The Years With Ross

JAMES THURBER

I WAS in Harold Ross’s office one hot day in the middle of August, 1928, when the phone rang, and he turned to it impatiently and said, sourly, to the transmitter, “Yeah? Hi, Aleck. Just a second.” He cupped the transmitter with his hand and said, “It’s Woollcott. He wants to tell me about the wedding of Charlie MacArthur and Helen Hayes . . . O.K., Aleck, go ahead.”

Alexander Woollcott, American phenomenon, once called by Stanley Walker “The first citizen of New York,” began talking in the fluent, practiced, almost compulsive way he had of telling a story. Ross promptly put the receiver down, gently, on the top of his desk, got up, walked across the room, and began alternately staring out the window and scowling at the jabbering receiver. An unintelligible babble came out of it, a little like the sound track of a Donald Duck animated cartoon. Against this dim and distant monologue, wasted on the office air, Ross set up a counterpoint of disdainful comment. “Listen to that glib son-of-abitch,” he said. “He thinks he’s holding me spellbound. He thinks he knows more about everything that happens than anybody else. He only knows a few things, and he tells them over and over, and sells them over and over to magazines.” I was embarrassed by this charade, but couldn’t do anything. Finally the gibbering came to an end and Ross leaped to the phone and said into it, “I’m sorry, Aleck. I suddenly had to go to the can.” Woollcott hung up sharply, like a slap, without a further word.

I had seen Woollcott at the Algonquin Round Table and at the theater, but didn’t meet him until late in August, 1927, when I was working on a Talk piece about the coming theatrical season. It was shaping up into one of the biggest seasons on record, with some three hundred and fifty different comedies, dramas, and musicals slated to be brought to Broadway. “You better go up and talk to Woollcott about it,” Ross told me. “He doesn’t know much, but he ought to know about what’s coming in. There’s a damn good piece in it, from what I hear.”

I had already drafted a five hundred word piece, based on what I had got from producers, playwrights, and press agents, but Ross was afraid it might not be sound. I telephoned Woollcott and asked him if I could come to see him. “I won’t read your copy,” he snapped, “but I’ll talk to you.”

He met me at his apartment door that afternoon the way he met everybody, man or woman, clad in pajama bottoms which were only partly covered by a dressing gown that he wore carelessly and whimsically. He began the audience with a long running attack on Harold Ross, a man who knew nothing, was mentally curious, like a child, without intellectual curiosity, however, and had a contempt for anything he didn’t understand, which was practically everything. The legendary charm of Alexander Woollcott, the still talkedabout spell he cast, did not come over to me. There are those, mainly women, who stare at me aghast, in a mixture of pity and horror, when I say this. They are the remaining members of the great Woollcott cult, and there was never anything quite like it.

It was evident to both of us, I think, when the two-hour session was over, that he and I could not be friends. Something chemical, which worked when most people came into contact with Woollcott, failed that day. Several years later he wrote me the only note I ever got from him, a single sentence in acknowledgment of a drawing I had done, at his request, of a line of hooded figures to illustrate one of his “Shouts and Murmurs” pieces. He wrote, “You are the only artist that should be permitted to draw hooded figures.”

THE originally close, occasionally warm, always ambivalent, and often sadistic friendship of Ross and Woollcott had begun years before I met either one of them. As a reporter on the New York Times, and later its dramatic critic, Woollcott had known and worked with Jane Grant, Ross’s first wife, and it was Woollcott who introduced them to each other in Paris. As in the case of virtually every other woman in his life, Woollcott had been half in love with her himself and, as always, both approved and disapproved of the marriage. It was in Paris, during the Stars and Stripes era, that Ross played his first pranks on Woollcott. The one he talked about most gleefully was the time he saw General Pershing approaching and deliberately failed to remind Sergeant Aleck that he was wearing a stocking cap instead of his regulation uniform cap. A group of the Stars and Stripers had been clowning around outside the newspaper building, taking turns putting on the stocking cap. Pershing, according to Ross, reprimanded Woollcott for his unsoldierly appearance.

