It takes two or more women to surround the average man, but Harold Ross could look as beleaguered as Custer in the presence of only one. He let an editor go in the early years because the man brought his wife into Ross’s office to meet him. Ross looked up and there she stood, seeming to be closing in on him from all sides. Very few women, even among those employed there, could enter the inner sanctum of old Surrounded. Of the privileged females, my second wife, Helen, was one. We walked into his office one day unannounced, and he didn’t start or turn pale. He had known her for quite a while by then, liked her personally, relaxed in her company, and admired her because she had been a magazine editor and once got out two monthlies all by herself, from cover to cover. More than once he grumbled, “I got fifty men and women I don’t even know walking around here with pieces of paper in their hands, getting in each other’s way, and Helen Thurber used to get out five magazines a month all by herself.” It was on that day in his office that Ross, discussing some guilty pair, said, “I’m sure he’s s-l-e-e-p-i-n-g with her.” He was the only man I’ve ever known who spelled out euphemisms in front of adults.
Ross had not liked the idea of my getting married again when he first heard about it, and he asked Bob Benchley to “talk to Thurber. See if you can’t do something about it.” Benchley did talk to me one evening, over cocktails, in his suite at the Royalton. He was repeating, I knew at once, Ross’s concern: that if I became happily married, something bad would happen to my drawings and stories. Benchley was married only once and told me he didn’t believe in second marriages. A man had his wife, whatever their relationship might be, and that was that. The rest was his own business. A woman friend of Bob’s once gave him a drawing of mine for Christmas. It showed a man hiding in a tree while a woman on the ground is calling for him, and the donor of this Christmas gift said, “The man is poor Bob, and the woman is all those women who keep after him all the time.” Later Bob met Helen, liked her, and said to me in an aside, “Why don’t you marry the girl? What are you waiting for—Ross’s permission?”
All that Ross ever said to me about Helen, before he met her, was, “Is she quiet?” Afterwards, I suppose, he was sorry, in his fashion, that he had told Benchley to see what he could do about changing my mind. It must have gratified him no end when the people in my drawings suffered no noticeable beatification except in one spot I did deliberately to scare him, which showed a man and a woman and a dog drifting dreamily among the stars; and he was further reassured when a piece called “A Couple of Hamburgers” indicated no lessening of tensions in my prose war between men and women.
We were often at Ross’s apartment, especially during his second marriage—to the former Frances Clark, mother of his only child—the marriage in which he was still young enough and well enough to seem comfortable at home, if I can use such big words as comfortable and home about him. Slowly he turned every apartment into an annex of his office and a gathering place for his men friends. “I got too many personal possessions,” he would say. There were only a few he wouldn’t have got rid of, out of a sense of escape, and among these was a collection of Gideon Bibles sent to him, from time to time and from most American cities, by his great friend Joe Cook when he was on tour. Ross kept his possessions, including his house near Stamford, but toward the end he lived in a suite at the Algonquin, looked after by a male nurse. He kept rejecting his third wife’s efforts to take care of him, partly because he wanted to be let alone when he was sick. Being looked after, or cared for, at such times only fretted him. He didn’t want any woman around. When, toward the end, we called on him in his Algonquin rooms, he complained about being “fussed over” and said, “I usually get rid of women callers by saying I have to lie down. One woman didn’t go, even then. Two hours later when I got up, she was still sitting out here.” After his death, it is said, an envelope containing a considerable amount of cash was found in a safety deposit vault marked “Getaway money.” It meant, I think, get-away-from-the-world-of-women money.
He didn’t want to get away from work, and kept at it until his final visit to the hospital in Boston where he died. One of his last projects, and one of his keenest interests, was the five-part profile on Duveen by S. N. Behrman. He had one of the galley proofs in his suite on our last visit there. He had put it aside momentarily to eat what he called supper. Its nature shocked Helen a little, as it would have any woman. He was eating sardines right out of the can. “It’s practically the only thing I can taste,” he said. I still keep thinking, against my will, of that brief visit, and of the tired, cloyed, but dogged efforts of Ross to fight against the disease that was killing him, and I like to turn from it to brighter thoughts of him.
I remember his panic the evening he got home from work and was told that he was going to be a father. He leaped to the phone, called a woman friend who gave him the name of an obstetrician, and then called the doctor, who came running. After a brief examination, the doctor came out of the bedroom, as annoyed as Ross was distraught. “It is possible that your wife is pregnant,” he said, “but it’s too early to tell for certain. As it happens, this is not an emergency, as your call indicated. I could actually have taken time to eat my dinner.”
“Judas, I didn’t know,” Ross told me the next day. “I thought you had to act fast.”
