Because the prime movers of The New Yorker were so creative and productive, their raw energy created a superabundance of drama and comedy. Ordinary problems became magnified and fragile egos threatened to implode.
The pattern was set during the heady 1920s when the young staff, under Ross’s relentless direction, by necessity drove itself to extremes. “We thought nothing of working from early morning until nine or ten at night, with a sandwich for lunch at our desks,” wrote the author Marcia Davenport, daughter of the opera singer Alma Gluck. “Then after dinner break the proofs would start coming in. They had to be corrected and rewritten in whole or in part after Ross got his hooks into them, so it was the rule rather than the exception to work from eleven or twelve at night until dawn. Three or four hours’ sleep and we were at it again.”
Some of the frenetic atmosphere was engendered by the haphazard arrangement of the early New Yorker offices at 25 West 45th Street. (The headquarters moved to 25 West 43rd Street in 1935.) Their disarray was compounded by Ross’s ceaseless quest for an efficient layout. Lois Long would later satirize the physical setup of the place:
There was always the little game of trying to find your desk, for instance. The offices, such as they were, were distributed all over the unrented sections of the building and the greatest delight of our editor (he still retains this lovable characteristic) was to move the desks about prankishly in the dead of night. The result was that you could easily spend an entire morning which you might have spent—God forbid—in honest labor, running up and downstairs in the elevators looking for your office.
The crap game started at four-thirty, at which time it was the particular delight of the Talk of the Town editor, the Art editor, and your correspondent to send our movie critic home to the wife and kiddies without his weekly pay check [sic]. This being accomplished with astounding regularity, everybody went out arm in arm to dinner.
Long contributed to the informal tenor by working in her slip in hot weather and frequently misplacing the key to her cubbyhole. When that happened, “she used the doorknob as a footrest and propelled herself gracefully over the partitions.” As for the crap games she referenced, they were eventually supplanted by poker games. Don Mankiewicz, briefly on the staff, remembered different-colored routing slips being used as betting chips.
Chaos reigned, too, when it came to the material itself. Robert Benchley, for instance, refused to double-space his copy. “The single-spaced stuff drove the proof and checking departments crazy because they couldn’t write between the lines, which I’m sure was his object,” said Gibbs. “And the fact that it was not only single-spaced but also crowded off to one side of the page made it almost impossible to get a word count without actually counting the words. It always came out shorter than I thought it was going to, and it was hell working out last minute fillers.”
At least Benchley could be relied on to file. Not so the erratic Dorothy Parker. “[She] would tell me on Friday that her piece was all finished,” Gibbs said, “except for the final paragraph, and stall me along that way until late Sunday evening when she’d say she just tore the whole thing up because it was so terrible.” Once he dispatched her a telegram that read, SWELL JAM I’M IN STOP COMMITTING SUICIDE IF NO COPY FROM YOU TODAY.
Gradually, as the Depression set in and The New Yorker settled down to the serious business of staying afloat, the irresponsibility and horseplay tended to diminish. But befitting a magazine of metropolitan gaiety, its corridors still rocked with nonsense, never more so than when its personnel were simply endeavoring to carry on. In a poker-faced vein, Ross once asked Fleischmann to set up a new room for the art conference, which at that time was being “held very clumsily in Mrs. White’s outer office with the juggling of a lot of tables, doors, etc.” Ross rejected the idea of holding the meeting in the reception room: “Every word spoken in the corridor outside of Gibbs’, McKelway’s and Mrs. White’s offices can be heard over the partition. The other day Mr. Winney* was telling someone I was out when I was heard talking four feet away. This is terrifying to several of us down here.”
Indeed, that reception room—the holding pen of the asylum, as it were—spawned its special brand of bedlam, as Gibbs recalled:
I saw some very funny people in the old reception room in the days when I was an editor of some kind: DeWitt Wallace whom I gave permission to print Talk in Reader’s Digest free, just because he struck me as such a pathetic hick; Maxwell Bodengiem, who came up with a bunch of poems but finally settled for a loan of fifty cents; a Mr. Zogbaum, who was Baird Leonard’s husband, and delivered her copy when she was reviewing books. It was usually just a drunken scrawl on the backs of a lot of bills and envelopes, and for quite a while I wrote Miss Leonard’s books [sic] reviews, as I did those signed by Nancy Hoyt and, once, one by Sally Benson’s sister, Agnes. In many ways, the Nyer’s [sic] debt to me is enormous.
Past the reception room was The New Yorker’s unique in-house web of intrigue—what White memorably called “a cesspool of loyalties.” He might well have added “disloyalties.” In its loves, hates, feuds, alliances, and similar dynamics, the cesspool was practically a culture unto itself.
And as was the case with editorial policy, Ross set the tone from the top down. The editor had many troubled relationships over his life, and the one he had with his publisher, Fleischmann, was as poisonous as any of them. The two were forever wrangling over expenses, equity, ownership, stock options, advertisements, promotions, and the like. More than once Ross threatened to quit. The famed New Yorker separation of church and state was as much a function of the two men’s mutual antipathy as it was Ross’s way of keeping the magazine’s content free from corrupting business influences. Ross, never particularly sensitive to the feelings of others, came to regard the gentlemanly Raoul Fleischmann as a meddling bankroller. In return, Fleischmann would regard Ross as impractically single-minded. Sometimes when the publisher would pass the editor in the corridors, he would sneer, “Pest.” And the editor would snarl, referring to the source of the family fortune, “Yeast.”
At the other extreme was the way Ross dealt with writers. He wanted to reward them as best he could, but for a long time, he couldn’t. Thurber was almost certainly exaggerating when he said, “The New Yorker did not begin paying its contributors real dough until it was nearly twenty years old.” Still, Ross acknowledged in the late 1930s that he was paying some of his top contributors “a ribbon clerk’s salary.” The lack of pay was the main reason such figures as Fitzgerald and Hemingway barely published anything in the magazine. As late as 1934, after they had more than proved their worth to Ross, White and Thurber were each receiving seventeen cents a word. Two years later Gibbs was getting half a penny less— hardly a windfall, even during the Depression.
If Ross could not make his people rich, he could at least make them feel they were needed. His letters to his favorites would be just as supportive as those of Katharine White, albeit more direct, such as WRITE SOME PIECES, DAMMIT! When not hard at work at his desk, he gregariously roamed the halls to drop by cubicles to jaw, wanting to be kept informed of progress and encouraging activity. Towering above the pack was White, the man he felt could do no wrong, the possessor of his own unique moral editorial compass. “There is only one White,” Ross confided in him.
“Harold’s relationship with Andy was special in a way no one else’s was,” said Katharine. “Nine times out of ten when he arrived at the office and got out of the elevator on the 19th floor he would turn left, to look in on Andy if only to be sure he was there or discuss a newsbreak line or tell him a joke or kick things around, instead of turning right to his own office. It was the way he started the day. . . . Ross trusted a few of us implicitly and Andy was one in whom he had complete faith.”
