The Years With Ross

EVERY time I go back to the letters, and there are dozens of them, that Harold Ross wrote me during the last three years of his life, I realize, and marvel, that they formed only a small corner of the correspondence he kept up with scores of writers, urging them on, praising their work, cheering them up, ironing out snarls and misunderstandings. patiently explaining, vigorously denying, running the whole range of emotions, and all that time he was far from the peak of health. Only one or two of the letters even touch on his many visits to the Lahey Clinic in Boston for checkups and treatments. “My trouble is mainly acidity, I guess,” he wrote in one note, “but the X-ray of the stomach nicer scar shows it was a beauty.” Then he would set about answering some complaint of mine, straightening something out for me.

Our exchange of letters in 1949 when, I now know, the onset of a hyperthyroid condition made me irritable and often unreasonable, shows that he was far less the snarler than I was. His letters are filled with commendation, even of my most minor pieces, and with solicitude, too. “I admonish you not to show up at the office for the next few days. Painters are at work in several offices and the halls look like a second-hand store. You’d kill yourself.”I had once bumped into a ladder in a corridor, and that had worried him almost as much as the chair placed at the top of a newly painted flight of stairs with a sign on it reading “Danger.” Somebody had yelled at me as I was about to walk into it and break my neck.

Picking up at random a clump of his correspondence, in 1949 and 1950, I found this brief memo about the opening of the Nugent-Thurber play in London: “Jim: Hot review of ‘Male Animal.’ London pleased. R.” Actually, the reviews could scarcely have been described as hot, nor was there really enough, in a brief casual I did at the time, to call forth this: “I got back from two weeks away, and the pleasantest thing I found was your piece, ‘The Comparable Max,’ which, I think, is very fine and funny. . . . It is unquestionably a very high-grade light piece.” This kind of Rossian reassurance came frequently in his last two years, 1950 and 1951, the dark heyday of McCarthy, during which humor fell off at the New Yorker and throughout the nation, and Ross kept urging White and Perelman and Sullivan and Gibbs and me to write something funny. I kept hearing from him all the time I was in Bermuda in the spring of 1950, and he pulled out all the stops: “I’m proud of your production down there. I may see Truax about a medal for you.”

That June he went out West “to fish and to show Colorado to my daughter.”He had gone up to get her at her school in New England, and also to receive the honorary degree of Doctor of Humane Letters at Dartmouth. “I’m so sheepish I won’t discuss that,” he wrote, “beyond saying that it is not for letters and that the magazine has been called Red so much that it may be a good idea to get a bit of conservative recognition. Some guy told me that he was in Ohio and attended some gathering that numbered ten. There was an argument as to whether or not the New Yorker is got out by Communists and the split was five to five, for Christ’s sake.” When a columnist spread the report that the New Yorker was “Red from top to bottom,” I wrote Ross that it wasn’t even read from cover to cover, but we shared a serious concern and a deep anger about the reckless charges of subversion that then threatened to make a chaos of the republic.

One so-called patriotic publication, devoted to denigration and innuendo about many writers and artists, often followed an attack on some author by saying in parentheses, “Also writes for the New Yorker.” This both saddened and infuriated Ross, editor of a magazine that had been attacked at least once by Moscow, an editor not only conservative in such politics as he embraced, but an antirevolutionary in everything. There may have been a Communist or pro-Communist here and there who had occasional pieces printed in the New Yorker, but their writing was neither subversive nor political. To the end, Ross never let the general fear and hysteria get him down, although it did depress him and send him off on occasional streams of good old American profanity.

Late in May, 1950, after Lillian Ross’s widely talked-about running interview with Ernest Hemingway had appeared in the New Yorker, I wrote Ross from Bermuda in praise of the piece as a refreshing new kind of Profile form by a writer who showed evidence of being able to do anything from a Talk story to a three-act play. Ross replied that Lillian had got great acclaim for her piece and that at least a dozen letters of applause had come to him. “A funny thing,” he added. “I just answered one letter that wasn’t applause, from Milton MacKaye, who is outraged and violent; says Hemingway was ‘pilloried,’ continues: ‘Is this modern reporting? If everything is privileged, I quit.’ He is writing under the assumption that the story was one of a drunken man, of a man on a bender, and hence an arrant invasion of privacy, which it would be if Hemingway had been drunk, which he wasn’t. I saw him then. He’s one of the best drinkers I know.”

