At Random, page 3
During my year at Packard and my job with the accountant, Uncle Herbert continued to talk to me about going to college; and if I hadn’t taken his advice, God knows what would have happened to me.
I didn’t have enough credits, since I hadn’t graduated from high school. I decided in January that I was going to college if I could, so I had until September to get all my entrance requirements. I went to Columbia and took several extension courses, and my uncle coached me in a couple of other subjects.
I quickly decided, after looking at the required courses, that I could never learn Latin or Greek; I had no aptitude at all in that direction. I discovered that at the School of Journalism you didn’t need those languages, so then and there I decided that was the place for me. (It was then an undergraduate school. It became a graduate school some years later.) But I still didn’t have enough credits. Although I never was good at algebra, I had counted on being able to pass the exam—for the last two points I needed. But I flunked. I simply couldn’t do it. So I took an exam in free-hand drawing, which almost anyone could do, and I passed that. That was one point. Then I took advanced French. This was a desperate gamble, because if I didn’t get that last extra point, I was dead. But I passed and got into the School of Journalism.
That summer Morty Rodgers had the next locker to me in gym class, and we continued our friendship. Morty’s father, Dr. William A. Rodgers, was a very important man in my opinion because one of his patients was my dream girl, Norma Talmadge, the beautiful movie star, and the idea that she was one of his patients dazzled me. I remember pleading with him to let me carry his bag when he went to see her. It was Morty Rodgers who introduced me to the fraternity I joined: Pi Lambda Phi. The head of the fraternity was young Oscar Hammerstein II. A boy named Horace Manges—who became the lawyer not only for Random House but for a half-dozen other big publishers—was also a member. Richard Rodgers soon joined it, and Rodgers and Hammerstein got me more and more interested in the theater.
The School of Journalism in those days was very famous, and while I was there it attracted such young men as my friend Howard Dietz, and George Sokolsky, Morrie Ryskind, Corey Ford and Max Schuster. Richard Simon, the other half of the future Simon and Schuster, was also there, but in the College.
In my freshman year I became pretty well set. First of all, I was already in a fraternity. I didn’t have to worry about that, as most freshmen did. Second, I went out for the college newspaper, the Spectator. The fellow who had written a column had just graduated, so they had the problem of who was going to take his place. I submitted several samples, and suddenly, and only a freshman, I was the columnist for the Columbia paper! Well, this was an open sesame to everybody and everything. I was elected vice-president of the class.
The freshman (2.2 illustration credit)
The Spectator column I wrote was called “The Stroller.” It was not a gossip column, though there were little pieces about personalities on the campus. I also tried to start controversies about the city government and the dismal subway service, demanding that 116th Street be made an express station—that kind of stuff. “The Stroller” was lively—and it was read! Soon I began sending in little things to Jester, the humor magazine, and I became even better known.
Not the least important thing that happened to me was that one of my freshman classes was with a professor named Harrison Steeves, and I will never forget Professor Steeves, because in his course we had to study contemporary authors. In those days the English authors were the popular ones. (This was around 1917. There have been great changes in the publishing business since then, and I like to believe I contributed to them.) There were very few popular Americans. There was one, Henry Sydnor Harrison, two of whose books I remember—a best seller called Queed and one called V. V.’s Eyes. They’re forgotten today, but were then considered outstanding literature. And of course, many Americans were reading books like Pollyanna. The professor also introduced me to H. G. Wells and Galsworthy; to Kipling’s Jungle Stories and Kim; and Arnold Bennett’s Old Wives’ Tale. I discovered for myself that there were authors like Anatole France, Theodore Dreiser and James Branch Cabell, and I began to appreciate good writing.
Steeves suddenly popped back into my life many years later. He had written a detective story, Good Night, Sheriff, not a very good one, but he brought it down to me, and I was so grateful for what he had done for me that I published it in 1941. It didn’t sell very well; it didn’t deserve to. But it pleased me to do it. I was making him very happy—this austere English professor who had written a mystery novel.
I soon discovered that if I played my cards right at Columbia, I could get two degrees at the same time—a B.Lit. at Journalism, and a B.A. at the College—without doing too much work. This required manipulating, but I thought that added to the fun. In 1917, right at the beginning of my college career, we got into the war. At that time there was something comparable to the ROTC: it was called the SATC, the Student Army Training Corps. We all became members and wore uniforms. One of my first exploits in the SATC was the day I was commander of the company and I had them in company rank marching across South Field (which is now all covered with buildings). As they were walking toward the grandstand I panicked, and couldn’t think of how to stop them. So to their intense delight, they went marching up into the stand, the whole company, while the real officers howled with laughter. I was not cut out for an army career. But anyway, I made a good story of all this in the column.
(2.3 illustration credit)
When the call came for officers’ training school, I applied for and was accepted by the infantry training school down in Camp Lee, Virginia, bucking for second lieutenant. Since I was the night editor of Spectator when the rule came through that anybody going off to the war would get full credit for any course he had signed up for, without even having to take it, I saw the notice the day before it appeared in the paper. So I rushed over to sign up for all the courses I could and then went to the dean for an okay. He looked at my program and said, “This is an interesting course you’ve planned out. I figure it would take about sixteen hours of homework a day to really do it right.”
I said, “Really, sir?”
He said, “You haven’t by any chance seen the rule that you’re going to get credit for everything you’ve signed up for before you go away to camp?”
I said, “I don’t know what you’re talking about, Dean.”
He said, “I didn’t think so,” and he stamped his approval.
So off I went. I was at Camp Lee until the war ended. I got credit for advanced geometry, something I could never do, and a couple of other science courses where you have to be exact—and I was terrible at those things. In history, economics and literature I was great. I’m very good at adding figures, too, but when it comes to algebra or quadratics or geometry, I’m absolutely hopeless.
