Authors: Janet Groth
True, I had one brief meeting with Jillian and Hugo and one of the former expats named Ruby, which took place in the Braun’s apartment. Fritz and I dropped by one evening in the company of the abstract artist we’d dined with, also an expat. But Fritz was mad at the artist, the artist was mad at Ruby, Jillian was mad at Hugo, and Fritz, finding that the rapid-fire exchange of insults outstripped his English, retired into a neutral corner, leaving me in a position that could only be called the lurch.
I felt I’d wandered into a hostile camp, but Fritz later shifted the emphasis to an unfavorable impression
I
had made. How I could have made any impression at all, I was at a loss to explain. However, Fritz said the general agreement on this point had done much to reestablish harmony among the others in subsequent me-less encounters. When I look back on those people now, I don’t know why I disliked them so. I believe at bottom there was some leftover feeling of inferiority behind it.
Th
ey were all, in one way or another, artists or artists manqué. It was clear that I, at twenty-three, was regarded as not having lived enough to be in their league. Unlike Rabe, I had never worked on the waterfront or written a history (unpublished) of the American Civil War in hipsterese. Nor had I lived in Europe for two years like Rabe’s ex-wife, Hester, and Hugo, and almost everybody else, except Jillian, who, however, had chalked up three husbands and three divorces, which seemed to balance things out where she was concerned.
Hester was the sister of a famous abstract expressionist. She and Rabe had already decided on divorce when Hester gave birth. Now, meeting in the cozy confines of the Braun circle, they talked happily of how they’d named their daughter the Aztec word for “regret.” Hugo, it developed, had once been the lover of Stella, now divorcing Sid. As in all exclusive groups, this one ran to a lot of cross-fertilization.
Th
ey seemed to like the fact that Fritz had “background” and “breeding,” and they thought his rebel stance put him in their own iconoclastic mold. But I thought the whole construct a rationalization on their part. It overlooked the sharp distinction between their minirebellions against their bourgeois families and Fritz’s breach with his father. Herr Steffan-Freude was a shipbuilder who switched to aeronautics in the 1920s and became one of the major architects of the bombers that devastated London.
Th
e Americans in the Braun circle still enjoyed the fruits of their trust funds, while Fritz, in fact, was disinherited. He was a real rebel. Another reason they liked to have him around was that he was not a proven failure.
Th
ey read his work.
Th
ey had the evidence of his sharp perceptions and his original mind. He lent the whole group a welcome air of greatness-to-be.
As to what Fritz saw in them, I grudgingly had to admit that with all the objections one might have to their characters, they made better conversation than most people I knew.
I tried hard, that summer, to reconcile the Fritz I knew when we were alone and Fritz as he behaved when he was the coddled darling of the Braun circle. One evening when I came back to an empty flat from a cocktail party given by a
New Yorker
friend, I started thinking about Fritz’s closed circle again. I knew I had made a hit at Ved Mehta’s party, and I wanted, more than anything, for Jillian and Hugo Braun to know it, too.
Th
e sensible thing to do, of course, would have been to eat some supper, take a long bath, and go to bed. But I had never been good at the sensible thing, and I now conceived the idea of going over to the Brauns’. People dropped in on them unannounced all the time. Fritz had made a point of extolling this swinging form of informality. So why shouldn’t I drop in?
Th
ese were people who, I had been told, appreciated style. So I would carry it off, with style. Disarm them with gay chatter, amusing anecdotes about James
Th
urber and E. B. White . . . Perhaps Fritz would be there. It seemed to me he almost always was.
I refreshed my makeup and walked the few blocks to the Brauns’. Even in my slightly elevated condition, I may have lacked the nerve to actually push their doorbell. But as I turned onto their street, I saw Hugo and Jillian crossing from the other side, in my direction, on their way home.
“Why, hello,” I said, trying to sound surprised. “I was just thinking of you. As a matter of fact, if I had seen a light on, I would have been tempted to call on you.”
Th
ey exchanged glances that were too nuanced for me to interpret in my fuzzy state.
“Well,” said Jillian, “you’re here. We’re here. Why not come up with us and have a drink?”