I suppose that the strangest edifice in Ross’s life was the cooperative house, far over on West 47th Street, that he and Jane Grant shared with Woollcott and their great friends, R. Hawley Truax and his wife, from well before the New Yorker started until 1928, when the ménage broke up. How it lasted so long, and why it began in the first place, I leave to older friends and better psychologists than I am. The two couples and Woollcott had separate living quarters and a communal dining room. Woollcott held forth at dinner almost every night, telling the stories that enchanted many visitors. He knew and was revered or feared, liked or avoided, by almost everybody of any consequence on Broadway and in the realms of gold round about. I was there for dinner once, in 1927, but time has drawn a veil over that evening, leaving me only a sense of having been self-conscious, nervous, and apprehensive all the way.

Russel Crouse remembers how Ross, after dinner, used to drag a cushion off a “sofa,” as he called all couches and davenports, put it on the floor, lie down, and go to sleep, while Woollcott talked and Rome burned. Ross resented his friend’s easy command of narrative and his ability to hold most of his listeners. Ross was by no means the skillful talker, the wit, the master of repartee, that Woollcott and many another of their friends were. Ben Hecht has written that Ross was not capable of a bon mot, and it is clear that the Sew Yorker editor picked up a lot of hints and helps in the art of verbal give-and-take from such of his intimates and acquaintances as George Kaufman, Dorothy Parker, Marc Connelly, Charles MacArthur, Bob Benchlcy, and Herman Mankiewicz. Ross was better at parry than at thrust, and that is why he learned to use, so often, his familiar “You have me there” and “A likely story” and “ That I’d have to see.” Some of his Round Table cronies instigated and implemented the gags and waggeries and practical jokes that Ross loved to play on people. He never became easy or expert at the art of ribbing, but went about it with some of the dogged determination he brought to the task of fixing up manuscripts and proofs in the office. Perhaps he had learned, partly from Woollcott, the knack of writing single sentences of praise, or of persiflage, but it seems to me he gave his lines a bounce and sincerity of which the style-conscious and Thespian Aleck was not capable.

When the 47th Street house was given up by its five occupants, partly because Ross and Jane Grant could never count on a night’s sleep uninterrupted by the late entrance into their room of Woollcott, brimming over with tales and anecdotes of his evening, the battle lines were even more sharply drawn. Woollcott claimed that, in dividing up their separate personal properties, Ross had “stolen” a set of silverware that was a Woollcott family heirloom. It was then, I think, that he called Ross a “dishonest Abraham Lincoln.” I asked Ross about this one day, but he went instantly into a high diatribe against his old friend. “He has the emotions of a fish. He’ll do anything for two hundred dollars — I get tired of seeing his face in testimonial ads. Goddam it, the magazine once printed a photo of him lounging in the back seat of some make of automobile. I didn’t catch it in time. Nobody ever tells me anything. Have you ever been to one of his famous Sunday morning breakfasts?”

I said I’d never been asked to Wit’s End, as Dorothy Parker had named Woollcott’s bestknown apartment in New York. “You’re lucky,”Ross said. “He sits there like a fat duchess holding out her dirty rings to be kissed.”

Through the years, relentlessly, Ross badgered Woollcott, laid traps for him, built up involved practical jokes to bedevil him. It is not easy, at my distance from it all, to figure why Woollcott was the perennial victim of so many gags and booby traps, invented by Ross, MacArthur, Connelly, and others, but I do have a theory. He was not so much a mere participant in his own daily life as he was the Grand Marshal of a perpetual pageant, pompous in demeanor, riding a high horse, wearing the medals of his own peculiar punctilio and perfectionism. His men friends loved to put banana peels in his portentous path to bring him down, high horse and all, while his women friends, whom he could slay in the subject of a sentence and eulogize in the predicate, loved to catch him before he could fall, or to pick up his outraged bulk. Gibbs thinks they tolerated his insults because he also called them, or most of them, geniuses.

