“WHOSE DAYS, IN ANY CASE, WERE NUMBERED”
“I’ll be here when I’m sixty, snarling,” Gibbs once predicted to Nancy Hale. He was off by four years.
In his final nontheater piece for The New Yorker, the short story “A Fellow of Infinite Jest,” Gibbs assigned himself the alter ego of Bardolph Martin, “the last of the fashionable literary humorists.” He transmuted Elinor, Tony, and Janet into “Perdita,” “Cyril,” and “Ariadne.” In a mordant and extended scene, Gibbs had them discuss his past accomplishments, his decline amid changing public tastes, and the possibility of dispatching him for his insurance money. Ariadne thinks he is worth about a dime, whereas Perdita estimates a return of about $300,000. The story ends with the arrival of Bardolph. His “halting footsteps were audible in the hallway,” Gibbs wrote, “clearly those of a man whose days, in any case, were numbered.” It was an ending that Katharine White thought “masterly.”
His actual departure was as mysterious as his marriage to Helen and the suicide of Elizabeth. Winchell, with his penchant for inaccuracy, reported, “Mrs. Wolcott Gibbs was upstairs in their Fire Island home confined to a wheel chair [sic] when Gibbs died at his desk downstairs. Charles Addams, whose cartoons are usually connected with macabre things, dropped in and found him.” Forty-five years later Botsford conveyed a similarly garbled version. “Gibbs was upstairs in his bedroom, reading proofs,” he wrote.
Periodically, Elinor would call up to him to remind him of lunch, but there was never an answer. Finally, she asked the maid to go up and rout him out. The maid came back and said, “Maybe you’d better go up, Mr. Addams.” Charlie went up, and there was Gibbs, dead in his chair. “He had his feet up on the windowsill,” Addams told me later, “and the proofs of his book More in Sorrow were in his lap. He had a cigarette in his hands and it had burned right down to his fingers.”
Some of these details are correct. Elinor was indeed in a wheelchair, having recently injured her ankle. And every reliable account places Gibbs with some form of More in Sorrow and a cigarette in hand. But no maid was likely in attendance. Nor, definitely, was Addams. And Gibbs was not sitting up. The most authoritative version comes from Tony. Though not present—he was with Tish at her parents’ place in nearby Seaview—he pieced together what happened:
My understanding was that he had taken the first copy of More in Sorrow upstairs the previous evening to look it over. He hadn’t seen it; it had only just arrived. And then he didn’t come down to breakfast the next morning, didn’t come down at all. And my mother grew mildly concerned, and went up to see what was wrong and discovered that he was in bed and dead with the book. And I don’t know if she saw a bottle of pills or what, but my understanding, again, is that she called—because I think we had a telephone at that point—Bill Birmingham and their doctor, or Bill may have called the doctor, because she probably didn’t want doctors or didn’t know how to get hold of them. I don’t think the town had a phone book at that point. But I guess Bill went up and had a look at him and knew immediately he was dead.
Amid the grief and confusion, it would not have been surprising for the ever-supportive Addams to place himself in the scene to somehow take some of the burden of the discovery off Elinor. It was not surprising, either, that Birmingham insisted that no autopsy be performed. When the attending physician mentioned the procedure, Elinor became quite upset, at which point Birmingham drew the doctor aside.
“What he did say, I was told, was, ‘If you insist on an autopsy, you are finished in this town,’ ” said Tony. “I’m sure Birmingham probably also at the time reassured him and said, ‘Look, I know this guy and he’s not healthy and he just slipped away in the night. So why are you making this production about it?’ And certainly there was no sign of foul play or anything like that, so the doctor probably had no great problems squaring it with his conscience.” Therefore, the official record was fudged. The coroner entered “Congestion and Cyanosis of Lungs” as the cause of death, with notations that an investigation and a chemical analysis were pending. It was further stated on the certificate that an autopsy had been performed, when in fact it never was.
Elinor suspected that her husband had killed himself. More than once he had overdosed, intentionally or unintentionally, on a combination of sleeping pills and alcohol. Gibbs’s access to drugs increased in his last years when the family moved from their semiprivate East 51st Street digs to a large apartment building on Park Avenue and 82nd. Mail was often left on a communal table in the lobby; among the parcels were pharmaceutical samples that were dropped off for the three physicians with offices on the ground floor. Elinor took full advantage of them. “She would sweep through without a second thought,” said Tony. “Anything that looked interesting, she’d take it.”
