Story of the Week: Harold Ross

James Thurber (1894–1961)
From James Thurber: Writings & Drawings

Interesting Links

Online exhibition: “A Century of The New Yorker: Beginnings” (New York Public Library)

“Celebrating The New Yorker’s 100th . . . A Toast to Harold Ross” (Michael Maslin, Ink Spill)

Previous Story of the Week selections from the Ross Years
• “If Grant Had Been Drinking at Appomattox,” James Thurber
• “Joey on the Cake Line,” John O’Hara
• “Insert Flap 'A' and Throw Away,” S. J. Perelman
• “Children Are Bored on Sunday,” Jean Stafford

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The first and last of James Thurber’s six covers for The New Yorker: a drawing titled “New Tricks” for the February 29, 1936, issue and an untitled cartoon commemorating the Westminster Dog Show for the February 9, 1946, issue. (New Yorker archive)

By the time he was 35, Raoul Fleischmann, a scion of the Fleischmann Yeast family and director of its bakeries, had become sick of the bread business. In 1921, he renewed an acquaintance with Franklin P. Adams, whose nationally syndicated column, “The Conning Tower,” appeared in the New York Tribune, and joined him for occasional games of poker at the apartment of the Broadway playwright George Kaufman, where he met the likes of future novelist Henry Miller, New York Times drama critic Alexander Woollcott, songwriter Irving Berlin, and American Legion Weekly editor Harold Ross. “One day early in 1924,” Fleischmann recalled, “Ross asked me to lunch and suggested that we start a new comic paper. What I knew about publishing was zero.” Fleischmann turned down this first appeal, but Ross tried again a few months later and “this time the idea was that the magazine was to be built around New York, with humor as merely an adjunct of the publication.”

The new weekly was, of course, The New Yorker, now celebrating its 100th year. “I wasn’t at all impressed with Ross’s knowledge of publishing,” Fleischmann admitted. “I had no reason to doubt his skill as an editor, nor any reason to believe in it. I had merely got into something I couldn’t get out of gracefully.” Fleischmann’s only serious attempt to get out of it occurred early on, during the summer of 1925, when he became concerned about the magazine’s losses in money and circulation. He told Ross that they needed to “suspend publication” but soon changed his mind and, with $100,000 provided by his mother, the magazine stumbled forward without missing an issue.

Aside from Ross’s short gig at American Legion, the total of his management experience was his editorship of the Parisian edition of Stars and Stripes during World War I, when he was 26 years old. During the decade before the war, he crisscrossed the nation and worked as a reporter for no fewer than nine papers, from the San Francisco Call to the Atlanta Journal. His start came when he was thirteen or fourteen, working as a stringer for the Salt Lake City Tribune. “One of his assignments there was to interview the madam of a house of prostitution,” James Thurber related in an oft-shared anecdote. “Always self-conscious and usually uncomfortable in the presence of all but his closest women friends, the young reporter began by saying to the bad woman (he divided the other sex into good and bad), ‘How many fallen women do you have?’”

Adams and Woollcott both wrote for Stars and Stripes in France while Ross was editor, and the three became friends. While in Paris, Ross also met Jane Grant, a Times city desk reporter who was in Europe as a singer and dancer to entertain the troops and who would become, with Ross and Fleischmann, one of the three founders of The New Yorker. Shortly after returning to New York in 1919, Ross and Grant married. In June the three men joined with other writers for a party at the Algonquin Hotel, the success of which led to the establishment of the Round Table, a group that met every day for lunch—and that provided much of the talent to The New Yorker during its first decade.

By the end of the 1920s, after Fleischmann had sunk an estimated $700,000 in the business, the magazine was turning a profit, with a circulation of nearly 100,000—respectable but far from the powerhouse it would later become. As Thurber confided to a journalist writing a profile on Ross, “His mother was never persuaded that Harold’s position on The New Yorker ever amounted to much. . . . He showed her over the office one day but she made no comment. He asked her at dinner that night, ‘Well, what do you think of The New Yorker, Mama?’ She sighed and replied, ‘Harold, I hope that someday you become connected with The Saturday Evening Post.”’

Thurber sold his first piece to The New Yorker at the beginning of 1927, after a half year’s worth of rejections. He met staff writer E. B. White soon after that small success, and White introduced him to Ross, who hired him immediately as a “managing editor” responsible for the administrative aspects of the magazine—a position Thurber was uniquely unqualified for. At the time, the staff included Katharine Angell (who later married White) and Ralph Ingersoll. They were subsequently joined by Wolcott Gibbs, Brendan Gill, Gus Lobrano, and Robert Coates, all of whom had extraordinary careers as editors and authors.

