Only one photograph hangs in the hallways of The New Yorker—a 1944 Bachrach portrait of a middle-aged man in a pin-striped suit. He has a wide, big-boned face, and he’s wearing an expression of wry puzzlement, a corner of his mouth turned up in a half smile. His most noticeable features are his eyes, which look out from behind round horn-rimmed glasses with steady curiosity, and his hair, thick and unruly and apparently plastered down for the occasion, which is now starting to spring up in back, like an unmowed lawn after a rainstorm. The man is Harold Ross, of course, the co-founder and first editor of this magazine, who was at one time not only a commanding presence in the imagination of everyone who worked for him but also a vivid man-about-town—a romantic, unpredictable figure, who seemed to embody much of that singular Jazz Age energy and creativity which transformed American cultural life. Nowadays, Ross is seldom thought of at all, even at the magazine he created. His portrait, gazing out at a seventeenth-floor hallway, is much less of a tourist attraction than James Thurber’s wall drawings, which when The New Yorker changed addresses, in 1991, were carefully removed from Thurber’s old office and mounted behind bulletproof glass down on the sixteenth floor, where they are visited and gawked at regularly. When the Ross portrait, by contrast, was taken down and copied for an exhibition in Japan, in 1992, it took a couple of days before anyone here noticed its absence.
Ross’s eclipse may have to do with the nature of editing, as opposed to drawing or writing: when it’s done well, it’s invisible. Yet lesser editors of Ross’s era—for example, Henry Luce and DeWitt Wallace, the founders of Time and Reader’s Digest, respectively—haven’t sunk to the same degree of obscurity, perhaps because they weren’t just editors but also builders of publishing dynasties, or because they had better P.R. Even during his lifetime, Ross was sometimes treated as a caricature—an ignoramus, a foulmouthed rube, who created The New Yorker almost by accident. After his death, in 1951, the process was accelerated. More than anyone else associated with this magazine, Ross has suffered from a common failing of New Yorker historiography—the tendency to reduce everyone, and every event, to colorful anecdotes. Ross the Rube made great copy for his friends—he made them look good (or sophisticated) by contrast. As William Shawn (who made equally good anecdotal copy, of another sort) wrote of his predecessor in 1975, “Harold Ross presented himself to the world as a raucous, clumsy, primitive, somewhat comic figure. He said extremely funny things spontaneously and intentionally, and in his conversation and in his physical bearing he was funny unintentionally, or almost unintentionally, as well. . . . Because of this . . . the serious and inspired work that he did as an editor tended at times to be lost sight of.”
The problem with the Ross anecdotes is not just that they’re selective and incomplete but that they’re almost invariably diminishing, often revealing more about the teller than about the subject. In “Ross, The New Yorker, and Me,” a 1968 memoir by Ross’s first wife, Jane Grant, he is a distant, socially inept bungler who nevertheless possesses some mysterious personal magnetism, and a near genius when it comes to publishing. In Thurber’s charming, if inaccurately titled, “The Years with Ross” (it should have been called “The Years with Me”), Ross is irascible and lovable, a Dickensian character wandering around the office with a sheaf of nitpicking memos, muttering “goddammit” with one breath and “God bless” with the next. And by the time Brendan Gill’s “Here at The New Yorker” came out, in 1975, Ross had become a “throwback and not always an appealing one”—the kind of fellow whose idea of a good time is to sit in a hotel dining room and toss spitballs or lit matches at the other guests.
No doubt all these sides coexisted in Ross, and there were probably many more. By various accounts, he was brave, cowardly, cruel, kind, generous, tight-fisted, priggish, profane, shy, and overbearing. Of the remaining handful of people here who actually worked for Ross, no two recall him in quite the same way. A few more of us—carryovers from the Shawn era, mostly—like to imagine that we knew him. Almost unconsciously, we make a point of using snatches of the old Ross editorial lingo (“Who he?”) and of writing down phone messages on the little pink memo-routing slips he designed, but the magazine itself has changed, of course, in ways that would no doubt have startled him.
