I finally told Ross, late in the summer, that I was losing weight, my grip, and possibly my mind, and had to have a rest. He had not realized I had never taken a day off, even Saturday or Sunday. “All right, Thurber,” he said, “but I think you’re wearing yourself down writing pieces. Take a couple of weeks, anyway. Levick can hold things down while you’re gone. I guess.”
It was, suitably enough, a dog that brought Ross and me together out of the artificiality and stuffiness of our strained and mistaken relationship. I went to Columbus on vacation and took a Scottie with me, and she disappeared out there. It took me two days to find her, with the help of newspaper ads and the police department. When I got back to the New Yorker, two days late, Ross called me into his office about seven o’clock, having avoided me all day. He was in one of his worst God-how-I-pity-me moods, a state of mind often made up of monumentally magnified trivialities. I was later to see this mood develop out of his exasperation with the way Niven Busch walked, or the way Ralph Ingersoll talked, or his feeling that “White is being silent about something and I don’t know what it is.” It could start because there weren’t enough laughs in “Talk of the Town,” or because he couldn’t reach Arno on the phone, or because he was suddenly afflicted by the fear that nobody around the place could “find out the facts.” (Once a nerve-racked editor yelled at him, “Why don’t you get Westinghouse to build you a fact-finding machine?”)
This day, however, the Ossa on the Pelion of his molehill miseries was the lost and found Jeannie. Thunder was on his forehead and lightning in his voice. “I understand you’ve overstayed your vacation to look for a dog,” he growled. “Seems to me that was the act of a sis.” (His vocabulary held some quaint and unexpected words and phrases out of the past. “They were spooning,” he told me irritably about some couple years later, and, “I think she’s stuck on him.”) The word sis, which I had last heard about 1908, the era of skidoo, was the straw that shattered my patience. Even at sixty-four my temper is precarious, but at thirty-two it had a hair trigger.
The scene that followed was brief, loud, and incoherent. I told him what to do with his goddam magazine, that I was through, and that he couldn’t call me a sis while sitting down, since it was a fighting word. I offered to fight him then and there, told him he had the heart of a cast-iron lawn editor, and suggested that he call in one of his friends to help him. Ross hated scenes, physical violence or the threat of it, temper and the unruly.
“Who would you suggest I call in?” he demanded, the thunder clearing from his brow.
“Alexander Woollcott!” I yelled, and he began laughing.
His was a wonderful, room-filling laugh when it came, and this was my first experience of it. It cooled the air like summer rain. An hour later we were having dinner together at Tony’s after a couple of drinks, and that night was the beginning of our knowledge of each other underneath the office make-up, and of a lasting and deepening friendship. “I’m sorry, Thurber,” he said. “I’m married to this magazine. It’s all I think about. I knew a dog I liked once, a shepherd dog, when I was a boy. I don’t like dogs as such, though, and I’ll, by God, never run a department about dogs—or about baseball, or about lawyers.” His eyes grew sad; then he gritted his teeth, always a sign that he was about to express some deep antipathy, or grievance, or regret. “I’m running a column about women’s fashions,” he moaned, “and I never thought I’d come to that.” I told him the “On and Off the Avenue” department was sound, a word he always liked to hear, but used sparingly. It cheered him up.
It wasn’t long after that fateful night that Ross banged into my office one afternoon. He paced around for a full minute without saying anything, jingling the coins in his pocket. “You’ve been writing,” he said finally. “I don’t know how in hell you found time to write. I admit I didn’t want you to. I could hit a dozen writers from here with this ash tray. They’re undependable, no system, no self-discipline. Dorothy Parker says you’re a writer, and so does Baird Leonard.” His voice rose to its level of high decision. “All right then, if you’re a writer, write! Maybe you’ve got something to say.” He gave one of his famous prolonged sighs, an agonized protesting acceptance of a fact he had been fighting.
