Anything Goes_ A Biography of the Roaring Twenties - Lucy Moore [95]
Ross intended his magazine’s selling point to be avowedly directed at “a metropolitan audience.” With no disrespect intended, he said, he was not concerned with the tastes of the “old lady in Dubuque” whom editors of national magazines had to consider. New York residents hoping to decide what to do in the evening would find news of the latest supper clubs and cabarets; local incidents and personalities would be reported upon in a pastiche of “the small-town newspaper style” with which Ross had grown up.
The prospectus was compelling, but in person Ross was less prepossessing. At the Round Table he was a listener rather than a performer, better at parry than thrust in repartee. His wit never sparkled like Dorothy Parker’s or Alec Woollcott’s. Although several of his friends agreed to allow Ross to use their names on his editorial board, they thought his ambitions ridiculous. As George Kaufman observed, Ross was “completely miscast as an editor” and none of their friends thought he had a chance of getting his magazine into print. “How the hell could a man who looked like a resident of the Ozarks and talked like a saloon brawler set himself up as pilot of a sophisticated, elegant periodical?” asked the playwright Ben Hecht.
Ross’s first stroke of luck came in the person of Raoul Fleishmann. Fleishmann, who preferred the Round Table (and its regular poker game) to the bakeries in which his family had made their millions, agreed in 1924 to invest $25,000 in Ross’s idea, more than matching Ross and Grant’s own savings of $20,000. Another Round Table habitué, a Broadway press agent called John Toohey, provided Ross’s idea with a name—the New Yorker—and was amused to be given shares in the magazine as thanks. He did not anticipate that they would ever translate into anything tangible.
The first issue of the New Yorker came out on 17 February 1925. Despite art director Rea Irvin’s characteristic typesetting (still used today) and his cover illustration of a dandy examining a butterfly through a monocle, which straight away conveyed the sophisticated, self-reflective feel for which Ross was striving, the articles were labored and the editing jumbled. The wit was immature; jokes were printed with the punch-lines first; pieces were featured in more than one issue; typos abounded. “So I went to Florida for a rest,” read one supposedly humorous comment on the Florida housing boom in April 1925. “Of course I left all my money there in real estate, and had to return by boat.”
Frank Crowninshield, editor of Vanity Fair, went through the first edition in his office with one of his writers. He was all too aware that as several of his contributors were friends of Ross’s the New Yorker might become a rival. “Well, Margaret,” he said to his colleague as they finished, “I think we have nothing to fear.” Ross needed to learn, commented Niven Busch (who later became a New Yorker writer), “that there is no provincialism so blatant as that of the metropolitan who lacks urbanity.”
The New Yorker was “the outstanding flop of 1925.” Advertisers failed to materialize. Circulation dipped below 3,000. In early May, Ross, Fleishmann, Hawley Truax (Ross’s tenant and a director of the magazine) and the professional publisher John Hanrahan met at the Princeton Club and decided to cut their losses. The initial investment of $45,000 had gone and Fleishmann was owed