Tish, among others, was dubious about a suicide. “He seemed rather, for him, in a more up cycle,” she said. “I don’t think that I can remember a bad time. . . . It wasn’t like he’d been ailing.”
The news made the front page of the Times. Thurber, in London with Helen, telegraphed Shawn: DEEPLY SHOCKED AND GRIEVED PLEASE HAVE [DAISE] TERRY SEND FLOWERS FOR US TO FUNERAL AND TO ELINOR. Tom Gorman of the secretarial staff told Katharine he was “drenched in grief.” When word reached O’Hara, he wept. He concluded that his old friend had drunk himself to death. “I had hoped, without much hope, that he might last out this phase and be one of my old-age cronies as he had been of my youth, but the whole business of life was stacked against Gibbs,” he told a friend. “I know of no one who had better reasons for being soured, and he is all the proof you need that things do not even up in the end. They never evened up for him.”
“We can’t bear it,” wrote John Mason Brown and his wife, Cassie, to Elinor. “We can’t believe it.”
The wake was held, as Ross’s service had been, at Frank Campbell’s. The funeral proper took place at the Protestant Episcopal Church of the Ascension at Fifth Avenue and Tenth Street, not far from where Gibbs once lived with his sister. It was an odd ritual; Rev. Peter Wilkinson, the assistant rector, did not once mention the name of the deceased, having never met him. “He wasn’t about to take the chance of pronouncing the name ‘Wolcott’ from a standing start,” said Tony. A number of Gibbs’s brothers in theatrical criticism were at the burial at Ferncliff Cemetery in Hartsdale. So were McKelway, Perelman, Liebling, Mitchell, Meredith, Burr, and Maney; Sam Behrman’s son, David, handled Elinor in her wheelchair. When he returned from the services, Sam found a copy of More In Sorrow waiting for him in his hallway, presumably sent either by Henry Holt or by The Saturday Review; the magazine was hoping he would write a review. “Just can’t,” he jotted in his diary a few days later.
White offered The New Yorker’s official farewell—with typical affection, humor, and personal insight. Gibbs probably would have been most pleased with White’s estimation of his nontheatrical editorial abilities:
Often the editor would have been far happier to publish a Gibbs opinion sheet than the manuscript to which it was attached. In fact, if these spontaneous and unguarded written opinions of his could be released to the world (and they most assuredly can’t be), they would make probably a funnier and sounder critique of creative writing in the late twenties and early thirties than has ever been assembled.
“Terrible that it had to be written,” Thurber told White, “but a fine thing that you were there to write it.”
Unlike Gibbs, Thurber had a repeat triumph on Broadway. It was A Thurber Carnival, a 1960 revue based on his best stories and drawings. Burgess Meredith directed the unconventional show, which featured Tom Ewell, Paul Ford, John McGiver, Peggy Cass, Alice Ghostley, and Eddie Mayehoff, a veteran of Season in the Sun. But seventeen weeks into its run, bad luck nearly ruined everything when an actors’ strike forced a closure from June 25 to September 5. When the strike was over, Ewell, who had played such central parts as Walter Mitty and Thurber himself, was no longer available. And then something of a miracle occurred: Thurber stepped into the role.
“He literally jumped at the chance,” said the actress, writer, director, and producer Haila Stoddard. “It was the only way to save the show. He was always performing, anyway.” It was an audacious move. But when Meredith asked if Thurber had memorized his lines, he erupted, “Memorized! I wrote the goddamn thing. I have the whole play memorized.”
For the author it was a wonderful experience, even if he could not see the audience. “He was a born actor,” said Stoddard. “He was suddenly a happy man again, full of involvement with the show and in love with being the new star on Broadway. And for the three months he was acting, the box office was fine. He saved his own show.” Thurber and Meredith both ended up winning a special Tony Award for their efforts, and Carnival ran for 223 performances.
Thurber’s New Yorker work, what remained of it, was less happy. “My old relationship really died with Ross and Lobrano,” he told Milton Greenstein, the magazine’s counsel and guru. Roger Angell agreed. “Thurber’s copy often came in clean and poor,” he recalled. “He’d shout and carry on. ‘Do you know who I am?’ he’d yell at me over the phone. ‘I sat at the Long Table at Punch!’ Once Shawn pulled me aside in the corridor and asked me, ‘Do you think Thurber is crazy?’ ” Nor were Andy and Katharine, among others, pleased with the pieces he issued in The Atlantic Monthly about Ross, which—loving as they were—by turns made his subject out to be an editorial moron, extolled Thurber’s own importance, and dwelt on such touchy matters as New Yorker payments and the sex lives of his colleagues. Little wonder, then, that between the sweetness of Carnival and the sorrow of the magazine, when he slipped away on November 2, 1961, his famous last words were reportedly the double-barreled “God bless . . . goddam.”