Ross’s daughter, Patricia, was one of the great things in his life, and the only female who could handle him with ease. When she was only seven he brought her to the Algonquin at lunchtime to show her off to his friends. She had a good time and didn’t want to leave. “I have to get back to the office,” he told her as she lingered in the lobby talking to people. “Just wait,” she told him, and he sat back in a big chair, with a deep sigh of restive resignation, and waited. Like any other father of a first daughter, he was sure that a girl in her infancy was a fragile object. “Can she breathe, lying on her stomach like that?” he asked her nurse when the baby was not yet one year old, and again, “Is it all right for them to sleep with their hands above their head? I think my mother said it’s bad for them, but I forget why.” I remember the day he tiptoed into Patricia’s room to show her to my mother. She quieted his fears about the baby’s fragility. “They usually outlive their husbands,” she told him, “and they always outlive their fathers, so I wouldn’t worry about her.”
The Gee Whiz Guy became utterly enthralled by the miraculous phenomena of conception, gestation, and parturition, and was always lecturing to one or more of us on the subject. This was his “being clinical,” that attitude of mind toward the functional which was privileged—in conversation, that is, not in type. When he had been a father for less than a year he went to a party one night at the home of Charles MacArthur and Helen Hayes in Nyack. “I had gone out into the kitchen to shake up some fresh drinks,” MacArthur told me, “and when I came back I stood there in the doorway listening to Ross. He was haranguing our guests, most of them fathers and mothers, and some of them grandparents, about the goddam miraculous cycle of menstruation. ‘Nature is wonderful,’ Ross was saying. ‘The damn thing stops at the right time and then resumes without any interference or help.’ ” The MacArthur guests were, I gathered, mostly men and women of the world of literature and the theater, and far from being shocked or bored, they listened in fascination to this lecture by the editor of the New Yorker. Charlie ended his description of the scene this way, “Ross has the charm of gaucherie.”
At about that same time, the spell of the miracle of birth still being upon him, he came over to me during a party at the apartment of Elliott and Norma Nugent. “I understand there’s an obstetrician here, a friend of yours and Nugent’s,” he said. “Can we get him in a corner for a minute? I want to ask him a clinical question.” The obstetrician, one of America’s most distinguished, had been a fraternity brother of Elliott’s and mine at Ohio State. I got him and Ross together in a corner. The clinical question he asked him was a hypothetical one, it turned out, and it had been troubling Ross’s waking hours. He wanted to know how
many women could be impregnated, theoretically, all things being equal and all women being nubile and willing, by a single seminal ejaculation. The doctor told him 300,000,000. I had never seen Ross look more profoundly thoughtful. “Geezus, nature is prodgidal,” he said, “nature is prodgidal.”
One morning, circa then, I found Ross, worried and stoop-shouldered, pacing a corridor, jingling those pocket coins. He came right out with his current anxiety. “Goddam it, I can’t think of any man that has a daughter. I think of men as having boys, and women as having girls.”
“I have a daughter,” I said, “and I wanted a daughter.”
“That’s not natural, is it?” he demanded. “I never heard of a man that didn’t want a son. Can you name any, well, you know, goddam it—terribly masculine men with daughters?” After protesting that I could outmasculine him the best night he ever saw, I said that Morris Markey, a masculine Virginian, had a daughter, and so did Joel Sayre, once described by Stanley Walker as “the wandering behemoth . . . a great man.” Ross brightened, but the sun and moon of reassurance shone in his face when I came up with “Jack Dempsey has two children, both girls.” His day was saved from the wreckage of despair, but he still had one final depressed word. “Goddam it, I hate the idea of going around with female hormones in me.”
Ross kept going to Boston during his last few years, first to see a specialist about his ulcers, and then to endure the torment of the bronchoscope and other ordeals after tests had shown that he had a minimal cancer. On one of these visits the man who knew almost every actress of his time called on one of his favorites backstage at a theater in which she was starring in a play translated from the French. Ross said to her, “Is the author of the play in love with you?” She turned away from her dressing-room mirror, her pretty eyes wide and her pretty lips parted, and said, “He’s sixty!” Ross was fifty-eight then, with less than a year to live, and it hurt him deeply to have his age group so tactlessly brushed aside as men in whom love has turned to ashes. I was fifty-six at the time, and not crazy about what the lady said myself. I told him she never would have said it if she had realized he was nearing sixty. “She thinks you’re still in your prime, as young as you look and as boyish as you talk.”
Ross ran a big hand slowly over his face. “The hell with it,” he said, and put, or tried to put, his mind on something else.
UNCOLLECTED PIECES
An American Romance
THE LITTLE MAN in an overcoat that fitted him badly at the shoulders had had a distressing scene with his wife. He had left home with a look of serious determination and had now been going around and around in the central revolving door of a prominent department store’s main entrance for fifteen minutes.
The knot of annoyed shoppers had been augmented to a sizable crowd by the time a floorwalker arrived and rapped sharply on the glass panels as they flashed by. “Here,” he called. “Here, stop this.”
But the little man kept going around and around.
“Use the other doors,” called an assistant department superintendent who came up. “There are plenty of other doors.”
He was unheeded and the crowd continued to gather about the relentlessly whirling door.
The store carpenter was sent for and he tried vainly to slip a wedge under the door and arrest its progress. A policeman attempted to hurl himself into the door and was badly bruised.
“It’s not a case for the police,” said one onlooker. “For shame. This man is a patient, not a criminal. It’s a case for a psychoanalyst.”