ONE of the better-known anti-Woollcott gags revolved about a full-length portrait of hint that had been done by Cyrus Leroy Baldridge, the Stars and Stripes artist. The picture hung on a wall in the 47th Street house. Ross told the tale many times, building it up and ornamenting it as the seasons rolled. He said that when Woollcott left town one time on a lecture tour or something, he had Baldridge do an exact replica of the portrait, with one slight difference: instead of looking straight ahead, as in the original, Woollcott’s gaze was turned slightly in one direction. “When Aleck got back to the house,” Ross used to say, “I had a bunch of people over and seated them so they couldn’t help seeing the picture. I kept staring at it, and finally Woollcott and the others did, too. ‘That goddam picture’s moving,’ I said. Woollcott didn’t say anything, but he knew something was wrong with the thing. I hoped he would think he was going nuts. It got to him, all right.” When Woollcott left the house the next day, the fake portrait was withdrawn and the original looked out again directly upon the room. The tale tells that Woollcott was never let in on the joke, died without knowing about it. Cy Baldridge, in a letter to me, dismisses the prank as having been overelaborated by Ross: “I merely made a quick tracing out of focus (rather à la El Greco) and substituted it in the frame. That’s all. Never knew what Aleck may have said when he probably discovered it later.”

Every time Ross played one of his tricks on Woollcott he told me and everybody else about it. The year the dramatic critic won the Vaiety award of a silver-headed cane for having been the reviewer that had most accurately forecast the season’s hits and flops, he brought it to a party attended by Ross and many others. The ornery conspirator from the Far West, with what confederates 1 do not know, swiped it and then joined in the search for it when the party was breaking up.

“I helped look for it, in closets and under sofas,” Ross said, “and it wasn’t easy bending over because I had the goddam thing stuck down one pants leg.” The next day — I think with the help of Charlie MacArthur, who described himself about that time as “a middle-aged pixie” — Ross found out from a mutual friend that a certain gentleman he didn’t know was about to sail for Europe. This fellow was persuaded to send Woollcott, from the middle of the ocean, a radiogram to this effect: “I seem to have picked up by accident a silver-headed cane belonging to you. I shall be in Egypt for three years. What do you want me to do with it?” When Woollcott read that, he sensed in it the not too fine American hand of his great pal. “He threatened to call the police and have me arrested,” Ross said, “if I didn’t get it back to him at once. He was always going to have me arrested.” As I remember it, the cane was returned to Woollcott wrapped in such a fashion it took an hour to get it loose.

When Ross let Woollcott begin writing his weekly page for the New Yorker called “Shouts and Murmurs,” in 1929, all of us were sure hell would break loose constantly between the two men, and it did. It helped to wear their thinningfriendship even thinner, for Ross complained about almost everything Woollcott wrote, and rejected all or parts of some of the columns. He brought one of them to me once and asked me if two of the jokes in it were familiar to me. They were, and I said so.

Ross killed both stories and Woollcott resigned, but we all got used to that. He resigned the way other men went home to dinner. Some of the resignations lasted longer than others, and in a few the rancor ran deep. He even tried to get Ross’s job once, sending for Katharine White, telling her it was urgent. He met her at the door clad as usual in pajama bottoms and dressing gown, and every now and then during his monologue that day his great bare belly would coyly appear and disappear, like a romping sea lion. “What would you think of me as editor of the New Yorker?” he threw at her to begin with. She indicated, just as quickly, that she wouldn’t entertain the idea for a minute. Katharine does not think that Ross found out about this, but it may well have been the occasion that caused him to wire Raoul Fleischmann, “If you hire Woollcott, this telegram is my resignation. Ross.”

Ross barged into my office one day, spluttering and swearing, to show me a story by Woollcott that had just appeared in the New Yorker and in McCall’s. The writing was not identical, but the substance of both stories was the same. It served as the text for a long lecture on the sins of Woollcoltism, which ended something like this: “Aleck only knows about nine words and phrases, and he uses them all the time. He writes about putting on his tippet, and going buckety buckety to the theater, and riding in his rickshaw, and he uses ‘These old eyes’ and ‘At long last’ in every third sentence.” I had first heard this ancient denunciation early in 1927, but Ross went right on buying Woollcott Profiles, some of them only a few pages long, on Harpo Marx, Charles MacArtour, the Lunts, George Kaufman, Marc Connelly, and three different Times men.