When it came time for White, inevitably, to have the last word, he conveyed it with his characteristic generosity and compassion: “I am one of the lucky ones. I knew him before blindness hit him, before fame hit him, and I tend always to think of him as a young artist in a small office in a big city, with all the world still ahead. It was a fine thing to be young and at work in New York for a new magazine when Thurber was young and at work, and I will always be glad that this happened to me.” He observed, poignantly,
His waking dreams and his sleeping dreams commingled shamelessly and uproariously; Ohio was never far from his thoughts, and when he received a medal from his home state in 1953, he wrote, “The clocks that strike in my dreams are often the clocks of Columbus.” It is a beautiful sentence and a revealing one.
St. Clair McKelway’s denouement was strung out and pathetic. In 1963 he secured a six-week summer residency at Yaddo, the writers’ colony in upstate New York. There he intended to finish up a book “about an impostor, a Brooklyn man now dead” that would, he said, be a “study of imposture, and the odd relation of the impostor to the artist.” But after checking in, he almost immediately checked out—to the Albany Medical Center. Yaddo canceled his residency; John Cheever, who had helped sponsor him, was compelled to apologize, “I did not know he was this seriously unhinged.” Some years later McKelway ended up in Bellevue and submitted a self-obsessed account of his stay there. Titled “A Reporter at Large: A Journalist in Bellevue,” it was never printed.
Poverty went in tandem with McKelway’s dementia. He had begun running up major debts after his return from the Pacific; when he was in Hollywood, Ross was “amazed that creditors didn’t grab money out there.” By the time he married Maeve and Saint died, the New York State Tax Commission reckoned he was in hock to The New Yorker for $7,138.76—in part as the result of incessant advances of fifty dollars a week. At intervals his creditors included the Rockland Light and Power Co.; the Uplifters Club of Rustic Canyon, California; the Algonquin; Dave Chasen’s restaurant; and the kennel where he kept his cats. Toward the end of his life, he had his mail forwarded to such disparate venues as the Hotel Esplanade in Locarno, Switzerland, and a Holiday Inn in Temple, Texas. At one point McKelway tried to check into the Mansfield Hotel in midtown, but the front desk refused him—not only because of his appearance but because he had left his wallet, containing three hundred dollars, back at The New Yorker. As he could, he ventured forth to the magazine, where he would often doodle on the walls, much like Thurber, although the quality of his work was not recorded.
He passed away on January 10, 1980, penniless and “dotty.”
John O’Hara prospered. After he returned to The New Yorker with “Imagine Kissing Pete” in September 1960, nearly forty more of his stories graced the magazine’s pages during the decade. Dedicating his 1961 collection Assembly to Gibbs, O’Hara continued to pay homage to his deceased champion by placing much of his work in Gibbsville. He wrote major novels, especially The Big Laugh, Elizabeth Appleton, and The Lockwood Concern. Critical reaction to his output was mixed, with reviewers tending to favor his stories over his longer works. But despite his not being awarded any honorary degrees—an omission that rankled—he received deference in the form of a Newsweek cover story in 1963 and, the following year, the Award of Merit Medal from the National Institute of Arts and Letters.
O’Hara treated the oscillating reception with his particular brand of gratitude and contempt. But so long as the money kept coming in he was happy; in 1963 his income tax payment alone was $135,000. He grew consumed with material objects, acquiring a veritable fleet of Rolls-Royces and other high-end cars, an expensive wardrobe, and tchotchkes of various kinds. He also turned reactionary, his conservatism reaching its peak with his 1960s Newsday column “My Turn.” His most embarrassing moment may have occurred when he expressed astonishment that Martin Luther King, Jr., was a contender for the 1964 Nobel Peace Prize. “I maintain that much of the guilt for [the] evil race situation must go to the liberals, whose conventional, strictly conformist view is that anything and everything the Negro does is right, and everything the white man does, vis a vis the Negro is wrong,” he wrote to an acquaintance. “This is a gutless, irresponsible attitude.”