Remarkably, Thomas Kunkel’s “Genius in Disguise: Harold Ross of The New Yorker,” which will be published next month by Random House, is the first thorough biography of Ross, and the first to try to sift through all the myths and contradictions. Kunkel (who interviewed me and many other people on The New Yorker staff) is himself a Ross-like character. A Midwesterner and a former newspaperman, he had never written a book before, and he set about this project without any institutional sponsorship. He talked to vast numbers of people and poked around in the archives, and in the process discovered more about Ross than probably even Ross’s closest intimates knew. Inevitably, his book reveals more about Ross’s disguises than about his genius, but that limitation has less to do with Kunkel, who is an energetic and enterprising reporter, than with the impenetrability of those disguises and the paradoxical, quicksilver quality of Ross’s gift. What appeared stubborn or willful at one moment could seem brilliant the next, and Ross liked nothing more than to keep you guessing. “You caught only glimpses of Ross, even if you spent a long evening with him,” Thurber wrote. “He was always in mid-flight, or on the edge of his chair, alighting or about to take off.”
Harold Wallace Ross was born in Aspen, Colorado, on November 6, 1892. His father, George, was a silver miner who had emigrated from Ulster. His mother, Ida, was a Massachusetts-born schoolmistress, and she was a stickler for correctness of every sort. When George proposed—by postcard, and with a signature that was barely legible—she offered to send him some writing paper so he could conduct a proper courtship. It was Ida who was responsible both for what came to be called Ross’s “puritanism”—his uneasiness about sex—and for his lifelong fascination with grammar and his habit of reading dictionaries and Fowler’s “Modern English Usage” for pleasure.
The silver market collapsed the year after Ross was born, and in 1901 the family moved to Salt Lake City, where George had started a wrecking company. (Ross claimed later that a stagecoach accident while he was on the way to Utah was what had caused his hair to stand straight up for the rest of his life, but photographic evidence suggests that, until Jane Grant talked him into combing it back, he may have used artificial goops and stiffeners as well.) According to Grant, Ross’s childhood was a more or less happy one, but Kunkel has discovered that in 1907, when Ross was just fourteen, he was living by himself in a Salt Lake City boarding house, and though he later moved back home, he ran away several times. In the classic pattern of so many bright, rootless American boys—the young Ben Franklin, for example, and the young Samuel Clemens—Ross hated school but at an early age fell under the spell of newspapering. He dropped out of high school in 1906, at the end of his sophomore year, and became an apprentice reporter, first at the Salt Lake Telegram & Tribune and then as part of the fraternity of hobo newspapermen who roved the country in the early part of this century, working a week here, a month there. Ross’s wanderings took him west to California, east to Brooklyn and Hoboken, and south to New Orleans and Panama. “Between the time he left Salt Lake and the spring of 1917, when he enlisted in the army,” Kunkel writes, “Ross the tramp reporter worked at so many newspapers—about two dozen—and usually for such short durations that before long he himself couldn’t reconstruct the bewildering itinerary precisely. Not entirely in jest he would say later, ‘If I stayed anywhere more than two weeks, I thought I was in a rut.’ ”
Kunkel’s discussion of this period of Ross’s life is absorbing and surprising. The first editor of The New Yorker, it turns out, was a man who had one foot in the twentieth century and one foot in the world of Mark Twain or Bret Harte. Tall and gangly, in an ill-fitting suit and yellow high-button shoes, the Ross of these years—Hobo Ross or Hangover Ross, as he was known then—is like a character straight out of “The Luck of Roaring Camp.” He drank, he swore, he played cards and dice, and he perfected a parlor trick of drawing a tenpenny nail through the gap between his two front teeth. He also filed hundreds and hundreds of stories, covering everything from steamboat launchings to murder trials, and he read the sorts of books that self-educated newspapermen read back then: Herbert Spencer, Jack London, Kipling, and Conrad. What Ross got, in effect, was an American education of the rough-and-ready, hard-knocks variety—the same kind of education that Howells and Crane had received earlier—and it served him better than many of his contemporaries could appreciate. Ross’s schooling left some comical omissions—he was middle-aged, for example, before he discovered that “claret” could refer to wine as well as to the fluid that old-time boxing writers loved to see streaming from prizefighters’ noses—but it provided him with an impeccable ear for phonyness or pretension of any sort and with an inexhaustible curiosity about how the world really worked. It’s no accident that in July, 1925, when The New Yorker finally started to find its voice—after months of stumbling around, trying to be a society magazine and a humor magazine—it did so with a piece of reporting, an article that Ross had commissioned on the Scopes trial, which was then taking place in Dayton, Tennessee. The piece, by Marquis James, describes Dayton this way:
As Kunkel remarks, you don’t have to listen very hard to hear in this an anticipation of Joseph Mitchell or A. J. Liebling; you can also hear, between the lines, the distinctive Colorado twang of Hobo Ross. The first key to his eventual success as a magazine editor was that he never stopped being a newspaperman.