From then on I was a completely different man from the one he had futilely struggled to make me. No longer did he tell White that I had common sense. I was a writer now, not a hand-holder of artists, but a man who needed guidance. Years later he wrote my wife a letter to which he appended this postscript: “Your husband’s opinion on a practical matter of this sort would have no value.” We never again discussed tearing down walls, the Central Desk, the problems of advertisers, or anything else in the realm of the practical. If a manuscript was lost, “Thurber lost it.” Once he accused me of losing a typescript that later turned up in an old briefcase of his own. This little fact made no difference. “If it hadn’t been there,” he said, “Thurber would have lost it.” As I became more and more “productive,” another of his fondest words, he became more and more convinced of my helplessness. “Thurber hasn’t the vaguest idea what goes on around here,” he would say.
I became one of the trio about whom he fretted and fussed continually—the others were Andy White and Wolcott Gibbs. His admiration of good executive editors, except in the case of William Shawn, never carried with it the deep affection he had for productive writers. His warmth was genuine, but always carefully covered over by gruffness or snarl or a semblance of deep disapproval. Once, and only once, he took White and Gibbs and me to lunch at the Algonquin, with all the fret and fuss of a mother hen trying to get her chicks across a main thoroughfare. Later, back at the office, I heard him saying to someone on the phone, “I just came from lunch with three writers who couldn’t have got back to the office alone.”
Our illnesses, or moods, or periods of unproductivity were a constant source of worry to him. He visited me several times when I was in a hospital undergoing a series of eye operations in 1940 and 1941. On one of these visits, just before he left, he came over to the bed and snarled, “Goddam it, Thurber, I worry about you and England.” England was at that time going through the German blitz. As my blindness increased, so did his concern. One noon he stopped at a table in the Algonquin lobby, where I was having a single cocktail with some friends before lunch. That afternoon he told White or Gibbs, “Thurber’s over at the Algonquin lacing ’em in. He’s the only drinking blind man I know.”
He wouldn’t go to the theater the night The Male Animal opened in January, 1940, but he wouldn’t go to bed, either, until he had read the reviews, which fortunately were favorable. Then he began telephoning around town until, at a quarter of two in the morning, he reached me at Bleeck’s. I went to the phone. The editor of the New Yorker began every phone conversation by announcing “Ross,” a monosyllable into which he was able to pack the sound and sign of all his worries and anxieties. His loud voice seemed to fill the receiver to overflowing. “Well, God bless you, Thurber,” he said warmly, and then came the old familiar snarl: “Now, goddam it, maybe you can get something written for the magazine,” and he hung up, but I can still hear him, over the years, loud and snarling, fond and comforting.
The First Years
I HAD never heard of the New Yorker when I sailed from New York on the Leviathan in May, 1925, for a year in France. My unawareness of Harold Ross’s “little magazine” (as Sam Goldwyn has always called it, in spite of its increasing wealth and matronly girth) was not surprising. Only a dozen meager issues had then reached the stands, all of them nervous and peaked, and most of them pretty bad. (“There’s that goddam ‘pretty’ again,” Ross would say. The easy overuse of “pretty” and “little” exacerbated his uneasy mind. Once, to bedevil him, I used them both in a single sentence of a Talk piece: “The building is pretty ugly and a little big for its surroundings.” After stumbling upon these deliberate oxymora, Ross poked his head into my office, made a pretty ugly sound with his tongue and lips, and withdrew. We had been disc
ussing the goddam pretty-little problem earlier that same day.)
The New Yorker was the outstanding flop of 1925, a year of memorable successes in literature, music, and entertainment, and the only flop that kept on going. Its continued existence may accurately be called life after death. The Leviathan was still at sea on that eastward voyage of thirty-four years ago when the weekly was officially declared dead at an executive luncheon in New York, presided over by its chief backer, Raoul Fleischmann. Then miracle, in the form of chance encounter, resurrected the deceased. Several hours after the coroner’s verdict, Ross ran into Fleischmann at the wedding of Franklin Pierce Adams, and, in that atmosphere of hope, beginning, and champagne, they decided to have another go at it. It was hard for the F and the R of the F-R Publishing Company to believe that their cherished infant could die in such a season of viability.
