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During its first decade of existence, The New Yorker operated out of cramped offices on the sixth floor of 25 West Forty-fifth Street. In 1935, at the nadir of the Great Depression, many national publications were losing money. The New Yorker defied that trend by continuing to prosper. Advertisers wanted to reach the magazine’s well-heeled readers, who spent fifteen cents a week for what former managing editor Ralph Ingersoll termed “[a] distillate of bitter wit and frustrated humor.”1

The New Yorker’s circulation that year topped 125,000; about half of the readers were outside the New York City area. Ingersoll marveled that a magazine edited by Harold Ross, who was regarded by many people as a mad genius, “has accomplished what no other weekly has been able to do in a generation: for the first six months [of 1934] it ran more pages of advertising than—hold your breath—the Saturday Evening Post itself!”² F. R. Publishing Corporation, the company Ross, his wife Jane Grant, and Raoul Fleischmann cofounded in 1925 with $45,000, was worth $600,000 a decade later. “Magazines are about eighty-five percent luck,” Harold Ross once quipped. “I was about the luckiest son of a bitch alive when I started The New Yorker.’”³ What Ross and many other people apparently forgot was that Fleischmann and other investors had pumped more than $700,000 into The New Yorker before it began paying its own way in 1928.⁴ Harold Ross’s “luck” had not come cheaply.

In keeping with its elevated status, The New Yorker moved to bigger and better offices in early 1935. Its new home was in a twenty-two-story office building at 25 West Forty-third Street, two blocks south of its original location.

Initially, there was lots of room there. However, as the magazine grew, so too did the number of employees, and before long space was again at a premium. By the time Mickey Hahn arrived in the fall of 1950, many members of the editorial staff were jammed two or three to an office.

There was a definite pecking order at the magazine. The eighteenth floor at 25 West Forty-third Street was occupied by writers, the nineteenth by Ross and his editing staff, and the twentieth mostly by the fiction and art departments. Mickey received special treatment when she was given one of what writer Brendan Gill described in his memoir Here at The New Yorker as the “bleak little ill-painted cells”⁵ on the eighteenth floor. The space had been vacated a few days earlier by Janet Flanner, The New Yorker’s Paris correspondent. Flanner had been visiting New York, and when she returned to Paris, Mickey moved into the office she had occupied. It was opposite the elevator. On the main editorial floor—the nineteenth—visitors stepped off the elevator to arrive unannounced at the doors of editor Ross and his staff. As a result, Ross found himself confronted more than once by disgruntled former employees and frustrated freelance writers who were upset that their submissions had been rejected. After one too many of these surprise encounters, Ross had a table and chair set up in the hallway, next to the elevator. Comely young women from Vassar, Barnard, and other exclusive schools, eager to add to their resumes a stint at the fashionable New Yorker, were hired as receptionists. Many came from well-to-do families and did not need the money, so they were paid a pittance.

The appearance of a receptionist was a change, one not everyone applauded—among them Wolcott Gibbs, the magazine’s theater critic. Gibbs, a fastidious man who was scornful of Ross’s adherence to “insect routine,” as Gibbs termed it, preferred to write at home. There, attired in a bathrobe, he composed his reviews while pacing the floor and chain-smoking cigarettes. Ross, who admired and liked Gibbs, used any excuse to get him to come to the office. One of the rare occasions that Gibbs did so was just after the receptionist’s table appeared in The New Yorker hallway. Gibbs dropped by for an appointment with Ross. As he stepped off the elevator and headed for the editor’s office, the startled receptionist called after him, “Sir! Sir! Can I help you?” Gibbs stopped and began muttering about Ross. When the young woman demanded, “Whom shall I say is calling?” Gibbs promptly returned to the elevator and pushed the down button. Sensing she had committed a major faux pas, the receptionist implored, “Sir, is there anything I can do for you?” Gibbs stepped into the waiting elevator without looking back. “No, thanks,” he said. “I’ve lost interest.”6

Such scenes being played out and the stream of people passing one’s office door could have been either a curse or a blessing for Mickey. Given her genial nature, her insatiable curiosity, and her remarkable powers of concentration, she reveled in the bustle. Mickey remained in the same office, opposite the elevator, for most of the next forty years. She even took the equivalent space in 1990 when The New Yorker moved to its current home, a few doors up the street at 20 West Forty-fifth Street. In the process, Mickey became one of only a handful of New Yorker staff writers to serve under the first four of the magazine’s editors: founder Harold Ross (1925–1951), William Shawn (1951–1987), Robert Gottlieb (1987–1992), and Tina Brown (1992–1998).