What most accounts of Ross’s provincialism fail to mention is that a certain anti-intellectualism was something that many people of his generation worked hard to cultivate. Liebling’s scorn for “the quarterly boys”; the Mitchell and John McNulty veneration of barrooms; the aggressively lowbrow reviews by Wolcott Gibbs—in those days, the anxious wish of the nerdish scribe to seem like a man of the world often took the form of a studied amateurishness. Ross played up to this view as much as anyone else, but he didn’t have to pretend. He was a man of the world—far more sophisticated and experienced, in many ways, than the people who made fun of him, and certainly more than most of the people who worked for him. By the time he founded The New Yorker, Ross, then in his early thirties, had been to war (he edited the Stars and Stripes), had been the editor of three other national magazines (Judge, The Home Sector, and American Legion Weekly), and had become a part of New York’s wealthy smart set. He went to croquet matches at the Swopeses’, played softball with Billy Rose and Harpo Marx, went duck-shooting with Bernard Baruch, and played high-stakes poker with anyone rich (or foolhardy) enough to afford it.
Ross also had a shrewd publishing sense. He saw, almost from the moment that he landed in New York after the war, that there was room for a new kind of funny, sophisticated metropolitan weekly. The country’s two big weekly humor magazines—Judge and the original Life—had become feeble and sophomoric; and the other weeklies, such as Collier’s, Liberty, and the Saturday Evening Post, were national magazines, unsuited in some ways to upscale advertising, and they were relentlessly middlebrow. The chic highbrow magazines, on the other hand—Vanity Fair and The American Mercury—came out monthly and had begun to seem slick and predictable. As Kunkel observes, Ross felt that no single magazine spoke directly to him or to his generation, and he was convinced that a magazine that did would inevitably find a receptive audience.
Ross himself was the first to admit that he got the look of this new magazine right long before he succeeded with the content. He didn’t have an “eye,” in the traditional, art director’s sense (one of his colleagues later complained, “Ross never understood pictures”), but he knew what he wanted, and he pored over copies of Simplicissimus and Punch, among other publications, for ideas about layout. “During the months—almost years—while The New Yorker was being evolved,” Jane Grant wrote later, “our reading was pretty much restricted to books on printing, typography, and other subjects related to magazines.” What Ross wanted—and what he urged Rea Irvin, the first art director of The New Yorker, to give him—was a look that was lively and nervy and original, and would consciously work against the tradition of classic, elegant magazine design embodied in those days in Frank Crowninshield’s Vanity Fair, with its crisp, stately layouts and stylish black-and-white photography. Irvin, famously, responded by creating a new typeface for the magazine, designing the various departmental logos, and, of course, sending the top-hatted Eustace Tilley out onto the newsstands for the first of his sixty-nine (so far) February outings. But the name of the person responsible for the early rambunctious, offbeat layouts of The New Yorker has somehow gone unrecorded. He drifted away, probably, as people regularly did in those days, when paychecks turned up with extreme infrequency. Or perhaps he just quit, unable to tolerate the agonies of the Tuesday-afternoon Art Meeting, a weekly ritual, sometimes lasting until early in the evening, that was attended by Ross, Irvin, a select group of editors, and the “art boy”—Philip Wylie in the early days, and then, briefly, Truman Capote. (When Ross first laid eyes on Capote, he said to Janet Flanner, “What is that?” and then quickly added, “If you know, don’t tell me.”) The art boy would prop potential covers and cartoons on an easel, one by one, and then Ross would lean forward, the fingers of his left hand splayed against his chest, his right hand wielding a white knitting needle that served as a pointer, and subject the artwork to an intense scrutiny, until he had exposed all the faults and inaccuracies lurking there. “Miss Terry, take this down,” he’d say to Daise Terry, the office manager, and he’d proceed to list the shortcomings he had found: doors that opened the wrong way, coats that buttoned on the wrong side, brownstone steps that were too close to the curb, road dust that looked insufficiently dustlike.