By contrast, it took White a while to acquire faith in others, including his colleagues. After all, it had taken all of Ross’s and Katharine’s combined powers of persuasion to get him to join the staff. He was very much a loner. “White’s customary practice in those days,” said Thurber, “if he couldn’t place a caller’s name, was to slip moodily out of the building by way of the fire escape and hide in the coolness of Schrafft’s until the visitor went away.” The two may have shared an office at the beginning, but when Thurber first asked him to lunch, White replied curtly, “I always eat alone.” Before long, though, the two were friends, spurring each other on. “We got on fine together,” said White. Early in 1929, when White found himself despondent enough to consider quitting his job and leaving town, the mere thought of a funny Thurber drawing revived him sufficiently that he determined to stick around. But there was more to Thurber’s tonic than his art. “[O]ne of the persons I like best in the world is Thurber,” White said. “Just being around him is something.” At the end of his life, White had on his bookshelf a ceramic rendering of a comic Thurber scene.
Still, the White-Thurber axis was troublesome. “To know Thurber and have him as a friend was a pleasure, but it was also a challenge—sometimes almost a full-time job,” White told Lillian Hellman long after Thurber died. “I discovered this early on, and I’m still at it. . . . I had to give up Thurber, after a few years, the way you give up coffee or cigarettes or whiskey. He became too strong for my constitution.”
Thurber’s force of will was frequently on display when, fortified by drink, he began acting up. “With Thurber, the scene was always in the offing,” said one witness. “He’d soften you up and then spring like a rattlesnake, but without the warning. He attacked both men and women; your sex was no protection. He could pick on you in a feline, catty kind of way.” Katharine White agreed. “We Whites were in such a difficult position about him because we loved him dearly up to a certain point—the point where he began to attack all women, including me.” As Maxwell put it, he had “a talent for the unforgivable.”
Beneath Thurber’s friendship with White ran an undercurrent of jealousy and envy. He was beholden to White as a writer, a pose that White found baffling. “I’ve never known, and will never know, how much Jim was influenced by my stuff,” he confessed. “It has always seemed to me that the whole thing was exaggerated. Jim himself exaggerated it, as he exaggerated other matters and events. . . . My memory of those early days was that Jim was writing very well indeed and needed no help from me or anyone else.” Yet in his insecurity he couldn’t help measuring himself against White. The self-imagined competition was often absurd. Early on, White told Katharine, Thurber began “discussing his bowels and comparing them to mine, claiming that his are better than mine, adding that of course he is older and taller than I am.”
Gibbs, a standoffish figure in the White mold, albeit more misanthropic, did his best to avoid friendships and rivalries alike. Much of his time in the office was spent kept to himself. “He had the semi-hangdog air of someone who drank a lot,” said the “Talk” reporter Jim Munves. By contrast, the assistant art editor Frank Modell remembered Gibbs as so dapper that he reminded him of Fred Astaire. Modell vividly recalled Gibbs pacing in the hallway, apparently composing a piece in his head. “I can almost hear his leather heels clicking on the floor and see the intensity on his face. It was a very impressive act.”
Gibbs did not make for mixing. In the New Yorker corridors, Edmund Wilson recalled, he “glided past like a ghost. His eyes always seemed to be closed.” Truman Capote went so far as to call him a “sourpuss.” “I never saw him smile,” said Modell. “The few times I saw him in the hall, I could just tell from his attitude that he didn’t want to be talked to,” said Ross’s private secretary, William Walden.
But try though he might, Gibbs could not avoid entanglements. Some were salutary. He set great store, for instance, by his closeness with Benchley. Benchley was not merely, as White said, a man whose “high spirits are those of a retired reformer, who got all his good deeds behind him safely in his twenties.” At his core was considerable kindness and sensitivity; he had a knack for setting the neurotic Gibbs’s mind and soul at ease. “When you were with him,” Gibbs recalled, “in the wonderful junk shop he operated at the Royalton in ‘21,’ or in less fashionable saloons which had the simple merit of staying open all night, you had a very warm and encouraging feeling that the things you said sounded quite a lot better than they really were and, such was the miracle of his sympathy and courteous hope, they often actually were pretty good. He wanted his guests to feel that they were succeeding socially and he did the best he could to make it easy for them.”
Gibbs was also devoted to the self-confident, frequently womanizing Addams, who could draw him out of his shell. In the 1930s they would make the rounds of the local watering holes, sometimes with Thurber, riding in a car down Third Avenue with “Gilbert Seldes hanging on the running board.” Addams “was a really dependable, almost miraculously dependable, friend,” said Gibbs’s son, Tony. “If there was a crisis, Addams would suddenly appear.”
But such confidences, for Gibbs, were rare. More often he retreated from emotional contact. He tooled down Third Avenue with Thurber, but as time went by, he relished such experiences with the high-strung humorist less and less. “They were not pals,” said Katharine White. In fact, Thurber would periodically and gratuitously tell Gibbs, “You think you can be as good a writer as Andy White but you never will be.”
Rather more vexing and problematic was the Gibbs-O’Hara connection. “Don’t think I am any less misanthropic than Gibbs is,” O’Hara confessed. “It’s just that I sputter and Gibbs is beautifully articulate.” By the same token, Gibbs had high regard for O’Hara as a writer; he once compared Appointment in Samarra to The Great Gatsby. (Gibbs, in turn, personally reminded O’Hara of Fitzgerald.) “If,” Gibbs predicted early on, “he can contrive to write about the things he authentically hates—waste and hypocrisy and the sadness of potentially valuable lives failing, but not without some dignity, because they were not born quite strong enough for the circumstances they had to meet—and if he can write about them with the honesty and understanding which he possesses in as great a measure as anyone writing today, then he will certainly be one of our most important novelists.”
For his part, O’Hara characterized Gibbs as “a kindly man whose days as an employe [sic] of the Long Island Rail Road have left him intolerant of cruelty.” Gibbs, he thought, was possessed of his own brand of worldliness, one that he came to appreciate as the years went by. “The conversation was animated, brilliant, and as might be expected of two men who have known each other for twenty-six years, classified material,” O’Hara wrote following one of their many lunches in the early 1950s. “I may say, however, that following our custom, we re-examined certain human frailties, such as the nocturnal, the fiscal and so on. After one of these lunches, a kind of euphoria takes hold—at least in my case—because in all the world there are only two men who are so free of pomposity, gallant but not silly in their relations with the opposite sex, gifted writers but not competitors, figures of consequence in Upper Middle Bohemia, men of experience without being dwellers in the past.” He once sent Gibbs a case of whiskey at Christmastime, with Gibbs reportedly returning it because he could not accept so extravagant a gift. “Gibbs and John were real intimates,” said Katharine White.
