alimony. When he swore, as he often did, that he was going to “keep sex, by God, out of this office,” and then added, “Sex is an incident,” he meant hand-holding, goo-goo eyes, fornication, adultery, the consummation of marriage, and legal sexual intercourse. Whether or not Ross knew it, there was a wistful and comic military-headquarters quality in his oft-repeated directive about sex. He brusquely ordered it confined to quarters, or assigned it to KP duty to keep its mind off itself, or simply declared all the offices and personnel of the New Yorker magazine off-bounds for the biological urge. Sex, normal and abnormal, legal and illicit, paid little attention to Ross and his imperious commands. It hid from him, and went on about its affairs as it had been doing for thousands of years.
There were many office marriages during Ross’s lifetime, among them the unions of Peter Arno and Lois Long, Andy White and Katharine Angell, Bernard Bergman and Frances Dellar, who had been Lois Long’s assistant. Lois, whom Ross had been lucky enough to steal from Vanity Fair at the very start of the New Yorker, had once been an actress. She knew just how to embarrass the girl-shy editor, and loved to do it. The first time I ever saw her, the day after I went to work on the magazine, she came into his office with the devil in her eye. Ross said hastily, “Don’t kiss me, Long. This is Thurber. He’s going to make some sense out of this place.” Lois Long, alias Lipstick, alias L. L., who could tell more about a man in two minutes than Ross sometimes found out in two years, plainly doubted it. Arno was not the only New Yorker who fell in love with Lois Long. A middle-aged gentleman, who was in his twenties at the time, has written me that after Lois became Mrs. Arno, he was heartbroken and for several days and nights did little except play a record of “Who?” over and over on his Victrola. This lovelorn fellow, by the way, was the man who first suggested that Arno should turn the Whoops Sisters into a series. (It ran with great success until Ross decided the uninhibited sisters were becoming too drunken and bawdy for his family magazine.)
There had been a large reception room, with easy chairs, a couch or two, and screens, in the old offices in West 45th Street, but Ross had once had a shattering experience there, and he ruled out a reception room when he moved to the present quarters of the magazine. Men and women now meet in a widening of the hall, sparsely furnished, just as you step off the elevator on the nineteenth floor. It’s as open as a goldfish bowl.
Ross’s shattering experience, his first dismaying brush with sex in the office, occurred during the first summer of the magazine’s existence. A young woman, one year out of Vassar, called on Ross with a letter of introduction from an old friend of his. He read the letter in his office and then ventured out into the reception room to interview the fair applicant for a job. She might have gotten it if she hadn’t said, in conclusion, “Of course, I realize what would be expected of a girl in a place like this—I mean in addition to her regular work.” Ross blenched, I have no doubt, mumbled something, turned tail, and fled from the room. Then he called a meeting of all the male members of the staff, of whom there must have been at least seven or eight at the time, and blamed them for what had just been said to him. “You’re giving this magazine a bad name around town,” he roared. “People are getting the wrong idea about it and about me.” Nobody knew what he was talking about, but they were all used to that.
One of the chill traditions of the New Yorker, and I think it grew out of Ross’s determination to dehumanize or at least de-emotionalize the place, was soon sensed by all of us when we went to work there. Almost nobody was ever introduced to anybody else, and there was never a general assembly of the staff to talk things over, for propinquity must have seemed to Ross a danger outweighing any benefits of staff cooperation. St. Clair McKelway had been working on the magazine for three months before we met. Lillian Ross had been there a couple of years before I met her on the stairs with someone who introduced us. Nobody has caught this cool state of unfamiliarity among co-workers better than Edmund Wilson, who became the magazine’s literary critic in 1944. This is from a letter he wrote me recently:
It was only after Russell Maloney’s death that I realized that the person I had been thinking was Maloney must actually be somebody else. Since I was seeing him still in the corridors, I knew that it could not be Maloney. I thought that Geraghty was Lobrano for years. That girl with the built-in tape-recorder who did those articles on Hemingway and the Stephen Crane movie—about whom I had a certain curiosity—I have never been able to identify or get anyone to introduce me to.
I must have been working in the office for years before Ruth Flint identified me correctly, and I should undoubtedly never have known her if she had not been a friend of my wife’s. At about the time I started in, a new messenger to the printer’s appeared. He was old-fashioned-looking and shabby genteel, carried a briefcase, wore a black derby and an old dark overcoat; his face was pallid and faded, and he walked with averted eyes; his features were rather refined. He looked, as Ruth said, like someone who might have absconded from an English bank and come to the United States. She thought that this man was me. When she told me this, I became rather curious about him and found, on inquiry, that she was so far r
ight that he was actually a disbarred Virginia lawyer. At one time I played with the idea of hiring him to impersonate me and deliver the lectures and after-dinner speeches for which I am sometimes asked.