This literalism when it came to art, and especially to comic art, was the other side of Ross’s daring: it stemmed from insecurity—from a suspicion that artists, if unchecked, would try to get away with anything—but also from a conviction that his audience ought to be able to “read” a piece of art as easily as it read a piece of writing. What drove him crazy was drawings that left the viewer uncertain about who was talking or what was going on and where. The early issues of The New Yorker didn’t include many “idea drawings,” as they came to be called—drawings with captions. There were one or two a week, most of them anemic stabs at sprucing up the old Judge and Life genre of illustrated two-line gags. (The humor, such as it was, was in the text; the drawing was essentially a decoration.) But Ross’s fastidiousness, his insistence that New Yorker art depict real people in recognizable situations, eventually led to something brand-new: comic art in which the artwork was intrinsic to the joke, and not just an illustration. Ross never liked the term, but, in effect, he invented the cartoon.
A lot of genius is luck, and Ross was lucky in the extreme (“I was the luckiest son of a bitch alive,” he wrote to George Jean Nathan, recalling the magazine’s precarious early days.) He was lucky in his timing—arriving in New York just when the pent-up energy of the war years was about to uncork itself—and he was lucky in the people whom he very quickly attracted around him: first, Rea Irvin (whose contribution to the early New Yorker is impossible to overestimate) and then, in short order, Katharine Angell (who became Katharine White), E. B. White, Thurber, Wolcott Gibbs, Peter Arno, Dorothy Parker, Robert Benchley, St. Clair McKelway, and the rest. Or perhaps it was they who were lucky to find him. These early contributors all had talent to burn, and, maybe because of that, their personal lives seemed, in many cases, to be in flames. Illness (or hypochondria), indebtedness, love trouble, alcoholism, mental instability—the list of woes besetting Ross’s staff was so long and comprehensive that he joked about hiring a staff psychiatrist, just as he had once briefly opened a staff speakeasy. Actually, The New Yorker had something better than a psychiatrist: it had Ross, whose odd and unlikely character became the one fixed point in so many otherwise sad and self-destructive lives.
Ross was rigid—even stuffy—in some respects (he believed that men should never attend matinées, and that an article should never start with the word “it,” “and,” or “but”), but he was flexible in many others. When the original formula for The New Yorker—a magazine for and about the Manhattan upper crust—didn’t pan out as he’d hoped, he modified and expanded it. In the beginning, at least, he published a lot of junk, not because he didn’t know it was junk but because in those early, ad-scarce days he had to fill the pages with something, and he knew that some kinds of filler were more useful than others. The piece that first put The New Yorker on the map was one that Ross didn’t particularly care for: called “Why We Go to Cabarets: A Post-Debutante Explains,” it was sort of the “Bright Lights, Big City” of its time—an attack on Social Register old-fartism and a celebration of the liberating energy of night-club life. Ross tried to fix up the writing, which he considered snotty, but when the author, a prominent young socialite named Ellin Mackay (who later married Irving Berlin), rejected his editing he went ahead and published the article anyway, in the issue of November 28, 1925. It made front-page news in the Times and the Trib, and for the first time ever The New Yorker sold out on the newsstand.
Ross never got over the panicky feeling of not having enough good copy to publish, and right to the end he was stockpiling ideas, just as in the early days he stockpiled staff members. Unnecessarily, as it turned out, for his greatest piece of luck proved to be an ability to get from writers more and better work than they knew they were capable of. Shawn wrote, “He gradually learned that the primary function of the magazine’s editors, including him, was to create a structure and an atmosphere—a little world apart from the world—within which the writers and artists could fulfill themselves. . . . By being hospitable to the best, and expecting the best, he often received the best.”
The big wheels in the magazine world these days tend to be either hedgehogs or foxes, to use Isaiah Berlin’s famous distinction: the high-concept types, who have lunch, hatch schemes, and leave the actual editing to the drones; and the nitpickers, a vanishing species, who obsess over the details in the firm belief that if you get the small stuff right the big picture will take care of itself: Ross was both. He fussed over your punctuation, but he also brooded about your career—about what you should be writing and how you should be doing it. “I don’t want to know what you think about what goes on in Paris,” he told Janet Flanner. “I want to know what the French think.” Years later, when Liebling was going off to cover the Second World War, Ross told him much the same thing: he wanted the story behind the story, the story from the point of view of the people who were living it. This apparently simple advice proved to be so high-concept that it transformed American journalism. Ross seldom knew beforehand what he wanted in a piece; what he wanted was what he himself would find interesting, and if it was good enough for him it was good enough for his readers. This trait, more than any other, distinguished him from contemporaries like George Horace Lorimer, of the Saturday Evening Post. Lorimer was not his readers: the readers were people he bought stuff for. Ross bought stuff for himself: and, luckily, he was interested in just about everything.