Still, O’Hara could be utterly exasperating. Egotistical and insecure, famously known as the master of the fancied slight, he was forever picking fights, especially when he had been drinking. “I have no arguments with anything said about John O’Hara as a gifted, and subsequently mistakenly overlooked American author,” said Peter Kriendler, the operator of “21,” where O’Hara enjoyed being seen. “But as a man I remember him as a pain in the ass.” Once, for reasons now unknown, O’Hara ordered a glass of brandy for the express purpose of tossing it in Gibbs’s face. When asked why he would do such a thing, he pouted, “But it was the best brandy.”
Another time, when O’Hara was “putting wrestling holds on ladies and otherwise acting churlish,” Benchley tried to put a stop to it. O’Hara responded by knocking Benchley’s cigar out of his mouth. The next morning he called to apologize.
“Look, John, please don’t apologize to me,” Benchley told him. “You’re a shit and everyone knows you’re a shit, and people ask you out in spite of it. It’s nothing to apologize about.”
“Do you mean that?” asked an astonished O’Hara.
“Of course I mean it, John. You were born a shit just as some people were born with blue eyes, but that’s no reason to go around apologizing for it. People take you for what you are.” Benchley’s bracing honesty and acceptance, spoken with the utmost gentility, reduced O’Hara to tears.
“I know him better than anybody,” Gibbs told Katharine White, “but that’s handicap more than anything else, I’m afraid.”
Gibbs and O’Hara could be afforded their complicated mixture of admiration and animosity because they were genuine intimates. A different instance altogether was the tragic case of Russell Maloney. Gibbs barely knew him, and yet he ended up as Maloney’s sworn enemy. So did a few others.
In addition to many stories, familiar essays, and casuals, Maloney published New Yorker Profiles of figures like Orson Welles, Leonard Lyons, and Alfred Hitchcock. His most famous fictional concoction was the wildly imaginative “Inflexible Logic,” about a hapless fellow who disastrously tests the old notion that six monkeys pounding on six typewriters for a million years will eventually type out every book in the British Museum. “Talk” was his special forte. In taking over the rewriting of the section largely from Thurber, Maloney turned out reams of copy; he boasted that he ultimately wrote more than two million words for the magazine, including “something like 2,600 perfect anecdotes.” He was, Geraghty said, “a cranky genius who could do anything around the place that could be done with a typewriter.”
And yet he left the staff, embittered, in 1945, after only about a decade. Two years later he published a piece about The New Yorker in The Saturday Review that his former colleagues derided as inaccurate and mean-spirited. By Maloney’s sights, both Thurber and White had been “very bad reporters” before joining the magazine; he said that for Ross, “Perfection is not a goal or an ideal, but something that belongs to him, like his watch or his hat.” In response, Ross denounced him as “totally incompetent,” “never a good fact man,” someone who “wouldn’t know a reporter if he saw one,” and “a social suicide” to boot. Referring blithely to his “psychosis,” Katharine White said that Maloney had made his post–New Yorker living “mostly by abusing us.”
The reasons for Maloney’s downfall were complex. Like his Profile subject Welles, he peaked early. Growing up in Newton Centre, Massachusetts, he was only about nine when his domineering mother insisted that he be issued an adult library card because he had already read all the books in the children’s section. Despite the prejudices of its Brahmin establishment against the Irish, Harvard admitted him; there he won the George B. Sohier Prize for the best thesis written by a student of English or modern literature. He began contributing cartoon ideas to The New Yorker for Peter Arno, Helen Hokinson, Thurber, Carl Rose, Mary Petty, Whitney Darrow, and others before he graduated in 1932; two years later Mrs. White invited him to join the staff.
It was a rapid rise, but to Maloney’s mind, it led nowhere. After a few years of “Talk” rewrite and other comedic duties, he found himself bored. It didn’t help that like all “Talk” contributors, he toiled in anonymity. He was sensitive, too, and thus ill equipped for an office where prankish insults and put-downs were routine. Arguably underappreciated and certainly overworked, especially during the war, he felt himself capable of better things. In 1943, when Clifton Fadiman quit as the magazine’s chief book reviewer, Maloney lobbied for the job. When it went to Edmund Wilson, Maloney “went stomping in to Ross and told him that this time, positively, he had gone too far.”
In short, Maloney felt that professional growth had eluded him. “As far as I can tell, I have managed to stand completely still,” he complained. “My first piece might have been my last, and my last my first, as far as any merit is concerned.” During the first half of the 1940s, he tried variously to wrest from Ross a substantial raise, an exclusive service contract, and more responsibility on his terms. He got nowhere.
Ross valued Maloney, so much so that when the latter became convinced that the bottles in the office water coolers were being “filled by a Greek from a faucet in a mop closet” and were thus unsanitary, Ross wrote a two-page memo on the subject and paid a local chemist ten dollars to test the stuff. (It displayed “no evidence of bacterial pollution.”) But the extraordinary effort of getting out a magazine starved for both personnel and resources during wartime didn’t allow him to indulge the temperamental writer. He had his own explanation for why Maloney quit.
“He was frustrated in his desire to be a critic,” Ross told O’Hara, “which I would never let him be, because I didn’t think he had the balance, the judgment, and the character to be a critic. He’s influenced almost exclusively by personalities, as nearly as I can see, is a disgruntled soul, and a critic has got to have objectivity.” Certainly Maloney’s forays into criticism could be unfortunate, never more so than in 1939 when he slammed The Wizard of Oz as having “no trace of imagination, good taste, or ingenuity.” He called it a “stinkeroo.”
Unable to accept that criticism was perhaps not his strong suit, he began to see conspiracies. One day he announced, “The Giants have come down from the hills!” Actually, it was only the Whites. “They were giants all right but no [sic] benign ones,” Geraghty mused. “Not to Maloney. To him they were ogres out to get him.”
His greatest jealousy and hatred was of Gibbs. White vividly remembered Maloney during the war “in his gas mask and helmet, ready to save everybody in New York except Gibbs.” When Gibbs temporarily couldn’t continue as the main “Comment” writer because he had fallen down and broken two fingers, Maloney was elated. During contract negotiations with Ross, he pressed for such outlandish concessions as “a bonus of twice the difference between Gibbs’ yearly income and mine, if mine is smaller” and “a definite offer of the Theatre column when Gibbs goes too crazy to write it any more.” Dismissing Gibbs as “the current Eustace Tilley” shortly before Pearl Harbor, Maloney wrote the Whites that his nemesis was “trying to spit on the theatre and on current events at the same time, and he hasn’t enough spit.”
