TRIALS OF BABYLON
In later years, Robert Ruark delighted in telling the tale of how he was discharged from the Navy in 1945. By the end of the conflict he was in a “semi-civilian” job in the censor’s office in Australia, attached to the Royal Navy. Ruark loved Australia at first sight, not least of all because of the Australian women. His natural charm, combined with his admirable war record, took him a long way in a country whose able-bodied menfolk were mostly off fighting the Japanese. As the war drew to a close, however, Ruark wanted to get home more and more, the various fascinations of Australia notwithstanding; when Japan surrendered, he realized, there would be a rush for the boats, and he did not relish the idea of standing in line with the other about-to-be-discharged servicemen.
Having a desk job, with access to a typewriter, all the necessary forms, and a knowledge by this time of exactly how the service worked (and more important, how it did not work), Lt. Ruark cut himself a new set of orders, bumped a ranking general off a flight, and flew home to Washington. His reception at naval headquarters was less than ecstatic, since his superiors believed he was still in the Pacific. By Ruark’s own account, he was unable to get an audience with an admiral to arrange his (legal) discharge, so he stood in the street outside the building and threw rocks at the admiral’s window to attract attention. Because the war was over and Ruark had an excellent service record of duty under fire, it was considered expedient, rather than court-martialing him for desertion, to quietly process him out of the Navy and back into what he called “the grey oatmealy realities of the peace.”
Like many servicemen returning home, what he expected and what he found were two completely different things. The utter lack of personal responsibility in the service — in the sense that you go where you are sent, and you do what you are told to do, and you cope with what you find when you get there — becomes a warm and happy memory when you are faced with decisions such as where to live, where to work, and what to pursue as a career. Returning to his pre-war job as “meek morning editor of the Washington Daily News” did not, by itself, appeal to a man who had commanded other men under fire, who had travelled the world and seen ships sink and his friends die, often horribly. From now on, Robert Ruark decided, he was going to live his life on his own terms.
***
Ruark was, by instinct and inclination, a newspaperman, and the years immediately after the war and before the advent of television were, in many ways, the heyday of newspapers. Radio, while a powerful medium in some ways, had failed to dislodge the printed word as the primary source of news and opinion — opinion that was molded by columnists who enjoyed nationwide celebrity status. The syndicated columnists of that time wielded considerable power and influence, to say nothing of freedom. Walter Winchell, Heywood Broun, and Walter Lippmann were household names, and a columnist who caught the public’s attention, who was read religiously regardless of subject matter, and who helped sell newspapers, was, to a great extent, free to write his own ticket. The freedom to go where he wanted and to cover the stories (and only those stories) that seized his imagination, appealed to Robert Ruark, and he set his sights on getting a syndicated column.
Post-war America certainly did not lack for news stories, so finding something to write about was no problem. The atomic bomb, the Cold War, the activities of the House Un-American Activities Committee, the beginnings of new wars in Indochina and Malaya, the dismantling of the British, French, and Belgian colonial empires — all of these guaranteed a steady diet of headlines. The problem was not news, it was getting attention. As any reporter can tell you, there is a big difference. For Robert Ruark, returning serviceman, the competition was rather heated; established columnists and returning war correspondents, replete with anecdotes and high-level contacts, dominated the news wires. Going back to work for the Washington Daily News was easy enough; elbowing his way into the ranks of the syndicated columnists was not.
The one thing Ruark could offer that big names like Edward R. Murrow could not was the perspective of a man who had seen the war from the inside — who had actually fired the guns and been shot at, had frozen on eight-hour wheel-watches in the North Atlantic, and had faced death on a daily basis. The Edward R. Murrows might have the ears of the mighty, but Robert Ruark could reach the imaginations of twelve million returning servicemen, and they were the people who bought the newspapers. As he figured it, anything that made him “glad, sad or mad” probably did the same for those twelve million other men who were in the same boat; all he had to do was put his finger on it. And what does a man alone in a foxhole think about when the bullets aren’t flying? Women. And what does he look for first when he comes down the gangplank in New York? Women. And what were the returning men actually finding? Not women, according to Ruark — at least not the women they had been dreaming about for the past four years. He looked around, as he put it, for the biggest window he could find and prepared to lob a rock through it. The window that grabbed his attention was the one through which the returning servicemen viewed, with increasing horror, disappointment, and dismay, the vision of American womanhood that greeted them as they got off the boat.
“During the war, since I was almost perpetually attached to lonesome ships and chained to lonelier islands, I had considerable opportunity to dwell upon dames and their place in our time,” he wrote later, in a piece that was included in a posthumous anthology called, simply, Women. While on watch in the Pacific off the island of Espiritu Santo in the New Hebrides, Ruark concluded that the key to his future prosperity as a columnist was to play upon the vanity of women. Men were sure to love it and women were sure to hate it, but either way it was sure to sell newspapers. He began with a column that on the surface appeared to be about women’s fashions, but which he later insisted was really a piece about “S*E*X.” In Ruark’s view, women’s fashions, from hairstyles to padded shoulders to spike-heeled shoes, were a conspiracy designed to cause those men to run back up the gangplanks and set sail once more for the South Pacific. He presented that opinion in a feature that appeared in November, 1945, and (Ruark commented innocently) “oddly, made the newspaper front pages.” The world was never quite the same again, and Ruark’s career as a syndicated columnist was launched amid a mob of nodding heads on the one hand and infuriated letters on the other.
Many years later, Ruark remarked that he had been a “professional wiseguy” as a columnist, and that phrase sums him up as neatly as anything. Reading his columns today, they are mostly dated, not only in subject matter but in their writing style as well. They are, for the most part, mildly amusing but eminently forgettable. The style of the day, as epitomized by Walter Winchell, was short, snappy, opinionated, and laden with slang; it was designed to grab attention first, to inform a distant second. There were political columnists, who ranged from the thickly ponderous to the thunderingly partisan; there were comic columnists, who wrote about their home life, their difficulty with income tax forms, or with getting the car started on a cold morning. Those who wail about the influence of television today, which seeks the lowest common denominator of intellect and then caters to it, should take a close look at the newspaper columns of the 1940s and ‘50s. Nostalgia aside, they were not much better, and in some ways, such as blatant libel and character assassination, they were considerably worse.