There are also two schools of editorial thought when it comes to the nurturing and managing of talent: that writers are fragile creatures, who have to be cosseted, and that they are monstrous egotists, who have to be prodded—bullied, if necessary—out of their self-involvement. Ross subscribed to both of these theories, too. He had a reverence bordering on awe for creative people of any sort, and a dim view of their practicality. (“He thought that people with talent didn’t in general know enough to come in out of the rain,” William Maxwell once said.) At the same time, he hated artiness, and never let any of his writers forget that it was just a magazine they were working on. Even if he liked something you had written, his praise was often tempered with fond disparagement, and sometimes it was delivered in the men’s room.
Ross did a certain amount of editing just by being around—by being Ross. He loved to patrol the writers’ floor, listening hopefully for the sound of typing (“Will someone please strike a key, goddammit!” he shouted once when the hallway was too quiet for his liking), and sticking his head into writers’ offices. A joke or a complaint or a piece of gossip, and then a booming “God bless,” a wave of his enormous hand, and he was off. To a degree that never failed to astonish new employees, Ross was anxious about the quality of what he printed, and was always in search of advice and reassurance. Ideas poured out of him, and he discussed them with anybody he happened to run into: not just the senior sachems but the secretaries, the office boys, and the elevator operators.
Ross did most of his text-editing by letter or memo—hectoring, wheedling, scolding, cajoling—and by means of his famous Ross notes. These lists of editorial points and suggestions, which he used to bang out on his Underwood typewriter, with a Parliament stuck to his pendulous lower lip or smoldering in the ashtray beside him, often ran to pages, and they are sometimes cited as evidence of Ross’s intellectual limitations: “Ariel—who he?” and “Is Moby Dick the man or the whale?” and (next to an S. J. Perelman joke about “the woman taken in adultery”) “What woman?” But if you study the Ross notes what they reveal is a man who was well informed about a wide range of topics—sports, geography, business, low life, high society—and brought all that knowledge to bear on a page of copy in an obsessive quest for precision and completeness.
What Ross was really interested in was clarity, and in order to obtain it he was not above resorting to the old newspaperman’s wile of pretending to be a little dumber than he was. Ross the Rube was in large part a disguise created by Ross the Editor. It amused him (he was a legendary practical joker), and it also made his job easier. His endless lists of queries maddened some of his writers (Liebling, for one) but were welcomed by others (including such hard-to-please cases as Rebecca West and Mary McCarthy), and they were tolerated by everyone—if only because they reduced the one-upmanship that so often infects editor-writer confrontations. Ross didn’t care whether you thought his queries literal or inane; all he cared about was that the piece worked.
One of the few areas in which Ross wasn’t lucky was women, and the problem was largely of his own making. Despite his Lincolnesque features and a lingering social unease, Ross was extremely attractive. One woman I know, who used to see him at parties in the thirties, says that he was “sexually magnetic—the most appealing man I ever laid eyes on.” And Ross liked women, after a fashion: he married three times, dated showgirls and movie stars (including the young Ginger Rogers) when he was single, and had a lifelong fascination with prostitutes. Even for a man of his era, though, he clung obstinately to a double standard and suffered cruelly from inflexible ideas about sexuality and about women’s roles. His second and third marriages—to Frances Elie (with whom he had a daughter, Patricia) and Ariane Allen—were unhappy; and, except for Katharine White, the brilliant and flinty Bryn Mawr graduate who became The New Yorker’s first fiction editor, he never really got used to having women as colleagues. Kunkel says that in a way Mrs. White was the love of Ross’s life, and suggests that part of the attraction for Ross was Katharine’s resemblance to his mother: they were both opinionated, no-nonsense Massachusetts Yankees who were unafraid of his temper. But it’s possible that Kunkel has mistaken for romantic love what was in fact something more like awe. Ross was scared of Katharine White. Everybody was.