I WAS glad that, during much of Ross’s last year, when he had a suite at the Algonquin, my wife and I were also there. We had lunch with him often, and I remember my last dinner alone with him. He said he hadn’t yet read a certain casual of mine that had appeared the week before, but he added, as he always did, some exaggerated quotes about it from others. It was characteristic of Ross that he had ended his letter to me about the Hemingway Profile this way: “By God, I’m glad to know you are starting in on some casuals again. . . . Perelman says he is starting up, too. That ‘Cocktail Party’ story of yours was a big sensation and, so far as the magazine was concerned, lasted until L. Ross’s Hemingway piece came along. Since then they’ve been talking about it.”

I set this all down, not only to preserve in type some cherished signs of that warming touch of his, but to show his deep concern about the decline of humor in his magazine. He knew that the writers of the time, under the gloomy threat of world annihilation, were departing from Euphoria to live in Jeopardy, and it was a continuous and major worry. His old dread, that the once carefree New Yorker, going nowhere blithely, like a wandering minstrel, was likely to become rigidly “grim,” afflicted his waking hours and his dreams. He tried, by cajolery, and even fulsome praise, to whip his dwindling stable of aging humorists into action. As long ago as 1933 Ring Lardner had died, at forty-eight; then came the death of John Mosher, at fifty, and Bob Benchley, at fiftysix, and Helen Hokinson. The humorists were going fast, and Ross kept at those who were left with spur and laurel.

In his last three years he wrote five letters to John McNulty, one of his special favorites, and here are quotes from them. “That was a fine piece, John. I heard about it all around.” “You have what it takes to write a story.” “Your best story in behalf of the humanities was that one about the old horse player. . . .” “I enjoyed your last piece, the episode in your wife’s girlhood. I enjoy all your pieces.” “I’ve just read the Irish story, which I found highly interesting, entertaining, amusing, and touching.”

For his old and intimate friend, Frank Sullivan, who was in a fallow period, he got out the spur. He had introduced Frank, about that time, to his pal, Mayor O’Dwyer, by saying, “This is Frank Sullivan, Mare. He sulks in his tent.” He kept sending Sullivan ideas for pieces, some of which I had thought up, and he told him, “Get to those things, and give my love to your sister, Kate.” Later he wrote him, “You have been a hell of a disappointment to me. You didn’t even get up that football series. Maybe it isn’t too late yet, for one or two, if you are so disposed. Oh hell.”

I THINK it was in April, 1951, that a routine checkup Ross underwent following a low-grade temperature revealed the presence of a minimal bronchial malignancy. Regular periods of treatment at the Lahey Clinic reduced this primary lesion, but his fatal infection could not be contained, for metastasis set in. I was unable, happily, to see the growing parchment tone and tightness of his facial skin, but I detected his decline in vitality by the tone of his voice and his increasing difficulty in breathing. One day, during one of the many times we crossed the street together, from the office to the Algonquin or back, he said suddenly, “Oh, well, you can always write for the theater.” It has taken me seven years to figure out what he meant by that. The other day I turned up a letter I wrote him in 1948 saying that I intended to write a play about him and the New Yorker, in which he would appear as the central character, one Walter Bruce. His reply was self-conscious and evasive, but he said he would mull it over and tell me what he thought about it later. And now I know he did tell me about it later in that one sentence, “Oh, well, you can always write for the theater.”