“Delighted,” I said, and I followed them into their brownstone. I had been there for only a quarter hour when Fritz telephoned to say he would drop by. Jillian must have intimated that I was there, for he spoke to me crossly when he walked in the door.
I knew he wouldn’t like it,
I thought,
but he doesn’t have to show it in front of them.
He brooded over near the fireplace. After a while he announced that he was leaving.
“I’ll come with you,” I said.
“I don’t want you to,” he all but snarled.
“Ooh,” said Jillian, raising her eyebrows. “Has somebody ever displeased somebody.”
“Very well,” I said haughtily, “I’ll just stay here with these nice people.”
Fritz departed. I chattered on. How successfully, I could not tell. It slowly dawned on me that I had openly challenged Fritz’s authority. Difficult for an American female to grasp the enormity of that. At the moment, I was only conscious that the impossible had happened. I had committed a social faux pas, and I was uncomfortable over the novelty of it. I had failed myself in many ways, but I had always prided myself on my social acumen, my flair for getting on with diverse types of people. As though if there were a heaven, I might yet get into it by behaving well at teas.
I made my departure, somehow, and went back to my apartment to wait for Fritz. At three o’clock in the morning, he came back home. I’d won. I was no longer excluded from his social life. Almost at once I saw how unimportant it was.
By fall, having sorted out our differing—and now inter
locking—circles of friends, we moved to a new, more
charming apartment on West Twelfth Street, a block and a half away from the old one.
Th
ere began a longish happy time of our life together.
I
NTERMEZZO
A
S IF TO MIRROR
my own happiness that fall of 1960, the world around me seemed to reflect only skies of blue. Beginning with the nomination of John Kennedy, the USA, at any rate, was entering its Camelot period. I hadn’t attended the big rally in Herald Square for Jack when he and Jackie campaigned in Manhattan. But I did go to Rockefeller Center on my lunch hour later that afternoon.
Th
e presidential candidate was alone and pressing the flesh among a crowd of supporters at the skating rink in front of 30 Rock. I had just a moment in his presence, but that moment brought me into the orbit of a most attractive man who seemed to find me attractive, too. What I had thought of as singling me out, I learned, was more likely the result of meds he took for back pain. Mr. Shawn’s then secretary, Pat Broun, who had briefly been employed at the White House, disabused me over lunch one day. She attributed that runaway testosterone—the smile, the intensity—which I’d found so compelling, to prescription drugs. Poor fellow. I would just as happily have gone on in ignorance.
Th
e New Yorker
was a solid bastion of blue under Mr. Shawn, who so sympathized with his staff’s enthusiasm that he announced (through the switchboard) a time-out for the Inauguration Day ceremony. We all gathered in the checking department (site of the only telly on the premises) to watch John Fitzgerald Kennedy be sworn in.
Th
e room was crowded and hot, but totally rapt, we watched the spectacle unfold, and we broke into a spontaneous cheer as the new president said, “Ask not what your country can do for you—ask what
you
can do for your country.”
Th
ere was general satisfaction voiced, too, when he placed a poet in the forefront of national life—at least momentarily—by his nod to Robert Frost.
It may have been about this time that some new faces began to appear around
Th
e New Yorker.
A battery of Talk reporters who had been brought in a few years before I arrived were moving on up to longer pieces or working on their own writing at home. So I missed the days when Anthony Bailey, John Updike, and Jon Swan came in regularly. But Calvin Trillin, John McPhee, and Calvin Tomkins arrived. And Ved Mehta, the sweet-natured, blind, Indian-born chronicler of his own extraordinary life, became a regular on “my” floor in 1961.
Ved never missed a day when he was in the country. His coworkers were not always at their best when coping with Ved.
Th
ey were jealous of his special, almost father-son relationship with Mr. Shawn and what they considered the inordinate amount of print granted his work. I am sure he knew how many jokes were directed at the visual descriptions (always accurate) in which his writing abounded—his antennae were sensitive enough to permit him to perambulate New York streets without aid.