The combination of braininess and sexiness appealed to Ross, though. He tended to go out with airheads, but he was nevertheless drawn to bright, attractive women who in some ways were ahead of their time and certainly of his. Sifting through the various Ross accounts, you can’t help being charmed by the alluring, gaminelike, and slightly bossy figure of Jane Grant, and wishing that they’d stayed together. If Ross was a character out of Bret Harte, she was one out of Dreiser. She grew up in Kansas, in a strict Baptist family, but became stagestruck at an early age, and when she was sixteen she moved to New York, determined to become a singer. She lived for a while in a theatrical boarding house, and eventually, to help pay for an apartment, took a clerical job with the society department of the Times. There she came under the wing of Alexander Woollcott, soon to be the paper’s chief theatre critic. Woollcott championed her writing career (in time, she was assigned to the city desk and became its first full-time female reporter), squired her around town, and, in Paris in 1918, brought her to a poker game where she met Ross. After she and Ross were married, two years later, Woollcott moved in with them. At 412 West Forty-seventh Street (way west, between Ninth and Tenth Avenues), the three shared a pair of brownstones (with the connecting wall knocked down) with Hawley Truax, who became The New Yorker’s treasurer, and assorted tenants. The place was part fraternity house and part an early and disastrous experiment in communal living. It was the kind of place where Gershwin might drop by in the evening to try out his latest version of “Rhapsody in Blue,” and where the next night thirty people would show up unexpectedly for dinner. Grant was almost hyperenergetic during this period—chasing down stories, dashing off to parties and dinners, and sometimes returning to the Times late at night to finish her copy. At 412, she was the housemother, the banker, and the nurturer of Ross’s dreams and ambitions. It was Jane who put Ross up to asking Raoul Fleischmann, the yeast-fortune heir, for help in starting a magazine. And it was Jane who provided the infant New Yorker with one of its key contributors by suggesting that Janet Flanner, an old reporter friend of hers then living in France, try her hand at writing a fortnightly letter from Paris. Ross didn’t care for her first two efforts, but he combined them into a single article, and to perk the column up he eventually added the byline “Genét” (very likely his notion of how “Janet” was pronounced in French).
When the Ross marriage broke up, in 1929, Jane (who later founded White Flower Farm, the innovative nursery, with her second husband) said that she was worn out by the strain of living without privacy. Ross, for his part, said that the problem was Grant’s proto-feminism. “The reason I left Jane Grant, or whatever it was, was that I never had one damned meal at home at which the discussion wasn’t of women’s rights and the ruthlessness of men in trampling women,” he said. “You go through several years of that and you can’t take it anymore.”
Ross never tired of pointing out that The New Yorker wasn’t his only good publishing idea; there were lots of others where that came from. He kept schemes in his head for a tabloid, for a paper about shipping, for publishing books in paperback, and—closest to his heart—for a true-crime magazine. The title he had in mind for this one was Guilty. Even when The New Yorker had become, in effect, a literary magazine, Ross never thought of himself as a literary fellow; he preferred to see himself as doer, a man who knew how to accomplish things. Or, more precisely, a man who might know how to accomplish things if he hadn’t had the misfortune to surround himself with people who didn’t. This persona of the beleaguered man of practicality, coping with folly, incompetence, and disappointment, is one that appears in Ross’s letters right from the beginning and helps make them the funny, riveting documents they are.
Thurber maintained that Ross was a terrible writer, but you’d never know it from Ross’s correspondence. The letters are brisk, sharp, and disarming, and they’re written in the highly polished regular-guy vernacular that transformed American prose in the first half of this century. (Ross claimed never to have read Hemingway; he once started “A Farewell to Arms,” he said, but he couldn’t believe a war story where the characters spent all their time in bed together. There are moments, though, when his letters have a Hemingway-like cadence and understatement.) Some of the letters are also what Ross might have called “casuals” in miniature: little comic essays on the frustrations of office life.
Ross was a romantic about people—he was willing to give virtually anyone a chance, and his expectations were so high that he was almost invariably disappointed—and he was a romantic about systems. He had a nineteenth-century faith in organization, and he dreamed, against all evidence to the contrary, of a mystical Central Desk that would take all the chaos and complications of 25 West Forty-third Street—the personnel, the contributors, the endless stream of proofs—and somehow transform them magically each week into a magazine. “Ross’s mind,” Thurber said, “was always filled with dreams of precision and efficiency beyond attainment.” Ross devised dozens of forms and procedures; he laid down rules and then amended them beyond recognition; he created byzantine payment schemes, designed to reward brevity and productivity both; and he sent and received countless memos, which were copied in triplicate, sometimes in quadruplicate, on onionskin sheets. How they churned out the paperwork in those days, back before the electronic office! Your heart goes out to the legions of young women who, under the exacting Daise Terry, had to cope with all this stuff; at the end of the day, they must have been so tired that they could hardly wriggle their swollen fingers back into the white gloves that she insisted on.