“The New Yorker was the turning point, the crucial element, in Thurber’s life, just as he was a crucial element in the magazine’s development,” noted Robert Gottlieb in a 2003 reappraisal of Thurber. “But at the start no one knew quite what to do with him. Ross, as always, was in search of an administrative editor who could, through some arcane magic, make sense of the chaos that he thrived on, hiring a procession of young men ill-equipped to fill this slot—‘Hell, I hire anybody’—then quickly dumping them.” Rather than dump Thurber, Ross kept him on as an editor, writer, and, eventually, cartoonist.

Thirty years later, Thurber chronicled the chaos in “The Years with Ross,” a series of ten articles in The Atlantic Monthly; it was extensively revised and published in 1959 as a book. We present from the book the selection titled "The First Years," which covers The New Yorker’s founding and James Thurber’s hiring. In his biography of Thurber, Harrison Kinney acknowledges that the work is “considered mischievously inaccurate by some of his colleagues and other Ross admirers. . . . One of his responsibilities as a serious humorist, he believed, was to burnish the lackluster events of human existence to the sheen of good stories and apologize later for any wreckage.” Yet underlying the raillery and self-aggrandizement is a decidedly fond portrait of the editor who changed the lives of so many writers.

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Notes: In the selection below, Thurber refers to an episode described in the first chapter of The Years with Ross, a “turning point” in his relationship with his boss. While Thurber was visiting his family in Columbus, his Scottish terrier Jeannie escaped. It took extraordinary efforts and several days to find her, and he returned to New York two days late. When Ross dismissively chided his employee and implied that his concern for a dog was unmanly, Thurber lost his temper and suggested that he get somebody else to help him with the magazine. “Who would you suggest I call in?” Ross asked, and Thurber responded, “Alexander Woollcott”—which launched both men into fits of laughter. “An hour later we were having dinner together at Tony’s after a couple of drinks.”

Herman Mankiewicz was a screenwriter, movie producer, and film director, best known for the screenplay of Citizen Kane (1941). Thurber’s references to Dubuque evoke a famous (or, perhaps, infamous) line in the magazine’s original prospectus: “The New Yorker will be the magazine which is not edited for the old lady in Dubuque. It will not be concerned in what she is thinking about. This is not meant in disrespect, but The New Yorker is a magazine avowedly published for a metropolitan audience. . . .” Ben Turpin was a slapstick comedian, famous for his crossed eyes, who starred in many silent films produced and directed by Mack Sennett. The U.S. navy dirigible Shenandoah crashed during a thunderstorm in Ohio in 1925, resulting in the deaths of 14 crew members. New York Giants pitcher Christy Mathewson died of tuberculosis at the age of 45 in 1925. Hero and Leander is a Greek myth about two lovers who lived on the opposite sides of the Hellespont strait. The Synder trial refers to the conviction and execution of Ruth Snyder and her lover Henry Todd Gray for the 1927 murder of Snyder’s husband.

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I had never heard of the New Yorker when I sailed from New York on the Leviathan in May, 1925, for a year in France. . . . If you don't see the full selection below, click here (PDF) or click here (Google Docs) to read it—free!

This selection is used by permission.
To photocopy and distribute this selection for classroom use, please contact the Copyright Clearance Center.

John O’Hara (1905–1970)
From John O’Hara: Four Novels of the 1930s

Interesting Links

“Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered: John O’Hara’s Pal Joey remains an exemplar of the epistolary novella” (Thomas Mallon, The Paris Review)

“The Tortured History of John O’Hara’s Pal Joey” (Levi Asher, Literary Kicks)

Previous Story of the Week selections
• “Christmas Poem,” John O’Hara
• “The Lily-White Boys,” William Maxwell

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John O'Hara: Four Novels of the 1930s
Appointment in Samarra | Butterfield 8 | Hope of Heaven | Pal Joey

Cover artwork from the souvenir program for the 1952 Broadway revival of Pal Joey.

“That was the only good thing I ever got out of booze, but mind you, Wilson, I wasn’t on a bender at the time I wrote it. I was perfectly sober!”

When the novelist John O’Hara was interviewed by gossip columnist Earl Wilson in 1948, he revealed how his most famous character, Pal Joey, was born during a post-alcoholic haze in a Manhattan hotel. A decade earlier O’Hara and his wife had just returned from a summer in England and were staying with her parents on the Upper East Side. His third novel (Hope of Heaven) was a commercial flop, the Hollywood novel he had hoped to write remained unwritten, and he was, as he admitted to Wilson, “broke.” So he told his wife he was heading back to Philadelphia to pound out his next story for The New Yorker at the Ben Franklin Hotel, where he occasionally stayed to work on his writing.