On another day, halfway across the street, he said, “I’ve given up smoking. I’m grown-up now,” and there was profound dejection in his voice. It came out that one doctor, he didn’t say who, had told him to go ahead and smoke now and then, and I think, and hope, he did. I told him that one of my doctors had said, “The way a doctor gives up smoking is to cut down on it.” Ross had not had a drink of hard liquor for years, his bland ulcer diet bored him, and giving up cigarettes was almost too much. As in the case of most American males who live in tension at the corner of work and worry, smoking had been his great relaxation. He had only a few others, playing backgammon or cribbage or gin rummy with his cronies, and reading True Detective and similar magazines, and once in a while he had gone to a baseball game with Grantland Rice. He got nothing whatever out of music, or poetry, or the philosophers, and gay parties were a thing of the past. He went to one or two, at long intervals, but never lost himself in them.

In the office, in the final weeks, he was abstracted, to use Shawn’s word for it, and couldn’t do much work. For eight months, as November came along, the task of selection, editing manuscripts, and querying proofs had been shifted to the overburdened Shawn and his associates. But there is in my hands his final opinion sheet on a Talk visit piece, and it is pure Ross at his perfect best. A reporter I shall call Higgins had gone to some kind of garden exhibition indoors and had described, in his copy, a man-made waterfall there. This was just the kind of thing Ross loved to get his fangs into, and demonstrate his knowledge, or intuitive sense, of what the hell was wrong with the description of it. His physical strength was going fast, but his mental alertness could still stand on tiptoe. Here is H. W. Ross’s final “Talk of the Town” outburst, dated November 8, practically an epitaph for that diminishing department he had once so greatly loved:

“1. Now, for Christ’s sake, this cannot have been a pile of some rocks. For one thing, if the pile was high enough to make water fall, more than some rocks required — tons and tons. But a base of rocks wouldn’t possibly make a waterfall possible. The water would all run down through the chinks in the rocks, internally. What the hell Higgins saw, I don’t know, but it wasn’t this. Real facts should go in. It’s some kind of structure faced with rocks. I should say, at guess.

“2. Please get the God damned book and check to see if the quote is correct. I will do fixing on this story if not used A-issue.”

YOU can see him walking up and down, you can hear him talking,” someone at the New Yorker said about those notes, written a month before he died and two days after his fifty-ninth birthday. My wife had bought him a handsome two-tone scarf, and after he got it he telephoned our suite from his and I answered. “Thanks for the muffler, old fellow, and thank Helen, too,” he said. “Goddam it, I knew when Forster called up this morning from the office and told me it was my birthday I’d be hearing fromyou.” On an earlier birthday, in a happier time, I had once sent him a dozen red roses at the office, and one of the girls had put them in a vase, and there they were on his desk, exchanging blushes with him when he got to work. “Don’t send me red roses, Thurber,” he had said later. “It’s goddam embarrassing. Men don’t send each other red roses, for God’s sake.” I told him I would get one of the girl secretaries to substitute a card for mine, reading, “In everlasting memory of those Riviera nights.” He said, “Nuts,” and grinned, and shambled away.

My mother, when she heard about the gift of roses, didn’t think it was very funny. “You should give him a sweater or a scarf.”she told me. “You see, he’s Scorpio, and with his moon where it is, his weak spot will always be his chest.”She told him that, too, and cautioned him to bundle up well when he went out in the winter weather. My mother and Harold Ross were fond of each other, and besides having me in common to worry about, they shared a deep interest in True Detective, and discussed it one day in his office: — my mother was absorbed in a story about a warden’s wife who was in love with a condemned man in the death block. Ross thought my mother was wonderful, and never lost interest in my stories about her and her pranks. Sometimes, in his mother hen phase, he reminded me of her. After I had scared him by coming down with a ruptured appendix in Virginia, in 1944, undergoing an emergency operation in a railroad hospital, and developing peritonitis, he wrote Helen a letter during my convalescence, objecting to my being brought back to New York too early, in a wheel chair, and said, “Wheeling him through town might have a permanent effect on him. Also he might get cold and wet.”

On the day we gave him the scarf we met him in the Algonquin lobby later and he growled, “Well, I’m wearing it.” I am sure he had put it on carelessly, the way that made every woman want to give his tie, or muffler, or jacket a couple of smart tugs and a tidy pat, and say, “There.”He was pleased that we had remembered his birthday. I could translate that old growl of his.