Robert Ruark’s columns fell somewhere in the middle. He wrote about politics, southern cooking, and the atomic bomb; he wrote about his dog, and living in Greenwich Village, and the mob. In one instance, he wrote about a mobster, walking his dog for him, in Greenwich Village. When it later became an issue, he wrote about civil rights and the attitudes of politicians in the Deep South. New York taxicabs, child rearing, and women’s fashions became staples — and there is nothing a daily columnist needs more than tomorrow’s sure-fire topic. Early on, he hit on his own domestic life as a winner, in that he could present Virginia as wife, feminist, autocrat, villain, heroine — but always, ultimately, the winner in any domestic squabble. It was formula writing to be sure, but it is a formula that predated Ruark by several centuries and will outlast him by several more.
To a working journalist, writing a daily column seems like a holiday. You write about what you want, offer your opinions, then knock off and go for a drink. Anyone who has written a column, however, knows the dictatorial deadline is a constant enemy, and life is one long search for the next topic. A truism of the business is that everyone in the world has three months’ worth of columns in him, waiting to pour forth; what separates the would-be columnist from the genuine article is how you fill that newspaper space, on time and every day, in the months and years after the easy topics run dry. There is a limit to how many times you can write about the same thing. Variety is an absolute necessity of survival, and a columnist is only as successful as the newspapers he helps to sell on any given day.
It is an ephemeral business — literally. Today’s triumph is forgotten if tomorrow’s column is boring, obscure, or in some way fails to touch a chord with various editors and is relegated to a back page. Then as now, there were means for polling readers and finding out if they read a column regularly, and if so, why. Ruark admitted that, even after he was an established columnist, the arrival of each day’s paper was torture. The first thing he would do was look to see where his column had been placed, how it had been treated, and whether his picture was, in fact, at the top beside the headline. In his perceptive foreword to Robert Ruark’s Africa, Michael McIntosh says of him, “His success was entirely of his own making, and yet he never believed it could last. At the core, he was a deeply fearful man, lacking all but the merest shreds of confidence in his own ability.” This hard-core insecurity stayed with Ruark throughout his entire professional life — as reporter, columnist, and novelist. No matter how great his success, he always feared it could be snatched away from him at any moment.
In The Honey Badger, commenting on the writing business generally in New York, Alec Barr’s agent, Marc Mantell, says “This is a forgetful business in a forgetful town.” Nowhere is that more true than in the business of daily newspaper column-writing. Columnists spend their early years elbowing their way into the ranks, and their later years trying to keep from being elbowed aside by newcomers.
Like most of his contemporaries, Robert Ruark mined the news wires for material. He stockpiled clippings and every so often would present a grab-bag column of funny titbits with suitable comment. Lightweight it might be, but it helped fill the gaps when ideas would not come. More than that, however, Ruark did actually go out and search for news. He was, like Winchell (to quote Hemingway, who had a very low opinion of newspaper columnists) “the most working of working newspapermen.” Ruark defined a columnist as “a reporter with a point of view.” This was an era in which a columnist, if he was a working newspaperman, dug up stories and broke them in his column. Ruark did that more than once during his early years as a columnist, and in a very high-profile way.
His first column, the “rock through the window” feature, had its desired effect: It caught the attention of Roy Howard, of the Scripps-Howard newspaper empire, and he hired Ruark as a feature writer, working out of head office in New York City. In January, 1946, Robert Ruark left Washington and moved to New York, checking into the Elysée Hotel on East 54th Street in Manhattan while he looked around for an apartment. Back in Washington, Virginia packed up the household effects and prepared to join him, which she did in June of that year. They found an apartment in Manhattan and settled in to become New Yorkers.
The Scripps-Howard chain, like most of its contemporaries, owned individual newspapers but also ran its own syndication service, employing both columnists and beat reporters. Its two major newspapers were the New York World-Telegram and Ruark’s alma mater, the Washington Daily News. When he went to New York, the managing editor of the Scripps-Howard News Service was Dick Thornburg, who was later replaced by Ruark’s old friend from Washington, Walker Stone. On hearing that Ruark had been hired, Thornburg was enthusiastic about having him aboard, but offered some advice as to how he should approach his column: Don’t be a clown, he said, and write what you see and hear, not what you think. Most of all, Ruark should have fun and let it show in the copy. It was a wide-ranging mandate in one way, but it required considerable self-discipline as well.
The newspaper business is built on self-discipline, because with few exceptions, editors care about two things, and two things only: Getting good copy, and getting it on time. Of the two, meeting deadlines is the more important. The daily newspaper business and the wire services are ruled by deadlines, and because their products — news stories — are transitory at best, what really counts more than literary quality is having copy that is accurate, that is the right length with the names spelled correctly, and that lands on the editor’s desk with minutes to spare. In the era before television, there were both morning and evening newspapers. Most major cities had one of each, and a metropolis like New York would have at least two of each. The morning papers competed with each other, and the evening papers competed with each other, and the two solitudes fed off one another, cannibalising stories for fresh copy and new leads.
On top of this, most papers would have more than one edition, and some had as many as six. The “bulldog edition” of a morning paper might appear on the streets as early as ten o’clock the night before, and the last edition hit at seven in the morning. The first edition of an afternoon paper would roll off the press at nine, and the last one late in the afternoon to catch people on their way home. In those halcyon days there were also the “Extras,” special editions printed on a moment’s notice, that were generally replates of the latest edition with a new headline shouting the news of events like the explosion of the Hindenburg or the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Competition — for readers, newsstand sales, and advertising — was as intense as it has ever been in any medium. Reporters were under constant pressure to deliver, and no one cared very much how they did it.
A columnist who had free rein, such as Robert Ruark, was allowed to work pretty much as he pleased, as long as he met his deadlines. By definition, a reporter is rarely in the office except when he is waiting for an assignment, writing his copy, or picking up his check. If you are not required for spot assignments on a moment’s notice, as a reporter is, most editors are quite happy to let you work wherever you are most productive. Early on, Ruark’s apartment became his office as well, a practice he continued for the rest of his life.
New York City, especially Manhattan, was the postwar Mecca for anyone seeking the big time, whether in newspapers, advertising, sports, or show business. Joe DiMaggio was playing for the New York Yankees, and the Brooklyn Dodgers were still ensconced at Ebbetts Field. It was a late-night town, and Damon Runyon was its wise-cracking chronicler. On Broadway, Rogers & Hammerstein competed with Nathan Detroit and Harry the Horse. For those who did not deal with them personally, even the gangsters had a certain panache and included such legendary names as Lucky Luciano and Bugsy Siegel. Black shirts with white ties, snapbrimmed hats, and loud-checked sports jackets were in. Flying to Havana was a popular weekend pastime, and there was always the chance of seeing Ernest Hemingway seated in a corner of the Floridita reading El Diario.