In some ways, the location of Mickey’s office almost seems symbolic. The impression her coworkers had of her was of a woman ceaselessly on the go. One day, Mickey was rushing off to England to visit her husband and daughters, or else to Chicago to visit her siblings and aged mother. The next, she was headed to the far ends of the globe to research another of her celebrated “reporter at large” articles. In the obituary he wrote for The New Yorker, veteran staff writer Roger Angell noted, “What is disconcerting about [Mickey] now that she is gone is how few of us, even among the old timers, can claim a close friendship with her, much as we admired her.”7

As often as not, Mickey’s office door was open. Yet even when she was working hard on an assignment and her door was shut, it was never really closed. Colleagues who interrupted the steady tap-tap-tapping of her typewriter knew she was always ready to talk about writing, office gossip, or any of her many other abiding passions in life—words, apes, monkeys, and zoos especially. Sometimes she would emerge from the office to beetle down the hall to check the spelling of a word in the big Webster’s Dictionary that was located on a stand on each editorial floor. She would often call on family and friends whenever something piqued her curiosity and she had to know. It might be the location of the island of Diego Garcia (in the middle of the Indian Ocean), the meaning of the philosopher’s notion of structuralism (a study of the concepts that underlie other concepts), or maybe the facts about the nerve disorder known as Bell’s Palsy, which paralyzed muscles in Mickey’s face for a time in 1963. A favorite game that Mickey, Sheila McGrath, and others used to play was to track down the word for some obscure activity; if people did it, the theory was, there must be a word for it. A typical example was the word for the act of inserting one word in the middle of another for dramatic or comic effect—unbloody-believable! The word is “tmesis.”

Mickey also loved to pose provocative questions, as much to stir up debate as out of any real desire for answers. (“Did Shakespeare know he was Shakespeare?” she would typically ask.) “Emily Hahn had the most intense love affair with words of practically anyone I’ve known,” recalled Valerie Feldner, a receptionist at The New Yorker who became her friend in Mickey’s latter years. “[She] made hunting for definitions and meanings an endless game.”⁸

Because Mickey Hahn’s reputation preceded her at The New Yorker, when she arrived many of her coworkers were curious about her. She was already something of an office legend due to her China to Me notoriety, her cigar smoking, and her striking good looks. Mickey was someone people talked about. She loved it; like her father Isaac, she craved attention and often played to an audience through her penchant for dramatic entrances. Once, in 1969, Mickey attended a high-profile reception at the New York home of the wealthy Canadian industrialist Edgar Bronfman and his wife Anne. Mickey strode into the crowded salon wearing black leather boots and puffing on a huge cigar. When one of the society ladies stared with mouth agape, Mickey smiled at her and announced in a stage whisper, “Can’t smoke opium here, you know.”⁹

Cigars were an integral prop in countless other Mickey first sightings. Professor James (“Jimmy”) Cummins, one of Charles’s former students and one of his closest friends, was a graduate student at the University of London in 1948 and was working for the summer as a waiter in a seaside town not far from Conygar. Someone had asked him to deliver a letter to Professor Charles Boxer, whom Cummins had never met, although they had common scholarly interests. “I hiked over there in the afternoon,” Cummins said. “As I was walking up the long driveway to Conygar I saw someone who was smoking a cigar standing on the second-floor balcony in riding breeches. It turned out to be Mickey. She didn’t have a horse, but she liked to wear riding breeches.”10

That is not quite the end of the Cummins story. Although Charles was away, Mickey invited Cummins to stay for a drink with her and Charles’s brother Myles, who was visiting. Cummins did, and he so enjoyed himself that he had no recollection of what time he finally went home, or of how he got there. All he knew was that he had made a new friend, a fact that was confirmed when he next met Mickey. It was just before Christmas that year at a lecture in London. When Mickey spotted him, she immediately came over and asked what he was doing for the holidays.

“Staying in my lodgings, I suppose,” said Cummins, who had been orphaned at an early age and had no close family.

