Life Stories-expanded

It used to be said around the New Yorker offices that our founding editor, Harold Ross, invented the Profile. But if a Profile is a biographical piece-a concise rendering of a life through anecdote, incident, interview, and description (or some ineffable combination thereon-well, then, it's a little presumptuous to stick Ross at the Front of' the queue ahead of Plutarch, Defoe, Aubrey, Strachey, or even The Saturday Evening Post. And yet in 192 5. when Ross launched the magazine he liked to call his "comic weekly," he wanted something different something sidelong and ironical, a form that prized intimacy and wit over biographical completeness or, God forbid, unabashed hero worship. Ross told his writers and editors that, above all, he wanted to get away from what he was reading in the other magazines-all the "Horatio Alger" stuff. James Kevin McGuinness, a staffer in the earliest days of the magazine, suggested the rubric "Profile" to Ross. By the time the magazine got around to copyrighting the term, it had entered the language of American journalism. Most of the initial Profiles in the magazine were fairly cursory and bland (and not worth anthologizing). The first was a sketch of the Metropolitan Opera's impresario Guilio Gatti-Casazza: it ran just over one page and showed scant evidence of even the most rudimentary reporting. It wasn't terrible funny. either. By 192 7, however, the reporting was getting stronger and the writing more irreverent. John K. Winkler's Profile of William Randolph Hearst, a five-part piece, was both uproarious and well researched, and Janet Flanner had begun perfecting a shorter form with a Profile of Edith Wharton. The most influential of the early Profiles was Alva Johnston's delightful dissection, in 1932, of a phony Russian prince named Mikhail Dmitry Obolensky Romanoff. The prince's real name was Harry F. Gerguson, late of Illinois. (Like Joseph Mitchell's great subject, Joe Gould, Gerguson was an irresistible fake. Obolensky was so irresistible, in fact, that Ross eventually befriended him and sent him off to Los Angeles, where he could freeload off Dave Chasen, the restaurateur; eventually, Obolensky mooched off enough of Chasen's customers to open his own place.) While the mainstays of Ross's New Yorker E. B. White and James Thurber, did the most to develop the magazine's urbane tone and sensibility, Johnston, who had won a Pulitzer Prize as a reporter at The New York Times in 1923 and later moved to the Herald Tribune, gave the Profile form real literary and journalistic weight. Johnston was the first to combine a natural wit and sense of storytelling with the legwork of a first-class newspaperman. His Profiles, especially those of Obolensky and the Florida architect Addison Mizner, influenced generations of New Yorker writers and Profile masters, from A. J. Liebling to John McPhee to Mark Singer. His obituary in the magazine read, in part, "When The New Yorker in its earliest days was trying, establish the Profile as a new journalistic form, it was Alva Johnston more than anyone else who set the pace, clarified the idea, and produced the pieces. He gathered and assembled facts in such a way as to give a fresh, candid, gay, and occasionally satirical picture of an individual." Ross was a man of enormous social energy and mischief, and he was not reluctant to use Profiles in The New Yorker as a means of settling feuds and even starting them. St. Clair McKelway's Profile of Walter Winchell enumerated hundreds of errors and bogus items in Winchell's gossip column; the piece was so thorough a trouncing that it provoked Winchell to report in the Mirror that Ross wore no underwear. Evidently, Winchell had erred again; Ross mailed him the very pair of undershorts he was wearing when he read the offending column. Winchell, for his part. demanded that the owner of the Stork Club ban Ross from his tables. Wolcott Gibbs's skeweriRemnick, David is the author of 'Life Stories-expanded' with ISBN 9780375503559 and ISBN 0375503552.