Ross Lhe Wag rarely combined his waggeries and his work, but there was the classic episode involving Woollcott and the so-called Great Chalice of Antioch. This precious first-century object, dug up in 1910, was put on exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum, as one stop in a nationwide tour that had begun with its display in 1933 at the Chicago World’s Fair. It was the kind of thing calculated to bring out Woollcott’s fluent phrases in full flower, and he gave it the works in a “Shouts and Murmurs” department. The piece ended this way:

“I know not what others feel about it, but for my own part I believe that after seeing Mr. Ripley’s exhibit of freaks in the Midway and watching the plausible antics of a life-size, synthetic dinosaur on view in a papiermâché, prehistoric jungle, after drinking a beer at Pabst’s and escaping from the touts who advise an inspection of the nude models in the Streets of Paris, I came along at sundown in my rickshaw to this white building, and, with my own eyes, beheld the Holy Grail.”

That instantly gave Ross the inspiration for another elaborate joke. He arranged to have a man MacArthur knew in Chicago send Woollcott a telegram the Wednesday the New Yorker reached the stands with the chalice article in it. The wire went something like this: “If you plan to write anything about the Antioch Chalice you’ll be interested to know that it is a hoax stop it was made by a man named Frank L. Schwartz in St. Louis in 1908.” Woollcott got Ross on the phone at once and told him to withhold the “Shouts and Murmurs” piece and substitute something else. “Jcezus, Aleck, the magazine’s practically on the stands. I can’t do anything about it,” Ross told him, in mock concern, and then, “Goddam it, don’t you know a phony when you sec one?” 1 his episode was finally forgotten, but not until Woollcott had been made to suffer for a day or two. The next year, 1934, Ross was married again, and things ran smoothly for a while between him and Woollcott.

THE baptism of Harold Ross’s daughter, Patricia, so named because she was born on Saint Patrick’s Day (in the year of our Lord 1935). had little of the anguish attending the memorable baptism of Clarence Day’s father, but a lot more complications, and a sudden theatrical gesture supplied by that old critic of the drama, Alexander Woollcott himself. Ross’s second wife and the mother of his child, the former Frances Clark, of French descent — she had a soft, unique, and charming accent — had told her husband she wanted the baby to be baptized in the Catholic faith.

“The trouble was,” Ross’s great friend, Frank Sullivan, has written me, “Frances did not knowhow to go about arranging the baptism, and of course Ross didn’t. It was arranged from a rather unexpected source. One night, at the Ross’s Madison Avenue apartment, the matter came under discussion when Dr. Eddie Devol and his pal, Bishop Samuel Trexler of the Lutheran Church, were present. Sam said, ‘Why, I can arrange it for you, Frances. I know some of the priests at the Cathedral.’ And he did, and that was how Patricia came to be baptized in the cathedral of her name saint, through the good offices of a Lutheran bishop. That, however, did not end the complications. It seemed that Woollcott had been invited to be godfather, probably by Ross, but the fathers at the Cathedral told Frances and Ross that a Catholic baptism necessitated a Catholic godmother and a Catholic godfather. Was Mr. Woollcott a Catholic? No. Then he was out, as far as being godfather was concerned.

“I never learned how Ross broke the news to Aleck, but it must have been a moving scene. Aleck wasn’t used to being dismissed like that. Anyhow, I was selected as second choice because I was a Catholic. . . . Patricia was baptized one pleasant June afternoon, and among those who showed up was Aleck. If he couldn’t be godfather he was at least going to look on. Father Furlong, now Bishop Furlong, was to officiate, and when he arrived at the font and saw Aleck he came over to me, drew me aside, and said, ‘Look here, you are to be the godfather, is that understood?’ I said, ‘Yes, father,’ and the ceremony began. At one point a two-branched candle was used, shaped like a Y. Father Furlong asked the godmother and me each to place a hand on a branch of the candle while he said some prayers. As I reached to do so, a hand followed by an arm slid past me from the rear and the hand joined my hand on the candle. Need I say that the hand was Aleck’s. I glanced at Father Furlong, but he said nothing and went on with the prayers. I may be mistaken, but I thought there were signs of suppressed mirth on his face. Anyhow, Aleck got in on the baptism in spite of the Church, and I don’t suppose Patricia was any the less effectively baptized because of his alien touch.”

