How Lillian Ross helped usher in the New Journalism.
HOW LILLIAN ROSS HELPED USHER IN THE NEW JOURNALISM
Lill ian Ross, who recently died at the age of 99, was one of the most remarkable writers of her time. She wrote for the New Yorker for half a dozen decades and redefined magazine journalism while providing fresh, vivid accounts of reality. She was a world- class listener, sensitive to the spoken word, able to identify expressions that revealed a subject’s character. She was never seen writing a note. The critic Edmund Wilson called her “the girl with the built- in taperecorder.”
Her clever handling of quotations was not always admired. She first aroused intense criticism with her profile of Ernest Hemingway, published in the New Yorker in 1950. Hemingway loved to talk about himself and his status, especially when drinking, and he particularly liked comparing himself to champion athletes.
When Ross interviewed him he had just turned 50. “It is sort of fun to be 50 and feel you are going to defend the title again. I won it in the 20s and defended it in the 30s and the 40s, and I don’t mind at all defending it in the 50s.”
Later Ross went with him to a museum, where Hemingway remarked, “I can make a landscape like Mr. Paul Cézanne. I learned how to make a landscape from Mr. Paul Cézanne by walking through the Luxembourg Museum a thousand times with an empty gut, and I am pretty sure that if Mr. Paul was around, he would like the way I make them and be happy that I learned it from him.”
He said he had also learned a lot from Mr. Johann Sebastian Bach. “In the first paragraphs of Farewell ( A Farewell to Arms), I used the word ‘ and’ consciously over and over the way Mr. Johann Sebastian Bach used a note in music when he was emitting counterpoint. I can almost write like Mr. Johann sometimes — or, anyway, so he would like it. All such people are easy to deal with, because we all know you have to learn.”
Many believed that she had depicted the leading American novelist of the day as a drunken blowhard. Hemingway didn’t think so. He liked the article and years later even provided a jacket blurb for a book by Ross. Not long after the Hemingway piece she was assigned to write a profile of John Huston, one of the most admired directors in Hollywood. He was preparing to adapt The Red Badge of Courage, the classic Stephen Crane novel of the Civil War.
Interviewing him, realizing the difficulty he was having in getting a serious war film honestly produced by MGM, she decided it might be better to write about the whole process. She began thinking of writing a new “sort of thing.” As she put it, “I don’t see why I shouldn’t try to do a fact piece in novel form, or maybe a novel in fact form.”
She studied every aspect of production, from script and casting to musical background, and sent the New Yorker much more than it had expected.
Her story, 90,000 words long, full of fascinating disputes, ran in five weekly instalments in the spring of 1952. I remember the excitement of reading it, waiting for each week’s issue, being disappointed when it was finished. When it appeared as a book, Picture, it was much admired, sometimes even called the best book ever written on making movies. Nobody said anything like that about the film itself. It satisfied almost no one and Ross’s research could explain why.
That story became, as she wished, either a fact piece in novel form or a novel in fact form. That was precisely the idea that became, in the 1960s, the New Journalism, as practised with great success by Tom Wolfe, Truman Capote, Gay Talese and many others, then and now.
Ross became a figure of wide interest, which was increased when she wrote a book about her private life. In 1998 she brought out Here but Not Here: A Love Story, an account of her 50- year relationship with William Shawn, the longtime editor of The New Yorker, who was married to someone else. Shawn remained married till his death in 1992, living in two New York apartments, blocks apart, for about five decades.
That’s part of Ross’s personal story, but I cherish the quotes from the people she interviewed most — such as Louis B. Mayer, head of MGM, who hammered on his desk while giving her his views of success in Hollywood: “Let me tell you something! Prizes! Awards! Ribbons! We had two pictures here. An Andy Hardy picture, with little Mickey Rooney, and Ninotchka, with Greta Garbo. Ninotchka got the prizes. Blue ribbons! Purple ribbons! Nine bells and seven stars! Which picture made the money? Andy Hardy made the money. Why? Because it won praise from the heart. No ribbons!”