We didn’t see him much after that. He sat with me one evening in the Algonquin Bar while I had a drink, and he said he thought he might go up to Boston and have something drastic done about the goddam cancer. This was the first time he had used the word to me. “It’s a long story,” he said, “and it doesn’t go well with drinks.”He was, of course, not drinking or smoking, but it was the slowing down of his ability to work that dejected him most and made him decide finally on an operation. When he left for Boston, early in December, he slipped away without fuss or formal farewells.

The last old-timer on the New Yorker staff to see him on the nineteenth floor was Rogers Whitaker, who had been on the magazine when I got there in 1927, and has long been one of its stalwarts, a man who has ably handled make-up and proofs, and edited copy. “Ross rarely edited me,” Clifton Fadiman told me. “For some reason he felt I was engaged in something mysterious that didn’t respond to the normal editing process. Rogers Whitaker was my copy editor, and I have never known a better one.” Fifteen years ago, when Ross had written a hasty letter to the governor of Connecticut, complaining about people from the Bronx trespassing on his property and littering it, Ralph Ingersoll’s PM had attacked Ross, and there was a flurry about it in the press that died out after Stanley Walker wrote an editorial in defense of Ross in the Herald Tribune. During the flurry Ross had said to me, “I should have let Whitaker see the letter. He wouldn’t have let me send it.” Ross’s farewell to Whitaker was typical. He met him at the elevator and said, “I’m going up to the clinic. I don’t know what will happen up there. All of you will have to carry on for me. God bless you.”

None of us will ever forget that characteristic good-by of Ross’s. This is the way Andy White ended his, and the New Yorker’s, farewell to H. W. Ross in the issue of December 15, 1951: “When you took leave of Ross after a calm or stormy meeting, he always ended with the phrase that has become as much a part of the office as the paint on the walls. He would wave his limp hand, gesturing you away. ‘All right,’ he would say. ‘God bless you.’ Considering Ross’s temperament and habits, this was a rather odd expression. He usually took God’s name in vain if he took it at all. But when he sent you away with this benediction, which he uttered briskly and affectionately, and in which he and God seemed all scrambled together, it carried a warmth and sincerity that never failed to carry over. The words are so familiar to his helpers and friends here that they provide the only possible way to conclude this hasty notice and to take our leave. We cannot convey his manner. But with much love in our heart, we say, for everybody, ‘All right, Ross, God bless you!’ ”

Ross told Sam Behrman that he wanted to spend one night at the Ritz in Boston before going into the hospital, but he hadn’t made a reservation. He said there weren’t any chairs in the Ritz lobby — he had once had to stand around and wait — the very kind of trivial annoyance that always kept popping up in his mind to override, momentarily, his major worries. Behrman promptly got Ed Wyner, manager of the Ritz, on the phone from Ross’s room in the Algonquin, and introduced the two men that way. A special easy chair was put in the Ritz lobby just for Ross, and this small attention was the kind of thing that meant more to him than a scroll or an honorary degree. Mr. Wyner was a gracious and attentive host during Ross’s last night at the Ritz, and the editor went into the hospital in a good mood. He had always been a pet patient at the Lahey Clinic, and he regarded many of the staff as friends. One of these was Dr. Sara M. Jordan, who had written, at Ross’s urging and in collaboration with the New Yorker’s Sheila Hibben, a book called Good Food for Bad Stomachs, to which Ross had contributed a foreword. In any hospital he ever entered, Ross was always the star patient. Years before, when he had spent two weeks at a sanitarium, a woman in the ninth month of hysterical pregnancy had been the doctors’ and nurses’ pet until, as the legend has it, “A man showed up who thought he was editor of the New Yorker.”