Robert Ruark stepped off the train in Grand Central Station in January of 1946 and instantly became a New Yorker. In later years, everyone from critics to biographers would describe Ruark as a boulevardier, a quaint term that evokes images of Maurice Chevalier and, in Ruark’s case, was not a compliment. New York is, like Paris and London, a society town. There are places to go and places to be seen. Its social life is a living, breathing entity, something you do not find in cities like Pittsburgh or Chicago. For Robert Ruark, a small-town boy from North Carolina who had spent his professional life in Washington, New York City was like a vast candy store — and Ruark was a small boy with an insatiable sweet tooth. The deprivations of his childhood, his years at university during the Depression, the tough climb up the newspaper ranks in Washington, eating the local diner’s blue-plate special every day for lunch, and his time cheating death in the Atlantic — all compounded to give him an insatiable appetite for everything New York was and what he aspired to be. The city’s pounding rhythms appealed to him. The same forces that shaped Guys & Dolls, that inspired Runyon and Frank Loesser and Leonard Bernstein, had their immediate effect on Robert Ruark, and he began to shape his life to the city around him.
One of the strongest characteristics of a good writer — of any good journalist, in fact — is the ability to blend into the scene around you like a chameleon. It allows you to see something from the inside, while remaining on the outside. In The Honey Badger, in a conversation with actress Barbara Bayne, Alec Barr compares writing with acting. We’re both hams, he tells her. “You adopt the protective coloration of a country or a situation or a group just like a chameleon changes his color. Yours is surface — Smithfield ham. I soak up my contact with situation, and store it away. That makes me a Serrano ham.” Used carefully, it is a very useful attribute, but carried to extremes it can be harmful. Robert Ruark employed this ability to great effect throughout his life, from the Navy to New York to Nairobi, but nowhere was it as destructive as in his efforts to become part of New York’s “saloon society.” His self-destructive tendencies, especially in alcohol consumption, were always there, but Manhattan provided the perfect environment to make them develop with horrifying ease.
According to Hugh Foster, Ruark’s daily schedule reads like something out of Damon Runyon. He would get up at noon, or later. His schedule was managed by his secretary, Leila Hadley, “a 19-year-old divorcee,” according to Foster, who “arrived for work around ten in the morning and worked sometimes until midnight. Though he seldom arose before noon, he would leave written instructions for her before retiring at night and there was always work to be done. She typed his daily column, answered the mail, and researched the topics that interested him. She also made his phone calls, booked his lunches, and kept track of his social schedule.”
Ruark’s actual working day does not look overly arduous — a few hours late each afternoon and an hour or so more after he got home in the wee hours, usually around four a.m. In fact, he was working very long hours: From the time he got up until he went to bed shortly before dawn, he was working — gathering material for his column, making contacts, jotting things down, following things up. That most of this work got done in a saloon does not mean it was not work. An inescapable truth of life in Manhattan is that it can be a great life, if you survive Manhattan. New York City is filled with hangers-on, people who claim the attention of working writers, novelists, playwrights, columnists, painters, and sculptors. There are so many, in fact, that it is a wonder any novels, plays, or columns ever get written, paintings painted, or sculptures sculpted. The distractions that make Manhattan such a fascinating place also make it exceedingly difficult to do anything that requires concentration, time, attention, and most of all, solitude.
From all appearances, Robert Ruark applied his chameleon-like qualities to fitting in all too well. He adopted a lifestyle that gave new meaning to the term “frenetic,” as if his liver had absorbed entirely too little punishment during his years at sea and he was determined to make up for lost time. His haunts were Toots Shor’s and Twenty-One for lunch; PJ. Clarkes, The Stork Club, El Morocco, and Eddie Condon’s late into the night. He moved through Greenwich Village and Harlem like a prowling alley cat, exploring the darker caves with all the relish of a country boy who steps off the bus with a fistful of banknotes and not much time to live. All accounts of Ruark’s life in Manhattan, from his own rueful but boastful recollections to Hugh Foster’s disapproving judgments, suggest a breathtaking pace, as if he simply could not wait for his own destruction.
***
What is sometimes forgotten, although it never was by Ruark himself, is that he was an immensely successful columnist and journalist throughout it all. His renown as a columnist does not rest on his turn of phrase describing New York taxicabs, but on two stories in particular that he broke as exclusives and pursued to the bitter end. The first involved Frank Sinatra and Lucky Luciano, and the second was about a prominent U.S. Army general in postwar Europe. As triumphs of investigative journalism, neither was quite Pulitzer Prize material, although Ruark was justifiably proud of them at the time.
Charles “Lucky” Luciano was a New York mobster of considerable notoriety in the 1940s, being a cohort of Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel (of Las Vegas Flamingo fame) and Meyer Lansky, as well as former luminaries like Dutch Schultz. At one time, Luciano’s main business was brothels, and he was finally convicted on a vice-trafficking charge, sent to prison, and, on his release, deported to Italy. From there he migrated to Havana, Cuba, which became his base for running his part of the New York mob and its expanding interests in places like Las Vegas. Frank Sinatra was then in the early years of his career, a slender young crooner from New Jersey who was the heart-throb of millions of teenage girls but not much else. Still, he was a popular public figure who was idolized, and who, at the time, made a great show of trying to direct young feet onto the straight and narrow path. Consorting with known mobsters was not, as Robert Ruark repeatedly pointed out, much of an example to the young.
When Ruark arrived in Havana in early 1947 as part of a trip around the country to visit friends and gather column material, he happened to see Sinatra in the company of Luciano and his bodyguards, as well as various other unidentified notables of the underworld. Ruark then unleashed a series of columns, condemning Luciano’s activities, applauding his deportation from the United States, and repeatedly asking what Sinatra was doing in his company. Shortly after these appeared, Luciano was deported from Cuba, which was reacting to a threat by the American government to halt shipments of pharmaceutical drugs if Luciano was allowed to stay. Ruark later claimed he “ran Lucky Luciano out of Cuba.” His columns probably did have some effect in marshalling public opinion on the matter and maybe even goading Washington into doing something, but Ruark was not solely responsible. Back in New York, his columns drew considerable criticism in the form of threats, both from Luciano’s fellow mobsters (as Ruark would have it) and Frank Sinatra’s fans.
