The Years with Ross, page 18
It doesn’t take a psychiatrist to realize that the sudden pounce, similar to what was known in the old six-day bicycle races as a “jam,” is the natural reverse of the coin of masculine shyness, especially in the virile Western type, unlettered in the literature of love. There is desperation and high impatience in it, as well as desire, a restless determination to get it all over with in a smoke screen of blustery action. Ross was ever afraid that sex would forget it was an incident and become an episode, and then an interlude, and, before long, the whole story, God help us all, of a man’s life.
The psychic trauma of Ross’s experience with the Vassar girl in 1925 stayed with him to the end. He jittered at the sight of an unfamiliar female face in any of the offices, and told Katharine White, as the New Yorker increased in size and more and more women typists and secretaries were employed, that he had to find a woman of strong character and firm hand to ride shotgun on the goddam girls on the editorial floor. He found what he was looking for in Daise Terry, in 1929, and she is still there, her hand as firm as ever, though she has ten times as many girls to control as there were thirty years ago. The editor carried a lot of his “problems of a personal nature” to her. When my daughter was born, spang in the middle of the afternoon of Wednesday, October 7, 1931, Ross turned to Miss Terry with a nervous monologue that must have gone like this: “I hear Thurber has just had a daughter. I hope somebody’s looking after him. Send Mrs. Thurber some flowers and say on the card they’re from the New Yorker. I thought babies were born early in the morning or late at night. I’m surrounded by women and children. I have to look after everybody’s personal life. Sometimes I wonder how the hell I ever get out a magazine. I hear the baby only weighs seven pounds—is that enough? I know damn well I weighed nine pounds. It has something to do with diet now, and is probably a fad of the doctors.” Then he must have stared about him morosely and harped on a theme he never left unharped on long. “This place isn’t a business office, it’s a sitting room, and it’s becoming a, by God, nursery.”
Ross didn’t like it at all when he found out, bumbling into what we called the Goings On room, that the girls there brewed both tea and coffee every afternoon, and he was appalled when he bumped into a Coca-Cola machine that had been installed while he was away. “If we have a candy counter, I don’t want to know where it is,” he bawled. “I heard somebody’s daughter running up and down the hall yesterday, as if this were a goddam playpen. I understand she fell and hurt herself. I hope they found the arnica—oh, we must have a medicine chest somewhere in this house!”
At about that time a series of my drawings called “The War Between Men and Women” was running in the New Yorker, and I got a telegram one day from Dr. Logan Clendenning in St. Louis that read, “Help. I’m surrounded by women.” I showed it to Ross, and he was off on his well-worn lecture again. “Doctors don’t know what it is to be surrounded by women. They can turn women patients over to nurses, or psychiatrists, or something. What we need here is a registered nurse and a trained psychiatrist. It’s the only office in the world where paste and scissors are kept in desk drawers. The women do that. And if they don’t show up for work, you can’t ask why. I wish the hell I was back on the Stars and Stripes—it’s the only place I ever really enjoyed working.”
It takes two or more women to surround the average man, but Harold Ross could look as beleaguered as Custer in the presence of only one. He let an editor go in the early years because the man brought his wife into Ross’s office to meet him. Ross looked up and there she stood, seeming to be closing in on him from all sides. Very few women, even among those employed there, could enter the inner sanctum of old Surrounded. Of the privileged females, my second wife, Helen, was one. We walked into his office one day unannounced, and he didn’t start or turn pale. He had known her for quite a while by then, liked her personally, relaxed in her company, and admired her because she had been a magazine editor and once got out two monthlies all by herself, from cover to cover. More than once he grumbled, “I got fifty men and women I don’t even know walking around here with pieces of paper in their hands, getting in each other’s way, and Helen Thurber used to get out five magazines a month all by herself.” It was on that day in his office that Ross, discussing some guilty pair, said, “I’m sure he’s s-l-e-e-p-i-n-g with her.” He was the only man I’ve ever known who spelled out euphemisms in front of adults.