He never made it. Instead he met up nearby with some companions and “got stiff.” The next day he checked into The Pierre, a hotel thirty-three blocks south of his in-laws’ apartment, and spent another two days drinking. He woke up early Saturday morning and asked a hotel attendant what day and time it was.

At that point remorse set in. I asked, ‘What kind of god damn heel am I? I must be worse ’n anybody in the world.’ Then I figured, ‘No, there must be somebody worse than me — but who?’ Al Capone, maybe. Then I got it — maybe some night club masters of ceremonies I know.

By noon O’Hara had finished a draft of the first Pal Joey story and was on his way back home, where he confessed his misdeeds to his wife yet had the story to show for them.

“Pal Joey” was immediately accepted by The New Yorker and appeared in its October 22, 1938, issue. Editor-in-chief Harold Ross was particularly enthusiastic about the story and requested additional pieces featuring the same character. By the time the first story had appeared in the magazine, O’Hara was in California working as a screenwriter for RKO Studios (and later for Twentieth-Century Fox). When New Yorker fiction editor William Maxwell rejected one of the follow-up episodes, O’Hara reminded him that Ross had promised “when both of us were sober, that if I wrote him ten Pal Joey pieces I could say the hell with Hollywood.” All told, twelve would appear in the magazine, and fourteen stories—all written as letters from Joey to the emcee’s far more successful “friend” and rival Ted—would be collected as a book in October 1940.

“I don’t know whether you happened to see any of a series of pieces I’ve been doing for The New Yorker in the past year or so,” O’Hara wrote in early 1940 to Broadway composer Richard Rodgers. “I got the idea that the pieces, or at least the character and the life in general could be made into a book show.” Rodgers and his partner, lyricist Lorenz Hart, liked the concept and agreed to score the musical, for which O’Hara would write the book. George Abbott, who was hired as director, remembered the original script as “a disorganized set of scenes without a good story line,” so the show was reworked before and during rehearsals and O’Hara approved the changes whenever he happened to show up at the theatre. Gene Kelly, who had just starred in The Time of Your Life, took on the role of Joey, while Vivienne Segal costarred as Vera, a character newly created by O’Hara for the show. The musical opened on Christmas Day 1940 and was a hit, running for 374 performances on Broadway despite (or, perhaps, because of) its risqué subject matter. Brook Atkinson, The New York Times critic, panned the show, finding much of the content inappropriate for a musical comedy: “If it is possible to make an entertaining musical out of an odious story, Pal Joey is it. . . . Although it is expertly done, can you draw sweet water from a foul well?”

In the late 1940s Doris Day had a Top Ten hit with the show’s most famous number, “Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered.” The song’s popularity led to the first studio recording of the show, which in turn led to a 1952 stage revival starring Harold Lang and Segal, reprising her role as Vera. O’Hara made a few changes to the second act and Rodgers revised several lyrics. (Hart had died in 1943.) The show proved even a bigger hit, enjoying a fifteen-month run of 540 performances—the longest of any revival of a musical in Broadway history to that date. This time Atkinson sang a different tune, praising “the tight organization of the production, the terseness of the writing, the liveliness and versatility of the score, and the easy perfection of the lyrics.” Recalling that he had not been “enchanted” the first time he saw the show, Atkinson now acknowledged that it “broke the old formula and brought the musical stage to maturity. . . . Pal Joey was a pioneer in the moving back of musical frontiers, for it tells an integrated story with a knowing point of view.”

“Joey’s is an American voice from the second act of the American century,” writes the novelist Thomas Mallon, “a time when the country’s wisecracks and slang, thanks to movies and even to books, wrapped themselves around the thoughts and vocal cords of half the world.” We present from The New Yorker’s 1939 Christmas issue one of John O’Hara’s original Pal Joey stories. In a mere four pages, it showcases the louche, tough-guy patter that would make its creator a rich man.

Note: Onawentsia Club, mentioned on the last page, is a country club in Lake Forest, Illinois.

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FRIEND TED:
Well Xmas is coming and the geese are getting fat, please put a penny in the blind man’s hat as the old saying use to go. . . . If you don't see the full selection below, click here (PDF) or click here (Google Docs) to read it—free!

This selection is used by permission.
To photocopy and distribute this selection for classroom use, please contact the Copyright Clearance Center.

Story of the Week

Sunday, April 20, 2025

The First Years

Saturday, December 15, 2018

Joey on the Cake Line