Ross got, and put in, a great many phone calls while he was in bed. Dave Chasen called him from Hollywood, but Ross told him not to fly East because “I won’t really be out of the anesthetic for a couple of days.” At his side, practically all the time, was his old friend and one of his chief lieutenants at the New Yorker, R. Hawley Truax. They talked, and played cribbage, and Ross gave him some brief final notes and instructions he had written in case anything happened. If anything should, one note said. “My friends at the New Yorker will take care of things.” Another expressed the wish that his daughter, then only sixteen, should scatter his ashes over the mountains near Aspen, Colorado, when she became twenty-one, but he left it completely up to her. I have not pried into Patricia’s feelings about that and, as the father of a daughter, I would have argued him out of the idea. I don’t think it actually mattered; he was just making notes. I do not believe he had a premonition of death, I think he had a hope of restored vigor.

Those of us who know about it will always be glad that Hawley Truax was on hand at the end. He and his wife had not only shared with the Rosses their cooperative house in West 47th Street for most of the twenties, but Hawley had been, and still is, the main balance wheel of the New Yorker, the only man as close to Ross as he was to Raoul Fleischmann, and the great keeper of peace, or at least truce, between the editorial and the business departments. Praise of him shines out in many letters I got from Ross. We were also glad that, by chance, Ross’s close friend, George S. Kaufman, was in Boston that last week.

I have a letter from Kaufman about Ross, one of the most prized of the numerous documents I have been lucky enough to collect in support of my own pieces. It goes in part like this: “Ross, as I recall, was a complete misfit when I first encountered him. He was slightly drunk and shooting craps on a blanket in my apartment at 200 West 58th Street, along about 1919. I think Jane Grant brought him around. The blanket had been ripped off a bed for the purpose because Ross had used a blanket for crap shooting when he was in the Army. If I had any thoughts about him then, they were to the effect that he didn’t belong in the Army or in civilian life either. I would have said he had a good chance of starving to death, and when he came along with the New Yorker idea, about ‘23 or ‘24, it didn’t improve him. On type he was completely miscast as an editor — nobody, not Broun or Woollcott or any of us — thought it would get started. He carried a dummy of the magazine for two years, everywhere, and I’m afraid he was rather a bore with it.

“As the years passed I can only say that I got to love him, if the word may be used between men. Then, on the day he died, I was in Boston with a show, and at one o’clock in the afternoon he phoned me. ‘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.’ I suppose I was the last of the old gang to talk to him. I could not reach Hawley until after the show at night, and Hawley said, ‘He died at a quarter of six.’ ”

Helen and I learned about Ross’s death on the operating table two hours after it happened, when Louis Forster, who now occupies one of the two rooms into which the editor’s old office has been divided, called us at the Algonquin. Helen went into the bedroom to answer the phone, and I heard her say, “No, no,” and knew what it was. The rest of that evening is dim for both of us. I remember telephoning Gibbs and White, and I think Helen and I went over to Tim Costello’s for drinks, and to see people who knew Ross, but not to eat much dinner. Faye Emerson was there later, one of hundreds of persons who, by midnight, had heard the news and were shocked and grieved, and didn’t want to be alone. There were tears all over town, and some of those who wept were men, and one of them was Sam Behrman, who had seen a great deal of Ross in his final days. The last meetings of the two friends had been good for Ross, partly because Behrman had dug up, too late for his series of Profiles, some new and valuable anecdotes about Duveen. How to get these into the magazine gave Ross something to take his mind off himself. He figured they could be run in a “Department of Amplification” in the back of the book. He didn’t like to lose anything good, and when the chance of time and circumstance frustrated him, it gave him something to goddam about, and pace up and down, and try to solve.

ON THE night of Thursday, December 6, Andy White began the sad task of writing the memorial to Ross that took up the Comment page the following week. Gibbs and I stood by, in case we might be able to help. The magazine, for all its crises, had never faced anything like this. Several of the top men of the staff had gathered at William Shawn’s apartment after Hawley Truax telephoned from Boston to say, “It’s all over.” Shawn and the others began notifying the rest of “my friends at the New Yorker.” The magazine, with Ross dead, was suddenly without an editor in chief. Ross had made it clear to some of us that he wanted Bill Shawn to succeed him, but the appointment of his successor was up to Raoul Fleischmann. The night, in 1948, when I had sat around with Ross and Mencken and Nathan, the editor kept talking so much about Shawn that Nathan said, “Who is Shawn? Who is Shawn?” I explained that Shawn was a quiet, retiring, tremendously efficient and hard-working man, who had begun as a Talk reporter in 1933 and risen to the position of fact editor. His great desire is to be anonymous, a word he frequently uses, a word no one ever applied to Harold Ross. But when Ross died, so unexpectedly, Shawn, as fact editor, and Gus Lobrano, as fiction editor, were next in line.