Ross had not liked the idea of my getting married again when he first heard about it, and he asked Bob Benchley to “talk to Thurber. See if you can’t do something about it.” Benchley did talk to me one evening, over cocktails, in his suite at the Royalton. He was repeating, I knew at once, Ross’s concern: that if I became happily married, something bad would happen to my drawings and stories. Benchley was married only once and told me he didn’t believe in second marriages. A man had his wife, whatever their relationship might be, and that was that. The rest was his own business. A woman friend of Bob’s once gave him a drawing of mine for Christmas. It showed a man hiding in a tree while a woman on the ground is calling for him, and the donor of this Christmas gift said, “The man is poor Bob, and the woman is all those women who keep after him all the time.” Later Bob met Helen, liked her, and said to me in an aside, “Why don’t you marry the girl? What are you waiting for—Ross’s permission?”
All that Ross ever said to me about Helen, before he met her, was, “Is she quiet?” Afterwards, I suppose, he was sorry, in his fashion, that he had told Benchley to see what he could do about changing my mind. It must have gratified him no end when the people in my drawings suffered no noticeable beatification except in one spot I did deliberately to scare him, which showed a man and a woman and a dog drifting dreamily among the stars; and he was further reassured when a piece called “A Couple of Hamburgers” indicated no lessening of tensions in my prose war between men and women.
We were often at Ross’s apartment, especially during his second marriage—to the former Frances Clark, mother of his only child—the marriage in which he was still young enough and well enough to seem comfortable at home, if I can use such big words as comfortable and home about him. Slowly he turned every apartment into an annex of his office and a gathering place for his men friends. “I got too many personal possessions,” he would say. There were only a few he wouldn’t have got rid of, out of a sense of escape, and among these was a collection of Gideon Bibles sent to him, from time to time and from most American cities, by his great friend Joe Cook when he was on tour. Ross kept his possessions, including his house near Stamford, but toward the end he lived in a suite at the Algonquin, looked after by a male nurse. He kept rejecting his third wife’s efforts to take care of him, partly because he wanted to be let alone when he was sick. Being looked after, or cared for, at such times only fretted him. He didn’t want any woman around. When, toward the end, we called on him in his Algonquin rooms, he complained about being “fussed over” and said, “I usually get rid of women callers by saying I have to lie down. One woman didn’t go, even then. Two hours later when I got up, she was still sitting out here.” After his death, it is said, an envelope containing a considerable amount of cash was found in a safety deposit vault marked “Getaway money.” It meant, I think, get-away-from-the-world-of-women money.
He didn’t want to get away from work, and kept at it until his final visit to the hospital in Boston where he died. One of his last projects, and one of his keenest interests, was the five-part profile on Duveen by S. N. Behrman. He had one of the galley proofs in his suite on our last visit there. He had put it aside momentarily to eat what he called supper. Its nature shocked Helen a little, as it would have any woman. He was eating sardines right out of the can. “It’s practically the only thing I can taste,” he said. I still keep thinking, against my will, of that brief visit, and of the tired, cloyed, but dogged efforts of Ross to fight against the disease that was killing him, and I like to turn from it to brighter thoughts of him.
I remember his panic the evening he got home from work and was told that he was going to be a father. He leaped to the phone, called a woman friend who gave him the name of an obstetrician, and then called the doctor, who came running. After a brief examination, the doctor came out of the bedroom, as annoyed as Ross was distraught. “It is possible that your wife is pregnant,” he said, “but it’s too early to tell for certain. As it happens, this is not an emergency, as your call indicated. I could actually have taken time to eat my dinner.”
“Judas, I didn’t know,” Ross told me the next day. “I thought you had to act fast.”