Sinatra himself suffered little from the attack. He insisted he just happened to meet Luciano in a casino in Havana and could hardly be held responsible for the character of everyone who approached him in a bar. Even as early as the 1940s there were rumors about Sinatra’s mob connections, although Ruark was the first reporter to come up with some solid evidence and put it in the newspapers. For their part, the newspapers knew good copy when they saw it and splashed Ruark’s columns on Sinatra and Luciano all over the front page. News stories about Sinatra and the mafia have always had an air of self-righteousness about them that completely ignores the fact that, if you grow up of Italian heritage in an Italian neighborhood, chances are you are going to know a lot of different people, some good, some bad. Some childhood friends grow up to be famous mobsters, others become famous singers. This is not to justify “consorting with known mobsters,” as the phrase quaintly goes, but simply to point out that it is a fact of real life.
Robert Ruark, however, saw the impact he was having and homed in on Sinatra personally. In his last column on the affair, he called Sinatra “a menace to the mental and moral welfare of several million adolescents.” Obviously, the publicity did not hurt Sinatra one bit, and it most definitely helped the career of one R. Ruark, Esq. The impact on Luciano is not known. Ironically, by the early 1960s, Sinatra was a global superstar and Robert Ruark was a big fan of his music. Both had moved on to bigger and better things.
Ruark’s next splash as a muck-raking columnist involved a man who was not then, and never would be, a household name. And so, many years after the fact, reading Ruark’s lip-smacking description of how he brought down Lieutenant General John C.H. “Courthouse” Lee, the immediate reaction is, “Huh?” Here is what happened.
In the early summer of 1947, fresh from his triumph over Luciano and Sinatra, Ruark set out for Europe on a trip down memory lane: A series of visits to seaports he had known when he was in the Navy, on convoy duty to the Mediterranean. The itinerary included Gibraltar, cities on the North African coast, and, of course, Italy. At the time, there were still large standing armies in Europe, and the U.S. Army was a major presence in what had been the Mediterranean theatre of operations. The commander-in-chief of the United States Armed Forces in the Mediterranean was Lt. Gen. J.C.H. Lee. His headquarters were in the Italian city of Leghorn. There had been for some time bits and pieces of stories leaking out about abuses in the armed forces in Europe, which is not surprising when you consider the situation. The continent was only just beginning reconstruction, and there were occupying armies everywhere you looked, from the Russians in eastern Europe, to the British, Canadians, Australians, and Americans in Italy and Germany. The military establishments were still huge, because it takes time to dismantle a major military machine. As well, there were areas of the continent that were still under, if not martial law, then at least a form of benevolent military government.
During the war, Lt. Gen. Lee had been on General Eisenhower’s staff in Britain, in charge of supply. When the war ended and the big-name generals either retired, returned home, or were promoted to senior positions in the Pentagon, Lt. Gen. Lee was given a major command in Europe. He appears to have been the kind of rear-echelon warrior who strides forth to assume command when the fighting is done, his chest resplendent with ribbons denoting nothing except accidents of time and place. Such officers can be found in all armies at all times, but nowhere can their questionable talents bloom so fully as right after a war, when the fighting is done but the budgets are still huge, civil government is weak or nonexistent, and the senior generals become a law unto themselves. Even so, Lt. Gen. Lee seems to have set new standards of self-aggrandizement and abuse of authority.
Robert Ruark went to Italy, saw the HQ, talked with the men, and went home to write a series of exposés. What he saw in Italy had enraged him; as a former officer who had spent a good part of his military career in the thick of some of the fiercest fighting of the war, the posturing of peacetime martinets like Lee naturally infuriated him. Some of the accusations against Lee seem trifling now; his actions were irritating and silly, perhaps, but hardly court-martial material. For example, it was said that Lee had military policemen from a black unit specially outfitted and polished to a high sheen, then stationed throughout the town specifically to stop other traffic and salute him as he passed. If so, Lee was only following military tradition: A hundred years earlier, Lord Cardigan, one of the most infuriating martinets the British Army ever produced (and the man who led the Charge of the Light Brigade at Balaclava), did the same thing with men from his regiment, the 11th Light Dragoons, nick-named the “Cherry Pickers” because of their flamboyant red breeches. The smartest-looking soldiers were given a day’s leave and five shillings, and were stationed throughout London with orders to snap to and salute when Lord Cardigan passed. One difference, of course, was that their pocket money came from Cardigan’s personal account, not from the military budget.
Other charges against Lee were more serious, otherwise the whole thing would have been dismissed as civilian carping. Lee’s men, it was said, were deprived of such essentials as proper food and washing facilities, and the money spent instead so Lee and the other officers could live in luxury. The general had special staff cars, special aircraft at his disposal, and strode around in polished boots and spurs. If that were the case, he may have been modeling himself on Gen. George Patton, whose home-made uniforms made Lord Cardigan’s men look drab. The difference, of course, was that Patton fought the battles and won the wars, and so could be forgiven his eccentricities; Lt. Gen. Lee was merely an elevated poppinjay (to use a Cardiganesque term). One other difference was that Patton never neglected his men, who worshipped him, whereas Lee’s men hated him and ultimately gave Ruark the material to blow the whistle. Which Ruark did, with a vengeance.
The series of columns appeared in August, 1947. In them, Ruark exposed the excesses of the officers, the deprivations of the rank and file, and the idiosyncracies of Lee himself. The first column appeared on August 11; on August 14, Scripps-Howard reported that a congressional subcommittee was looking into Ruark’s charges, and after that events unfolded with astonishing alacrity. Lt. Gen. Lee issued the usual denials, the army began an investigation, and the general decided that honorable retirement was in order. Meanwhile, other newspapers and magazines had picked up the story and were in full cry. As Ruark later commented, “many of them were covering me.” He was, he said, the complete expert on the story, and even had aircraft laid on to allow other reporters to cover him. As a journalistic triumph it belonged more to the wild and woolly days of Ben Hecht and crusading newspapers than it did to the Watergate affair and the advent of investigative journalism a quartercentury later, but for Ruark personally it was the story that turned him from a columnist who wrote about things, into a man about whom things were written. He made Time and Newsweek, and later that year was described by Life as “the most talked about reporter in the U.S. today.” Ruark also became a syndicated columnist for United Features, a Scripps-Howard subsidiary, which allowed him to be published in any newspaper that subscribed to the syndicate.