Shawn became editor of the New Yorker, as its founder had so devoutly hoped he would. People still speak of “Ross’s New Yorker,” and his name is heard in conversations and seen on printed pages. At least half a hundred people in the past seven years have said, or written, to me, “I never knew Ross, but when he died I felt I had lost a dear friend.” One man, a literary agent who gets around town, told me, “You could feel the sorrow all over the city the day after Ross died. I don’t think I have ever experienced such a sense of communal grief about a man most people I met had never even seen.” We were all asked, a hundred times, “What will happen to the New Yorker now that Ross is dead?” We had our separate answers to that, but Joe Liebling’s is perhaps the one that will last: “The same thing that happened to analysis after Freud died.”

Out of all my million memories of Ross, one keeps coming to mind more than any other. It was the day he came into my office, carrying a copy I had given him of a collection of my pieces and drawings, which I had dedicated to him. I hadn’t told him about the dedication in advance, and he had come upon it unprepared: “To Harold Ross, with increasing admiration, wonder, and affection.” In my office, with the book open at this flyleaf, he said, “Affection?” I imitated his mock growl. “Yes, affection,” I said. “Do you want to make something out of it?” He stood there a moment, then began chortling, went to the door, turned, and said, with that old limp wave of his hand, “Thanks, old fellow. I appreciate it.” Ross, I found out later, sent out dozens of copies of it to his special list of favorite people.

H. W. Ross had a world and wealth of warming and wonderful things to look back upon as he lay dying. He had been a great success, he had made hundreds of friends and thousands of admirers, he had contributed something that had not happened before in his country, or anywhere else, to literature, comedy, and journalism, and he was leaving behind him an imposing monument. He had got his frail weekly off the rocky shoals of 1925 and piloted it into safe harbor through Depression and Recession, World War II, and the even greater perils of the McCarthy era. His good ship stood up all the way. He sometimes threatened to quit, and he was at least twice threatened with being fired, but he kept on going like a bullet-torn battle flag, and nobody captured his colors and nobody silenced his drums.

A hundred editorials, after his death, acclaimed the genius of the Colorado urchin who had reached the High Place the hard way. The back files of the magazine in his years shine with triumphs that time cannot darken. Scores of admiring, and envious, editors attested to his brilliant command of a staff of wartime writers whose coverage of all theaters of the conflict forms one of the outstanding accomplishments of American journalism, good writing, and excellent editing. Many eulogies of him ended with the identical words: “He was a great editor.” He made, as I have said, a lot of friends and lost a few; he made the right enemies and kept them all. Some of the things he touched were smudged, but most of them were stained with a special and lasting light, as hard to describe as the light in a painting.

On the morning of December 7, 1951, Hobart Weekes took some pictures of Ross’s office. One of them clearly brings out, on the west wall, a photograph of William O’Dwyer, a list of the names of New Yorker artists, one framed sentence of an editorial in the Lynchburg, Virginia, Advance, and four of the drawings I made for Ross poking fun at the goings on of the art meetings. My drawings were given to Patricia Ross, who isn’t sure where she put them, just as my own daughter isn’t sure where she put the drawings I have given her. I hope that the quotation from the Lynchburg Advance still hangs on that wall, where it belongs, but I have been reluctant to ask, or to feel around for it, in the fear that it might have been lost. Of the thousands of appreciations of the New Yorker that have been written, this must have been the one of which H. W. Ross was proudest, and I shall end my long fond view of him, and his life, and his work by reprinting it here. “It is a supposedly ‘funny’ magazine doing one of the most intelligent, honest, public-spirited jobs, a service to civilization, that has ever been rendered by any one publication.”