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To meet the deadline for the book, plus a dozen articles for magazines (Look, Reader's Digest) that had helped to bankroll the trip, he was unable to spare six months of his two-year writing time for the two operations that eventually restored almost complete vision through bottle-thick spectacles. Against dwindling sight and funds, Gunther, a hunt-and-peck typist, had his typewriter equipped with outsize keys, used ever stronger eyedrops that enabled him to read and write only for two hours at a stretch. Says Jane: "The house was littered with magnifying glasses."
Name-Wonder. Before going off to the hospital, Gunther gallantly tossed a farewell shindig, insisted on greeting each guest without help, though he almost had to rub noses before he could recognize them. It was a typical gesture. Anything but the traditionally tough, cynical newsman, Gunther fairly quivers with delight at meeting people, deeply craves their approval. Says one intimate: "He has no acquaintances—only best friends."
Gunther's best friends, who tend to be conspicuously witty or pretty, run a stellar range from Addams, Charles, to Zorina, Vera. To Book-of-the-Month Club Judge John Mason Brown, "John's foible isn't name-dropping, it's name-wonder. He's never got over the mica that's in names. He has a child's sense of giving a party, a fairyland belief in celebrities." One fairyland fable who slips frequently in and out of the house on East 62nd Street is Greta Garbo, the "G.G." to whom John Gunther dedicated Inside Russia Today, along with "G. and V." (Socialite George Schlee and his wife, onetime Fashion Designer Valentina, who introduced Garbo to the Gunthers).
As a host, Gunther likes to invite at least 75 people and mix such disparate guests as Foreign Affairs Editor Hamilton Fish Armstrong and Audrey Hepburn, Marlene Dietrich and the Duchess of Windsor. He dotes on introducing the famed to the famed in glowing detail, as if they inhabited far-distant planets. One occasion when Gunther skipped such identification was in presenting Paul Auriol to the Duke of Windsor, who murmured: "Don't I know something about your father?" The glacial reply: "Possibly. He's President of France." (The duke was repaid at the same party when the Adman-Philanthropist Albert Lasker lengthily congratulated him in the innocent belief that he was the real-life hero of the newly opened Broadway musical, The King and /.)
"Myself — with Fingers Crossed." What does Gunther believe in? "I believe," says he, "in myself—with fingers crossed." Puffing thoughtfully on his ever-present Marlboro, Gunther adds: "I have no deep, institutionalized religious beliefs. I believe in the fact." On looking inside Gunther—despite his deep faith in his prowess as a journalist—Gunther finds: "I'm terribly limited. I completely lack intensity of soul. I'm not original. I'm really only a competent observer who works terribly hard at doing a job well."