In 1948, John Freeman, managing editor of United Features, nominated Robert Ruark for the Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting and submitted the Lee series to the Columbia School of Journalism for consideration, along with other examples of Ruark’s work. He did not win the Pulitzer, but that hardly mattered. As a national columnist, no more proof was needed that he had, indeed, arrived.
Fifteen years later, Robert Ruark had achieved sufficient status that True Magazine asked him to write an autobiographical piece, published as part of its continuing series titled “The Man I Know Best.” In it, Ruark reviewed his own life from start to finish and summed up his postwar journalism career this way: “You get started with a gimmick. Mine was a simple gimmick. I came out of the war looking for an easy way to make a living, and maybe some largish money as well...” He had, he pointed out, established himself as a magazine writer before the war, and during the latter stages of the conflict when he was on staff duty, or kicking his heels at home waiting for a new posting, he had written various pieces for Collier’s, the Saturday Evening Post, and Liberty. When the war ended, he had the contacts, the skills and, Lord knows, he had the material to write about, but doing magazine articles was “piecework.” There was too much time required to prepare and sell each article for the amount of money received at the far end (a lament that any modern-day magazine writer will echo). What Ruark wanted was a steady gig — a daily column that would bring in the money, each week and every week, regardless of where he was or what he was doing.
Having decided he would write for the twelve million returning servicemen, Ruark described his ideal writing as “not as lofty as Lippmann, not as gossipy as Winchell, not as bosom-conscious as Wilson, not as angry as Pegler. I would be a cosmic columnist...” It only needed, he said, a few things: “A fast kickoff, and then a succession of attention-getters, and somebody would be coming around with a fat contract for syndication.” The actual events followed the script to the letter. The first column on women’s clothes, or as Ruark put it, “S*E*X,” was the kickoff; Sinatra, Luciano and Lt. Gen. Lee provided the follow-up attention getters. Thus Ruark the writer, on Ruark the reporter:
These good stories only really happen when you’re young, with strong arches, and the digestive processes of a goat. In those days I could use gin as a substitute for slumber and still write fifteen columns in a brisk afternoon at the portable.
It was a wondrous time of lucky reporting.
Wondrous and lucky, to be sure, and, to his credit, Robert Ruark made the most of it.
***
It is amazing now, looking back at Ruark’s first five years in New York, to see the amount of work and travel he managed to pack in. This was in the days when trans-Atlantic air travel took sixteen hours instead of six, and when most journeying around the country was still done by train, Ruark, whatever his other faults (and in spite of written disclaimers to the contrary on his part) was never lazy, and his output in terms of words written and words printed was astounding. One time, he mentions, he wrote sixteen columns at a sitting, in a hotel room in Rome, working through the night to file a backlog of columns before he continued on to Africa.
Ruark had been a working columnist in New York for barely a year when he published his first book, a “spoof of a historical novel” titled Grenadine Etching, Her Life and Loves. The dust jacket copy describes it as a “hilarious and riotous lampoon,” and “a brilliant burlesque.” Ruark himself goes on to describe it thus:
It is a very adequate historical novel, suitable for Hollywood, book clubs, or for lighting the fire. You want sex? Sex we have. You desire action, intrigue, discussions of food and clothes and philosophy? We have them all.
It is, according to the dust jacket, also a book of “straight thinking and sharp satire, all very much in the tradition of Robert Ruark’s enormously popular syndicated column.” Alas, Grenadine Etching is also as eminently forgettable as most of Ruark’s columns: written for today, written for the fast buck, written to grab attention, to get a laugh, and then move on. In 1947, historical novels of the Samuel Shellabarger (Prince of Foxes) genre were the rage. They appeared in hardcover, shortly followed by paperbacks with lurid jackets, and were made into movies starring second-tier actors and actresses. Presumably, everyone involved made a pretty good living, however, and Robert Ruark never wrote anything in his life where he did not keep an eagle eye on the money involved. Whether Grenadine Etching made much money is another question. It did not sell well, and Ruark ruefully advised anyone “with a book in him” to leave it right where it was. But the book certainly added a little lustre to his name as a popular writer.
The action largely takes place in New Orleans and involves a cast of characters that are larger than any life should be. Ruark brings in historical characters in outrageous situations, and while much of it may have been pretty funny at the time, very little of it is funny (or even comprehensible) now. Without the daily headlines to give context to the injokes, none of it makes a great deal of sense. In an odd sort of a way, the book reminds one of Ernest Hemingway’s Torrents of Spring, a satire on Sherwood Anderson intended for the sole purpose of breaking his contract with his publisher, Boni & Liveright. Unless you have read Anderson’s novel Dark Laughter, which was the immediate object of the satire, the satire itself makes little sense. Today, Torrents of Spring is a Hemingway curiosity and nothing more; similarly, Grenadine Etching.
Reflecting on the book’s reception in his column, Ruark reported that “Life magazine did about seven pages on it. Time murdered it, but Newsweek loved it good. The papers kicked it around, for good or evil, and I went on the radio...” Ruark the columnist takes jabs at Ruark the novelist, and the column satirizes the novel — journalistic recycling with a vengeance, proving yet again that everything that happens in a writer’s life is bound to end up in print somewhere, eventually if not sooner. Ruark being Ruark, beneath the surface lather of humor lies the real truth of what it is like for a first-time author seeing his work bound between hard covers:
(You think) this is a real, live Book. At least it’s got words in it and my name on it. But it’s a false emotion. All you’ve got is a dead chicken around your neck, and you wear it for months. Even when it begins to stink you still wear it.
Then the reviews flow in, and the torture starts. What you thought was funny ain’t. You thought the book was too short. Some fugitive from a pawnshop thinks it was too long. You thought...
And thought, and thought: All the conflicting emotions of an author, weighing the good reviews against the bad, lying awake nights trying to figure which are the accurate reviews and which are merely jealousy or sycophancy — all of these come into play. Ruark became what he called a “victim of literary lead poisoning — a dire disease which comes from operating outside your regular racket.” He was a happy man once, he said, before he became a book author. “Now I am merely addicted to benzedrine, whisky, and rest homes. With quilted lounges.”
