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."