Whence came this enmity? Gibbs suspected he had driven his colleague crazy through an act of “mistaken kindness”—namely, introducing Maloney to his future wife, Miriam Battista. “One night, when he first came to town,” Gibbs said, “he told me he didn’t know any girls, so I said ‘There is nothing easier’ and called up Miriam who was working in a show called Mulatto. I’m afraid I told him in effect that she was a sure lay. . . . A month or so later, I remembered to ask him how he made out and, of course, he never spoke to me again because they were married.”
Gibbs personified everything Maloney wished to be: a witty man about town, a wearer of many editorial hats, an arbiter of taste. Actually, Maloney was already well established in that persona and, with a few more years of seasoning, might have achieved it entirely. But stymied in his early thirties, Maloney became convinced that Gibbs “was out to do away with me.” And so he determined to destroy him:
I started reading Comment very carefully, every week. Whenever I found an error in judgment or grammar, a phrase or an idea that Gibbs was using too often, or something that was inconsistent with something he’d said before, I’d write duplicate memos to Ross and Shawn. . . . I did this for about a year. Then, one week, Gibbs had an ill-made little sentence about somebody or other being in his “customary dilemma.” I wrote a little memo that Fowler would have been proud of, pointing out that a dilemma is something you don’t get into voluntarily, and that Gibbs must have been trying to say “usual dilemma.” I remember I had several sentences illustrating proper uses of the different words, like “Gibbs had his customary dinner of eight Martinis, and next morning had his usual hangover,” and “Gibbs took his customary crack at Jed Harris’s latest play, because Harris once rejected a play he had written.” And I said that, even if I wasn’t considered enough of a stylist to write really important things, at least I’d never used words I didn’t understand. Two weeks later, Shawn was put in charge of Comment and I was asked to contribute, and, after about six months of my doing it in competition with Gibbs, he announced that he was sick and tired of doing that boresome [sic] drivel, and wanted to be an editor again.
I wish I could put into words the satisfaction it gives me to think about this. It’s like lying on a feather bed and being massaged by angels.
If Gibbs truly did want to get rid of Maloney, or if Maloney really did undermine Gibbs, the evidence is elusive. Gibbs himself said that he gave up “Comment” in the early 1940s because “getting out a weekly collection of trivia about Armageddon was absurdly beyond my talent or inclination.” But even if Maloney actually could have sabotaged Gibbs, surely no amount of revenge would have satisfied his need for self-realization. When Maloney quit The New Yorker, he did so ostensibly because at thirty-five he was too old to maintain his pace. Actually, he said, it was “to broaden my scope.”
And broaden it he did, both before and after leaving. He published in Life, Collier’s, The Atlantic Monthly, and The New York Times Book Review. He doctored plays, did a new version of the book of Die Fledermaus for the Philadelphia Opera Company, and wrote for Orson Welles, Billie Burke, and Fred Allen. Though he never succeeded Fadiman, he reviewed books for the Chicago Sun and on Thursday nights hosted a CBS radio program called Of Men and Books.
What should have been his crowning triumph was his original musical comedy Sleepy Hollow, based on the legend of Ichabod Crane, which opened on Broadway in June 1948 and starred Miriam. Unfortunately, it ran for only twelve performances.† The show’s collapse destroyed what was left of Maloney’s already precarious finances. (His last New Yorker casual, printed in 1944, had been a darkly humorous take on bankruptcy.) Less than three months after Sleepy Hollow closed, its author succumbed to a stroke at age thirty-eight; he had suffered from severe idiopathic hypertension all his life and had long predicted he would die young. In addition to Miriam, Maloney left a three-year-old daughter, Amelia, and more than ten thousand dollars in debts. Many years later, invoking the considerable contributions that her late husband had made to The New Yorker, Miriam would appeal to the magazine for financial assistance, in vain.
In its youthful heyday, the New Yorker crowd was a rowdy bunch. At the magazine’s tenth anniversary party in 1935, when Morris Markey saw McKelway accompanied by Stanley Walker, the former city editor of the Herald Tribune, he quipped, “Ah, here’s Mac, surrounded by beauty as usual.” McKelway flailed but failed to connect; Markey hit his opponent in the chest, sending him backward over a table. The very next day at Gibbs’s apartment, when Thurber beheld Elinor Gibbs quite pregnant with Tony, he sneered, “You ungainly creature, you.” This so infuriated Gibbs that he bloodied Thurber’s nose and mouth.
From the beginning of his enterprise, Ross was determined to circumvent at least one form of internal mingling and mangling. “I am going to keep sex out of this office,” he vowed. He was not always successful. Early on, in fact, he undermined himself by setting up a salon in a Fleischmann-owned property on 45th Street. “He thought if the magazine had its own speakeasy it would be safer for us and that the same general decorum could be kept that Mrs. White inspired at the office,” said Lois Long. “Then Ingersoll came in one morning and found Arno and me stretched out on the sofa nude and Ross closed the place down. I think he was afraid Mrs. White would hear about it. Arno and I may have been married to one another by then; I can’t remember. Maybe we began drinking and forgot that we were married and had an apartment to go to.”
Long and Arno would likely have gotten into trouble on their own even without Ross’s inadvertent assistance. In fact, they were The New Yorker’s poster children for intramural love gone sour. Their marriage in 1927 was perhaps as inevitable as their divorce three years later. Both of them—Long, comely and flirtatious; Arno, well built and square-jawed—were after-hours embodiments of the Jazz Age. Arno, slightly younger than Long, had been born Curtis Arnoux Peters, the son of a New York State Supreme Court justice. A graduate of the Hotchkiss School, he played the banjo in a band at Yale and was later in a group whose members included Rudy Vallee. He changed his name to Arno, he told friends, because he wanted to separate his identity from that of his respectable family. He was right to do so; his first drawings in The New Yorker, which appeared shortly after its 1925 debut, were defined by their sardonic take on Manhattan’s booze-laden, libidinous speakeasy culture.
“I’ve always rebelled against the social order, if you get what I mean,” he griped. “At least, some aspects of it. As I grew up I became dissatisfied with the life around me.” He was determined to expose the “fatuous” crowd he himself ran with. “I had a really hot impulse to go and exaggerate their ridiculous aspects. That anger, if you like, gave my stuff punch and made it live. I mean, I don’t know anything better to call it than anger.” Arno especially despised “vain little girls with more alcohol in their brains than sense.”
Lois Long had more sense than alcohol in her brains. But Arno, who was convinced that “at no time in the history of the world have there been so many damned morons gathered together in one place as here in New York right now,” somehow saw in her an embodiment of the social whirl he enjoyed attacking. When he spoke of his anger, he was not exaggerating; Long was sometimes his target. “Occasionally she would come into the office with a bruise or black eye and reply if sympathetically asked what had happened, ‘Oh, I ran into a door in the dark,’ or ‘I was in a taxi accident,’ ” said Marcia Davenport. Years after her divorce from Arno, their acrimony continued unabated, with Arno failing to provide agreed-upon alimony and child support payments. At one point, he owed her over fourteen thousand dollars yet lived in a ten-room penthouse and “was busy buying champagne and brandy all over the place.”