Nonetheless his frank, revolutionary fiction—as opposed to his social commentary—has endured, passing through cycles of critical evaluation and re-evaluation. The former New Yorker editor Charles McGrath recently praised O’Hara’s “toughness and grittiness, a determination to succeed and prove others wrong, that made him get up every morning—or, more likely, every afternoon—his head pounding, light another cigarette, and start typing.” Frank MacShane, one of his several biographers, did not flinch at confronting O’Hara’s snobbery, his arrogance, and his reflexive defensiveness. But ten years after O’Hara’s death on April 11, 1970, at the age of sixty-five, MacShane proclaimed his subject “one of the half-dozen most important writers of his time.”
Charles Addams retained his unique combination of artistic morbidity and personal cheer to the end. But there would be almost no more Addams Family cartoons after 1964, when their namesake television series debuted; the decorous Shawn apparently didn’t want any crossover between his refined magazine and Hollywood commercialism. At one point, when Addams tried to submit a Family cartoon, the editor replied quietly, “I don’t think we want to revive them.” Nonetheless the clan lived on not only in reruns but in various animated appearances, TV and theatrical films, and profitable merchandising. In 2010 The Addams Family debuted as a Broadway musical to mixed reviews but lucrative box office. One can only wonder about the judgment that Gibbs, who had wanted to collaborate on a live-action version of “that haunted house bunch” some sixty years before, would have passed on it.
Irrespective of the Family, Addams still had plenty of offbeat material with which to work. One of his most famous later cartoons was of an old man securing himself in his room with seven locks on the door, unaware that directly beneath him someone is sawing his way up through the floor. His New Yorker oeuvre came to include more than thirteen hundred illustrations and covers. Thanks in part to his productivity and Family tie-ins—from the TV series alone he made $141,276—Addams lived well. To his collection of esoteric items (at one point he acquired a pair of biopsy scissors), he added a variety of foreign cars, including an Aston Martin, a Bentley, a Bugatti, and a supercharged German army staff vehicle. Unlike O’Hara, Addams did not deploy these acquisitions as status symbols; they were reflections of a fun and imaginative personality.
Addams’s devil-may-care attitude continued to find expression in his love life, through which he ran without much thought of the consequences. In the 1960s he dated the newly widowed Jacqueline Kennedy, an admirer of his work, until she began putting him down, indicating that as a mere cartoonist he was not quite in her league. “She may be the moodiest woman I’ve ever met,” Addams complained. He also had a tempestuous relationship with Joan Fontaine that was so public it set off marriage rumors. Ignobly, he seems to have seduced Gibbs’s daughter, Janet, when she was a young woman who was just beginning to exhibit symptoms of bipolar disorder. After two failed marriages, to Barbara Jean Day and Barbara Barb (nicknamed “Good Barbara” and “Bad Barbara” because of their respective personalities), he settled down in 1980 with Marilyn “Tee” Miller. The wedding took place in Tee’s pet cemetery at her home in Water Mill, New York. “It’s my favorite place in the world,” Tee told the Times. In many ways it was a perfect joining; the bride wore black.
He succumbed to a heart attack on September 29, 1988, slumped behind the wheel of his Audi in front of his apartment building. By that time he had been pronounced “an American landmark, one of the few, by which one and all have learned to steer. An Addams house, an Addams family, an Addams situation are archetypes that we see all around us.” His ashes were buried in Tee’s animal graveyard.
E. B. White became something of an elder statesman of American letters. Honorary degrees, along with such accolades as the National Medal for Literature and the gold medal of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, poured in. In December 1963 he was given the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the country’s highest civilian award. However, he “muffed” his attendance at the ceremony in Washington, remaining at home because of one of Katharine’s ever-mounting bouts of ill health. Even without that excuse he probably would have found a reason not to attend. “I dislike cameras and airplanes,” he told Andy Rooney. “The camera is unforgiving; the airplane is impractical in thick weather. So I avoid both.” A few months after the ceremony, Senator Edmund Muskie was dispatched to present the prize to White on their mutual Maine turf, a gesture that rather embarrassed the author. “I really had not intended to put anyone to any trouble,” he wrote. In 1978 he received a special Pulitzer Prize citation for the collective body of his work.
For White, prose was more important than accolades. He lived long enough to write memorable “Comment” about the assassination of President Kennedy and the first moon landing. Both entries reflected his continued ability to turn an unexpected phrase. Noting that JFK disdained hats, he remarked that the president “died of exposure, but in a way that he would have settled for—in the line of duty, and with his friends and enemies all around, supporting and shooting at him.” When it came to Apollo XI, his devotion to one world remained as strong as ever. Disdaining the planting of the Stars and Stripes on extraterrestrial soil, he transcended nationalism and reached for universalism:
Like every great river and every great sea, the moon belongs to none and belongs to all. It still holds the key to madness, still controls the tides that lap on shores everywhere, still guards the lovers who kiss in every land under no banner but the sky. What a pity that in our moment of triumph we did not forswear the familiar Iwo Jima scene and plant instead a device acceptable to all: a limp white handkerchief, perhaps, symbol of the common cold, which, like the moon, affects us all, unites us all.