Ross had paced and paced, and thought and thought about it, before he agreed to let Woollcott contribute a weekly page of any kind to the New Yorker. Their quarrels were instantaneous and interminable. They bickered about the location of the page, which Woollcott hoped would run before the “Talk of the Town,” but Ross was dead set against that. “He loves to show off at the theater, and the Algonquin, and his apartment, and everywhere else,” Ross said, “but he’s not going to show off around here.” Their next battle was over Rea Irvin’s decoration to go with the title. Rea had to do dozens before he got one both men agreed on — the comic mask on one side, the tragic on the other. It was easy to get drawings in those days, but prose did not exactly flow in, and the Woollcott page made a good backlog when copy ran short.

Upon Katharine White and later Wolcott Gibbs fell the heavy burden of “handling Woollcott.” Katharine managed to coax him into making changes, over the telephone most of the time, but once in a while he asked her to call at his apartment and discuss some problem of grammar, taste, Ross, or make-up. I saw him in the office only once in my life. The two inimical friends communicated by note, and the exchanges were usually sharp or bitter. Woollcott liked to stab Ross, in prose or speech, with a stiletto, and could not forgive him for using a ball bat or a bungstarter, as in a saloon brawl. Sometimes Woollcott picked up and threw whatever was handiest, never realizing that Ross enjoyed nothing better.

If Woollcott had the emotions of a fish, Ross had the hide of a hippo. I remember the day, at the office elevators, when he read aloud to several of us a letter from old Vitriol and Violets that ended, “I think of you as dead. Hoping I shall soon be the same ...”

Ross got a kick out of provoking stinging letters from his old AEF buddy and, in the case of one real blisterer, had twenty copies of it made and sent them to various friends of his and Woollcott’s. “I wanted the goddam thing to pop up everywhere he went,” Ross explained to me. The editor of the New Yorker knew nothing about such celebrated literary feuds as those between Henry James and H. G. Wells, Dickens and Thackeray, Stevenson and Henley, and it didn’t seem to occur to him that Woollcott did not at all mind having his written philippics perpetuated, that he must even have hoped some of them might attain the stature of deathless literary epistles. All of the letters, and even the shortest notes, bore signs of the sweat of rewrite. Labored expressions like “Your urchin defense mechanism” were lost on Ross, but they are preserved here and there in books in the libraries of friends.

The thing that widened the breach between the two men beyond closing was the three-part Profile Gibbs wrote on Woollcott in 1939. The fuss raised about it after the third part had appeared became one of the most memorable crises in the history of Ross’s weekly. I’ll let Gibbs himself say something about that strange interlude.

“Woollcott did O.K. the galleys, with only minor protests. Actually, he didn’t seem to realize that there was anything particularly unkind about the pieces until Beatrice Kaufman, Edna Ferber, Neysa McMein, and a bunch of those girls started needling him. I mention these because they were the only ones who reproached me personally.

“I think what Woollcott’s friends really resented was that I implied he was a bonehead whose conception of genius could hardly be taken seriously.

“When I first started on the Profile, Woollcott wanted me to come up to Lake Bomoseen and spend a month with him, getting the flavor of his personality, I guess. It was March, but he had a great big fireplace. It was very hard for him to imagine anybody turning down a chance like that.

“Ross was very odd about the Profile. He supplied most of the really damaging stories — like the one about Woollcott’s dearest friend who turned out to be a counterfeiter — and then seemed terribly alarmed when he saw them on paper. He took the buck for them, though.

“ ‘Shouts and Murmurs’ was about the strangest copy I ever edited. You could take every other sentence out without changing the sense a particle. Whole department, in fact, often had no more substance than a Talk anecdote. I guess he was one of the most dreadful writers who ever existed.”

The loyalty of Woollcott’s friends and the loyalty of Ross’s friends were among the strongest anybody ever heard of. (“I hope they deserved it, few mortals do,” said a man who remained neutral throughout the final years of the war between Ross and Woollcott.) I was, to be sure, a Ross man, but I have never been able to get wrought up by attacks on him. When Woollcott sliced up Ross for a full half hour the time I called on him, I did not jump to my feet, or double my fists, or do anything but listen. I guess I always saw H. W. Ross, and still do, as something one has the right to criticize, like a show, or a pageant, or a monument, or a movement. I openly disagreed with Woollcott several times on points of fact, but let his opinions ride. He loved to make everybody mad, and used insults the way other people use simple declarative sentences.

