Anything Goes_ A Biography of the Roaring Twenties - Lucy Moore [94]
Years later James Thurber described Ross’s fuming over news that Thurber had been imitating him, to the delight of their friends. “‘I don’t know what the hell there is to imitate—go ahead and show me,’” Ross snarled at Thurber. “All the time his face was undergoing its familiar changes of expression and his fingers were flying. His flexible voice ran from a low register of growl to an upper register of what I can only call Western quacking. It was an instrument that could give special quality to such Rossisms as ‘Done and Done!’ and ‘You have me there!’ and ‘Get it on paper!’”
Janet Flanner, a friend of Grant who worked for Ross for over a decade, found him “a strange, fascinating character, sympathetic, lovable, often explosively funny, and a good talker who was the most blasphemous good talker on record.” His swearing was constant, unconscious and entirely chaste. Ross’s “goddam” and “Geezus” were simply interjections—they had nothing to do with any deity. Thurber said Ross was virtually unable “to talk without a continuous flow of profanity . . . it formed the skeleton of his speech, the very foundation of his manner and matter, and to cut it out would leave him unrecognizable to his intimates, or even to those who knew him casually.”
Ross’s sense of morality was as innocent as his swearing. Flanner remembered him discussing a couple having an affair: “I’m sure he’s s-l-e-e-p-i-n-g with her.” He was, she said, “the only man I’ve ever known who spelt out euphemisms in front of adults.”
Their post-war gang in Paris included Alec Woollcott, Heywood Broun, Ring Lardner and Franklin Pierce Adams. When they returned to New York the collective friendship flourished against a new backdrop—the smoky back room of the Algonquin Hotel.
Ross and Grant married in 1920 and three years later moved into two large converted tenements on West 47th Street in the virtual slum of Hell’s Kitchen. Their huge, elegant house, run by Chinese houseboys, was always open for an after-hours drink or a game of poker—complete with the added thrill of the possibility of being robbed while arriving or leaving. Guests included everyone from the outspoken nightclub hostess Tex Guinan to the boxer (and wannabe intellectual) Gene Tunney. They had two tenants, also Round Tablers, Hawley Truax and the temperamental Alec Woollcott whom Ross described receiving visitors “like a fat duchess holding out her dirty rings to be kissed.”
Woollcott was the frequent victim of his friends’ mockery. “He was not so much a mere participant in his own daily life as he was the Grand Marshal of a perpetual pageant, pompous in demeanor, riding a high horse, wearing the medals of his own peculiar punctilio and perfectionism,” wrote James Thurber. “His men friends loved to put banana peels in his portentous path to bring him down, high horse and all, while his women friends, whom he could slay in the subject of a sentence and eulogize in the predicate, loved to catch him before he could fall, or to pick up his outraged bulk.” Wolcott Gibbs, later writer and copy editor at the New Yorker, thought his friends tolerated Woollcott’s “insults because he also called them, or most of them, geniuses.”
In the early 1920s Ross edited The Home Sector, a magazine devoted to veterans’ issues, and, for a miserable few months in 1924, he worked at the humorous magazine Judge. From the time he had arrived back from France he had dreamt of creating and editing his own magazine, and he and Grant had been saving money to fund it since their marriage. “He carried a dummy of the magazine for two years, everywhere,” said his friend George Kaufman, “and I’m afraid he was rather a bore with it.”
Ross’s vision, as laid out in the mission statement he produced in the autumn of 1924, was a reflection