The Receptionist (12 page)

My “dark night” ushered in a long weekend of self-examination and a visit, the following Sunday, to the Fifty-Fourth and Lexington Lutheran church, the one handiest to the E train (in at Fourteenth Street, out at Lex and Fifty-
Th
ird).
Th
is in turn resulted in a first stirring of renewed attention to my baptismal/confirmation vows and a rededication to the tenets of the Nicene Creed. As in the case of C. S. Lewis, the promptings of my soul were not Pauline—not accompanied by lightning bolts on the road to Damascus; rather, as Lewis puts it, the change from the darkness of unbelief into “the light of reality” was more like the transition from the unreal world of dreams to the state when, “after a long sleep, still lying motionless in bed,” I became aware that I was now awake.
Th
is did not mean I knew who, exactly, that “I” was, but I had a grip on my actions and a renewed sense of responsibility for them. Whoever this person I walked around in was, I was not, after that annus horribilis of 1959–60, any longer prone to destroy her.

B
ACK
ON
R
ECEPTION

I
N 1959
TH
E NEW
Yorker
obtained premises formerly leased by Exide Battery and turned the area into offices for its growing editorial staff. I returned to my job on the now expanded eighteenth floor as to a haven. Life in the fast lane, I decided, was not for me. A girl could get hurt out there.

One day, shortly after the job switch was made, Joe Anthony (Sheila McGrath’s predecessor as office manager) brought around a bright pink card that would allow my employer to deduct one dollar a week from my salary toward a retirement fund for me.

“Take my advice,” he said kindly. “You need every penny of your salary now, and you are never in this world going to stay here long enough to need a pension.”
Th
anks, Joe. Yet really, who could have predicted the cost of that unsigned card?

My stint in the art department did produce one positive result. While I worked there, I was treated by others on the staff as an equal, and the pattern of acceptance was never quite reversed by my return to the rank of receptionist.
Th
is often redounded to my benefit. Perks came my way in the form of invitations to share the opera seats and intermissions in the green room with the music critic, good tables and entrées to discos with the nightclub critic, tickets to art openings and movie screenings, and caviar and perfume from the fashion department goody bags at Christmastime, not to mention the favorable aura that seemed to settle like a mantle over me the moment my turn came in social introductions to say where I worked.

Frank Modell, with whom Evan and I had occasionally double-dated when together, continued to treat me as a friend. Realizing, perhaps, that I had been given a raw deal by Evan, Frank was generous and sweet as well as very funny on the subject. He and I established ourselves in the more staid offices of the nineteenth floor (Mr. Shawn’s floor) as “rowdies” when, in December, at the instigation of Brendan Gill, the two of us began organizing a Christmas party. It was to take place in the hall outside the mail room, using the counter in front of the newspaper files as a bar. Jack Kahn’s schoolboy sons, on a vacation visit to their pa, volunteered to help decorate with the crepe paper bells and strings of holly-entwined lights I’d provided from a lunch-hour trip to the five-and-dime.

Frank drew wonderful cartoon invites for the three editorial-floor bulletin boards. A buxom female form stood opposite a male form in a suit, both of them cut off above the neck, toasting each other with glasses held at clinking level—the hour and place and date of the festivities inked in below. It was the posting of the one on nineteen that got us into trouble with Mr. Shawn. Lou Forster, his aide-de-camp, came down the back stairs to deliver the kibosh.

“Miss Groth?” he queried, and when I copped to being she, he informed me that Mr. Shawn had “decided that we just can’t have this kind of office party here at
Th
e New Yorker.
It would put the publication in too embarrassing a position if we were to be discovered throwing the very sort of office Christmas party the magazine has always satirized in its cartoons.”

I couldn’t believe my ears, but soon Brendan came shuffling down the staircase to weigh in with a sardonic wag of his head: “It’s true, I’m afraid.
Th
e whole thing is off.”

Jack’s sons were devastated. I felt pretty low, too, as I took down the last of the streamers and threw them in the trash. A few rebellious souls stood around at about five o’clock, drinking a little smuggled-in whiskey out of paper cups, but the point had been made and carried. I still have one of Frank’s posters, though.