It was typical behavior for Arno, who often lived as if Prohibition had never been repealed. Outwardly a cheerful soul, singing as he drew and painted, he had a mean and arrogant streak. He paid the artist Arthur Getz fifty dollars for a cover design and then, after minor revisions, pretty much passed it off as his own, losing the original rough in the process. Another time, when two of his cartoon captions were changed without his permission, he insisted that if anything like that ever happened again, the magazine would have to pay him five hundred dollars. His love life was the stuff of comic books: Cornelius Vanderbilt, Jr., once chased him down the street, brandishing a revolver, after Arno had embraced Mrs. Vanderbilt. He carried on a well-publicized affair with the debutante Brenda Diana Duff Frazier and, during a late-night row, gave her a shiner.
And yet, as Arno had accurately assessed, his anger provided important fuel for his artistry. At one point he telephoned Geraghty to announce, after three years of psychoanalysis: “Jim, congratulate me. I’ve lost my arrogance.” Geraghty replied, “Peter you should lose your drawing arm first.” Arno eventually became something of a gun nut, with “quite an armament, licensed and otherwise,” and although he remarried and continued cartooning for The New Yorker up to his death in 1968, he eventually settled into a “seething reclusivity.”
Other New Yorker unions were more successful. One was that of William Walden and his wife, Harriet, aka “Tippy”; she succeeded him as Ross’s private secretary when he joined the army during the war. Another was that of Freddie Packard and Eleanor Gould; her microscopic dissection of syntax, vocabulary, punctuation, and similar myriad details for fifty-four years perfectly mirrored her husband’s obsession with facts. She would often write in the margins of passages that baffled her, “Have we completely lost our mind?”
But for the sheer communion of souls, no New Yorker marriage could surpass the long and happy merging of E. B. White and Katharine Angell. At first glance, their joining was unlikely. White was a relative novice in the romance department; he had had a couple of girlfriends, most notably a Cornell compatriot named Alice Burchfield. But he was awkward and chaste; his letters to her from the early 1920s were never signed “fondly” or “affectionately,” let alone “love,” but “sincerely” or with nothing other than his name. Early on at The New Yorker, White also had a brief dalliance with one of its young secretaries, Rosanne Magdol. Although he considered marrying her, she remembered that they mainly went for walks.
Katharine, meanwhile, was in the last throes of her marriage to Ernest. The first seven years, she said, had been happy. But by 1922 it was clear that the union was untenable. Ernest had a terrible temper; awful arguments became commonplace. Perhaps worst of all, he was a philanderer. As Katharine remembered it, at one point he even lived with “a much older woman all his working week” and returned to his family only on weekends.
Finding kinship in their gentility, their appreciation of fine prose, and their close working relationship, White and Katharine were drawn together. But the process was neither easy nor straightforward. Katharine, almost seven years older than White and technically higher on the masthead, was still married. White was both shy and conflicted. However their mutual interest began, it was in full swing by June 1928. By that time, when Katharine, Ernest, and the children went for a month to Paris, she and White contrived to meet each other there on the sly. They even managed to slip away to St. Tropez and Corsica. However, upon their return to New York, both Katharine (blocked by her devotion to her children) and White (reluctant as always to be tied down personally or professionally) decided to end the affair. For some months they maintained a miserably inconclusive friendship. Then, in February 1929, possibly having learned of the affair, Ernest knocked Katharine to the floor. In May she took up residence in Nevada preparatory to obtaining a divorce. “I went to Reno with no idea that Andy and I would be married,” she wrote later. “I had been hurt too much & saw no future in a marriage with a man nearly 7 years younger than I. He felt the same reservations.”
Nonetheless, she wrote him scores of letters both longing (“I do want to see you”) and humorous (“This attractive thing is a chart of my sunburned nose—It’s peeling all over”), filled with details about her daily routine, which included horseback riding, and about her fellow denizens of the Circle S Ranch. Once she sent him a sage blossom. But White did not venture west to visit her. On the contrary: his nerves frayed by his involvement with Katharine, and beset by internal doubts, he decided to take an indefinite leave of absence from The New Yorker and lit out for Camp Otter, in Ontario, where he had once served as a counselor.
Come the fall, though, once Katharine’s divorce came through and both she and White returned to New York, it was all but obvious that they were destined to be together. On November 13 they slipped away to Bedford Village, fifty miles north of the city, and were quietly married, telling no one. Walter Winchell soon broke the news in his column, leaving their co-workers and relations agog. White acknowledged, “This marriage is a terrible challenge: everyone wishing us well, and with all their tongues in their cheeks.” But once committed, he had no doubts, as he told Katharine shortly after their wedding:
I have had moments of despair during the last week which have added years to my life and put many new thoughts in my head. Always, however, I have ended on a cheerful note of hope, based on the realization that you are the person to whom I return and that you are the recurrent phrase in my life. I realized that so strongly one day a couple of weeks ago when, after being away among people I wasn’t sure of and in circumstances I had doubts about, I came back and walked into your office and saw how real and incontrovertible you seemed. I don’t know whether you know just what I mean or whether you experience, ever, the same feeling, but what I mean is, that being with you is like walking on a very clear morning—definitely the sensation of being there.
Their happiness needed no further emotional cementing. But the birth of their son, Joel, the following year, made it complete.
Ross may have been bent on keeping sex out of the office, but there was little he could do to guide his people through their private romantic entanglements, especially when they came into contact in some way with The New Yorker itself. In fact, he was a test case. His first wife, Jane Grant, was instrumental in the success of his enterprise; they had pooled their life savings to establish The New Yorker, and Jane had played an early and invaluable role in getting its feet on the ground. By Ross’s admission, “She is the one who got Fleischmann interested in promoting the magazine. There would be no New Yorker today if it were not for her.”
But Grant’s strident feminism, coupled with Ross’s single-minded devotion to his creation, led them to divorce in 1929 after nine years as husband and wife. Ross remarried twice, and both unions ended unhappily. From Grant, he went first to a “beautiful and mysterious Frenchwoman half his age,” a divorcée named Marie Françoise Elie. But they had almost nothing in common and split in 1939—not, however, before they conceived Ross’s beloved daughter, and his only child, Patricia. Ross’s third wife was Ariane Allen, an alumna of Barnard and the University of Texas, a charming and flirtatious minor actress and model; they married in 1940. But her show business way of life simply did not wear well with the fun-loving but rather more literary-minded Ross. The New Yorker, said Thurber, “was the deadly and victorious rival of each of his three wives.”
