Word: yorkerism
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Cinemale Marlon Brando, in a New Yorker profile by wispy-banged Author Truman Capote, recalled the late Cinemactor James Dean: "He had an idée fixe about me. Whatever I did he did. He was always trying to get close to me. He used to call up. I'd listen to him talking to the answering service, asking for me, leaving messages. But I never spoke up. I never called him back . . . When I finally met Dean, it was at a party. Where he was throwing himself around, acting the madman ... I took him aside and asked...
...February 1927, Reporter James Thurber quit his $40-a-week job on the New York Evening Post to start work as a $100-a-week deskman on Harold Wallace Ross's The New Yorker. Thurber was then 32; The New Yorker had just turned two; and Editor Ross, at 34, was already the whip-wielding crank who was to inspire and bedevil staffers until his death in 1951. In the November Atlantic Humorist Thurber started a serialized memoir of Ross by recalling their early days together...
Ross distrusted most of those who wrote for The New Yorker, says Thurber. "He nursed an editorial phobia about what he called the functional: 'bathroom and bedroom stuff.' Years later he deleted from a Janet Planner 'London Letter' a forthright explanation of the nonliquid diet imposed upon the royal family and dignitaries during the coronation of George VI. 'So-and-so can't write a story without a man in it carrying a woman to bed,' he wailed. And again, 'I'll never print another [John] O'Hara story...
...really only an accident of Ross's naiveté that allowed one of the most famous of New Yorker cartoons to get into the magazine. Reports Thurber: "He was depressed for weeks after the appearance of a full-page Arno depicting a man and a girl on a road in the moonlight, the man carrying the back seat of an automobile. [Caption: 'We want to report a stolen car.'] 'Why didn't somebody tell me what it meant?' he asked...
While Ross persisted in expecting precise, orderly, machinelike efficiency from Thurber, Thurber persisted in trying to write New Yorker prose. One day Ross stormed in on him. "You've been writing," he exploded in accusation, "I don't know how in hell you found time ... I admit I didn't want you to." Thereupon he wrote Thurber out of the imagined society of efficient journalists and treated him as a sort of basket case. "I was a completely different man," writes Thurber ". . . one of the trio about whom he fretted and fussed continually-the others were Andy...