At first I feared that the more lasting result of the episode was to be the impression Mr. Shawn retained of me as a wild cannon on eighteen. But as the months and years went by, and word floated up to him (as he always found ways for it to do), he began to manifest more confidence in my discretion. When one of the staff writers’ wives suspected her husband of cheating on her and he hadn’t come home to dinner by 10:30 p.m., she called Mr. Shawn, and Mr. Shawn called me. I did what I could to suggest that the wife in question was overreacting. He called me again when Frank Modell was not answering his phone on the morning of a day when he was expected to attend the art meeting. I was elected to go down to his apartment, where I found a tousled Frank, sheepishly discovering that his receiver had been knocked off the hook and he had failed to notice. He was just sleeping in.

A more attractive aspect of my job came in the form of invitations to book parties. I think it may have been in October 1962, when St. Clair McKelway’s
Th
e Edinburgh Caper
was being published in book form, that “Mac,” as his friends called him, threw a big cocktail party in his suite at the Hotel Adams and invited me.

Th
e Hotel Adams is no more, but in the sixties it was still a mostly residential hotel on the Upper East Side, a slightly less expensive alternative to the Stanhope. Even so, it was not cheap, and I wondered if this grandly catered affair accounted for the spectacular tab he ran up on his drawing account at the magazine. I knew of the McKelway penchant to live beyond his means when in the manic phase of his bipolar disorder. But since he wrote
Th
e Edinburgh Caper
under the delusion that he was part of an international conspiracy, I suppose it came under the heading of professional expenses.

Mac was a handsome, well-dressed chap who sported
Scottish forebears and seemed entirely plausible in the
role of inactive military officer, which he was. While he was vacationing in Edinburgh during the last year of the Eisenhower presidency, his active imagination got to work cooking up a dandy conspiracy. (“Active imagination” was the euphemism he used to describe his periods of delusional grandeur; today we would say he was “off his meds.”)
Th
e Edinburgh Caper
involved a plan to kidnap, perhaps even assassinate, President Eisenhower, the Queen of England, and the Duke of Edinburgh.
Th
at McKelway and
New Yorker
readers should derive pleasure from a plot to assassinate a US president underscores the happily ignorant state Americans then enjoyed.
Th
e next year that would change.

Mac’s brow was unclouded that October evening. He seemed serenely untroubled by the cost as he greeted the thirty or so guests standing around in his large chintz living room. Many notables in publishing were there, among them a number of the writers from the eighteenth floor: E. J. Kahn Jr. and his first wife, Ginny; Berton Roueché and his wife, Kay; Robert Coates; and two or three others, including a tall, ruddy-faced young Talk reporter named (after his maternal grandfather) Grover Cleveland Amen. Grover would later see me home in a taxi, very properly walking me to my door and leaving me at it. Robert Lescher, then an editor at Holt and later to head his own literary agency, was there with Mary Cantwell.
Th
ey were to divorce some years later, and she would write a vivid account of their marriage, their bookish Greenwich Village world, and their breakup in her
Manhattan Memoir.

White-jacketed waiters circulated expertly around the crowded room, offering trays of canapés on toast points and Ritz crackers. (In that era, Ritz had pretty much cornered the snack cracker market, now so overabundant with herbal and spiced variations.) Drinks, passed on separate trays, consisted of a heady array of daiquiris, martinis, manhattans, and Tom Collinses. Almost no one seemed to be drinking anything soft, and there was no wine on offer.
Th
is was a crowd that had learned to drink in the twenties and, with drying-out respites from time to time, was hard at it still. All this was accompanied by the enthusiastic smoking of cigarettes, people somehow managing to juggle everything yet seldom spilling their drinks.
Th
e room became, naturally, increasingly smoky, as well as noisy and laughter-filled. By 8:15 p.m. the crowd was just beginning to thin, the waiters circling mostly to collect glasses and napkins. Able, for the first time, to see over to the other side of the room, I noticed a buzzing cluster of people paying rapt attention to a tiny, watery-eyed woman dressed in black, sitting on a sofa with a gray poodle by her side.
Th
is could only be Dorothy Parker, of the wickedly funny bons mots.
Th
e only Parker mot I could summon up was “Men don’t make passes at girls who wear glasses.” Since I was still three or four years away from the day when a combination of myopia and astigmatism would force the dreaded glasses on my nose, I recited this to myself with equanimity. I felt a shiver of excitement as I realized there was an empty seat on that very sofa, just on the poodle’s right. After standing on high heels for two hours, I overcame my shyness and took it.