The more Ross tried to systematize the office, of course, the more inefficient it became, and it was this paradox that sent him on his famous, decade-long quest for a “Jesus”—an administrative genius who could bring order out of confusion. So many people held this thankless post—some, like James M. Cain, for only a few months—that other staffers used to joke about the “Jesus parade.” Ross would build up impossibly high expectations for the latest incumbent and then turn on him when it became clear that the poor soul could not live up to them. The procession ended only in 1939, with the promotion of William Shawn, originally a writer for the Talk of the Town, in whom Ross found less a Jesus, perhaps, than a Moses—someone who could codify and expand his vision, and translate it for succeeding generations.
What can the relationship between Ross and Shawn have been like? It’s difficult to imagine two more dissimilar people: the one big, loud, vulgar, and gregarious; the other tiny, quiet, fastidiously polite, and almost pathologically shy. Shawn, in an afterword he wrote for Gill’s book, often defends Ross in ways that inevitably point to the differences between them: he says, for example, “Ross was no moral philosopher, and his social conscience was shaky, and he knew nothing whatever about politics, but he had a profound ethical sense when it came to journalism.” Yet Shawn clearly saw in Ross a kindred spirit—someone who shared his profound dislike of falseness and glibness. And Ross, for his part, welcomed Shawn’s overwhelming competence and the fact that, in an office that was becoming increasingly temperamental, he never needed maintenance or propping up; he simply got the job done. In later years, when Ross was uncertain about a piece or a proposal he would sometimes say to its writer, “Well, I guess I better see what the boys think.” The boys were Shawn.
Ross may also have seen in Shawn someone who shared his ambivalent view of the business side of the magazine. By the time I joined The New Yorker, in the early seventies, it was received dogma that relations between the editorial and the publishing departments of The New Yorker had reached such a carefully adjudicated state of amicable purity and understanding that it was, as Shawn liked to put it, “too complicated to talk about.”
What Kunkel suggests is that this supposed state of harmony was probably just a sign of wariness and exhaustion on both sides. Practically from the moment Ross and Raoul Fleischmann first became partners, they failed to get along. In the beginning, at least, Ross was overcome by guilt; Fleischmann had been lured into backing The New Yorker on the understanding that his total investment would be twenty-five thousand dollars, but over the next three years he wound up pouring seven hundred thousand more—most of what he was worth—into the struggling magazine. Once The New Yorker became profitable, things only got worse, for Ross became convinced that Fleischmann and his “stooges,” his “ring of stupid fumblers,” were taking more than their fair share of the proceeds. Ross’s suspicions weren’t entirely groundless. In the mid-thirties, he discovered that Fleischmann—and The New Yorker—was secretly underwriting Stage, a glossy theatre magazine. Ross’s resentment, Fleischmann later admitted, was “boundless.” Ross sold most of his own New Yorker stock—to Time, Inc., of all places—and later threatened to resign if the contributions to Stage didn’t stop. Fleischmann backed down, as he did again a few years later, when Ross took part in what amounted to a stockholders’ revolt, accusing the New Yorker management of malfeasance. Ironically, as Kunkel points out, all the bad feeling actually served to strengthen the magazine’s editorial independence. Had Fleischmann felt welcome on the editorial floors, he might have been tempted to interfere; and Ross’s eventual disgust with the business side freed him to do what he did best—to edit.
Two themes recur in all the accounts of the early days at The New Yorker: how hard it was to put out the magazine, and how much fun it was. The two were not unrelated: some of the fun, surely, came from succeeding at something that was almost impossibly difficult—publishing every week a magazine that was smart, stylish, truthful, informative, and entertaining. But a lot of the fun came from Ross himself and from the staff he assembled around him. Ross was not in fact good at spotting talent right off. He made many more hiring mistakes—people who then had to be fired by one of his minions, since Ross could never bring himself to do the job in person—than real discoveries. But, once he knew the people he could count on, he had a knack for keeping them—well, not happy, exactly, but constantly reassured and constantly energized. If you were lucky enough to work for him, it was like having a particularly charming but slightly crazy older brother, who took his fraternal responsibilities to unheard-of lengths. He would tease you, flatter you, play tricks on you, worry about your finances and your love affairs; sometimes he’d make you weep with gratitude, sometimes with frustration. When you went home at night, Ross was what you talked about, and all too often he was what you dreamed about, too.