“Nonsense!” replied Mickey. “Come to Conygar with us.” So he did, and that was the start of a beautiful, lifelong friendship.¹¹

Given Mickey’s outgoing nature, it understandably wasn’t long before she knew everyone at The New Yorker and everyone there knew her (or knew of her). People sought her out. She was among them for nearly five decades, but it was never in her nature to be a joiner, and so she was never really one of them. Asked about his reminiscences of Mickey, veteran New Yorker writer Brendan Gill noted, “We’ve nodded cordially and exchanged hellos for fifty-odd years, but it is in the nature of New Yorker relationships never to progress beyond that point. Professionally friendly, but not intimate; admiring, but almost always silently so.”¹²

When The New Yorker marked its seventieth anniversary in 1995, it did so with a lavish double issue (February 20–27) in which Mickey’s name and byline were conspicuously, inexplicably, and inexcusably absent. If the oversight hurt, which it must certainly have, she never let on.

Despite her longevity, Mickey was never one of the inner circle of cronies at The New Yorker—mostly males—who in the old days surrounded editor Harold Ross or his successor William Shawn. “The great, liberal New Yorker,” like virtually all the national magazines of the day, was owned and managed mostly by men. There were many strong female personalities at the magazine all right—Katliarine White being the best known—but for the most part, The New Yorker was a “guys-only” club, where a kind of literary locker room mentality prevailed. Mickey, no shrinking violet herself, was regarded as a character by her male colleagues. “She was a sweet-tempered feminist, who didn’t dislike men,” retired New Yorker fiction editor William Maxwell told Roger Angell.13

It speaks volumes that Mickey did not receive even a single mention in Brendan Gill’s book, or in James Thurber’s memoir The Years with Ross.¹⁴

When Mickey met Harold Ross that long ago summer day in 1929, her relationship with the New Yorker editor was distant and businesslike. At first, she hated him. That changed as they came to know one another. Mickey never forgot how Ross had paid her mother’s way to New York in September 1943 so Hannah Hahn could be there when her daughter arrived from Hong Kong. Later, when Mickey heard that Charles had been beheaded by the Japanese, she “instinctively” rushed into Ross’s office to share her grim news. Ross consoled her by taking her to lunch at the Algonquin Hotel, his favorite haunt. “We talked about a lot of other things, and Ross told me not to believe the rumors. He was right,” Mickey said.¹⁵

Ross was always congenial and warm toward Mickey Hahn, even when they had their differences, as they inevitably did. Mickey sensed from the beginning that there was more to the New Yorker editor than met the eye. As dissimilar as they were in many ways, in others they were kindred spirits. Like Mickey, Ross was a complex, contradictory character with a chameleon-like vitality. Like Mickey, he knew many people, but few people really knew him. There were many Harold Rosses, just as there were many Mickey Hahns. “I think we should all write our own books about him,” Mickey once said. “We all have Ross stories.”¹⁶

No one ever questioned Ross’s talent or his dedication. He had an engaging wit, a nimble mind, and an unequalled eye for literary talent. Writers loved to work for him; Ross was a “writer’s editor”—one of the nicest things most writers will ever utter about the people whose job it is to prune and polish their words. As Charles McGrath pointed out in a tribute to Ross, written for The New Yorker’s seventieth anniversary issue, “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.”¹⁷ The point was, Ross had a tremendous respect for creative people, and he genuinely cared about the people who wrote for him.

Given all of the bizarre tales that such writers as Thomas Kunkel, Brendan Gill, and James Thurber have recounted about how New Yorker staff were hired and fired, the story of how Mickey Hahn joined the staff is disappointingly mundane. When she first began writing for the magazine, it was because Katharine White—Angell at the time—had drawn her to Ross’s attention. The appearance of Mickey’s byline in The New Yorker jump-started her literary career, giving her instant credibility. The magazine had become a huge success by 1929. Every writer who was anybody in America dreamed of having an article published there. Mickey was as much at home spinning the offhand “casuals”—a New Yorker term for articles and stories—as she was at writing the magazine’s trademark hard-edged, yet literate, reportage. A. J. Liebling and Joe Mitchell had perfected the format, and Mickey became one of its most skilled practitioners.

When she inquired in 1950, Mickey was offered a job as a New Yorker staff writer. It was as easy as that. Although she had spent a lot of time there following her return from Hong Kong, Mickey had always shared office space with others. That was normal; when fellow staff writer Philip Hamburger was hired in 1939, he was put into a cubicle “roughly the size of a hotel icebox” with two other writers.18 Things were different for Mickey. In 1950, she got her own office. She also got a typewriter and a pile of yellow copy paper. A window with a partially obstructed view of Forty-fourth Street was the only frill.

