Lillian Ross
Sharp and witty reporter who created the ‘celebrity profile’
LILLIAN Ross, the journalist and author, who has died aged 99, was a reporter with The New Yorker for some 60 years and is credited with inventing the “celebrity profile”.
The first interviewer to immerse herself fully in her subjects, she wrote with disarming perspicacity about everyone from Ernest Hemingway in his hotel room and Charlie Chaplin walking “just like Charlie Chaplin” to John McEnroe talking about his feelings in the commentator’s box.
Sharp and witty, she had an ear for dialogue and a keen eye for detail, and could pick out her subjects’ idiosyncrasies (and vulnerabilities) through observing their clothes, the furnishings of their houses, the tone of their voice and even how they poured a drink.
In 1950 in her interview with Hemingway, she described the novelist, then aged 50, with unforgiving meticulousness: “His hair, which was very long in back, was grey, except at the temples, where it was white; his moustache was white, and he had a ragged, half-inch full white beard. There was a bump about the size of a walnut over his left eye.”
In 1952 she was given an assignment to follow the director John Huston as he worked on The Red Badge of Courage, based on Stephen Crane’s novel of the American Civil War. The subsequent article, which ran to more than 16,000 words and was published in instalments, was reproduced as a book, Picture (1952), an unvarnished examination of the movie-making business.
In total, she would produce more than 500 articles for The New Yorker, many of which were published as collections in her books, Talk Stories, Takes and The Fun of It.
As well as the celebrity interviews (Ingrid Bergman, Clint Eastwood and Robin Williams were all subjected to her penetrating gaze), her writing covered social and political change from, in 1949, the House Un-American Activities Committee to private schoolchildren from New York’s Upper East Side in The Shit-Kickers of Madison Avenue (1995).
She prided herself on her journalistic standards. As a young woman, she was referred to as “the girl with the built-in tape recorder”, although, in fact, she hated audio recording (“fast, easy, lazy”) and took detailed notes instead (her preferred notebook was a 3 in x 5 in spiral-bound). In 2002 she published Reporting Back: Notes on Journalism, in which she told her readers (quoting Hemingway) that “the old, simple words are the best”.
The youngest of three children, Lillian Ross was born Lillian Rosovsky on June 8, 1918 in Syracuse, New York, and brought up in Brooklyn.
After receiving her degree from Hunter College, New York, she had a spell as a graduate at Cornell University. In 1945 she arrived at The New Yorker, her first job in journalism. Apart from a short spell away from the magazine in the late 1980s, she continued to write for The New Yorker into her 90s.
In one of her last articles, Bearable (2010), she recalled her friendship with J D Salinger: “The older and crankier he got, the more convinced he was that in the end all writers get pretty much what’s coming to them: the destructive praise and flattery, the killing attention and appreciation”.
In 1998 she surprised friends and colleagues by publishing a frank memoir, Here But Not Here, which described the 40-year love affair she had had with The New Yorker’s (married) former editor, William Shawn. For many, it seemed to be an abandonment of one of Ross’s own strictest journalistic principles: “I don’t want to write about anybody who doesn’t want me to”.
Even in very old age, she took great pleasure in the company of young people and always encouraged younger writers.
Lillian Ross, who died on September 20, is survived by her adopted son. WIT: Lillian Ross in the 1940s. Photo: Bettmann Archive