As it turned out, if literary lead poisoning was a disease, it was a malady without a cure. The one lasting value of Grenadine Etching was that it showed Robert Ruark he could, and should, write books. Certainly that was the feeling of his publisher, Doubleday & Company. The following year, Doubleday published an anthology of his newspaper columns, I Didn’t Know It Was Loaded, which, true to form, included his just-quoted column entitled “Authors and Ulcers.” According to Ruark, the books title has very little to do with its content. He used it because, he insisted, “someone gave it to me, gratis, and good free titles are hard to come by.” The correct title would have been: “Food, drink, dogs, sports, radio, women, children, cosmetics, fashion, war, peace, wives, husbands, architects, actors, columnists, jugglers, Chinamen, singers, artists, houses, apartments, birds, bees, flowers, and juke boxes.” But, he said, as a title, that was too long and not sensational enough, although it certainly summed up, not only the contents of the book, but Ruark’s daily column besides.
From the beginning, his wife, Virginia, was a favorite column topic, whether as subject matter or alleged instigator thereof. The image of the bumbling husband whose wife allows him to revel in his own supposed superiority while, in reality, she calls the shots, was a staple not only of columnists, but of comedians, radio shows and, later, television writers. Here is how Ruark established Virginia’s literary persona, Mama: “It is a damned lie that Mama writes my stuff. I write it. She just tells me what to write. I generally obey her, because she is smarter than I am. Also, she is bigger than I am.”
Although I Didn’t Know It Was Loaded mostly contains Ruark’s daily columns, some chapters were written expressly for the book, and others were columns expanded beyond their original length. They were then grouped and titled by subject matter, such as “This Is New York.”
A year later, Doubleday published a second volume along the same lines, One for the Road. Although it followed the same format as Loaded, for the first time Ruark allowed a hint of seriousness to creep in. The book was dedicated to Rocky Riley, the former sports editor of the Washington Daily News, the man to whom Ruark felt he owed a lot for the writer he had become. In the foreword he talked about Riley’s views on the craft of writing, and credited him with any discipline he might have as a writer. Riley, he added, would probably have hated the fact that the book was dedicated to him, since he “had a pretty low opinion of people who committed books. He ranked them with newspapermen who wore spats.” With that sentence alone, you see what a good influence Riley had been.
Robert Ruark had been in New York barely four years and had already published three books, as well as close to a thousand newspaper columns. In pursuit of material, he had travelled to Europe, North Africa, South and Central America, the Caribbean, and all over North America. Manhattan was now his home, and he and Virginia were living in a flat in Greenwich Village with their boxer dog, Schnorkel. Schnorkel had become something of a celebrity himself, having been adopted by a local mobster who appeared periodically and politely asked permission to take him for a walk. He also assured Ruark that he need not worry if he accidentally left his door unlocked; no one in this neighborhood, he said, would touch the Ruark household.
For its part, the Ruark household was not exactly a nest of domestic bliss. The footloose existence of an itinerant newspaperman is not endearing even to the most understanding of wives, and Virginia was far from being that. Once in New York, she quickly abandoned any thought of a formal career in interior decorating and settled in as the wife of a celebrity columnist. She was, however, no more sympathetic to Ruark’s absences as his fame increased than she had been when the Daily News had despatched him from pre-war Washington to cover a murder trial in the boondocks. It was not merely the absences, either: Ruark was a dedicated, almost flagrant, pursuer of other women. From the beginning Virginia had been convinced he was carrying on love affairs during every absence, and to a great extent she was right. Ruark’s pursuit of other women, and his need to prove his ability as a lover, make one wonder what, exactly, he was trying to prove.
One obvious need stemmed from the fact that the Ruarks were childless, and were destined to remain so. By 1949, they had been married for eleven years, yet they had no children and it was not for want of trying. The post-war baby boom was in full swing, with children being born left and right, yet Virginia never became pregnant. In 1947, Ruark returned from a prolonged swing through South America; exhausted, he went to see his doctor and underwent a lengthy series of tests. They proved beyond a doubt that he was sterile. This fact about their lives together became a significant part of The Honey Badger when it was written fifteen years later. Like Ruark, Alec Barr is sterile; like Virginia, Amelia Barr is frustrated at being deprived of having children. Reflecting on the situation in an interview many years later, Ruark opines that children really are the basis for a marriage, since there is no other sound reason for two people to live together permanently. Children become the cement that holds a couple together, and after the children are gone, the responsibility stays on. Whether this was somehow intended to justify his own behavior, which was by almost any marital standard irresponsible, is hard to say. In The Honey Badger, he describes the process of “baby building” with clinical brutality. Barely a dozen paragraphs into the book, Alec Barr is watching his wife as she dresses for dinner:
Alec Barr was not seeing the fine firm breasts and the sumptuous backside. He was not seeing the thin fair skin or the dark blue eyes. He was not seeing a tall, oppressively healthy woman in her thirties. He was seeing a pretty woman drawn by Dali or Artzybasheff.
Alec Barr was seeing a thermometer stuck into a sumptuous backside. He was seeing a chart which logged days and hours between menstrual periods, with red checkmarks against vital dates. He was seeing taxicabs panting at the curb, waiting for the fluid of life (produced by masturbation, trapped by contraceptive, caught after swift withdrawal in a cup) so that the recipient of wishful new life might rush speedily to the gynecologist, who would inject the fluid of life into the cervix, thus avoiding vaginal acids...
He was seeing himself, Alexander Barr, as a sterile stallion, bought at great price, checked and crosschecked, stuffed on wheat germ until tassels grew from his ears — Alec Barr, stallion at stud who could produce no get from the willing mare.
Hugh Foster says that the knowledge they could not have children “drove an additional wedge into the Ruark relationship. Virginia became increasingly maternal about Bob, called him ‘Baby’ and tried to envelop him in a blanket of expanded domesticity. He, on the other hand, increased his number of one night stands.” Foster even suggests that learning of his sterility made women more accessible to Ruark, since they knew there was no danger of pregnancy if they had an affair with him, but whether that was stated by one of the participants, or was merely conjecture on his part, he does not say.