In at least one important regard, Mickey was no different from other New Yorker staff writers: the terms under which she was hired were vague and informal, at least in her mind. Mickey liked to joke that she had no job guarantee, no security, and no safety net. In a 1988 interview with a reporter from Publishers Weekly, Mickey explained her status at The New Yorker after thirty-eight years there by noting, “I don’t know. They might kick me out any minute. But I’m so old [83] they probably won’t.”¹⁹

In actual fact, Mickey and other “fact writers”—as opposed to those who wrote for the fiction department—were considered employees. By the terms of the contracts under which each of them had been hired, they were entitled to a share of the magazine’s profits and to coverage under The New Yorker’s group health insurance plan. This became an issue in 1978, when Internal Revenue Service officials decided that people under contract at The New Yorker were not “employees” for income tax purposes. This caused a great deal of upset and anger until U.S. Senators Bill Bradley from New Jersey and Daniel Patrick Moynihan from New York cosponsored a 1979 bill in Congress that specifically exempted the magazine’s current contract employees—but no new ones—from this tax office ruling. Despite what Mickey may have said, she literally had the U.S. Congress to thank for her job!²⁰

In that job, Mickey was encouraged to write about anything and everything that interested her. Given her insatiable curiosity, the range of her literary territory was limited only by her boundless imagination and tireless work ethic. In return for a right of first refusal on her articles and stories, The New Yorker provided Mickey with a weekly draw, picked up the costs whenever she traveled on assignment, and paid her a higher rate for submissions than it otherwise would have done had she not been on staff. The more of her work that appeared in the magazine, the higher her per-article rate. Disliking routine as much as she did, this arrangement suited Mickey perfectly. Others might have been uneasy in such an unstructured environment, but Mickey was in heaven; she had found the job of her dreams.

During her first few weeks back in New York, Mickey stayed at the home of her old friend Donald Hanson and his wife Muriel. Then she sublet an apartment from the estranged wife of writer Nunnally Johnson. The dwelling was a brisk half-hour walk from work. Mickey arrived most days no later than seven o’clock, hours before almost everyone else in the editorial department—the regular office hours being 10 A.M. to 6 P.M. Longtime New Yorker staff writer E. J. Kahn, Jr., himself “a morning person,” recalled that most days when he got in, there was Mickey “almost always at her desk just off the elevator landing, already into her day’s stint. Even if I never went to bed, I would be hard pressed to match her formidable output,” he wrote.21

Harold Ross was already in failing health when Mickey joined The New Yorker staff. His smoking habit caught up with him the following spring, when he learned that he had cancer of the windpipe and only months to live. At first, Ross did not tell any of his New Yorker colleagues. However, speculation about his health grew as his absences from work became longer and more frequent. William Shawn, the managing editor of the nonfiction department (Gus Lobrano held the equivalent job in the fiction department), assumed more and more of the editor’s duties.

When Mickey learned of Ross’s death on December 6, 1951, she was in Hong Kong. She had gone there with Charles for ceremonies marking the tenth anniversary of the Japanese attack on the city. Ross, in Boston for cancer surgery, died unexpectedly on the operating table. “I cried like an idiot,” Mickey recalled.²² It was only after he was gone that she grasped how much he had really meant to her and to her career. Not only was Harold Ross one of the most remarkable men she had ever met; he had been a good friend, indeed. His death was a huge loss to her and to everyone else who knew him. In many ways, Harold Ross had been the heart and soul of The New Yorker.

There was a lot of speculation following Ross’s death about whether the magazine he had founded could—and would—continue without him. To the surprise of some observers, the transition was almost seamless. The man who made it happen was Ross’s handpicked successor, William Shawn. Mickey had known him for many years, and they had an excellent working relationship. Shawn, two years younger than Mickey, had grown up in the same Chicago neighborhood where the Hahns lived, and for a time he and Mickey had even gone to the same school.

Shawn was ruddy, short, balding, and polite to a fault; he used honorifics when speaking about everyone, even messenger boys and elevator operators. He was born William Chon, but changed his name to Shawn. He thought Chon looked too Oriental on paper, and that Shawn was more befitting a young man with literary aspirations. He must have been right; Harold Ross hired Shawn in 1933 to write for the magazine’s “Talk of the Town” section. Shawn, who shunned the limelight as much as Ross did, proved to be more skilled with an editor’s pencil than with a writer’s typewriter. He edited many of the articles that Mickey sent from China in the late 1930s and early 1940s. That is when she got to know him. “Shawn could not have been more different from Ross,” Mickey explained. “He was very gentle and deliberate. He pondered everything a long time. Maybe Ross did, too, but he didn’t seem to.”23