Many of his New Yorker “Letters” from various locales were collected in The Points of My Compass; much of his correspondence made it between hard covers as well. And he published his last children’s novel, The Trumpet of the Swan. If not as well remembered or quite as beloved as Charlotte’s Web and Stuart Little, it endeared him yet to young readers who knew nothing of what he had done for Ross’s magazine.
Katharine, meanwhile, found herself not quite able to adapt to changing times. While she was still editing fiction, she had asked Norman Mailer if he would care to contribute to The New Yorker. Mailer refused, explaining that he would not be free to use the word shit in its pages. “White wrote back to suggest that perhaps Mr. Mailer did not understand the true meaning of freedom,” wrote the future New Yorker critic Louis Menand. “Mailer answered that he did indeed understand the true meaning of freedom: freedom meant being able to say ‘shit’ in The New Yorker.” Not that Katharine wholly resisted the New Journalism; Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, she told Behrman, was “a feather in Shawn’s cap.”
In her official retirement, she preferred to focus on projects that were within her power—namely, her gardening columns. But her health was declining rapidly. Escaping the Maine winters, the Whites began spending time in Florida. The change of climate, however, could only do so much. By the early 1970s Katharine was suffering from shingles, dermatosis, a fractured vertebra, osteoporosis, a kidney infection, and congestive heart failure. Within a short time she found herself relying on various friends and aides some eighteen hours a day. In her own way she hated her downward spiral as much as Thurber had hated his; she called herself “a bent and horrible looking old crone” and “a burden to myself and poor Andy.” Collaborating with her husband and Philip Hamburger, she published her final New Yorker item, a minor “Talk” entry about a Medicare claim conducted via telephone and computer, in 1971. She died six years later, a week after writing a letter to Jean Stafford that she acknowledged was “dull and feeble.”
Andy had written her many a poem in their decades together. This was one of Katharine’s to him, composed twenty-two years before her passing:
Saint Valentine and I one day a year
Go shopping for my sweet, my only love,
And then I would my minute prowess move
To choose a necktie he would want to wear
Of fabrics silky, staunch, or very sheer.
Alas, though I the heavens move
In [working?] Cupid’s many-colored dove,
I turn up nothing that will please me, dear.
O Garrell, Keep, and Saks! O Brothers Brooks! [Jarrell?]
What horrors do you lead me on to buy?
What spotted outrages you like to call a tie
Constructed to undo a Greek god’s looks?
Forgive, my dear, this annual charade,
And only wear my love when you parade.
“This place doesn’t fit me since Katharine died,” Andy told the Times in 1980. “Only just lately have I been free to explore the depths of despair you get into. I don’t have friends here my own age. Everybody I know is below ground.”
White’s last years were far from unhappy. He reveled in his grandchildren, his periodic writings, life on the farm and his extensive correspondence. After some initial reluctance, he cooperated with Scott Elledge, a professor of English at Cornell, on E. B. White: A Biography. On the whole he was pleased by the result. “I was reduced alternately to tears and to laughter,” he told his chronicler. “The laughs were generated by rediscovering what a consummate ass I was, early and late.” He remained his own man, writing what he wanted and somehow balancing his need to be heard while keeping great chunks of his life, which informed so much of his output, to himself. Linda H. Davis, who wrote definitive biographies of both Katharine and Addams, captured this dichotomy in a fond but unflinching New Yorker reminiscence:
A vulnerable, intensely private man, White put up a lot of fences and opened the gate to a select few. Even those who got past the gate could quickly find themselves back on the outside. . . . A writer used to a self-centered existence, a man whose close relationship with his wife had left other people on the periphery, he was also an affectionate person, quick to sign “love” to his letters to a new friend, and he needed the warmth of human contact. But his personality said, “Come here, come here. Get away, get away.”
When he left, at eighty-six, on October 1, 1985, the cartoonist Brian Duffy of the Des Moines Register seized on the Garth Williams illustration of Charlotte’s Web that depicted Charlotte having spun out the words SOME PIG. Duffy rendered a mournful Wilbur poised beneath the silken epigraph SOME WRITER.