For Ross, the Second World War was a major turning point. In a way, the war was the making of The New Yorker. The circulation jumped dramatically, and The New Yorker became a truly national publication, not just a chic comic weekly for East Coast sophisticates. The dispatches sent from overseas by reporters like Liebling, E. J. Kahn, Philip Hamburger, Mollie Panter-Downes, Flanner, and many others gave the magazine a new breadth and depth and seriousness. But all this came at a heavy cost on the fun side. With most of the editors off in the Army, Ross and Shawn had to get out the magazine virtually by themselves, and the work was so hard that Ross even flirted with the idea of going biweekly. “The magazine is running us; we aren’t running it,” he said at one point.
Even when the war ended and everyone came home, nothing was quite the same. The magazine had become big and complicated, and Ross, instead of being the older brother, now found himself the father figure to a bunch of cranky middle-aged children. White was talking about moving back to Maine for good. Thurber was increasingly moody, and was drinking too much. Some of the newly returned editors were grousing that Shawn had used their absence as an occasion for self-advancement. Ross, too, began to complain, and to talk wistfully about the old true-crime mag.
Reading Kunkel’s account, and Ross’s own letters from this period, you sense that Ross suffered a good deal from the sadness that so often attends success in America. He had built an enormously successful enterprise, and now he was trapped by it. Like many geniuses, Ross wound up alone at the end—in his case, perhaps, because he had been taken over by his own persona, the put-upon, curmudgeonly Editor. Ross died, during an operation for lung cancer, at the New England Baptist Hospital, in Boston, on December 6, 1951. For over a year, he had been separated from his third wife, Ariane, and had been living by himself in Room 806 at the Algonquin, dining, as often as not, on sardines right from the can. The last words he spoke to anyone from “the old gang” were to George S. Kaufman, a poker-playing pal, and what he said was phrased in jokey, old-fashioned newspaper-speak: “I’m up here to end this thing, and it may end me, too. But that’s better than going on this way. God bless you. I’m half under the anesthetic now.”
One more photograph of Ross. This is a snapshot taken by Lillian Ross (no relation), probably in the summer of 1950. Ross, looking thin and tired, is standing on what is unmistakably the terrace outside the editor’s suite at 25 West Forty-third. Either it was very windy on the day that Lillian Ross took her picture or else the cleaner must have ironed Ross’s trousers sideways. They’re flattened, creaseless, against his legs in the stovepipe fashion of children’s drawings. Ross’s jacket doesn’t look quite right, either: it’s wrinkled and seems bigger in one shoulder than in the other. “The trouble with that photograph may lie with the subject,” Ross wrote to the taker of the picture. “One in my calling should, of course, look hard-pressed, harassed, and careless, but not that disorderly. I’ll get my suits pressed up. The basic trouble is, though, that I’m sort of warped.”
In a way, Ross was warped. Though he clearly overcame the limitations of his background, and even turned them to his advantage, he showed for all his life the strain of having to adapt a nineteenth-century upbringing to a world where high-top shoes were not quite the thing anymore, where the telephone rang all the time, and where women were everywhere and felt free to lecture you about your shortcomings. You could see it in his body language; he was always fidgeting, Jane Grant said, as if he suffered perpetual growing pains. He was probably misshapen, too, from the burden of having to be so many things to so many different people: friend, nursemaid, mentor, paymaster, morale-booster, and sometimes rejecter and door-shutter. But the strain that took the greatest toll was just having to assume responsibility for what he had created. Against all odds, Ross had succeeded in putting together a magazine that was everything he had dreamed it would be, and now it was up to him to get out next week’s issue, and the one after that, goddammit, and the one after that . . .
Ross was something new in American publishing—an editor who edited not just with a pencil, or with “sensibility,” but with the force of personality. And the strange and exacting demands of this new profession may account for the wariness in his expression as he stands there on that windswept terrace. He seems drained, used up. If you didn’t know better, you’d never guess that this was one of the great figures of magazine history. You’d think he was just another guy from out of town, alone in the big city. ♦