This was not to say Shawn was any easier to work for than Ross had been. Mickey recalled one occasion when she was writing a long article about the Greenpeace environmental group. She had given Shawn portions of the article to read. “He came into my office carrying it all,” Mickey recalled. “He was very red in the face as he announced, ‘We’re not going to do this!’ Then he put the papers down on my desk and left. I never had any explanation. The editor who was working with me on the article tried but couldn’t get an explanation either.”²⁴

Such incidents were rare. Mickey generally got along with Shawn as well as she did with most of her New Yorker colleagues. Of course, she got along better with some than with others. Among the more high-profile New Yorker people for whom she had a special fondness was humorist James Thurber. “Jim,” as Mickey called him, had lost an eye in a childhood bow-and-arrow accident, and a degenerative condition had left him nearly blind in the other. Although this prompted his early retirement, Thurber’s presence was still felt at the magazine. He still dropped in, and he sometimes prowled the offices in the evenings, after all of the staff had gone home. One of his tricks was to write cryptic graffiti in small letters in the upper corners of the walls, near the ceiling. Writer Joe Mitchell was astonished to look up in his office one day to see the words “Too late!” scribbled in Thurber’s distinctive hand. How long it had been there, Mitchell had no idea.²⁵ Other times, Thurber left cave drawing-like humorous doodles in conspicuous locations, often in the hallways. When The New Yorker moved from 25 West Forty-third Street, an entire wall with Thurber’s pencil renderings was taken down and carted along.

In the fall of 1951, Thurber was only fifty-six years old, but he was already enfeebled. Tall, graying, and with his once-lean body prematurely gone to an old man’s paunch, Thurber was a melancholy figure; the death of his old friend Ross had affected him deeply. He could not get around without his wife or someone else to act as his guide. Nonetheless, when he heard that Mickey was back in New York, Thurber sometimes made his way over to her house to visit. When Thurber’s wife Helen discovered he was sneaking out on his own, she followed him one day. She was furious with him for taking such a huge risk.

“I came to know Jim pretty well,” said Mickey. “Nobody else can remember what I remember about him. He once took me to have lunch with his mother, and she had a bad eye, too. They say it isn’t true, but how could I make that up?”26

Mickey recalled another incident a few years later which she said was typical of Thurber and revealed his mischievous side. He loved practical jokes. Sadly, toward the end of his life in 1961, these became increasingly sophomoric, sometimes even cruel. “Thurber and I were out some place one evening and we went to the office to get something. Jim was drunk. I’d had a few drinks, too, but I wasn’t drunk,” Mickey said.

“They used to push the office mail through a slot in the door in those days, and I remember that Jim picked up The New Yorker’s mail that night, and he tore up everything—letters, subscription requests, drawings … everything. Why? I don’t know, and he never said.”²⁷

Thurber became increasingly prone to such unpredictable outbursts. Even his family and friends were at a loss to explain why. Some people attributed it to his bitterness at going blind. As it turned out, that was not the case; there was a physiological reason. Mickey recalled how she attended a wake at Costello’s Bar, long the favorite after-hours haunt of the New Yorker editorial staff. It was not until the next day that Mickey realized that during the entire evening at Costello’s, no one had even so much as mentioned Thurber’s name. “I told Bill Maxwell about it. He said, ‘Of course. Jim [Thurber] was so awful people didn’t want to talk about him.’ Thurber was making scenes. It turned out that he had a tumor on the brain.”²⁸

Another of Mickey’s favorite New Yorker personalities was cartoonist Charles Addams, the creator of the Addams family characters. Like Thurber, Addams had a sometimes naughty, off-the-wall sense of humor. In 1969, Mickey had caused an uproar with a New Yorker article entitled “The Big Smoke,” in which she told the story of her opium addiction. Not long afterward, she chanced to be on a crowded office elevator with Addams. He winked as he flashed a wicked smile, then produced a small box from his coat pocket. On it the word “Opium” was spelled out in big letters. Addams tucked the box back into his pocket, where he had been keeping it in anticipation of this moment. Addams said nothing further. That was his way of having fun.

Another time, after Mickey did a series of articles on communicating with animals, Addams marched into her office with his mongrel dog Alice in tow. He introduced the mutt to Mickey. “Addams told me his dog understood everything you said. He looked at her and announced, “Alice, you’re looking dirty. We’re going to wash you.’ The dog quickly made herself scarce,” said Mickey. “So maybe she really did understand.”29