It is reported, in the Samuel Hopkins Adams biography of Woollcott, that Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne would not read the New Yorker again after the Profile, and I experienced myself the chill that fell upon the once fairly warm friendship between Ross and Noel Coward. In 1936 Ross and I had given a party for Coward at Ross’s apartment, and many of his friends were there. Later I saw Coward several times, on a friendly basis, but then there came a post-Profile night at the theater when Coward turned a nervous and self-conscious fixed grin upon the two of us, but said nothing. I am told that he recently grouped Ross and Gibbs and me together as “the three most dreadful men in New York.” I had had nothing whatever to do with the Profile, but the outraged Woollcott circle damned all of us on the New Yorker.

From Bill Levick, who called Woollcott “Foolish,” to John Mosher, who said, “You must admit the old horror is competent,” the put-upon Aleck was beset on all sides at the New Yorker. Some of us, though, were simply outside the battle and the cat-scratching. The point at issue was not, at bottom, Woollcotts ability as a writer, but his importance as a friend, companion, and counselor. Woollcott himself used to brag that he was the best writer in America, but had nothing to say.

IT WAS about 1940 that Alexander Woollcott, sensing that his years left on earth were not many, retreated to his famous island place at Lake Bomoseen. “to set his house in order.” He decided to make up with his old friend Harold Ross, but began feeling better and told other friends he was certainly not going to make up with Ross if he was not going to die. When his end was again clearly in view, he told several of his intimates that he was no longer able to deceive himself about the nature of his relationship to the editor of the New Yorker. “If I made up with him now,” he said, “it would be a hypocritical and insincere gesture.” He never changed his mind about that.

I was listening to a radio discussion panel one night in January, 1943, and heard Woollcott, one of the participants, say something flat and sharp that took in Germany, Hitler, Chicago, and the Chicago Tribune. I was convinced that the old boy was going to give ‘em hell from then on, but ten minutes went by and his voice was not heard again. It was to be heard no more over the air on this planet, except in transcriptions. He had suddenly held up for Rex Stout, Marcia Davenport, and others on the program to see, a piece of paper on which he had scribbled, “I am sick.” He was helped quietly out of the room, showing up to the end the courage for which he was known to both friend and enemy. He died in the hospital at midnight, while extra operators at CBS were trying to handle the thousands of anxious calls that kept coming in to the studio.

In January, 1951, eight years almost to the day after the death of Aleck Woollcott, I found Ross sitting dejectedly in his office and asked him if he was all right. He ran his big right hand slowly over his face, wiping away the invisible web of regrets and sorrows, in a gesture long familiar to me, and said, “All of my friends are dead.” He didn’t mean that literally, for he had many loyal friends left on earth, but I knew the ones he was thinking about. He was thinking about Bob Benchley, Heywood Broun, Ed MacNamara, Ring Lardner, and a dozen others, but the name uppermost in his mind and heart that day, although he didn’t say so, was Alexander Woollcott.

“What is it ends with friends?” wrote William Ernest Henley, the original of Long John Silver, and the friendship he must have had in mind was his own with Robert Louis Stevenson. There is a curious memorial, by no means poetic, to the broken friendship of Harold Wallace Ross and Alexander Woollcott. Everybody who knew the two men well, or anything about the history of the New Yorker, seems to remember it, and it is continually bobbing up, not only in conversation, but in actual reproduction. It is a parody of the memorable New Yorker anniversary cover, but the face of the nineteenth-century dandy is the scowling face of Harold Ross, and the butterfly he is examining contemptuously through his monocle is the winged Aleck Woollcott. The parody cover was used on a privately printed burlesque of the New Yorker on the occasion of the first anniversary of the magazine. It is an odd and inalienable part of the American success story of H. W. Ross, the boy from Colorado with the urchin defense mechanism.