End of a New Yorker

Harold Ross once defiantly accepted the description of his New Yorker magazine as an "adult comic book." This was a less-than-just verdict on the magazine that caused or charted wide changes in American humor, fiction and reporting, but it was quite in keeping with the arrogant character of Editor Ross to accept it.

In 26 years he made The New Yorker a synonym for urbanity, but he himself remained a bawling, rough-cut outlander from Aspen, Colo. A catty old friend, Alexander Woollcott, once described him as looking like "a dishonest Abe Lincoln." Rumpled, wild-haired and irascible, Ross talked in an ear-splitting voice, a combination of rasp and quack. He often expressed himself in skid-row profanity, or by mere grunts or gap-toothed grins. He had the energy of a bull, and a bull-like charm. Though he often sounded as crass as a cymbal, he had an amazing sensitivity for words, a pouncing eye for the phony, a rigorous taste. He was a great editor.

Not for an Old Lady. Had it not been for World War I, Harold Wallace Ross might have frittered away his career as a roistering tramp newspaperman. He left home at 18, bummed his way for seven years from paper to paper until he enlisted in the Army during World War I. He became editor of the Army's Stars & Stripes, on a staff that included Woollcott, Franklin P. Adams and Grantland Rice. After the war, they forgathered in New York, where their friendship continued at poker parties of the Thanatopsis Literary & Inside Straight Club and at the famed Round Table of wits in the Algonquin

Hotel. Ross edited two veterans' magazines and the fast failing Judge; then he decided to start his own. He persuaded a fellow poker player who had a lot of money, Raoul Fleischmann, to back him. His idea was a humorous magazine that would not be "for the old lady in Dubuque."

Begun in 1925, The New Yorker went shakily on for three years. Fleischmann poured in $550,000. Ross furiously hired & fired, cajoled and cursed, trying to get the kind of magazine he wanted. In the first year and a half alone, about 100 staffers were fired, many with a muttered apology from Ross: "We need geniuses here." Gradually Ross found what he needed: James Thurber, E. B. White, Ogden Nash, John O'Hara, S. J. Perelman, Peter Arno, Helen Hokinson, 0. Soglow.

In the chaotic early days, pay was low. Ross himself (who eventually got $50,000 a year) had his salary computed every month, based on earnings. Once, when Ross was explaining things to a new managing editor, he said, "I am surrounded by idiots and children." At that point, a copy boy burst in, shouting: "Mr. Thurber is standing on a ledge outside the window and threatening to commit suicide." (Actually, Thurber was merely sitting on the ledge to get a whiff of fresh air.) Ross turned to the editor. "See?" he said.

As the magazine grew and became hugely successful, such anecdotes of life in The New Yorker office became the talk of the town. By insiders, its success was attributed not only to the ornery talents of its contributors but also to Ross's "thousands and thousands of tiny prejudices."

The Fact Man. His fiercest prejudice was against writing that was not crystal clear. In its Profiles, Reporter at Large, Talk of the Town, etc., Ross insisted on knowing everything about the subject and the people, right down to their blood pressure. On the margins of manuscripts he scrawled scores of choleric questions and comments: "Who he," "What's that," "Don't think," "File and Forget." He never rewrote a piece himself, but his marginal scrawls often ran almost as long as the article. Another prejudice--against the traditional two-line* "he & she" cartoon--led to the one-line caption, sharpened by a dozen rewrites. Ross was as captious about cartoons as about stories. Looking at a cartoon, he would growl: "Who's talking?" A character had to have his mouth wide open so the reader would know instantly who was talking. Though his profanity was as natural and unconscious as his breathing, he was puritanical about the printed word. He even barred such words as "armpit" and "pratfall."

On fiction, Ross was never as sure of his touch--or The New Yorker's--as he was on fact. He ceaselessly searched for new authors, helped them develop new ways of telling stories, liked them plotless. But he was not always sure what the often neurotic, atmospheric stories were about. Once he grumbled: "I'm never going to buy another story I don't understand."

Clearing the Books. Ross drove himself hard. He developed ulcers; once he had a nervous breakdown. Later, he casually referred to this as "the time I went crazy." He drove his staff just as hard, but never nagged or chivied his writers or artists. He was alternately quiet and garrulous, biting and sentimental. Sometimes he encouraged struggling writers and cartoonists by buying material he knew he could not use. To regular contributors, he gave sizable monthly advances, often erasing their debts at Christmas.

When Drama Critic Wolcott Gibbs wrote Season in the Sun, which kidded Ross unmercifully, he went to see the play and liked it, although puzzled by it. "Everybody says it's just like me," he complained, "but I don't do that, do I?"

When success came to The New Yorker --its present circulation is 350,000, including 75 subscribers in Dubuque--Ross grew periodically bored, and the magazine occasionally suffered from it. Last April, he began to turn some of his work over to his editors, and stopped coming regularly to the office. But this time it was not boredom but something else. Last week, at 59, Editor Ross died in a Boston hospital after an operation for cancer.

Will The New Yorker keep its tone and quality without him? The staff thought it would; their indoctrination has been thorough. For the time being, the magazine will be run by the board of editors who took over when Ross became ill. The board includes William Shawn, 44, managing editor for nonfiction; Gus Lobrano, 49, managing editor for fiction, Art Editor James Geraghty, Executive Editor Leo Hofeller, Mrs. E. B. White, a fiction editor, and Hawley Truax, vice president. Eventually, a chief editor, probably Shawn, will be named.

But no one can really take Ross's place. His snarling, unappeasable appetite for excellence will be missed by everybody, including the old lady in Dubuque.

* Ross reprinted one arsy-versy, week after week.

Pop: A man who thinks he can make it in par.

Johnny: What is an optimist, pop?

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