Thurber’s involvement with women never interfered, at least not seriously, with his life at the magazine. But he did manage to intertwine his personal and professional worlds, generally in an awkward fashion. At parties with staff members and friends, he could often be counted on to make drunken and clumsy passes—a “grabber,” in short.‡ Much of this behavior was a consequence of his unhappy first marriage to Althea Adams, an associate from his Ohio State crowd who hung about Columbus following their graduation. The large-boned Althea stood five feet nine inches tall, with a personality to match her stature. “She was the domineering type, bossy and pushy, always wanting her own way,” said Thurber’s brother Robert. “Why Jamie married her, I’ll never know.”
Thurber owed Althea his first professional success at The New Yorker—specifically, his casual “An American Romance.” But she was simply too much the archetype of the Thurber woman for their marriage to endure, and they divorced amid considerable press attention in 1935. That same year Thurber married Helen Wismer, a smart, confident Mount Holyoke graduate who would provide him with the succor and support he needed as he became both increasingly famous and progressively infirm. He proposed to her immediately following his divorce. “When we finally found each other in the Algonquin lobby that day and sat down to have a drink,” Helen remembered, “he just turned towards me and said, ‘Will you marry me?’ I said, ‘Wait a minute,’ went to the ladies’ room to recover, and when I came back, I said, ‘Yes.’ ”
But before Thurber married Helen, he became enmeshed with and was periodically overwhelmed by Ann Honeycutt, a blond, somewhat plump Louisiana expatriate known as “Honey.” A radio producer for WOR and CBS, Honey was a bona fide free spirit, living in digs that were painted in shades of pea green and eggplant. She wrote only a handful of pieces for the magazine. But because she ran with its regulars so often, and Ross saw so much of her, he concluded that she was a member of his staff. At one point he remarked, “That was a good piece you did on the Philippines,” when in fact she had written no such thing. (She thanked the confused editor anyway.) She was the magazine’s darling, with an extraordinary ability to bewitch gentlemen without meaning to. Edward Newhouse recalled that if any man between sixteen and ninety was in the same room with her for an hour, he was a lost cause: “You were in love!” For a few years she was the third of McKelway’s five wives.§
For all her flirtations and affairs with others on the New Yorker staff, Honey and Thurber became each other’s particular fascination. “I’d been thwarted by much of life, and Jim opened doors for me,” she said. “He claimed to suffer from inferiority feelings and said it was why he needed to be seen with attractive women.” Improbably, Honey insisted that she and Thurber never had intercourse. Nonetheless, she said, “for a half-dozen years I had more fun with Jim Thurber than I’d ever had with anyone in my whole life.”
“He always carried a torch for her,” said Thurber’s colleague “Jap” Gude. “She was something special, perhaps unattainable, for him.” Many years after his initial intoxication with her had worn off, he told White that he realized that at heart he didn’t particularly like her. “Our love,” he explained, “never ripened into friendship.”
The spell that Honey cast on the men at the magazine enveloped Gibbs as well. He dated her on and off, even though he was decidedly ambivalent. He called her “Miss Honeyclutch, who makes me think of walking up two flights into the smell of cabbage.” Yet he once sent her a telegram that read IN BED A BROKEN MAN AFTER CALLING YOU FOUR THOUSAND TIMES. They shared an unlikely love of baseball and, even more unusually, boxing; he once took her to a bout between Primo Carnera and Jack Sharkey. For a while, in the early 1940s, Gibbs and Honeycutt even constituted a third of the owner-management of the decidedly second-rate heavyweight fighter Melvin “Eddie” Edge.
Honeycutt was not the only New Yorker woman with whom Gibbs found himself involved; among those he squired was the exotic correspondent Emily Hahn. As was the case with Thurber, his romantic encounters began with the erosion of his first marriage. When it came to affairs of the heart, the young Gibbs had been hopelessly inexperienced. What with his prep school upbringing, summers sequestered with relatives in the town of Merrick on Long Island’s South Shore, and the all-male company of Long Island Rail Road crews, females had never really been part of his world.
As he entered his early twenties, spurred in part by his fragmented home life, Gibbs found himself searching for someone to love, only to get nowhere. Poems to two of his would-be conquests, their identities lost to history, reflected that frustration:
Paula
You made your pose a lack of pose,
Suave seeker after paradox;
Shunned worldliness and rather chose
To mock this callow soul that mocks.
Not cynicism would you sing,
Enthusiasm’s quite the thing,
Agnosticism’s on the wing
It’s sweller to be orthodox.
Babette
She wears a white star in her hair
And holds herself aloof from “mushing.”
Today when children lisp of Freud
She’s disinterred the art of blushing.
The rose that glows in Babette’s cheek
Proclaims the child an early riser.
Babette is pure and good and sweet.
And so I’m going out with Liza.
But on July 24, 1926, while still a cub reporter at the East Norwich Enterprise, Gibbs married Helen Marguerite Galpin, the daughter of William Galpin, an English-born butler and all-around jobs boss for Mortimer Schiff, the immensely wealthy head of the financial firm Kuhn, Loeb. Gibbs apparently met her through his publisher cousin, Lloyd Griscom. At that time, Griscom was chairing a drive to raise money to build a local Boy Scout camp; the project had the full blessing of Schiff, the Scouts’ international commissioner. Somewhere along the way, Gibbs encountered his butler’s daughter. A twenty-year-old student at Elmira College, Helen had demure looks, wavy, bobbed blond hair, and an aristocratic voice. She was something of a flapper, loving jazz and venturing from her Oyster Bay home whenever possible to take advantage of Manhattan nightlife. For the perpetually insecure Gibbs, she would have been an exotic creature.
Unfortunately, the union was impulsive and calamitous. In a short story called “Love, Love, Love,” composed some twenty years later, Gibbs would write that he had married Helen following an all-night revel with several other couples. Because she was “a respectable girl with a family to whom it would be impossible to explain an overnight absence,” she became hysterical the following morning. Gibbs was able to alleviate her “climax of despair” only by promising her to drive them as soon as he could to the nearest justice of the peace. This he proceeded to do; one of his fellow Enterprise reporters, Louis Stancourt, and his wife, Evelyn, served as witnesses. When he awoke the following morning, he found himself staring blankly for about half an hour at his coat, in which was contained his marriage license. “I thought there might be some way I could just ignore the whole thing.”
He couldn’t, of course. Even if the marriage had taken place under better circumstances, Gibbs and Helen were still a bad fit. In real life, Helen was sassy and outspoken; in columns he published in the North Hempstead Record, Gibbs would disguise her as a dangerous harpy named “Hilda.” He wrote of her becoming so enraged at a Long Island Rail Road conductor who demanded her ticket, even though she couldn’t get a seat, that she attacked him with an ax and tossed his body out the train window. He imagined himself throwing her into Camann’s Pond in Merrick: “She looked perfectly absurd rooting down there in the eel-grass and we had a good hearty laugh as we hauled her out and thumped some of the water out of her.”
The marriage ended in divorce around the time Gibbs came to work at The New Yorker.¶ Then, in August 1929, he married Elizabeth Ada Crawford, a native of Detroit who worked as a writer in the magazine’s promotion department. It was as impulsive a joining as the one with Helen; the two were wed at a “Gretna Green”—a locale where they could escape tiresome premarriage legal procedures—in Connecticut. Still, by all accounts the young couple flourished, and Elizabeth was one of the most popular members of the New Yorker staff. After a sojourn in Bermuda, they settled down to what appeared to be a secure domestic life.
That all ended, tragically, on March 31, 1930, when Elizabeth committed suicide by jumping out of a window of the couple’s seventeenth-floor apartment in Tudor City. Some accounts state that Elizabeth leaped when Gibbs was talking with O’Hara and the men would not let her join in the conversation. Others believe she was driven to kill herself after Gibbs cruelly and repeatedly mocked her attempts to be a writer.
As best as can be determined—and the details still seem improbable—Gibbs and Elizabeth had attended a performance of Death Takes a Holiday the week before at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre. In this memorable work, a beautiful young girl falls in love with Death (played on Broadway by Philip Merivale), who is masquerading as a handsome young man. When Death returns from a three-day holiday on Earth, he takes the young girl back with him as his bride. Gibbs informed the police that Elizabeth had told him, “One of these days, I am going to jump out of the window”—an indication that she somehow wanted to join Death on a permanent holiday. “I never, of course, took her seriously, and her remark had slipped my mind, almost immediately after she said it.”
Katharine White said that Gibbs and Elizabeth had been up all night prior to her suicide and that when she pretended to be asleep that morning, she had jumped out the bathroom window. But all press and police accounts contradict her recollections: Gibbs’s sister, Angelica, who was about to graduate from Vassar, had been lunching with them at their apartment. At one point, Elizabeth excused herself to the bedroom. When she failed to return after a few minutes, Gibbs looked out the window and saw her on the pavement, a crowd rapidly gathering around her.
The fallout was appalling. Gibbs phoned Katharine at the office and exclaimed, “Could you come right over—Elizabeth has killed herself!” Katharine dashed from her desk and arrived to find Gibbs moaning, “I never should have left the room.” He was in hysterics. “He was already threatening to kill himself and he kept emphasizing what bad publicity this was for The New Yorker and said he could never return to the magazine again,” Katharine remembered. Somehow she got Gibbs into a hospital, where he was sedated. The death was shocking enough to make tabloid headlines and rattle even the case-hardened detectives of the East 51st Street Station. “If I were God,” said one of them, “I would bring her back to life again.” So concerned was O’Hara about Gibbs’s sanity that he stayed with him following the nightmare.
After Elizabeth’s death, Gibbs managed some semblance of a home life with his newly college-graduated sister, moving into an apartment with her at 21 East Tenth Street. Like her brother, Angelica was finding her way in the literary world. Having co-edited an anthology of poetry at Vassar, she would go on to be an editor at McCall’s and publish some fine Profiles and fiction in The New Yorker. Her short story “The Test”—a subtle, sensitive glimpse of racism in action—was anthologized in one of the magazine’s prestigious fiction collections. Life with Wolcott, by contrast, was not as pleasant. Gibbs dubbed Angelica, not known for her housekeeping, “Miss Dirty Dishes of 1931” and called their joint quarters an “orange and green seraglio.”
When Angelica left to get married and settle in suburban Port Washington, Long Island, Gibbs took in the future Broadway producer Leonard Sillman for seven months. The room that Sillman rented from him had its own entrance from the hallway and a connecting doorway with Gibbs’s room; Sillman would slip his ten-dollar rent under the door between them. They rarely met; Silllman was generally out at night and Gibbs all day. But they did occasionally encounter each other, after a fashion, as Sillman recalled:
When I got back to the apartment I heard my landlord in the adjoining room bidding goodnight to some guests. I heard him say his goodnights and I heard him close the door and then I heard him close the door and then I heard a ghostly sort of a “plop!” Alarmed, I unlocked the door that separated us and entered Mr. Gibbs’ apartment. My landlord lay in a heap by the door.
I picked him up, carried him to his bed, undid his tie, took off his shoes and laid his blankets over him. I tiptoed back to my room, got my overcoat, and hell-footed it up to Harlem.
That scene was repeated several times.
Gibbs’s view of life, already dark, became even more desperate. The perplexing personalities of women in general became toxic for him. In his own way, he was as much a misogynist as Thurber. After the death of his second wife, he held forth at grisly length on the “new girl” of the era:
Hats in this unfortunate year sit far back on their wearer’s heads, disclosing foreheads curiously like white and bulbous tombstones. Scarlet lips and great fringed eyes stare out of faces as pallid as plumbing fixtures. Long red fingernails seem to threaten the startled young man’s throat as they reach across the table for another of his cigarettes. Altogether the effect is unpleasantly mortuary and, hard as it is to believe, probably intentionally so.
Around that time, though, Gibbs met the apparent love of his life. Nancy Hale, a writer at Vogue, began contributing to The New Yorker in 1929. The granddaughter of Edward Everett Hale and the great-niece of Harriet Beecher Stowe, she would eventually become well known for novels and short stories about New England and the complex lives of fashionable women. Hale was elegant, distinguished, frank, and beautiful, and Gibbs was her editor. It was not long before they became romantically involved.
Their affair apparently began in either the latter half of 1930 or the first half of 1931. From the start he was besotted, and for the better part of two years he maintained a uniquely barbed tone of infatuation:
It seems very likely to me that I am going to die at about four o’clock this afternoon unless you telephone me or something.
I love you because you’re smarter and better looking than anyone I know, and have the most appalling character.
I miss you terribly already and I’m beginning to get some fine morbid ideas. I can see you sitting on the nice clean sand and making up your mind that I’m a sort of mushroom growth, urban and sickly, and not practical at all.
Christ, a year ago I didn’t give a God damn whether I could write, or how I looked, or what people thought about me, and now I want to be swell at everything so that you’ll think of me as a bargain.
When you’re away I equip you with a beauty and wisdom and nobility of character that would be quite impossible in a human being—like the girls who were always kicking off with t.b. in old poems. I wouldn’t like it at all if you were really like that, but there’s a gloomy satisfaction at the moment. Darling, I wish loving you didn’t make me talk silly.
There was only one problem: Hale was married to one Taylor Scott Hardin, and the couple had a child, a baby boy named Mark. The marriage was admittedly rocky, and Gibbs spilled much ink trying to persuade Hale to leave her husband for him. Hale and Hardin did eventually divorce, in 1936; she would marry again, to the Time Inc. writer and editor Charles Wertenbaker, then to the University of Virginia English professor Fredson Thayer Bowers.