A psychoanalyst was called.
“How old are you?” he demanded.
The little man did not answer. Nor did he answer when the specialist asked him where his boyhood had been spent, and if he had ever been in a cyclone and if he had ever had a severe shock while out walking.
Soon the newspapers heard about it and the crowd was pushed aside to make room for the photographers. The little man had now been going around for two hours.
At this point a richly dressed gentleman in a greatcoat shouldered through the crowd and spoke loudly.
“I’ll give him $45,000 if he can go for another two hours,” he said. “I’m a big chewing gum magnate from the West.”
Bets of ten to one were immediately placed that the little man couldn’t do it. He was such a little man.
At five minutes of eight, just before the additional two hours ended, firemen were helping hold back the crowd. Flares were lighted. As the store clock sounded eight, the little man fell out of the doors, exhausted. Willing hands supported him to a nearby hotel where the management had thrown open the Presidential suite. By midnight the little man had received more than $100,000 worth of offers from the vaudeville and moving picture companies.
“I did it for the wife and children,” he said.
The New Yorker, March 5, 1927
A Visit from Saint Nicholas
IN THE ERNEST HEMINGWAY MANNER
IT WAS the night before Christmas. The house was very quiet. No creatures were stirring in the house. There weren’t even any mice stirring. The stockings had been hung carefully by the chimney. The children hoped that Saint Nicholas would come and fill them.
The children were in their beds. Their beds were in the room next to ours. Mamma and I were in our beds. Mamma wore a kerchief. I had my cap on. I could hear the children moving. We didn’t move. We wanted the children to think we were asleep.
“Father,” the children said.
There was no answer. He’s there, all right, they thought.
“Father,” they said, and banged on their beds.
“What do you want?” I asked.
“We have visions of sugarplums,” the children said.
“Go to sleep,” said mamma.
“We can’t sleep,” said the children. They stopped talking, but I could hear them moving. They made sounds.
“Can you sleep?” asked the children.
“No,” I said.
“You ought to sleep.”
“I know. I ought to sleep.”
“Can we have some sugarplums?”
“You can’t have any sugarplums,” said mamma.
“We just asked you.”
There was a long silence. I could hear the children moving again.
“Is Saint Nicholas asleep?” asked the children.
“No,” mamma said. “Be quiet.”
“What the hell would he be asleep tonight for?” I asked.
“He might be,” the children said.
“He isn’t,” I said.
“Let’s try to sleep,” said mamma.
The house became quiet once more. I could hear the rustling noises the children made when they moved in their beds.
Out on the lawn a clatter arose. I got out of bed and went to the window. I opened the shutters; then I threw up the sash. The moon shone on the snow. The moon gave the lustre of mid-day to objects in the snow. There was a miniature sleigh in the snow, and eight tiny reindeer. A little man was driving them. He was lively and quick. He whistled and shouted at the reindeer and called them by their names. Their names were Dasher, Dancer, Prancer, Vixen, Comet, Cupid, Donder, and Blitzen.
He told them to dash away to the top of the porch, and then he told them to dash away to the top of the wall. They did. The sleigh was full of toys.
“Who is it?” mamma asked.
“Some guy,” I said. “A little guy.”
I pulled my head in out of the window and listened. I heard the reindeer on the roof. I could hear their hoofs pawing and prancing on the roof. “Shut the window,” said mamma. I stood still and listened.
“What do you hear?”
“Reindeer,” I said. I shut the window and walked about. It was cold. Mamma sat up in the bed and looked at me.
“How would they get on the roof?” mamma asked.
“They fly.”
“Get into bed. You’ll catch cold.”
Mamma lay down in bed. I didn’t get into bed. I kept walking around.
“What do you mean, they fly?” asked mamma.
“Just fly is all.”
Mamma turned away toward the wall. She didn’t say anything.
I went out into the room where the chimney was. The little man came down the chimney and stepped into the room. He was dressed all in fur. His clothes were covered with ashes and soot from the chimney. On his back was a pack like a peddler’s pack. There were toys in it. His cheeks and nose were red and he had dimples. His eyes twinkled. His mouth was little, like a bow, and his beard was very white. Between his teeth was a stumpy pipe. The smoke from the pipe encircled his head in a wreath. He laughed and his belly shook. It shook like a bowl of red jelly. I laughed. He winked his eye, then he gave a twist to his head. He didn’t say anything.
He turned to the chimney and filled the stockings and turned away from the chimney. Laying his finger aside his nose, he gave a nod. Then he went up the chimney. I went to the chimney and looked up. I saw him get into his sleigh. He whistled at his team and the team flew away. The team flew as lightly as thistledown. The driver called out, “Merry Christmas and good night.” I went back to bed.
“What was it?” asked mamma. “Saint Nicholas?” She smiled.
“Yeah,” I said.
She sighed and turned in the bed.
“I saw him,” I said.
“Sure.”
“I did see him.”
“Sure you saw him.” She turned farther toward the wall.
“Father,” said the children.
“There you go,” mamma said. “You and your flying reindeer.”
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