Ross’s daughter, Patricia, was one of the great things in his life, and the only female who could handle him with ease. When she was only seven he brought her to the Algonquin at lunchtime to show her off to his friends. She had a good time and didn’t want to leave. “I have to get back to the office,” he told her as she lingered in the lobby talking to people. “Just wait,” she told him, and he sat back in a big chair, with a deep sigh of restive resignation, and waited. Like any other father of a first daughter, he was sure that a girl in her infancy was a fragile object. “Can she breathe, lying on her stomach like that?” he asked her nurse when the baby was not yet one year old, and again, “Is it all right for them to sleep with their hands above their head? I think my mother said it’s bad for them, but I forget why.” I remember the day he tiptoed into Patricia’s room to show her to my mother. She quieted his fears about the baby’s fragility. “They usually outlive their husbands,” she told him, “and they always outlive their fathers, so I wouldn’t worry about her.”
The Gee Whiz Guy became utterly enthralled by the miraculous phenomena of conception, gestation, and parturition, and was always lecturing to one or more of us on the subject. This was his “being clinical,” that attitude of mind toward the functional which was privileged—in conversation, that is, not in type. When he had been a father for less than a year he went to a party one night at the home of Charles MacArthur and Helen Hayes in Nyack. “I had gone out into the kitchen to shake up some fresh drinks,” MacArthur told me, “and when I came back I stood there in the doorway listening to Ross. He was haranguing our guests, most of them fathers and mothers, and some of them grandparents, about the goddam miraculous cycle of menstruation. ‘Nature is wonderful,’ Ross was saying. ‘The damn thing stops at the right time and then resumes without any interference or help.’” The MacArthur guests were, I gathered, mostly men and women of the world of literature and the theater, and far from being shocked or bored, they listened in fascination to this lecture by the editor of the New Yorker. Charlie ended his description of the scene this way, “Ross has the charm of gaucherie.”
At about the same time, the spell of the miracle of birth still being upon him, he came over to me during a party at the apartment of Elliott and Norma Nugent. “I understand there’s an obstetrician here, a friend of yours and Nugent’s,” he said. “Can we get him in a corner for a minute? I want to ask him a clinical question.” The obstetrician, one of America’s most distinguished, had been a fraternity brother of Elliott’s and mine at Ohio State. I got him and Ross together in a corner. The clinical question he asked him was a hypothetical one, it turned out, and it had been troubling Ross’s waking hours. He wanted to know how many women could be impregnated, theoretically, all things being equal and all women being nubile and willing, by a single seminal ejaculation. The doctor told him 300,000,000. I had never seen Ross look more profoundly thoughtful. “Geezus, nature is prodgidal,” he said, “nature is prodgidal.”
One morning, circa then, I found Ross, worried and stoop-shouldered, pacing a corridor, jingling those pocket coins. He came right out with his current anxiety. “Goddam it, I can’t think of any man that has a daughter. I think of men as having boys, and women as having girls.”
“I have a daughter,” I said, “and I wanted a daughter.”
“That’s not natural, is it?” he demanded. “I never heard of a man that didn’t want a son. Can you name any, well, you know, goddam it—terribly masculine men with daughters?” After protesting that I could outmasculine him the best night he ever saw, I said that Morris Markey, a masculine Virginian, had a daughter, and so did Joel Sayre, once described by Stanley Walker as “the wandering behemoth . . . a great man.” Ross brightened, but the sun and moon of reassurance shone in his face when I came up with, “Jack Dempsey has two children, both girls.” His day was saved from the wreckage of despair, but he still had one final depressed word. “Goddam it, I hate the idea of going around with female hormones in me.”
Ross kept going to Boston during his last few years, first to see a specialist about his ulcers, and then to endure the torment of the bronchoscope and other ordeals after tests had shown that he had a minimal cancer. On one of these visits the man who knew almost every actress of his time called on one of his favorites backstage at a theater in which she was starring in a play translated from the French. Ross said to her, “Is the author of the play in love with you?” She turned away from her dressing-room mirror, her pretty eyes wide and her pretty lips parted, and said, “He’s sixty!” Ross was fifty-eight then, with less than a year to live, and it hurt him deeply to have his age group so tactlessly brushed aside as men in whom love has turned to ashes. I was fifty-six at the time, and not crazy about what the lady said myself. I told him she never would have said it if she had realized he was nearing sixty. “She thinks you’re still in your prime, as young as you look and as boyish as you talk.”