In 1925, the greatest of war plays, What Price Glory?, was still running at the Plymouth, and two young men named Rodgers and Hart wrote the music and lyrics for the unforgettable Garrick Gaieties, whose big song hit, “Manhattan,” still gaily rides the national airwaves. It was the year of The Great Gatsby and of Arrowsmith and An American Tragedy. In 1925, the new Madison Square Garden was opened, and presented its popular monstrosities to an eager public: the six-day bike race, the marathon dance, an indoor flagpole sitter, and strange men and women who took part in rocking-chair and gum-chewing contests, indefatigably entertaining the insatiable addicts of endlessness. The Poor Nut, starring its coauthor Elliott Nugent, was a hit at the Henry Miller. Elliott came down to the ship to see me off. He was then making, we figured the other day, approximately a hundred times as much money as the twelve dollars a week I was going to get on the Paris edition of the Chicago Tribune.
Meanwhile, the New Yorker kept going downhill. From an original runoff of fifteen thousand copies in February, its circulation fell to a pernicious-anemia low of twenty-seven hundred copies in August. One evening, during that summer of Harold Ross’s greatest discontent, the harried editor ran into Dorothy Parker somewhere. “I thought you were coming into the office to write a piece last week,” he said. “What happened?” Mrs. Parker turned upon him the eloquent magic of her dark and lovely eyes. “Somebody was using the pencil,” she explained sorrowfully. It gave a fair enough picture of the goings on in West 45th Street, where a small inexperienced staff strained to bring out a magazine every Thursday.
This is a memoir of my years with Ross, and so I shall take up, as tenderly and as briefly as may be, the troubles that beset the founder of the New Yorker before I became a party to his predicament and a witness of his woe. Ross could never have seriously believed his constantly reiterated “Writers are a dime a dozen.” A great many writers were in Hollywood during his early struggles, others were in Paris—among them two future New Yorker authors, Robert Coates and Joel Sayre (Sid Perelman joined them in 1926)—and most of those he knew personally in New York were a million dollars a dozen and more amused by the New Yorker’s flounderings than by its contents.
There is little doubt that Ross’s famous and busy writer friends of the Algonquin Round Table and its fringes took his fond enterprise lightly, as a kind of joke on him and Fleischmann. A few of them helped now and then, with left hand, and tongue in cheek. “The part-time help of wits is no better than the full-time help of half-wits,” a great wit named Herman Mankiewicz is reported to have said at the time. When I reminded Ross of this line years later, all he said was, “God knows I had both kinds.”
He couldn’t pay anybody much money, in an era when magazine word rates were extremely high. (Nunnally Johnson got ten times as much for his humorous stories in the Saturday Evening Post as Ross could have paid him.) When Elwyn Brooks White came to work for the New Yorker, part-time, in 1926, he got thirty dollars a week, with an additional five dollars for each of his first-page comments, which were soon to become one of the New Yorker’s best-known contributions to American letters.
The record of contributions by the men and women Ross must have expected to help him, out of the goodness of their hearts, during the first year is disheartening to look back upon. In 1925, Dorothy Parker turned in only one piece and two poems, and her celebrated book reviews, signed “Constant Reader,” did not begin until October, 1927.
Robert Benchley waited ten months to lend a hand, and his first casual was printed in December, 1925. He didn’t take over the New Yorker’s theater criticism until 1929, the same year that Ross’s close friend Alexander Woollcott started his page called “Shouts and Murmurs.” Ross’s good friend Ring Lardner sent in one piece in 1925 and was not heard from again for two years. Marc Connelly and Arthur Kober got around to writing for Ross in 1926, and George Kaufman’s name was first signed to a New Yorker casual as late as 1935.