Wilson was used to the office luncheons of the New Republic staff, and to even more intimate fraternization on the old Vanity Fair, where, on certain rainy days, charades were actually played by men and women of the staff. The game was instituted by the editor, Frank Crowninshield. Games at the New Yorker, or the merest suggestion of games, would have given Ross the jumps or an even worse seizure. Furthermore, the New Yorker people were not gregarious. White was a solitary luncher, for example, and I had been on the New Yorker a year before I had lunch with him. Most of us played our own versions of Post Office and Pillow here and there about town, but there was nothing doing in this area at the New Yorker. Oh, I could tell you a few stories, but I won’t. There was another cause for the ungregariousness of the people. The first of a series of three or four New Yorker parties was held in the offices, in the American tradition, but there was so much spooning and goo-goo eyes, and drinking and worse, that Ross issued an edict saying that all office parties would be held elsewhere after that.
H. W. Ross was married three times to women, and once, and for keeps, to the New Yorker magazine. He differed from most men in that his office, not his home, was his castle. His inviolable, and formidable, selfness had no permanent fusion point with any woman. The only entity he ever fused with was the New Yorker. It was the deadly and victorious rival of each of his three wives. Neither I nor any other man ever heard Ross tell a dirty story, but when he became what he called “clinical” he could take your breath away with his forthrightness about the sexual nature, exploits, and disabilities of friends and acquaintances, true or just guessed at. I heard him only once in my life talk about a conquest of his own, and that time he was what Mencken used to call “spifflicated.”
Ross, as I have said, divided women into good and bad, but there was a subdivision of the bad, which, while not exactly good, was somehow privileged. These were the women of great talent, especially in the theater, whose deviations from convention and morality in their private lives were, by the very nature and demands of talent, excusable—“I guess,” he might well have added.
One night in the 1920’s Ross persuaded a country bumpkin to go with him to Texas Guinan’s night club—he never took me there, perhaps because he was afraid I would lose my innocence and the winsome, childlike quality of my prose. Between marriages, and not yet permanently “off the sauce,” as O’Hara puts it, he was in a merry mood, and all of a sudden, to his companion’s dismay, jumped up from his chair and crossed to a table where two couples were drinking and talking and watching the show, whatever it was. The charm of one of the ladies had caught Ross’s fancy and he made a gallant, though misguided, effort to bend over and kiss the back of her hand. The kiss ended up on the nape of her neck. Chairs were pushed back and the two men at the table stood up. They did not enter into the spirit of Ross’s merriment. An experienced bouncer appeared. The experienced Miss Guinan disappeared. The bouncer, stiff and firm, helped Ross and his friend into their overcoats and gave them their hats. Fifteen seconds after the editor’s kiss, he and his companion were out on the sidewalk. Ross was bewildered and hurt. “I thought it was gay,” he said dejectedly.
A few years after that, during a hiatus in both Ross’s married life and mine, we made the rounds of a few night spots in the company of Burgess Meredith and Franchot Tone. Some time after midnight, in one of the gathering places of café society, I told Ross I would demonstrate how gentlemen manage a proper approach to the Strange Lady at the Next Table. She happened to be one of the more famous post-debutantes of her day, and Tone and I, arm in arm, went over to her table, bowed, and presented ourselves. We were not thrown out of the place, but we did get a cold and wordless rejection, becoming in a lady of quality. Her breeding and her hauteur were untouched by both my dark sinister Latin charm and Tone’s boyish demeanor and frank open countenance. The next day I found Ross stalking the corridors of the New Yorker, his shoulders sagging, his mood depressed. To my “What’s the matter now?” he replied, “Goddam it, I have a certain reputation to keep up in this town, and I spend one whole night helping you and Franchot Tone chase girls around night clubs.” Once again the Great Multiplier of Menace had turned one girl into girls and was worrying about the bad effect of all women on all men.
About this same era he came upon me one evening in the Oak Room of the Algonquin having drinks with three or four other persons, including Lilyan Tashman, whom I had never met before and never saw again, and Humphrey Bogart, a drinking companion of mine since well before he played Duke Mantee in The Petrified Forest and went on to Hollywood and fame. Ross wouldn’t sit down with us, and I detected all the signs of his discomfiture. The next day he said to me, “What the hell are you going around with Tashman for? She’s way out of your league, Thurber.” I explained that I was not going around with Miss Tashman, and that my woman companion the evening before was a housewife and homebody and the mother of four children. “A likely story,” said Ross, and then, “Well, the hell with it. Now in this casual of yours here, you use a colon where anybody else would use a dash. I’m not saying you can’t do it. I’m just bringing it up.” After an argument, he agreed to let the colon stand, for he was, as I have said and now say again, at once the most obdurate and reasonable of editors.
The first time I met Ross’s mother, she suddenly said, “Harold was always bashful with the girls, even as a little boy.” Harold was embarrassed and shushed her instantly with “Don’t tell Thurber things like that. He blabs everything. Besides, it isn’t true.” It was true, though. Harold Ross employed the technique I once called the “Get-Right-at-It Move” in a series of drawings I did for the New Yorker, “The Masculine Approach.” He printed all of the drawings except that one, which showed an impassioned male wrestling with a girl on a sofa, the gleam of Pan in his eye. The troubled gamin from Aspen, Colorado, had no subtleties of approach to the female, no routine of sweet nothings, no romantic build-up. Before marriage, and between marriages, he was, various lovely and desirable ladies have told many of us, inclined to make a sudden and unexpected dive at them, which usually ended in chaos and the laughter of the love object. He seemed to believe that “sweep her off her feet” was to be taken literally, in the physical sense. Once, to a laughing lady he had brought down with a veritable Catfish Smith football tackle, he moaned, “What did I do wrong?” This Lochinvar, American Western style, was not alone in his shock tactics; they were practiced on ambushed damsels by a poet I know, a young publisher I used to know, and an English novelist I once met who has written of “tumbling lassies in the bracken,” which puts him one up on Ross, for bracken is rougher than carpet.
It doesn’t take a psychiatrist to realize that the sudden pounce, similar to what was known in the old six-day bicycle races as a “jam,” is the natural reverse of the coin of masculine shyness, especially in the virile Western type, unlettered in the literature of love. There is desperation and high impatience in it, as well as desire, a restless determination to get it all over with in a smoke screen of blustery action. Ross was ever afraid that sex would forget it was an incident and become an episode, and then an interlude, and, before long, the whole story, God help us all, of a man’s life.
The psychic trauma of Ross’s experience with the Vassar girl in 1925 stayed with him to the end. He jittered at the sight of an unfamiliar female face in any of the offices, and told Katharine White, as the New Yorker increased in size and more and more women typists and secretaries were employed, that he had to find a woman of strong character and firm hand to ride shotgun on the goddam girls on the editorial floor. He found what he was looking for in Daise Terry, in 1929, and she is still there, her hand as firm as ever, though she has ten times as many girls to control as there were thirty years ago. The editor carried a lot of his “problems of a personal nature” to her. W
hen my daughter was born, spang in the middle of the afternoon of Wednesday, October 7, 1931, Ross turned to Miss Terry with a nervous monologue that must have gone like this: “I hear Thurber has just had a daughter. I hope somebody’s looking after him. Send Mrs. Thurber some flowers and say on the card they’re from the New Yorker. I thought babies were born early in the morning or late at night. I’m surrounded by women and children. I have to look after everybody’s personal life. Sometimes I wonder how the hell I ever get out a magazine. I hear the baby only weighs seven pounds—is that enough? I know damn well I weighed nine pounds. It has something to do with diet now, and is probably a fad of the doctors.” Then he must have stared about him morosely and harped on a theme he never left unharped on long. “This place isn’t a business office, it’s a sitting room, and it’s becoming a, by God, nursery.”
Ross didn’t like it at all when he found out, bumbling into what we called the Goings On room, that the girls there brewed both tea and coffee every afternoon, and he was appalled when he bumped into a Coca-Cola machine that had been installed while he was away. “If we have a candy counter, I don’t want to know where it is,” he bawled. “I heard somebody’s daughter running up and down the hall yesterday, as if this were a goddam playpen. I understand she fell and hurt herself. I hope they found the arnica—oh, we must have a medicine chest somewhere in this house!”
At about that time a series of my drawings called “The War Between Men and Women” was running in the New Yorker, and I got a telegram one day from Dr. Logan Clendenning in St. Louis that read, “Help. I’m surrounded by women.” I showed it to Ross, and he was off on his well-worn lecture again. “Doctors don’t know what it is to be surrounded by women. They can turn women patients over to nurses, or psychiatrists, or something. What we need here is a registered nurse and a trained psychiatrist. It’s the only office in the world where paste and scissors are kept in desk drawers. The women do that. And if they don’t show up for work, you can’t ask why. I wish the hell I was back on the Stars and Stripes—it’s the only place I ever really enjoyed working.”
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