CONSUMMATE REPORTER STILL TALK OF THE TOWN
She made journalistic history in what was then a male-dominated world and her pioneering work still reads fresh to this day
James Thurber nicknamed her “the girl with the built-in tape recorder”, for her uncanny ear for dialogue. John Huston called her “Kid”, and Ernest Hemingway, simply, “Daughter”. A dogged young reporter with an elfin face and a cap of dark curls, Lillian Ross started working at The New Yorker in 1945, welcomed into the void left by the male reporters and editors who had gone off to serve in World War II, although she was paid far less. By midcentury, she had made journalistic history by pioneering the kind of novelistic non-fiction that inspired later work like Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood.
Reading Come in, Lassie! her rollicking sketch of a Hollywood under siege from the Committee on Un-American Activities, you can’t help but wish Ross were covering the 2016 presidential campaign. (Here’s Jack L Warner, president of Warner Bros, in a passage from Lassie: “‘Don’t worry!’ he roars, slapping the backs of the lesser men around him. ‘Congress can’t last forever!’ ”)
Ross’ particular skill was to charm her subjects into revealing their most unscripted, id-like selves, as Hemingway memorably did during a three-day tour of New York City with Ross at his side. In the article that resulted, a riveting, hilarious work of cinematic journalism, she nailed, among other quirks, Hemingway’s idiosyncratic, article-free “Indian talk”: “Book is like engine,” Hemingway told her. “We have to slack her off gradually.” With that piece, How Do You Like It Now, Gentleman? Ross largely invented the modern entertainment profile; it would also earn her accusations that the work was a vicious parody, although Hemingway had read it before publication and adored it.
Ross is famous, too, for her 40-year relationship with The New Yorker’s legendary editor, William Shawn; she was the so-called shadow wife, who broke the rules when she published her memoir of their life together, Here But Not Here, in 1998, when Shawn’s actual wife, with whom he had three children, was still living.
Throughout her long career, Ross has been both praised and pilloried for her drive and for her survival skills; for being, as one former New Yorker editor put it recently, a very ambitious journalist of the wrong sex.
“I was encouraged to be myself,” Ross said. “I was very lucky.” It was 4pm on a Tuesday when Ross and Susan Morrison, the articles editor at The New Yorker, welcomed a reporter to the East 85th Street apartment Ross has lived in since 1958. Now 97, she wore a grey sweatshirt and gold button earrings, along with her trademark curls and impish grin. With Morrison’s help, Ross has collected many of her signature pieces, including that Hemingway profile, along with newer work, into a book that stretches over 60 years of journalism. Reporting Always: Writings
from The New Yorker, is out now from Scribner. The modest apartment is still decorated with the midcentury furniture chosen so many years ago by Shawn: an Eames desk, a Danish modern rocker, four Italian chairs around a small, round, white laminate table. “It’s all Bill’s taste,” Ross said. “He was a marvellous man. The love of my life. People don’t like it when I say so.”
While her colleagues perhaps envied her access to William Shawn and were deeply antagonistic to her exposing him in her memoir, it is clear that Ross suffered tremendously for the relationship and paid for it with the thing she loved most, her work. “The more engulfed I became in our life together,” she wrote in Here
but Not Here, still an uncomfortable work 17 years after its publication, “the less I wrote ... I didn’t have my old energy for the work.”
In 1987, when Shawn was fired after more than half a century at The New Yorker, and two years after Condé Nast bought the magazine, Ross left along with him, joining Shawn in exile on 85th Street. (Shawn was succeeded by Robert Gottlieb, who had been an editor at Knopf.)
Tellingly, it was another young journalist who had fallen in love with her much older, married boss — that would be Tina Brown, once a reporter at The Sunday Times, the British newspaper, under the editor Harold Evans — who gave Ross her job back. When Brown inherited
The New Yorker, a traumatised community whose numbers were much diminished from the rout of the Gottlieb era, in 1992 (the year Shawn died, as it happens), she called in Ross, then in her seventies, who recommenced writing
Talk of the Town pieces and profiles with all of her former gusto.
It was Brown who drew from Ross the tale of her relationship with Shawn, although ultimately it was not published in The New Yorker, out of respect for him, Brown said. “I felt very drawn to her,” she added. “She was the iconic girl reporter who fell in love with the editor. Of course, I had done the same thing. We sort of bonded on a similar arc.” Nearly two decades later, a generation of New
Yorker writers has come up largely unmarked by the family scandals of the last century. (In 2000, Dinitia Smith, reviewing a crop of New
Yorker memoirs in The New York Times, noted drily: “For some, reading about the old days at
The New Yorker is like listening to a friend tediously describe his plane ticket being upgraded, or the dream he had the night before.”) Many of these younger writers have been able to enjoy the encouragement of Ross without having to parse her lineage or be haunted by any family skeletons.
Morrison has been Ross’ editor since the late ’90s, and she uses her work to teach younger writers.
“She was the oldest and also the most energetic writer at my disposal,” Morrison said. “She would call me at about 4 and say, ‘I just heard from Carol Matthau that there’s such and such, and it could be interesting’. Then she’d call me at 10 and say, ‘I have a good little story’. When I came to work the next day, she would have filed it. When I’d call her to say how great it was, she’d be at the gym with her trainer, after having pulled an all-nighter.”
(Ross’ last Talk of the Town piece for the magazine ran early in 2011, an article about her old friend Robin Williams, who was in New York City performing in Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo, a play about Iraq.)
A reporter recently asked Ross about her first article, which she wrote when she was in junior high and reporting on the new library in her school. (You’ll find the first line recalled in Ross’ introduction to Reporting Always: “Fat books, thin books, new books, old books.”)
Ross said she doesn’t recall getting a byline, nor much else about the piece, but she does remember the pleasure she took in seeing it in print. “There was nothing special about the words,” she said, “but they were mine.”