It wasn’t until 1930 that the names of Perelman and Ogden Nash showed up in the magazine’s pages; Sally Benson’s first story had been printed the year before. Clarence Day’s reminiscences of a New York life were published in 1933. “If I had never printed anything but Clarence Day’s stuff, it would have been enough,” Ross once told Frank Sullivan, who, incidentally, wrote only three pieces for Ross in 1925; it would be ten years before his Cliché Expert first took the witness stand.
The New Yorker was a year old before Gluyas Williams began drawing for it. Peter Arno, who had sold Ross a spot in June, 1925, was first represented by a captioned drawing in September of that year of ordeal. Helen Hokinson’s first captioned drawing brightened the New Yorker in November, 1925. It showed a saleslady at a perfume counter holding up a small phial to a woman customer and saying, “It’s N’Aimez Que Moi, madam—don’t love nobody but me.” The woman customer, glory be, was the original garden club dowager whose hilarious ilk became before long one of the ornaments of New Yorker humor. This first Hokinson was, it seems to some of us now, the funniest thing that Ross’s tremulous magazine printed in the year of our Lord 1925. The little magazine that died and came to life in the same day had the invaluable help and guidance of Rea Irvin from the start. He was responsible for its format, its special type that bears his name, and the famous figure that adorned its first issue and every succeeding anniversary number, that of the nineteenth-century dandy inspecting a butterfly through his haughty monocle.
Nothing is so dated as an old prospectus, unless it be a faded love letter to a lady who many years later divorced its author, so I shall spare you the New Yorker’s prospectus, drawn up in the chill winter of 1924, except for a couple of sentences that are pertinent here: “There will be a personal mention column—a jotting down in the small-town newspaper style of the comings, goings and doings in the village of New York. This will contain some josh and some news value.”
The word “josh,” smelling remarkably of Ross’s old-fashioned vocabulary, and the phrase “the small-town newspaper style” were unhappily lifted out of context and magnified into motto by Ross and his helpers. They got the young magazine off on the wrong foot, wearing the wrong shoe. Its early issues went in for a frivolous and curiously small-town kind of joke, an almost subcollegiate flippancy, and a self-conscious, intramural urbanality, all of which show up bleakly now in an old New Yorker folder labeled “Office Gazette,” kept in a secret vault in the present offices and accessible only to those of us who are going on a hundred.
The contents of the Office Gazette consist of fragile and yellowing notes, suggestions, letters, and interoffice memos, stained with sweat and blood, mainly Ross’s. Herein we encounter a great deal of tittering about the Optimist Joke, a two-line joke that was accidentally printed like this:
“A man who thinks he can make it in par.”
“What is an optimist, Pop?”
This sentimental souvenir of the old days was reprinted in every anniversary issue of the New Yorker for twenty-five years before it was abandoned. Even right side up it shows what was the matter—a kind of youthful lack of loving care. One poem was accidentally printed in two different issues in 1925; a building l
ocated by the New Yorker at Sixth Avenue and 55th Street was actually at Sixth Avenue and 54th Street; the name of George Eliot was spelled with two l’s, and Carolyn Wells was called Caroline, two mistakes that were pointed out by that old precisionist, F.P.A., whose hawk eye was ever alert for inaccuracies. When a verse of Philip G. Wylie’s, signed with his initials, was reprinted in the New York Sunday World, it was credited to Pelham Grenville Wodehouse, and the Gazette had much rueful fun with this.
Among the notes in the old folder is one beginning “At a mass meeting of the two contributors to this magazine” and another reads “The magazine for people who cannot read.” The intramural joshing turns up everywhere in the crumbling documents. Someone suggested a drawing showing “Harold Ross calling at the Martha Washington Hotel on his aunt from Dubuque.” There is a lot of high school levity about the idea of using the face of Ben Turpin in burlesque reproductions of famous paintings, or to replace the countenance of Jimmy Walker, Calvin Coolidge, and others, in a series of cartoons. The Gazette reveals that New Yorker readers were instructed, in one issue, how to pronounce Rea Irvin’s first name and Helen Hokinson’s last name.
One 1927 item is worth reprinting in full, since it deals with two New Yorker immortals who soon rose above all the joshing: