“A SILLY OCCUPATION FOR A GROWN MAN”
“There is nothing like an Opening Night to make the performer wish he were temporarily dead or at least slightly numb,” wrote Louis Sobol in 1945. “The producer doesn’t feel too frolicsome either.” Describing “that second of throat-catch and heart-pause when the house lights dim out,” he noted that at that moment,
[B]ackstage folk shiver with the swoon-droops, a sinister ailment germinated not by the thought that out front are notable First Nighters like Fannie Hurst, Herbert Bayard Swope and Irving Berlin, Hope Hampton, Moss Hart and Gilbert Miller, or that relatives are in back seats or in the balcony, but by awareness of a dozen or so deadpanned gentlemen and unemotional ladies of varying ages, moods and eccentricities, generally referred to by the honest and the fearless as Dramatic Critics. These exalted personages draw handsome salaries from the newspapers or magazines they represent in return for submitting a candid report on the latest play. On this report may hang the fate of the producer’s investment—anywhere from $20,000 to $250,000. Similarly, on the critics’ decision may rest the length of the actor’s job—the yardstick which measures the difference between being able to dine at “21” and the Stork and standing in line at the Automat.
The bottom portion of the opening spread of Sobol’s magazine piece caricatured nine of those critics clustered in the front row, their faces registering expressions ranging from mild skepticism to outright hostility. Third from the left was Gibbs, looking directly at the reader with a countenance that was quite unsmiling.
When Gibbs composed a review, he did so “in the manner of a little boy plucking the wings off a nasty insect.” Gibbs, it was said, set “standards so high that even he could never attain them,” as these snippets attest:
The Man with Blond Hair, which vanished from the Belasco after seven performances, was a striking example of the effect of lotus-eating on the human mind.
In the course of the piece known as I Killed the Count, which bounced into the Cort one night last week, the audience was permitted to see the same man killed three times by three different people and to hear a fourth confess to the crime. It remained, nevertheless, about the dullest exhibition you can imagine.
Very soon after the curtain rose on A Boy Who Lived Twice, a society matron from Oyster Bay declined a cup of tea offered her by the butler and ordered up a slug of Scotch. “Braxton,” she said frankly, “I’m pooped.” This established the approximate comedic level of last week’s entry at the Biltmore.
Sea Dogs, which blew into the Maxine Elliott, was hard for me to accept as a serious dramatic enterprise, undertaken for profit. The ship was on fire, the captain was drunk, and from where I sat, the audience appeared to be either dead or asleep.
[Abie’s Irish Rose] had, in fact, the rather eerie quality of a repeated nightmare; the one, perhaps, in which I always find myself in an old well, thick with bats, and can’t get out.
“God, he’s brilliant,” said an anonymous admirer. “He doesn’t like anything.” To which Ross supposedly replied, “Maybe he doesn’t like anything, but he can do everything.”
Actually, Gibbs was always ready to praise good work, often at length, and he was generally perceptive enough to recognize its merits. He found Noël Coward’s Blithe Spirit to be “as deft, malicious, and fascinating a comedy as you could hope to see.” Of Guys and Dolls he declared, “I don’t think I’ve ever had more fun at a musical comedy than I had the other night.” On a more serious level, he was appropriately moved by Death of a Salesman. In describing Arthur Miller’s masterpiece, he acknowledged, he had not done justice in conveying “the quality of his work, of how unerringly he has drawn the portrait of a failure, a man who has broken under the pressures of an economic system that he is fatally incapable of understanding.”
Nonetheless Irwin Shaw, the author of the archetypal New Yorker short story “The Girls in Their Summer Dresses,” made a telling point when he wrote,
Critics in New York are made by their dislikes, not by their enthusiasms. Their bon mots, which are quoted and remembered, are always capsule damnations, cutting and sour. Their reputations and, I suppose, their pay, depend, then, upon disliking plays. Wolcott Gibbs, of the New Yorker, despite his firm resolve to learn nothing about the theatre and to treat it like a garrulous mother-in-law who will stay the winter if given any encouragement, is, in his handsomely written, cranky tirades, often uproariously funny. But when he is trapped into praising a play, his review reads like a paper by an intelligent, somewhat snobbish sophomore at a nice college in a course in contemporary literature, and is forgotten as soon, except by the actors and playwright he reluctantly patted on the head.
Shaw’s use of “snobbish” was fitting. Once, when sitting next to Gibbs during a “godawful, sentimental” offering called A Roomful of Roses that had the women in the audience weeping into their handkerchiefs, Henry Hewes of The Saturday Review ventured, “Isn’t this terrible?”
“Yes,” Gibbs responded.
“But I feel like some kind of snob,” Hewes continued, “when I see all these women very moved by all this.”
To which Gibbs replied, “What’s wrong with being a snob?”
There were other reasons why Gibbs was not enthused by his bailiwick. “I’ve always felt that play criticism was a silly occupation for a grown man,” he said.
The roots of Gibbs’s dramatic antagonism were planted in childhood. He generally found that whenever his mother took him to see a play, the performance rarely matched his expectations. Ben-Hur and Peter Pan let him down at a young age. So, especially, did The Wizard of Oz. The young Wolcott did not like Dorothy’s adult demeanor or her habit of “detaching herself suddenly from the events around her and singing a song.” He particularly hated the palpably costumed Cowardly Lion: “I was sad enough to cry about him, and whenever I read the Oz books after that, it was never a living lion I saw, but a cloth-and-cardboard one, prancing idiotically on its hind legs.” From incidents like this, Gibbs said, he “began to suspect that all so-called ‘children’s entertainments’ were designed to provide adults with a bogus and condescending nostalgia.”
Yet it was precisely Gibbs’s sharp eye that made him the ideal candidate to replace his good friend Benchley when Benchley began spending long stretches in Hollywood making his film shorts and leading what Gibbs called “one of the most insanely complicated private lives of our day.” Gibbs’s first theater column, about Eugene O’Neill’s Ah, Wilderness!, appeared in 1933, and as the decade progressed, he pretty much became Benchley’s designated successor. Gentle to the core, Benchley encouraged the arrangement. “Once, shortly after Robert returned [from Hollywood], Gibbs told him that he was going to give up theater reviewing, because no matter how hard he tried, his prose sounded awful,” recalled Benchley’s son Nathaniel. “Robert took him out and bought him a drink, and told him not to worry, that his stuff was fine. ‘I wish I could write as well,’ he concluded. It was what Gibbs described as a grotesque thing to say, but he almost believed that Robert meant it, and that borderline belief was enough to encourage him to continue.” In fact, by late 1938 Benchley was telling Ross that he thought Gibbs was “obviously better on the job than I am in my dotage.”
And so it was that Gibbs settled into Benchley’s job and an idiosyncratic routine. Typically, he would arise at about ten o’clock. After some coffee and a small breakfast, he would compose his review of whatever he had seen the night before. He usually paced in his living room, scattered with copies of Playbill, as he worked out in his head what he wanted to say. Always there would be three Lucky Strikes smoldering in ashtrays that he had positioned at either end of the room and on a coffee table in the middle. As he walked back and forth he would pick one up, take a puff, set it back down, then continue on to the next ashtray. He thus worked his way through three packs of cigarettes a day while actually smoking only about half that amount. He rarely dressed before he went out in the evening, preferring to do his work in pajamas and a dressing gown. This embarrassed Tony, who avoided bringing friends home, lest they see his father looking as if he had just rolled out of bed.*
When Gibbs sat down to write his review, he would work in the living room on a Royal portable. He could type only with his right thumb, right forefinger, and left forefinger, having once broken the other digits when jumping down a flight of stairs on a drunken bet. (His left pinky was adorned with a family signet ring made of twenty-two-carat gold so soft that he kept it together with a Band-Aid.) But he more than compensated for his infirmity by typing with such speed that his fingers would quite literally become a blur on the keyboard. He hit the keys so forcefully that after six months of constant pounding, the Royal would begin to break down. After another six months, the machine would be beyond repair, and The New Yorker would supply him with a new one. Between the broken-down Royal, his mangled fingers, his own rapidity, and his mania for expressing himself clearly, his copy was usually full of mistakes. So he would hand this mess, complete with Eagle number-one pencil corrections, to Elinor, who would unscramble it and type a clean copy.
Eventually Gibbs would get dressed and, with Elinor frequently in tow, proceed from the East 51st Street apartment to the theater district, where he would dine out before the curtain.† Making it to a playhouse should not have been a major ordeal, but it often was. “[T]here are seldom any cabs in the slum area in which I live,” he told his readers, “so that I have to progress dismally and circuitously from East to West underground, usually winding up somewhere in the mysterious catacombs underneath Times Square, where it is said many a man has been lost forever.” He continued:
The theater itself, on an opening night, isn’t a very comforting place for a nervous man. The old faces (and some of them are getting very old indeed) have the effect of a recurring nightmare: the off-stage conversation is loud and generally facetious, for there is hardly a first-nighter who doesn’t fancy himself as a humorist; the air is almost always either too hot or too cold and strongly charged with the scent of alcohol, perfume and disinfectant; there is rarely any adequate place to dispose of a hat and coat; and again there is the anxiety about getting a cab in the end—a doomed project, since only the first ten or twelve people leaving the theater are likely to be so accommodated and there are those who, after years of experience, can run rings around an antelope.
These are by no means all the physical discomforts attached to my career—there is, for instance, the matter of trying to make notes on a program in the dark which are apt to say, “Why she keep that goat in the attic?” on inspection the following morning—but they are probably enough. It has sometimes occurred to me that managements would be well advised to furnish each critic with a good stiff drink of something or other on his arrival at his seat, but I’m afraid this idea will never really take hold, the consensus among producers being that a writing man operates best in a state of faint uneasiness and melancholy.
From time to time, Gibbs would try to ameliorate these conditions. He brought Elinor with him as much for her ability to magically find a taxi amid the postcurtain crush as for her companionship. And periodically he would buy unreliable trick pen-and-flashlight combinations at novelty shops, hoping they would help him scrawl his notes with some degree of legibility in the dark. But they never quite worked. He was forever jotting cryptic, even indecipherable messages like “Lanchstr get face stuck I these nights awful if.”
What with his job challenges, his natural irascibility, and the mediocrity he so often witnessed onstage, Gibbs quickly acquired a reputation as a hanging judge. Frequently he would be so unimpressed by what was being unfurled that he would simply cross his arms and glower. Or he would cup his chin in his hand and feign sleep. Not infrequently he did pass out, either from inebriation or from sheer boredom. So did Elinor. Once she awoke suddenly in the middle of an act and blurted out, “What are all these people doing in my bedroom?”
Often he was so appalled by the proceedings that he would not stick around. Regarding Sleep, My Pretty One, by Charlie and Oliver H. P. Garrett, he wrote, “There was said to be a brief flurry of excitement toward the end of the third act, but unfortunately, I wasn’t there by then.” When it came to the “massacre” that was Stanley Richards’s Marriage Is for Single People, he departed “while the malady was still in its primary stages.”
He may have left early, but his judgment was usually acute. “He was always right,” said Geraghty’s assistant, Frank Modell. In The Yale Review, Vernon Young said that Gibbs’s criticism was “unique and indispensable” and “surely unsurpassed for its purpose by any weekly jester since The Age of Dryden.” Young exulted, “I would forgive him anything—even poisoning.”
But if he had admirers, he had far more detractors. Charles Cooke, a former New Yorker employee, once told Ross that Gibbs not only had a “sick critical viewpoint” but that his old boss had begun to “confuse Gibbs’ little-boy ‘I hate everything’ complex with true sophistication.” (“You don’t suck me into any argument on Gibbs,” Ross shot back.) After Gibbs dismissed Lillian Hellman’s The Searching Wind, Dashiell Hammett consoled her: “I read the Gibbs review last night and a nasty little puppyish affair it is. Jesus, the impudence of the little when they happen not to like something! It fills them with all the power of a beauty contest judge.” His pan of The Biggest Thief in Town by Dalton Trumbo, which lasted all of thirteen performances, brought this outraged letter from the author:
I have just read your obstinately wrong-headed review of The Biggest Thief in Town.
I call to your attention the sentence, “Unfortunately, Mr. Trumbo, whatever his gifts as a political thinker may be,” is a dull dog, etc.
The very wording of the comment indicates that here I have you on unfamiliar ground. Please, therefore, be informed that my gifts as a political thinker are of a very high order.
Other assaults were even more savage. A dozen supporters of Flahooley, an overblown puppet show whose book and lyrics were the work of no less than “Yip” Harburg (“I’d avoid it if I were you,” Gibbs wrote), called his review “the most stupid thing we have ever read.” Above their collective signature they wrote DOWN WITH GIBBS. Calling Gibbs “egregious,” Eric Bentley said he disguised his “barbarism in the sheep’s clothing of a dilettante” and that his “special contribution is an attempt to legitimize philistine prejudice.” Raymond Chandler felt similarly:
The fact that Gibbs (together with other New Yorker critical minds) is gifted with a talent for derogatory criticism doesn’t necessarily make him a good critic. I remember, long ago, when I was doing book-reviews [sic] in London, that my first impulse always was to find something smart and nasty to say because that sort of writing is so much easier. In spite of its superficial sophistication, the whole attitude of the New Yorker seems to me to have that same touch of under-graduate [sic] sarcasm. I find this sort of thing rather juvenile.
For a while, Gibbs felt obliged to respond to the criticisms of his criticisms. But this quickly proved impossibly time-consuming. He solved the problem very simply. To anyone who questioned his judgment, he would send a form response that read, “Dear Sir [or Madam]: You may be right. Sincerely, Wolcott Gibbs.”
Gibbs was quite capable of missing the mark. By his own admission, he was tone-deaf and so could not wholly appreciate musicals. “I have no idea how the damn things get there in the first place,” he acknowledged. Mel Brooks once asked him, “Mr. Gibbs, why did you never give a musical a good review?” He could be as capricious as anyone. “When youth and beauty walk on the stage,” he said, “to hell with Sarah Bernhardt.” And like other critics—Alexander Woollcott included—he was capable of putting himself out on embarrassing limbs. “Every now and then he goes off on a book or a play, liking it when nobody else can stomach a word of it and it is usually a one-joke book or a one-joke play,” observed The Harvard Crimson. “A few years ago he liked a musical called Park Avenue which flopped. It was one long, dull joke about intermarriage and divorce in the Park Avenue set. But Gibbs raved about it, for what must be curious reasons.”
Gibbs could sometimes be grievously wrong not just critically but factually. Although he admired South Pacific, he thought it bore little resemblance to James Michener’s original source material. Michener and his friend Herman Silverman were outraged. “We decided to call Gibbs and tell him what a jerk he was,” Silverman recalled. “To our gratification, Gibbs apologized and explained that he had used as his reference a paperback edition of Jim’s book which omitted the two stories upon which the musical was based.” Gibbs’s explanation seems improbable in the extreme, but Silverman bought it.
He engaged in a delicate balance with playwrights, producers, cast members, and all the other interrelated parts of the incestuous Broadway culture. Fair comment being what it is, there was usually no recourse for the stricken. At one point James Reilly, executive director of the League of New York Theatres, protested that Gibbs was guilty of “continual carping,” having sneered at nearly half of Broadway’s recent twenty-five openings, dismissing Tennessee Williams’s Summer and Smoke as “cloudy and monotonous” and Jean-Paul Sartre’s Red Gloves as “slightly irritating.” In an internal memo, Ross brushed aside the charge: “Mr. Reilly’s is funniest letter of the month.”
Still, blood was occasionally drawn. When Apple of His Eye, by Kenyon Nicholson and Charles Robinson, failed to impress Gibbs early in 1946, the producer, Jed Harris, refused to send him press tickets to his fall production of Loco, the undistinguished handiwork of Dale Eunson and Katherine Albert. Gibbs outwitted Harris by quoting several negative reviews from some of the New York dailies and deduced, “On the whole, it seems possible that Mr. Harris sent his tickets out to quite a lot of undesirable people.” The incident became so well publicized that when Congressman Emanuel Celler scrutinized the Shubert organization some years later, he cited it as one of the reasons for his investigation.
Curiously, Gibbs enjoyed a respectful, even admiring, relationship with many of those on whom he passed judgment. Theater people would often genuflect before him. Linda Kramer, a childhood friend of Gibbs’s daughter, Janet, saw them do so at “21” and other pre- and post-Broadway venues. “It was quite exciting because he was terribly important. He was sort of an idol.”
Of course, it helped if he liked their work. Even before he publicly declared Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Oklahoma! “a completely enchanting performance—gay, stylish, imaginative, and equipped with some of the best music and dancing in a long time,” he crossed the length of Sardi’s to shake hands with the choreographer, Agnes de Mille. “I want to congratulate you,” he said. “That was most distinguished.” The praise, de Mille said, left her “in a sort of stupor.” Similarly, when he extolled Tallulah Bankhead in The Circle, she was so taken that she later entertained him while he was in the hospital. “I put on a one-woman floor show designed to cure or kill,” she wrote in her memoirs. “The nurses swore it was the most exciting vaudeville ever seen on the floor. Without music, too! After the drubbing I had taken in Cleopatra, Gibbs’ words had been nectar. I would have married him on the spot, had not the venture involved double bigamy.”
Gibbs’s most gratifying, problematic, and complex relations with the Broadway set were with his fellow critics and columnists. In the 1940s and 1950s their pronouncements on live dramatic entertainment were practically gospel, and they were accorded commensurate respect. The producer Mike Todd once commissioned a four-by-thirty-six-inch painting of six of the day’s leading critics—Gibbs included—holding up their enthusiastic reviews of his musical As the Girls Go. This was transmuted into a billboard measuring 26 feet high and 156 feet long above the Winter Garden Theatre, where the production was playing. All together Todd paid more than ten thousand dollars for the effort. Dozens of Broadway tastemakers were similarly canonized in an Al Hirschfeld mural called “First Nighters” that once adorned a curving wall behind the bar of the Hotel Manhattan on West 44th Street at Eighth Avenue. Gibbs, squeezed in at the far left, was caricatured with a boutonniere, sallow expression, cigarette in drooping hand and rail-thin corpus.
Amid the first-night crush, and the competition with the other press, Gibbs navigated his way among his fellows. His closest confidant was John Mason Brown, the elegant, Harvard-educated reviewer for the New York Post and, later, The Saturday Review. “[F]rom time to time I seem to be in disagreement with a great many of your opinions,” Gibbs told him, “but it is all so literate and charming and persuasive that I am often almost convinced against my own strong, interior judgments.” When, in 1942, Brown left the Post to fight the war, Gibbs remarked that opening nights seemed “pretty bleak and strange” without him. In turn, Brown congratulated Gibbs as “the best parodist to have written since Beerbohm.”
But for the most part, Gibbs regarded his peers askance. Some, like George Jean Nathan of Esquire and The American Mercury, merely amused him. “Mr. Nathan can be moderately silly when his special prejudices are involved” and “I am embarrassed to admit that Mr. Nathan fascinates me somewhat more as a genial essayist than as a critic” were representative jabs. When Russell Crouse found himself captivated by a blond actress named Lorna Lynn, he told Gibbs that he hoped to marry her. After a moment’s thought, Gibbs responded, “George Jean Nathan probably will.”
In a rather different fashion he actively despised Burton Rascoe of the World-Telegram. Their enmity dated to the 1920s, when Rascoe was writing for the Great Neck News, the regional rival of Gibbs’s North Hempstead Record. By the 1940s Gibbs thought that Rascoe, like his old nemesis Woollcott, had become excessively self-indulgent; he called his column “Burton’s Anatomy of Rascoe.” To Brown he confided, “I’m sure Mr. Rascoe is a moral man, but he isn’t decorative and I’m damned if he knows what he’s talking about most of the time.” Rascoe in turn called Gibbs “the New Yorker’s tired young man of the theater.” More seriously, he accused Gibbs of plagiarism. In 1943, after Rascoe wrote a review of Men in Shadow by Mary Hayley Bell, he noted curious similarities between some of his phraseology and certain Gibbs sentences that appeared in The New Yorker some days later. This raised Gibbs’s hackles. “I have done many terrible things in my life,” he said, “but I have never robbed the poor box.”
Gibbs’s prejudices against his contemporaries were cemented by his inclusion in the New York Drama Critics’ Circle. He found their formal gatherings to be pointless, going so far as to skewer the Circle in a casual called “The Jukes Family Revisited” (the title being a reference to the recidivism and mental retardation of the extended and pseudonymous “Juke” family of upstate New York, who were often invoked as a defense of eugenics). Gibbs composed the piece as a broad stage farce and in the opening aired some of his grievances toward the organization:
The curtain goes up on a scene of unimaginable squalor, in a basement dining room in some second-rate Broadway hotel. There is a long table at the rear of the stage and most of the critics are seated at it, behind a formidable array of glasses and bottles. Two or three of the brothers have collapsed in drunken sleep and several of the others are clearly far from sober. On the walls there are a great many indecent pictures. A young woman, dressed like a French maid in a 1905 farce, fills the critics’ glasses from time to time, often finding it necessary to sit on their laps as she does so. There is a small piano in one corner of the room, at which a typical disorderly-house musician is batting out “Mademoiselle from Armentières.” On the floor, there is a crap game, involving three prominent members—Mr. [Brooks] Atkinson, Mr. [Howard] Barnes, and Mr. [Richard] Watts.
After a raucous call to order, it is proposed to add to the rolls such unlikely characters as a thirteen-year-old girl and the critics for National Orthodontist and Furtive Detective magazines. At one point, the assembled chant to the tune of “Onward Christian Soldiers” a ditty that begins, “Welcome novice cri-atics/To this den of vice/Brothers, ye are treading/Where things ain’t so nice.” The sardonic touches include ten absurd motions, e.g., “Each critic who is paid more than five hundred dollars a week shall be entitled to one full extra vote” and “Any critic not personally acquainted with Henry L. Mencken shall be penalized one whole vote.”
Nor did Gibbs consider his fellow members to be good company. Louis Kronenberger of PM (a “correct and literate” type, Gibbs allowed, whose “active social conscience makes it difficult for him to approve wholeheartedly of any product without a serious purpose”) recalled a memorable scene to this effect: “While having an altogether placid conversation with two fellow members, Gibbs suddenly drew himself up, said to one of them, ‘I will not be talked to like that!’ and then to the other, ‘How dare you insult my wife, sir!’ and, not staying for an answer, flung out of the private dining-room door and, clattering down the stairs, escaped from what had obviously bored him beyond endurance.”
Despite his frequent contempt for the Circle, Gibbs did from time to time find common cause with them. One occasion was the 1943 opening of Maxwell Anderson’s Truckline Café, with a cast that included Karl Malden, Marlon Brando, Kevin McCarthy, and Frank Overton. The reviews were scathing. Ward Morehouse of the Sun called it Anderson’s “worst play in nearly a quarter of a century of valiant service as a dramatist”; in the Daily News, John Chapman thought it “the worst play I have seen since I have been in the reviewing business.” The wounded producers, Harold Clurman and Elia Kazan, closed the production almost immediately—but not before taking out a large protest ad in The New York Times. In it, they raged against the “group of men who are hired to report the events of our stage and who more and more are acquiring powers which, as a group, they are not qualified to exercise.” The diatribe, which combined a defense of the play with an attack on the “blackout of all taste except the taste of these men,” went on for some five hundred words. Gibbs spoke up for the Circle in his own left-handed way. “I’d say offhand that there are only about three newspaper reviewers here who are competent to write about anything,” he said, “but it is absolutely absurd to make an issue out of this play, which has no merit whatsoever.”
A rather more serious incident took place a few months hence when Gibbs joined Rascoe, Nathan, and Stark Young of The New Republic in quitting the group for reasons that remain obscure; it seems there was a fierce internal brouhaha over the kind of exclusivity that Gibbs would later send up in his Jukes Family sketch. Adding to the drama, Joseph Wood Krutch of The Nation stepped down to take a year’s leave of absence, and Robert Garland immediately resigned when he was officially elected to the group to fill one of the slots. About four months after his resignation, though, Gibbs rejoined the Circle. Having been implored by Howard Barnes to return, he replied with customary nonchalance, “Why not?”
In his critic’s capacity, Gibbs was distracted by Broadway personalities outside of the Circle. In the 1940s and the 1950s there existed in Manhattan a unique collection of newspaper columnists who were closely yet nebulously associated with the entertainment world. They breezily dished industry dirt, occasionally reliable commentary, and related items. Their ranks included Ed Sullivan, Earl Wilson, the pseudonymous Cholly Knickerbocker, and of course, Winchell.
The New Yorker made special sport of one of them, Leonard Lyons, the author of “The Lyons Den” column for the Post; Russell Maloney ripped into him in a 1945 Profile, declaring, “Aside from his immediate relatives, Lyons knows nobody but celebrities.” His tired reportage was widely regarded as untrustworthy. Freddie Packard, with his usual scrupulousness, found some of Lyons’s items to be so vague and absurd that he fired at the columnist a dozen or so specific queries each in two separate casuals, demanding pertinent details. McKelway spoofed the lame tone of “The Lyons Den” in a casual called “The Mare’s Nest.” Among his fictional items was an anecdote that he attributed to Assistant Secretary of Agriculture Grover B. Hill: “Many farmers in recent years have been using a machine that works on much the same principle as the military tank. Called ‘tractors,’ because, working on much the same principle as the military tank, they have potent traction and can cross rough fields, etc.”
Gibbs tended to stay clear of hack writers, but he could not avoid them entirely. One was Dorothy Kilgallen. Her column “The Voice of Broadway” reached beyond show business to encompass such Winchellian subjects as politics and the mob. Against his better judgment, Gibbs in the early 1940s collaborated with her on a fanciful musical about a “sporty, cosmopolitan” female writer of a daily radio soap opera. Through her dreams, she is transported into the role of Scheherazade. But after a first treatment, Gibbs disentangled himself. When the show’s costume designer, Miles White, ran into Gibbs at the Algonquin and asked how things were going, Gibbs explained that he had been forced to throw up his hands over the troublesome project. “I can sum up the whole show in one phrase,” he said. “It’s the phrase that Miss Kilgallen opened every one of our story conferences with: ‘Wouldn’t it be cute if . . .’ ”‡
On the other hand, Gibbs had respect and even a strange affection for Lucius Beebe, who owned several newspapers around the country and wrote a chatty, amiable society column called “This New York” for the Herald Tribune. His interest in Beebe extended beyond the fact that Beebe’s first name was that of his, Gibbs’s, late father. Both were born in 1902. Both had attended the Roxbury School. Both had had problems with college; Beebe was thrown out of Yale after he hurled an empty bottle at the stage of the Hyperion Theatre in New Haven and roared, “I am Professor Tweedy of the Yale Divinity School!”
Despite this fracas, Beebe managed to transfer from Yale to Harvard, with President James Angell of the former supposedly telling President Abbott Lawrence Lowell of the latter, “I apologize for sending you such a bad potato.” As Gibbs had been a prankster at Hill, so Beebe was one at Harvard. According to legend, he circulated a ballot to see if it would be worth trading President Lowell and three professors for “a good running backfield.” The motion, drawing more 2,300 responses, failed by only seven votes.
Both Gibbs and Beebe were fascinated by railroads. But whereas Gibbs had been a mere brakeman on the LIRR, the wealthy Beebe personally owned two plush pieces of rolling stock, the Gold Coast and the Virginia City. The latter was a “pretty toy, a jewel box, a dream on wheels,” said Gibbs. It was “ninety-three feet long, weighs a hundred and eighty-five thousand pounds, and consists of a twenty-three-foot observation-drawing room, three master staterooms (each with its own toilet facilities), a small Turkish bath, a dining room seating eight, a galley with a fifty-bottle wine cellar, an extra seven-hundred-pound refrigerator on the forward platform, and crew quarters for two.” The whole rig was wired for music and equipped with three telephones for outside communication. When Beebe welcomed visitors aboard, he would cry, “Welcome to Walden Pond!”
Beebe was an aesthete supreme, and Gibbs was particularly taken with his sartorial self-indulgence. At any given time Beebe owned about forty suits, ten of them formal outfits (“I would no more think of appearing in a restaurant in the evening out of dinner dress than I would in swimming shorts”). He had a mink-lined, astrakhan-collared dress coat that he insured for $3,000. For a ten-day visit to Hollywood, his wardrobe included seventy-two shirts. His accoutrements included three gold cigarette cases worth some $700 apiece, a cashmere sapphire cabochon ring worth $1,200, and a platinum watch that cost $1,000. He was, Gibbs said, “menacingly well-groomed.” For his part, Beebe understood Gibbs perfectly; he called him “a fiend in human form.”
A cadre of publicists and press agents fed Gibbs’s Broadway chroniclers—from Beebe to Sullivan—a steady diet of tickets, interviews, and exclusives. The best known was Richard Maney, whom Gibbs called “the most prosperous gnome of the lot.” Jack Gould of The New York Times estimated that Maney could “spout Elizabethanisms by the hour and recite Shakespeare even longer.” He had a dispassion about his work to which Gibbs could relate. “Press agentry is no business for people with nerves,” Maney once said. “But it can be a gay life for one with detachment, with sympathy for the deranged and with an understanding of why the theater’s children behave the way they do.” Gibbs admired Maney’s ability to treat his own people “with the genial condescension of an Irish cop addressing a Fifth Avenue doorman.” The condescension was not always so genial; from time to time Maney would tear into a client with the dreaded sneer, “You actor, you!”
Gibbs was also taken with Maney because he had a passion for fly-fishing and Gibbs, as a devotee of the sand and surf, loved to cast his reel. He published a typically barbed yet smiling Profile about Maney in 1941; the title, “The Customer Is Always Wrong,” hinted at the treatment. He quoted Maney as once saying that “All female stars have one thing in common: after you stand on your head to arrange an interview, they break the date because they have to go and get their hair washed.” The press agent was featured several times on the NBC radio show Information, Please, moderated by Clifton Fadiman; calling his appearances “cerebral ambushes,” Maney remembered, “My most hair-raising moment came when, casting a furtive look at the studio audience, I caught the eye of Wolcott Gibbs, The New Yorker’s critic and bon vivant. Mr. Gibbs leered at me like a hyena from the front row, and whirled his forefingers about his ear in a circular movement.”
Yet Maney respected Gibbs. He thought him “a perfectionist, a stickler for syntax and symmetry and sentence structure” and a master stylist who was “pained by the prose of many of his fellows.”
* Gibbs’s work habits caused Tony embarrassment of another sort when he was about seven and was assigned a classroom report on what his father did for a living. “I had not the foggiest notion, so I came home and asked. And he said, ‘Well, what do you think I do? I get dressed up and I go to work at night and I come back long after you’re in bed.’ I couldn’t come up with anything. So he said, ‘A burglar.’ ” A naïve Tony duly conveyed this information at school, causing something of an uproar.
† One of Gibbs’s preferred restaurants was an Italian establishment called Zucca’s on West 49th Street. Rita Zucca, the daughter of the proprietor, gained notoriety as one of the fascist propagandists during World War II, known as “Axis Sally.”
‡ Other writers, including Sidney Sheldon, replaced Gibbs, but there was no saving the production, which opened as Dream with Music in 1944 and ran for only twenty-eight performances. On opening night, the acclaimed ballerina Vera Zorina slipped and fell onstage. Two scenes later, during a tender interlude between her and her lover, there was a power failure. The stage manager tried to compensate by holding a flashlight over the heads of the infatuated partners, at which point the audience began giggling and the house lights were suddenly restored. Sheldon called it “probably the most disastrous opening in the history of Broadway.” Gibbs agreed with a friend that the fiasco was an example “not of good taste or bad taste but simply of no taste at all.”