Authors: Joseph Mitchell
I left the freighter when it docked in the Port of Albany, New York, to unload its cargo of pulp logs. I took a bus to New York City, and a few weeks later I got a job on The World-Telegram, an afternoon newspaper, where I still work. Most of the time I have been assigned to write feature stories and interviews and in the course of this assignment I have been tortured by some of the fanciest ear-benders in the world, including George Bernard Shaw and the noted
ever-voluble educator Nicholas Murray Butler, and I have long since lost the ability to detect insanity. Sometimes it is necessary for me to go into a psychopathic ward on a story and I never notice the difference. In a newspaper office no day is typical, but I will describe one day no more incoherent than a hundred others. When I came in one morning at 9 I was assigned to find and interview an Italian bricklayer who resembled the Prince of Wales; someone telephoned that he had been offered a job in Hollywood. I tracked him to the cellar of a matzoth bakery on the East Side, where he was repairing an oven. I got into a fight with the man who ran the bakery; he thought I was an inspector from the Health Department. I finally got to the bricklayer and he would not talk much about himself but kept saying, “I’m afraid I get sued.” I went back to my office and wrote that story and then I was assigned to get an interview with a lady boxer who was living at the St. Moritz Hotel. She had all her boxing equipment in her room. The room smelled of sweat and wet leather, reminding me of the locker-room of Philadelphia Jack O’Brien’s gym on a rainy day. She told me she was not only a lady boxer but a Countess as well. Then she put on gloves to show me how she fought and if I had not crawled under the bed she would have knocked my head off. “I’m a ball of fire,” she yelled. I went back to the office and wrote that story and then I was
assigned to interview Samuel J. Burger, who had telephoned my office that he was selling racing cockroaches to society people at seventy-five cents a pair. Mr. Burger is the theatrical agent who booked such attractions as the late John Dillinger’s father, a succession of naked dancers, and Mrs. Jack (Legs) Diamond. He once tried to book the entire Hauptmann jury. I found him in a delicatessen on Broadway where he was buying combination ham and cheese sandwiches for a couple of strip-tease women. He pulled out a check made out to him and proved that he had sold and delivered a consignment of cockroaches to a society matron who planned to enliven a party with them, the cute thing. Mr. Burger said he had established a service called Ballyhoo Associates through which he rented animals to people. “I rent a lot of monkeys,” he told me. “People get lonesome and telephone me to send them a monkey to keep them company. After all, a monkey is a mammal, just like us.” I wrote that story and then I went home. Another day another dollar.
Do not get the idea, however, that I am outraged by ear-benders. The only people I do not care to listen to are society women, industrial leaders, distinguished authors, ministers, explorers, moving picture actors (except W. C. Fields and Stepin Fetchit), and any actress under the age of thirty-five. I believe the most interesting human beings, so far as talk is
concerned, are anthropologists, farmers, prostitutes, psychiatrists, and an occasional bartender. The best talk is artless, the talk of people trying to reassure or comfort themselves, women in the sun, grouped around baby carriages, talking about their weeks in the hospital or the way meat has gone up, or men in saloons, talking to combat the loneliness everyone feels. The talk when you interview someone for a newspaper is usually premeditated and usually artificial.
Now and then, however, someone says something so unexpected it is magnificent. Once I was working on a series of stories about voodoo and black magic in New York City. With an assistant district attorney, I had a long talk with a Negro streetwalker. From the vague story she told the Vice Squad detective who put her in the pokey the D.A. suspected that she had been used as an altar in a black mass. She wasn’t much help because she saw nothing particularly unusual in her experience. Finally, exasperated, the D.A. asked her why she became a prostitute in the first place, and she said, “I just wanted to be accommodating.”
You seldom know what you are going to ask about when you are sent to interview someone. The desk says, “Go interview this dope,” and you locate the person and start talking. It has to be done in a hurry and there are few people who can just open their mouths and say something worth printing in a newspaper.
Usually the best way to start an interview with a well-known person is to recall the worst thing you ever heard about him and ask if it is true. You have to make a person angry but not too angry. I remember the icy glint that came into the eyes of Aimee Semple McPherson when I asked her if it was true that she ordained her husband, David L. Hutton, a stout torch singer, so he could get passes on the railroad. That is not always the best way. Whenever I have to interview Mrs. Ella A. Boole, the world president of the W.C.T.U., I give her to understand that I am a far greater enemy of rum than she is.
Some people—Gertrude Stein, Emma Goldman, Gilda Gray, Eleanor Holm and Peter J. McGuinness, Sheriff of Brooklyn, are an assortment—can unload enough quotes for a story at any hour of the day or night. (Gilda Gray, the Polish shimmy-shaker, is nice. Once I went up to see her about a rumored engagement to some scion or other. She sensed there was no particular story in that and told me instead about a visit she made to the convent in Milwaukee in which she was educated. She had lunch with the nuns and before they sat down to eat she gave them a few movements of the black bottom, a dance from the twenties. “I gave the sisters a few tosses just for old time’s sake,” said Miss Gray. “They sure did enjoy it.”) Two classes of humans whose quotes are always
amusing are frustrated, spiteful old actresses on the down grade and people with phobias, especially people who predict the end of the world. (There used to be a disappointed man named Robert Reidt out on Long Island who was always going up on a hilltop near East Patchogue with his family to await destruction. Predicting the end of the world was an obsession with him. One dull day I called him up to ask if he had any advance information on the crack of doom and the telephone operator said, “Mr. Reidt’s telephone has been disconnected.”) A woman whose conversation was always unpremeditated was the late Mary Louise Cecilia (Texas) Guinan. Once I went with her to Flushing where she and her “Gang of Twenty Beautiful Guinan Girls” were filling a vaudeville engagement. We rode out in her bullet-proof limousine, an automobile previously owned by Larry Fay, the cutthroat. Someone was planning to produce a play based on the life of Aimee Semple McPherson and Miss Guinan had been asked to play the lead. I remarked that Mrs. McPherson certainly would sue the producer. “That,” said Miss Guinan, “is no skin off my ass.”
I am pleased when an interview starts off like that. I admire the imagery in vulgar conversation. I wish newspapers had courage enough to print conversation just as it issues forth, relevant obscenity and
all. Some of Mayor La Guardia’s most apt epigrams, for example, cannot be printed in any New York newspaper. If a reporter tries to get anything unusually hearty in a story some copyreader or other will trim it out. There are scores of admirable copyreaders on New York newspapers, but most of them seem to be too bored to give much of a damn about anything. They don’t have to be censored; they willingly censor themselves. They appear to prefer the nasty genteelism to the exact word; they will cut the word “belly” out of your copy and write in the nauseating word “tummy.” I have seen a pimp referred to as “a representative of the vice ring.” On the newspaper for which I work the reporters write “raped” and it always comes out “criminally attacked.” Also, copy-readers appear to like tinsel words, words such as “petite.” Day after day in one newspaper I have seen Lottie Coll referred to as “the petite gun-girl,” and Lottie is as big as Jack Dempsey and twice as tough. A good copyreader would rip a word like “petite” off a sheet of copy just on general principles. Once I covered a political rally at which a tipsy statesman cursed his opponent for fifteen violent minutes. His profanity was so vigorous I expected it to leave cavities in his teeth. I used some of his milder remarks in my story, but the copyreader cut it out and wrote in, “Commissioner Etcetera declared that his opponent was not aware of the issues.” There is no fury which
can equal the black fury which bubbles up in a reporter when he sees his name signed to a story which has been castrated by a copyreader or one of the officials on the city desk.
The least interesting people to interview for an afternoon newspaper are the ones who probably should be the most interesting, industrial leaders, automobile manufacturers, Wall Street financiers, oil and steel czars, people like that. They either chew your ears off with nonsense about how they are self-made (“When I landed in this country all I had was seventeen cents and a poppyseed roll and now I am chairman of the board”) or they sit around and look gloomy. After painfully interviewing one of those gentlemen you go down in the elevator and walk into the street and see the pretty girls, the pretty working girls, with their jolly breasts bouncing about under their dresses and you are relieved; you feel as if you had escaped from a tomb in which the worms were just beginning their work; you feel that it would be better to cheat, lie, steal, stick up drugstores or stretch out dead drunk in the gutter than to end up like one of those industrial leaders with a face that looks like a bowl of cold oatmeal. Next down the list are society women. I rank them with the jimsonweed and the vermiform appendix; I cannot see any reason for their existence. Also, they have bad manners. In the line of duty I have had dealings with
scores of drunken dowagers and gawky, concupiscent debutantes and it is my belief that the society women of the United States have the worst manners of any women in the world; coffeepot waitresses are gracious in comparison.
