New Yorker’s Harold Ross Truly A Character For The Ages

“Genius In Disguise: Harold Ross Of The New Yorker” By Thomas Kunkel (Random House, 497 pages, $25)

Great magazines succeed not only in capturing the spirit of their time but in transporting readers into a shiny and immediate world bound between the covers.

In 1925, Harold Ross, a high school dropout from the then-frontier town of Aspen, Colo., created the most sophisticated urban journal of the 20th century. For the quarter century that Ross guided the magazine, and for many years after, the New Yorker created the journalism equivalent of Astaire dancing.

Most weeks, not another publication could touch it.

In an era as soaked with characters as bootleg gin, Ross was a giant, an eccentric for the ages. He forbade staffers from speaking to him in elevators. Why? Because he worried that it would identify him to armies of hopeful artists and scriveners.

His pre-punk hair screamed toward the heavens while his language mopped the decks of hell. “As ugly as he is brilliant,” said the writer Janet Flanner. He played the rube - “Is Moby Dick the whale or the man?” he once queried a writer - while palling around with Noel Coward and Ginger Rogers.

Ross, as everyone called him, proved irresistible fodder to a good many of his New Yorker charges. “The Years With Ross” is James Thurber’s charming valentine. Brendan Gill delivered the more resistible “Here at the New Yorker.” E.J. Kahn, Jr.’s entry in the Ross canon, “About the New Yorker and Me,” is really vice versa.

Thomas Kunkel, a veteran newspaperman, never knew Ross and never worked for the magazine (until an excerpt of “Genius in Disguise” was published in last month’s 70thanniversary issue).

But of all the New Yorker volumes, this is the one to read - though no one should ever pass up Thurber.

It helped that Ross, like so many of his staffers, were New Yorkers by choice, lending the newcomer’s curiosity about Manhattan to the magazine. (Ross’ successor, the equally legendary William Shawn, was a Chicagoan. And the current editor, Tina Brown, is British. Among the magazine’s four reigning editors, only Robert Gottleib was a native.)

“Ross’ New Yorker represented an almost magical confluence of an idea, a time and a place, arriving just after New York emerged as a world city, yet before the pervasive presence of television: that brief window when an erudite little ‘comic paper’ could be a major cultural force in a way that is unthinkable now,” Kunkel writes.