Word: rossing
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...think it's irrelevant," Ross replies to the question people are asking: Why publish a memoir about your 40-year relationship with a married man while his wife, whom you say you are fond of, is still alive? "There were no secrets, really, that were divulged," Ross says firmly. "We never went underground, and he [Shawn] talked with her [Cecille] about what was happening with him and with me immediately...
...Lillian Ross, who has written for the New Yorker since 1945 and should be in The Guinness Book of World Records for conducting the longest office romance, was in town last week, seated at her regular table in her favorite Manhattan restaurant, La Caravelle, where she wore a dark green Armani pantsuit, drank San Pellegrino water and filled us in on reaction to her new book, Here but Not Here: My Life with William Shawn and the New Yorker (Random House; 240 pages; $25), which has had most of the New York literary world buzzing for the past several weeks...
Still trim and vigorous in what she allows only as her seventh decade, Ross quickly took charge of the discussion about her years working and living with William Shawn, the New Yorker's editor from 1952 until 1987. Shawn died in 1992 at the age of 85, leaving sons Allen, a composer married to former New Yorker writer Jamaica Kincaid, and Wallace, an actor and playwright. Shawn's wife of 64 years, Cecille...
What was happening was that the editor and the writer had set up house in a building 11 blocks from the apartment where Shawn's wife and boys lived. Cecille would not give her husband a divorce, Ross says, and he would not unilaterally leave the marriage. So Shawn shuttled between residences, eating nearly all his meals with Ross, checking in at home, rejoining Ross in time to watch the late news together, and then returning home to sleep next to a private phone on which he and Ross conversed...
...arrangement seems daring even by today's forgiving standards. Perhaps more distressing is that Ross explodes Shawn's beatific public reputation, one protected by many who worked with him. "Mr. Shawn," as he was addressed at the New Yorker, was beloved by his staff. His decency, skill, editorial patience and generosity are legendary. He was shy, courtly and neurotically self-effacing. Ross, however, reveals a side of the man that resembles a Walter Mitty fantasy: a denizen of jazz joints, racetracks and classy restaurants. He was also an ardent mate. "After 40 years, our love-making had the same passion...