Politicians, as a rule, make work easy for the reporter. Some of them are so entertaining you can write about them under water. (Herbert Hoover is not in this class. He is the gloomy kind. I have interviewed him twice and both times his face kept reminding me of the face of a fat baby troubled by gas pains.) It is perhaps an ugly commentary on the American press, but the function of the interviewer on most newspapers is to entertain, not to shed light. For his purposes, men like Huey Long and Hyman Schorenstein, a Brooklyn district leader who is reputed to be unable to read or write, are made to order. An interviewer soon begins to judge public figures on the basis of their entertainment value, overlooking their true importance. It is not easy to get an interview with Professor Franz Boas, the greatest anthropologist in the world, across a city desk, but a mild interview with Oom the Omnipotent will hit the bottom of page one under a two-column head. Also, the American press will string along with the fatuous, attacking only the weak and the eccentric. Even the semicolons are pompous on Nicholas Murray Butler’s mimeographed statements, but the papers
nail them to the front page practically every Monday morning in the year. If Nicholas Murray Butler and Peter J. McGuinness made the same identical statement the papers would treat Mr. Butler with a gigantic amount of respect but Pete would be treated as a yap who should keep his mouth shut. It is safe to write accurately only about the nuts and the bums. When a public figure does something ridiculous reporters may then write about him accurately. J. P. Morgan was always treated with elaborate respect until he played rock-a-bye-baby with a lady midget; then the newspapers were not afraid of him any more.
Huey Long, as I say, was made to order. Any barely literate reporter could write an epic about him. The last time I saw him he was sitting up in bed in the Waldorf-Astoria with a hangover. He had on a pair of baby-blue pajamas and he was yawning and scratching his toes. There were three reporters in the room asking him questions. To every question he would say, “It’s a lie,” and laugh throatily. Then he sat on the edge of the bed, groaning, and told a long incoherent story about a relative of his who kept a saloon. The politician most lavish with incoherent quotes, however, was former Mayor John P. O’Brien of New York City. It was worth money to hear him orate. Once I heard him speak to a gathering of women and he said, “During the week I have momentous
matters to attend to. I meet great people and I must go here and there to make up the addenda that goes with being Mayor of the city. Therefore when I come here to this great forum and see before me flowers and buds, ladies, girls and widows, emotion is just running riot with me.” Another time he got to his feet and said, “Mr. President, and may I say, brothers? When I get in a room with chairs I get the fraternal spirit.” Once he addressed the Ohio Society and he read a poem, sighed and said, “I yearn now and then for the dear old river or for some Bohemia where you can get away from the stress of it all.” I have seen a puzzled audience staring at him, wondering what he was getting at. One night I listened to him tell about the time he almost slid off the tailboard of a furniture van and I was so fascinated by the words tumbling out of his mouth that I forgot to take notes. After his speech I went up to a stenographer he had brought there himself and got him to read me off a hunk of the oration. We printed the story next day and two of his campaign managers came around and said I made the whole thing up and threatened to sue for $150,000.
No reporter can work on interviews constantly without becoming a little batty; sooner or later he will begin hearing the birdies sing. When it gets through with more important matters I think that rotation of jobs should be one of the points taken
up by the American Newspaper Guild, the union of newspapermen, of which I am a member and in whose program I believe. When a city editor catches you looking cross-eyed at your notes and wishing black plagues on the head of the inarticulate lulu you have just interviewed he is sometimes nice enough to put you on the street for a while, or on rewrite, or maybe a big story breaks and saves your sanity. Just when you are about to collapse with one of the occupational diseases of the reporter—indigestion, alcoholism, cynicism and Nicholas Murray Butler are a few of them—a big story, a blood-hunt that takes you out of the office, usually breaks.