But she did not wed Gibbs. Sometime in the spring of 1933, Hale determined that she would try to make her union with Hardin work. She seems to have insisted that she and Gibbs separate for a year, making no promises about what would happen when the twelve months were up. The news devastated him:
Darling, I’ve spent two days now just on the edge of putting my head down and howling like a dog. Everything seems to be in some damn kind of conspiracy to make it worse. The telephone has been ringing every ten minutes and I always answer it just as hopefully, and every book or paper I pick up has something in it that brings me right back to you again. . . . I just sat here and made up lists of the things that aren’t going to be any more—no more having you walk into speakeasies, mostly legs, to meet me for lunch, no more little bed that falls apart in the night (there ought to be an Indian word for that), no more taxi-rides when I could kiss you. . . . Oh darling whatever happens, I’m so damn glad that you have slept with me, and I have something to remember.
Not long after Hale parted with Gibbs, O’Hara introduced the heartbroken writer to the last of his three wives. Elinor Mead Sherwin was born on May 15, 1904. Her lineage, if not as quite glitteringly Social Register as Gibbs’s, was nonetheless distinguished. She was distantly related to the Sherwins of Sherwin-Williams paint fame and had been given her middle name after William Rutherford Mead, of the architectural giants McKim, Mead & White, to whom her family was also dimly tied. Her father, Harold, was an architect himself, specializing in woodworking. (Elinor would quaintly refer to him as being “in trade.”) After attending Rye Seminary and graduating from the Brearley School, she entered Wellesley in 1922. There she spent little more than a year, dropping out because she hated the food and was uninterested in such offerings as the required course in Biblical History 101. For a while she made a living as an actress in silent films. Thin, pretty, and slightly toothy, she was so captivating that a Hollywood producer reportedly named a seventy-foot schooner for her. Returning to Manhattan, she worked as a model, being paid in clothes.
In her off-hours she milled with a shifting group of bored socialites, dissipated literati, and assorted hangers-on. One was Alec Waugh, the older brother of Evelyn Waugh and already a prolific and respected author in his own right. In the grim winter of 1930–31, he found himself entertaining “honorable intentions” toward Elinor—intentions he claims she did not reciprocate because she was “unsatisfactorily entangled with a married man. I did not reach second base.”# Still, during their elusive courtship he wrote a slim volume of barely disguised reminiscences, one chapter of which he devoted to his fascination with her:
A love story, to be typical of New York, would not so much have to show the impact on a foreign mentality of a girl who typified the city’s life, as [of] the city itself that would direct the course of a man’s love for her.
In its way, it would probably be a conventional enough story; there would be the conventional chance meeting in a friend’s house; the start in the man’s side as there walked into the room in a green dress, a girl in the early twenties, very slim, and slight and townlike and the thought that came to him: “That’s some one terribly pretty,” he says. “I must talk to her.”
Her voice is low pitched and to an English ear difficult to follow. They are discussing the theatre, and he tells her that no, he has never seen Hamlet. She smiles at that and her smile is friendly.
“Now what do you think I was asking you,” she said.
“What I thought about John Barrymore.”
She laughed, “I was asking you if you didn’t think one saw plays better from the balcony.”
“I suppose that you’ve heard as much of my conversation as I’ve heard of yours.”
“Haven’t you heard much of mine?”
“About one sentence in every four.”
And they laugh together and the laugh is a bond between them. And they talk easily and lightly, conscious of kinship and attraction, as though they had been friends for years. “She’s nice,” he thinks, “and sweet and real.” And he looks across the room at her as she stands beside the man who has brought her to the party, and a queer feeling of jealousy twitches him.
It was this sort of innate, effortless charm that led Gibbs to meet and wed her within a matter of a few months. For the third and last time, he married on impulse, scurrying up to Stamford for the occasion on October 14, 1933, once again before a justice of the peace.
For twenty-five years, Gibbs and Elinor remained devoted to each other. His world-weary cynicism perfectly matched her natural irreverence, which was so saucy that her nickname was “Flip.” On one occasion when a friend was admiring sea gulls, Elinor replied, “Yes, the little darlings will peck your eye out.” When Gibbs’s niece, Sarah, had her first child, Elinor insisted that the baby not be proffered to her: “Don’t hand her to me—I’m always afraid their heads will fall off!” They had two children, Wolcott, Jr. (known as “Tony” because he resembled the nephew of a nurse of his at New York Hospital), in 1935, and Janet in 1939.
The marriage was far from perfect. There were whispers of mutual infidelity. When he became the magazine’s theater critic, Gibbs would sometimes go to opening nights with actresses when Elinor couldn’t accompany him; he was particularly devoted to one Susan Douglas, a tiny woman who had been born Zuzka Zenta Bursteinová in Vienna. By the same token, O’Hara asserted that Elinor was the mistress of Gibbs’s good friend, the playwright and New Yorker contributor Sam Behrman. When Benchley died, Elinor’s grief was so great that it was thought they must have been romantically involved.
As the years went by, the union cooled. “They lived in the same house,” recalled a childhood friend of Janet, “but beyond that it wasn’t much.” An adult acquaintance went so far as to call their relationship “quite strange.” But at its base was a genuinely sustaining love of a kind Gibbs had never known. Once when he was left in New York without Elinor, he dispatched to her a poignant mixture of domestic detail and heartfelt longing:
I think I’ve done everything you told me, too. Herta [the maid] has taken the money to your mother, and is giving kitty the pills, and will take her up to the doctors Wednesday. The money envelopes look a little peculiar, sort of running over and mixed up, but I haven’t investigated them very carefully. There is nothing serious though, except the state of mind, which is what they call booze-gloom. This passes. I miss you and love you more than anything in the world, darling. What an enormous bed!
* Harold Winney, who eventually became Ross’s personal secretary, ended up embezzling more than $70,000 from him and committing suicide.
† In his review, titled “Washington Irving Slipped Here,” Gibbs dismissed the musical without particular rancor or invective. He called it “pretty” and “melodious” but mainly “dull.” He did say that the songs and dances, for which Maloney was not responsible, were “often first-rate.”
‡ Helen Stark, the magazine’s longtime librarian, never recalled seeing Thurber in the company of any woman except his mother.
§ McKelway married his first wife, Lois Little, the sister of the United Press correspondent Herbert Little, in 1925. His second wife was Estelle Cassidy, whom he married in 1929. His fourth and fifth marriages will be discussed presently.
¶ Details of the breakup, including its exact date, are elusive; neither Gibbs nor Helen discussed the subject. Indeed, their children from their subsequent unions were unaware of the names of their parents’ first spouses until this author informed them. Helen subsequently married Howard Powers, the manager of a Cadillac dealership in Brooklyn; together they had two sons. One of them, after providing critical biographical information about his mother, resisted further contact. Helen died in 1985.
# Waugh’s great-nephew, Alexander, disputes this: “My great-uncle Alec was a sex maniac so I have no doubt that he performed some injustice upon poor Mrs. Gibbs.”