In 1964, a year after his divorce from Virginia, Ruark stated flatly, “The marriage department is for the birds unless you want to have children out of it. In the process of manufacturing them and raising them up, you have done something between you and your wife which gives you a solidity and firmness of love. Sexual love gets to be like oatmeal after one becomes divorced from the moonlight and roses and let’s-fall-down-in-the-arboretum stage.” This sentiment is echoed in The Honey Badger, indirectly, when sex between a married couple is described as “The same old trade. It lacks mystery.” Perhaps Ruark was trying, with his serial seductions, to prove he was a man in spite of his sterility, or perhaps he was merely seeking to reprise the “moonlight and roses” stage of romance, by falling down in the arboretum with one new woman after another. Or, perhaps, it was simply the thrill of the chase. As with most things, the simplest explanation is the most likely. At any rate, it really does not matter what Ruark’s motivations were, because his extramarital sex life had very little overt effect on his marriage over the years. No monumental love affair ever arose to cause terminal strife or a messy divorce; he and Virginia stayed married almost to the end, during which time she played a significant (if behind the scenes) role in his work, as well as providing a stable base from which to operate. Jealous she might have been, but she was just as jealous in guarding her own life as the wife of a famous writer of ever-increasing wealth, and the way to keep that life was to stay married, regardless of the indiscretions of the writer himself.
***
Shortly after he moved to New York, Robert Ruark met Harold Matson, the literary agent who was to play an equally important role in his life, not only in promoting him as a writer but by becoming a close friend and confidante who helped Ruark over the rough spots and managed much of his private life. The Matson Agency had offices at 30 Rockefeller Plaza. Matson himself was a transplanted Californian who had emigrated to New York just before the war, and built an impressive stable of authors that included Herman Wouk, Evelyn Waugh, Richard Condon, and Arthur Koestler. Matson also has an alter ego in The Honey Badger, Marc Mantell. From all the evidence, it appears that Matson played a rather complicated role in the lives of the Ruarks, much more so than Mantell does with Alec and Amelia Barr. As painted in the novel, Amelia distrusts and resents Mantell from the beginning, while he plays father confessor, coach, and trainer to Barr throughout his literary career. In Matson’s case, he became a close friend of both Ruarks — husband and wife — and later in their marriage, according to Foster, was at times the only link between them as their marriage drifted inexorably onto the rocks. He also looked after the management of the Ruark finances, handling the money, covering overdrafts, providing “impeccable accounting facilities,” and dealing with the ever-increasing number of medical emergencies involving Ruark’s parents. Marc Mantell does exactly the same for Alec Barr.
The important role that an agent can play in an author’s life is difficult to explain to someone who is not a writer, but Ruark comes very close to it in The Honey Badger. Writing, especially writing a book, is a very lonely profession. It requires a single-mindedness of purpose. The writer is alone with his thoughts, his plots, his characters. Typically, writers are assailed by doubts about the quality of the work they are doing, which makes it even more difficult to sit down at the typewriter and immerse themselves in an exhausting labor that may, they become convinced, be a complete waste of time and effort. You have no one, really, to confide in, to bounce ideas off, or to discuss plot twists. A man’s wife might, in normal circumstances, provide such a sounding board, but it is very rare to find such an animal for the simple reason that the vast majority of literary wives are already jealous of the time their husbands spend writing, instead of paying attention to them. Writing is a full-time job, “full-time” being twenty-four hours a day when you are gestating something major like a book. You walk around with your head full of facts and figures and conjectures and possible leads and improbable twists, and “even when you are there, you’re not,” as Ruark put it.
In The Honey Badger, Alec Barr does not discuss his work with Amelia, and it becomes one of the failings of their marriage; in real life, however, Ruark did discuss his work with Virginia. According to Harry Selby, his close friend for more than a decade in whom he confided at length, Virginia was a very important part of Ruark’s work. Every new idea was tried out on her first, and if she did not approve, it was discarded. She read the drafts and criticized at length, and Ruark both depended on her and trusted her judgment. Such a relationship is, however, the exception. There is another kind of literary wife — the woman who tries to become involved in her husband’s work but either does not know good from bad, or is afraid to say anything except positive things. Alec Barr’s second wife, Penny, falls into that category: She reads everything he hands her and responds that it is “marvelous” even when Alec has already mentally marked it “rewrite.” For Alec, the one constant is the guidance of Marc Mantell; for Robert Ruark, it was that of Harold Matson.
An agent’s major purpose is to sell an author’s work, negotiate contracts, look after the administrative chores, field complaints, and generally keep people off the author’s back so that he can do what he does best, which is write. For this, the agent gets a percentage (usually ten per cent) of the money that comes in. Having an agent singing your praises and going to bat for you in the face of publishers and their legal lapdogs is a huge advantage for a writer, who usually has little interest in the arcane aspects of business and the endless legal clauses of publishing contracts. As he pointed out repeatedly over the next decade, Robert Ruark was very lucky to become associated early in his career with one of the best literary agents in New York.
Financially, Robert Ruark was doing very well indeed, and doing so in a very high profile way. His columns were printed in hundreds of daily newspapers, and his byline was frequently found in magazines like The Saturday Evening Post. With his column, his freelance magazine writing, and the books that he was publishing, by 1950 Ruark’s income had become substantial. In an era in which a salary of a hundred dollars a week was enough to support a middle-class family, even in New York City, Ruark was very well off. Hugh Foster quotes a profile of Ruark from Life Magazine in November, 1949, in which he said his 1948 income totalled more than $55,000 — $40,000 from his syndicated column and another $15,000 from his book publisher, Doubleday. A thousand dollars a week is decent money today; in 1949, it was wealth.
About this time another incident occurred that was of great significance to Ruark. His grandfather’s house in Southport came up for sale, and Ruark bought it, had it refurbished, and ensconced his parents in it at his own expense. They would live there most of their remaining lives. Over the next eight years, the house assumed considerable importance to Ruark’s work, when he began writing about his childhood in Field & Stream, and it even became one of the later “Old Man and the Boy” columns under the title “The House Comes Home.” Ruarks grandfather, Edward Hall Adkins, lived in the house with his wife, Miss Lottie. When he died of cancer in 1930, the house passed out of the family, along with the magnolia tree and its resident mockingbird. According to Ruark, it became the property of a real estate agent who was known throughout the town as a miser. Miser he may have been, but also according to Ruark, he refused to sell the house to anyone outside the Ruark family — all of whom were “flat busted” until little Bobby came along with his New York millions in the fall of 1949. That may be overstating what happened, although it is the impression Ruark gives in the articles he wrote about the house.