Ross ran a big hand slowly over his face. “The hell with it,” he said, and put, or tried to put, his mind on something else.
10
Who Was Harold, What Was He?
Franklin Pierce Adams took Ross tobogganing one wintry afternoon in the twenties, somewhere in Connecticut. A few days after that, at the Algonquin Round Table, someone asked, “What does Ross look like tobogganing?”
“Well,” Frank said, “you know what he looks like not tobogganing.”
Ross looked like various things to various people. To Margaret Case Harriman he had “a clown face,” and it isn’t hard to visualize the vivid portrait Rouault could have done of him as Pagliacci. To Ben Hecht, his old friend, Ross was “burglar-faced.” When the Algonquin circle put on a theatrical benefit, back in the twenties, Ross was cast as a taxi driver. Stanley Walker has never got over a notion, thirty years old, that the rugged New Yorker editor, whose ancestry was Scotch-Irish, was an American Indian, probably Ute or Shoshone. Here is ethnologist Walker on Ross, the Amerind: “Did you ever notice the way Ross walked? It was an Indian walk, slow, shambling, head bent forward, oddly like a camel’s swaying motion. Only the little Indians from below the Rio Grande were any good on their feet, graceful runners, rhythmic boxers. Of course Jim Thorpe could run, but when he walked he walked like Ross.” I never saw Ross run, but something tells me he didn’t run like Thorpe.
Ross was always figuratively on the run in the office, but in his outdoor activities he was ambulatory. He was an ardent fisherman and a fair croquet player (once he drove his ball into the rough and when he came back to the lawn a few minutes later, he not only had the ball, but a case of poison ivy). Vivid tales of Ross as fisherman are still heard in the land. Once, in New Brunswick, he went out in a canoe with an Indian guide and let the guide do most of the fishing for him. Ross was absorbed in reading a book he had brought along. He used to say that if you wanted to read a book you had to get away from New York, or at least away from home and office. One of his favorite Talk stories was about a businessman whom a friend was astonished to behold coming out of a house in Greenwich Village, far from his usual haunts. To the friend’s “What are you doing down here?” the businessman said, “I’m finishing a book.” The friend said, “I didn’t know you were writing a book,” and the man said, grimly, “I’m not writing a book, I’m reading one.”
Ross did most of his fishing in Colorado and Nevada, usually with Dave Chasen, Frank Capra, and the social historian Nunnally Johnson, who wrote this report of one of their fishing expeditions: “If you think Ross was sartorially a man of undistinction in the fashionable world of smart New York, you should have seen what he looked like on a fishing trip, I can’t even imagine where he got such garments, unless they’d been discarded by Joe Jackson, the tramp bicyclist. He looked so villainous that he attracted worried attention in a truck drivers’ diner where we stopped for breakfast on the way to Nevada.”
I have no data at all on Ross as a swimmer, but ever fresh in Johnson’s memory is a story of Ross at a moonlit swimming pool in Hollywood. During an evening party, twenty years ago, a lovely young blonde suddenly “shucked,” as Nunnally puts it, and ran out to the pool, naked as a Renoir nymph, only slenderer. One of the gentlemen also shucked and tore after the lady, and they were disporting like porpoises in the water when the male porpoise looked up and saw Dave Chasen viewing the antics with interest. Ross was there, too, but with his back squarely to the pool. He was trying to divert Dave’s attention. The male swimmer heard him say, in his loud voice, “Where do you get your asparagus, Dave?” The swimmers dressed, all ardor spent, and the party was resumed in the living room, the embarrassed Ross nervously turning the conversation to a midnight probe of the parsley situation.