I remember mumbling something complimentary to Mrs. Parker (as everyone called her) and getting a bleary nod in return. Talk swirled around us, and Mrs. Parker’s head—rather small and tightly permed—dropped forward onto the white lace collar of her dark dress. I thought perhaps she was asleep. Somebody introduced the smudge-colored poodle to me as Cliché.
Th
e poodle remained impassive. Noting a box of dog biscuits open on the coffee table, I took one and, holding it out, asked, “Want a biscuit, Cliché?”

Quick as a flash, Mrs. Parker’s head came up, her eyes now glittering icily through what seemed permanent tears. She barked in a voice I was sure was heard all over the room, “It’s not a biscuit, for Christ’s sake. It’s a bickie! Who d’you think you are, Henry James?” Blood rushed to my face as I hastened to correct myself and offer the dog its rightly named morsel.
Th
ank the gods, Cliché took it and the moment passed. I realized, even then, that I had been granted a sort of dubious distinction: I had been put down by the queen of the game.

I loved my little outpost down on the writers’ floor and the sense it gave me of being in the center of things. When J. D. Salinger needed to find the office Coke machine (there wasn’t one), I was the girl he asked. When Woody Allen got off the elevator on the wrong floor—about every other time—I was the girl who steered him up two floors where he needed to be. When Don Stewart was dating Jean Seberg and she needed to use the ladies’ room, I was the girl who unlocked it for her. When Maeve Brennan was homeless and sleeping on the couch in Jack Kahn’s office, she, too, found her way to the ladies’ john with a key from me. When Leonard Bernstein wanted to make sure his kid brother, Burt, knew he loved him, Lenny called me. When James
Th
urber needed emergency office space, I was the one who knew that Robert Coates was away and slipped him into Coates’s office so he could put one of his last pieces for the magazine—“
Th
e Watchers of the Night”—to bed. When Delmore Schwartz was found dead in his hotel room, I was the one who located Dwight Macdonald to go over and pick up the pieces.

A natural progression from such perfunctory but personal contact sometimes led to more substantial involvement in the writers’ work.
Th
is might, and in fact did, take the form of producing pasteups for Whitney Balliett’s books on jazz, suggesting chapter arrangement for Emily Hahn’s
Look Who’s Talking!,
finding a German translator for Jack Kahn’s use in his profile of Arthur Loeb Mayer, running a small lending library of classics and
New Yorker
authors. And sometimes it led to involvement in the personal lives of those I served and theirs in mine.

When I couldn’t get an answer from Columbia to my request for an application to their grad school, Dwight Macdonald wrote a scorching letter to his pal Jacques Barzun, likening me to Joseph K. and Columbia to a dark bastion of byzantine bureaucracy. From the day I chided him on making political criticism his forte and yet refusing to do his duty as a citizen and vote, Dwight was always deferential to me in an amused way. He consulted me for suggestions for his book of literary spoofs, an anthology for Random House called
Parodies,
and even used some of them: Chaucer’s tale of Sir
Th
opas and excerpts from Jane Austen’s
Northanger Abbey.
He inscribed the British edition of
Against the American Grain
to me as “the Egeria” of the eighteenth floor. I had to look her up in a classical dictionary, but I didn’t tell him that. Turns out she was counselor to a king.

When Dwight was reviewing movies for
Esquire,
he continued to write pieces for Mr. Shawn and used the same office while wearing both hats. In the late 1960s
Th
e
New Yorker
supported a virtual cottage industry of movie reviewers right there on eighteen. Pauline Kael and Penelope Gilliatt, who split the magazine’s reviewing chores, also had offices there, so quite a number of movie people as well as writers like Michael Crichton came through. Burt Lancaster, stung by something Dwight had written about his performance in
Th
e Train,
paid him a visit and, Dwight said later, “tried earnestly to change my mind.”

As for Miss Gilliatt and Miss Kael, they couldn’t have been less alike. I was not the only one around the office who feared conflict if their paths should cross. Both were tiny women, and both had a species of red hair; but physical size and coloring aside, the two women were like chalk and cheese, in their personalities, their writing styles, and their responses to films. Miss Gilliatt reeked of class (quite literally, as she moved in a cloud of expensive perfume), while Miss Kael was feisty West Coast blue collar all the way.
Th
eir differences made for an interesting contrast in the magazine’s film coverage. It also led to interesting complexities when one of them was in the position of reviewing movies intimately associated with the other.