Ruark may even have entertained the idea of living there himself eventually, but it never came to pass for a variety of reasons. And if he expected that becoming a property owner in Southport would enhance his or his family’s social status in the town, he was very wrong. There was a long legacy of bitterness, in Ruark at least, toward the denizens of Wilmington and Southport, and that bitterness was eventually reciprocated when he wrote about them in two novels, Poor No More and The Honey Badger. The house is still there, and the Robert Ruark name has become famous in Southport, but it is only since his death and the revival of his reputation in the 1980s that this has been so. There is now a Robert Ruark Foundation and all kinds of references to him in and around the town, according to Eva Monley, who visited Southport while trying to turn The Old Man and the Boy into a movie. There are now pilgrims who go to see the places Ruark wrote about, and the residents are eager enough to take the money when it is offered. But this attitude is a far, far cry from the situation that existed from 1950 until Ruark’s death in 1965.
The status of the Ruark family in North Carolina was not enhanced by the activities of Ruark’s parents, Robert Sr. and Charlotte, who deteriorated quickly after the war, both financially and physically because of their dependence on drugs and alcohol. What had been a worrisome situation before the war became a full-blown, family-destroying problem afterwards. The family reputation suffered, partly due to the elder Ruarks themselves, but also from public perception of how well Robert Jr. was doing in New York, what he was (or was not) doing to help his parents, and what he should have been doing instead. This is not unusual for anyone who leaves a small town and makes good, but it is worse for anyone who has a high public profile, whether actor, singer, or syndicated columnist. Every article that appeared about Ruark, commenting on his success or his income, exacerbated the situation at home. On the one hand, the elder Ruarks, chronically broke and needing money to feed their respective habits, borrowed from anyone they could, with no apparent intention of repaying the money. Their creditors loaned them money believing they were good for it, given their rich and famous son. The other citizens of Wilmington and Southport watched this scenario unfold with the usually “tut-tutting” of neighbors everywhere, and Robert Ruark found himself opening one letter after another demanding he make good his parents’ debts.
From all appearances, Ruark wanted to have it both ways: He wanted to enjoy honor in his home town for his accomplishments, but at the same time have it realized that he was not made of money and was not about to shower endless dollar bills on his parents or their creditors. Since alcoholics and drug addicts are not noted for either their restraint or good sense, this problem could only get worse until the parents did the honorable thing and died. Which is exactly what happened. They became a millstone of ever-increasing weight around Ruark’s neck, and a source of endless irritation for the next ten years.
In 1950, Ruark managed to get everyone concerned to agree to a reasonable course of action, at least temporarily: He would repay his parents outstanding debts on condition that they commit themselves to a sanitarium for addiction treatment. Later that year his father was released, but his mother remained in the hospital, apparently incarcerated until such time as Robert Jr. authorized her discharge. This he refused to do, in spite of his father’s repeated entreaties and accusations that she was being kept a prisoner. At one point, while Robert Jr. was out of town, Virginia wrote to her father-in-law and laid down the law in no uncertain terms. He had no right, she said, either to question his son’s judgment in the matter or to quarrel with the doctor’s diagnosis. She ended the letter by telling her father-in-law his wife would be released when “Bobbie is damned good and ready” and that they would pay no more of the family debts, even if it meant jail for the parents. Needless to say, this was not the end of the matter, but it gives some idea of just how critical the situation had become even at this stage.
The “parent problem” was one more source of pressure on a man who really did not need any more. The demands of writing a daily column are bad enough without adding endless importuning letters from home, the mounting costs of living large in New York, and constant travel far and wide. Robert Ruark set a very high standard for himself, and it was obviously taking its toll. He was always a great one for keeping score, whether it was dollars of income or words of output. In the same Life profile, he was quoted as listing the number of words he was required to write in a given year. Each column was 650 words, and there were five columns a week, fifty weeks a year, for a total of 162,500 words. He threw in “another 100,000 expended in false starts” and did not even include book-writing and magazine articles.
To put this in perspective, a novel or serious nonfiction book might run 100,000 words. Ruark added that the popular conception that he could do a column in half an hour might sound good to the uninitiated, but it was like saying that a baby was born in half an hour in the delivery room, without taking into account the previous nine months. Actually, many of Ruark’s columns read as if they were written in thirty seconds, never mind thirty minutes — as if they were dictated into a tape recorder while chasing kangaroos over rough ground. To say they are unpolished is putting it mildly, and it was only Ruark’s innate ability with words that allowed him to pull it off. His newspaper columns are not the raw material of which immortality is made, literary or otherwise. At the same time, he was exactly right that the time required to physically write a column is but the barest tip of a very large iceberg. Figuring out what you want to write about, absorbing the information, then letting it gestate in your subconscious, is the most time-consuming aspect of writing. Trying to write something before you are really ready is a waste of time unless you are writing quick-and-dirty daily journalism, where perspective does not matter a great deal. Ruark may in fact have written sixteen columns at a sitting one long night in Rome, but the work that went into those sixteen columns was the product, probably, of weeks of observing, sifting, and subconscious consideration.
From the beginning, a major part of that material gathering was done by travelling, and Robert Ruark set a pace that is daunting even to consider. No part of North America escaped a Ruark visit, as well as the rest of the western hemisphere. As a syndicated columnist, he was writing for readers all over the country, not just in New York, and much as Manhattanites might think their island is the center of the universe, and every aspect of their lives endlessly fascinating to everyone else in the country, to his credit Robert Ruark realized such was not the case. This was probably because Ruark was not a New Yorker; at any rate, he used travel as a convenient way of coming up with new topics and new perspectives.
In 1948, he and Virginia boarded a tramp freighter (a lovely, romantic term, that) for another trip to North Africa. The following year, they headed in the opposite direction for an extended visit to Australia, with a stop-over in Hawaii on the way. On that trip they covered some 30,000 miles, according to Ruark, and he was only persuaded to leave Australia by a peremptory summons from United Features to get back to New York to do some work. This summons, naturally, became the subject of a column. As with most columnists, Ruark’s daily life was becoming the real subject about which he wrote regularly, and gradually his life was being built around its suitability for literary treatment. This is another of the (many) failings of professional writers: Everything that happens, from childbirth to father’s death, from a friend’s betrayal to a lover’s loss, becomes grist for the mill. There is no such thing as a quiet, private vacation with your wife, only the prospect of a business trip on which she accompanies you.
By 1950, Robert Ruark was financially successful enough to begin planning the really major business trip, thinly disguised as a vacation, that he had dreamed of all his life: A two-month safari in East Africa.