Th
e work itself represents his triumph over all that. We had one emotional dustup out in the corridor in the early seventies. I no longer remember what precipitated it, but I remember vividly our mutual apologies and Ved’s weeping and throwing his arms around me and saying, “I love you, Jan.” His inclusion of me in the parties he gave, at his first place in the Picasso, and later in the Dakota, always pleased and touched me. I came to know his father and his sister Usha well enough to attend the engagement party Ved threw for Usha and her handsome husband-to-be, a naval officer. Having known them, even a little, has lent an added interest for me to Ved’s six volumes of autobiography.
Also among the new arrivals were Henry Cooper, Gerry Jonas, and Bill Wertenbaker—a trio of young writers hired just out of college who were to contribute fact pieces on space, ecology, and water sports, in that order.
Th
ese fellows were roughly my own age, and I found myself at a number of parties to do with their engagements or weddings and, in one instance, was part of a foursome attending a concert at Carnegie Hall. Nice fellows. I was particularly enchanted to be included in a “sherry party” one Christmas, held in Henry’s family’s vast apartment on Park Avenue. It must have been there that Henry casually asked if I had plans for the holiday and, learning that I had none, invited me to come by for Christmas “lunch”—a wondrous affair straight out of Dickens (
after
Scrooge sees the light), complete with a golden goose and blazing plum pudding.
Th
ree generations of Coopers—whose photos crowded the lid of the closed piano—made me feel welcome and as at home as a girl from Iowa could. Henry was my favorite of the blue bloods I came across—absolutely no side, and he seemed to know I enjoyed the peeks he gave me into his world. Showed me around the family graves on a Saturday trip I once made up to Cooperstown. Yep, James Fenimore and all.
Constance Feeley, too, was one of the new fact writers given an office on eighteen.
Th
ere were not that many women on the floor and she and I began having the occasional lunch or after-work drink together. As the daughter of a career army officer, Constance had a history as a loner who found it hard to fit in. Once, when she had done a Talk piece on Carlos Montoya, a star of the flamenco guitar, we went to a concert he gave at Carnegie Hall. I discovered a hair trigger to her temper that bordered on the psychotic. She had just such a break with me, flying into a rage when I innocently confused the classical with the flamenco guitar (or perhaps it was the other way around). It was all I, even I, with my vaunted powers as a soother of artistic temperaments, could do to quiet her down and sustain the relationship.
One night she asked me to dinner at her one-bedroom apartment in Murray Hill. I found the whole evening strangely touching. Each doily and cut-glass decanter, each candle on the linen-draped card table with the telltale folding legs and folding chairs, bespoke a hostess unaccustomed to making such efforts. When the bell rang and the lady from the apartment across the hall entered and was introduced to me as Doro Merande, I realized whom the efforts had been made for. Miss Merande was a character actress of great charm and standing, both in Hollywood and on the stage. It was her stories of those places behind the scenes that we had been called together to hear. Doro said she’d suffered great pangs of near sibling rivalry when her sister-under-the-skin—the actress Margaret Hamilton—vied for the same “sour, witchy old women” roles. Margaret, complained Doro, was “not even the prettier of the two of us” but, perhaps just on that account, had won the coveted role of Wicked Witch of the West in
Th
e Wizard of Oz.
Miss Merande allowed herself the tiniest moment of pique, but that soon gave way to genuine pleasure as we raved about our love for the roles she did win, in
Our Town,
Th
e Seven Year Itch,
and
Th
e Man with the Golden Arm.
We were just finishing up our lemon sorbets when the bell rang again and Constance pressed the buzzer to let up a young man with locks of dirty-blond hair that flopped over sharp features, wearing a white sharkskin suit and holding a white fedora. He was introduced to us as Tom Wolfe, a former colleague of hers at
Th
e Washington Post.
Th
e two had bonded as a couple of gentlefolk braving the rigors of the DC city beat. In a definite Virginia accent, Mr. Wolfe told us he couldn’t stay. He was dropping off a manila envelope. I wondered if it was a piece of writing he had asked Constance to get into the hands of the
New Yorker
fact editor. I thought he expressed some bitterness as he turned to leave that, unlike Constance’s, his own job application at the magazine had been rebuffed. But I may be mistaken about that.