Just as I returned to college, Morrie Ryskind, the editor of Jester, left Columbia, and in my sophomore year I was made editor in chief of the magazine—that was heady stuff!
Being editor of the Jester was a great experience for me, so I was delighted that both my boys worked on a college humor magazine. Chris was the vice-president of the Harvard Lampoon, of which Jon later became president. Chris’s first book, The World’s Largest Cheese, was published by Doubleday in 1968; it has all the things he wrote for the Lampoon and other pieces done since. He’s a great boy. They’re both great boys.
Illustration for Jester cover, December, 1917 (2.4 illustration credit)
To improve the Jester, I quickly started both a book-review column and a drama column—the drama column, of course, got us free theater tickets. Then I thought that this could finally be my chance to meet Norma Talmadge, my dream girl. So I wrote a letter asking if I could interview her for the Columbia Jester, and a reply came setting up a date. Soon the whole campus knew I was going to meet Norma Talmadge. I was so darn excited about it, but when the day came, I lost my nerve; I was afraid to face her, and I never went. I wrote a glowing interview, anyway—faked the whole thing, ran it in Jester and sent copies to Norma Talmadge. I got a warm letter from her in return, saying she had enjoyed meeting me so much and that the interview was masterful and she hoped we’d meet someday again soon. The letter was framed and put up in the Jester office.
There was a course at Columbia called Comparative Literature, which was one of those cinches where you got two points for doing practically nothing. The whole football team and the entire staff of Jester, including me—all the finaglers—were taking it. The professor who gave the course was Henry Wadsworth Longfellow Dana. He was a great-nephew, or maybe just a nephew, of the poet Longfellow. We had our first class with him, and the next day Dr. Butler kicked him out of Columbia because he was a pacifist. We were just being thrown into a war, and here was Dana making very pacifist statements and joining I-didn’t-raise-my-boy-to-be-a-soldier groups. If his name had been Smith or Jones, I don’t think Butler or anybody else would have given a darn. He was only an obscure English teacher up at Columbia, but since he was named Henry Wadsworth Longfellow Dana, the papers quoted at length everything he said. It took two lines just to print his name. And Butler was infuriated, so Dana got the heave-ho.
Now all we dedicated students rejoiced: “It will take them a month to get another professor.” We went to the next class expecting to see a little white notice on the door saying there would be no class until they got a new teacher. But overnight they did dig one up, and to our disgust, he was standing there, ready for action, when we came in. His name was Raymond Weaver. He had a very deep, mellifluous voice. He wore one of those long, stiff Arrow collars that met in the front, and he was a very formidable gentleman. We resented his turning up so quickly, and when he started talking, I’m sure we all thought, especially the football team, My God, what are we in for! But this class turned out to be one of the greatest things that ever happened to me, because Raymond Weaver’s course in Comparative Literature was extraordinary. Inside of three weeks this man had even the athletes reading Dante and Cervantes and Melville (on whom Weaver was an authority), and discussing them with deep interest. He was a persuasive teacher and a wonderfully nice man.
There were only about thirty people in the class, and I decided I was going to make Weaver one of the most popular teachers at Columbia. I started writing stories about him in my Spectator column. There was a baseball player on the Chicago White Sox, Buck Weaver, who was a wonderful player, except that he later became one of the Black Sox in the great baseball scandal. But at the time he was still a great hero, and of course I kept referring to Raymond Weaver as “Buck” Weaver. The dignified Mr. Weaver was not amused. And then I made up stories from whole cloth about him—anything to keep his name in the paper. He used to fuss at me, but I could tell that he was not really displeased. The following spring over a hundred people registered for his course. What at first seemed theatrical about him soon became very attractive to us.
Another thing happened through Weaver. He had rooms in one of the Columbia dormitories, and students would drop in after class once in a while to see him and talk. I met Richard Simon there. Dick was always something of a dreamer. He loved music and played the piano beautifully. He was also one of the most self-centered men who ever lived; he did what he wanted, and what didn’t interest him simply didn’t exist so far as he was concerned. He read only the assignments he liked, and if we were discussing a book he hadn’t read, he’d just get up and play the piano.
My education at Columbia was not only getting a background in literature and history; I also learned at the School of Journalism—mainly through my experience on Jester and Spectator—how to write a quick story, how to put it down in as few words as possible. Something else that I think is invaluable: I learned not to clutter up my mind with a lot of useless information, because an intelligent man doesn’t have to carry all that stuff in his head; he has only to know where to find what he needs when he needs it. I learned where to look for the things I needed and just how to go about getting them. Of course, there was another thing. Those were the years when I was becoming a man, and good teachers like Raymond Weaver and Benjamin Kendrick in the history department were an inspiration to me. I learned a lot just by knowing them.
I made Phi Beta Kappa in my junior year. I earned it because the courses I took were the ones that interested me and I worked on them—English, economics, history.
Editor of Jester, surrounded by some members of the staff (2.5 illustration credit)
It was during my senior year at Columbia that one of the most important encounters of my life took place. One of the courses I was taking was called Appreciation of Music, and the teacher who gave it was Daniel Gregory Mason, a well-known man in his field. His was another of those courses in which you got a two-point credit almost automatically. Mason would play classical music on the piano, and I used to sit in class and write Jester jokes and never bother to listen to him.
Many orchestras used to send two free tickets to members of Mason’s class, but you couldn’t bribe these brilliant music lovers to go to one of the concerts. The tickets went begging. There was one big exception, however: the Philadelphia Orchestra, with the great Leopold Stokowski conducting. It wasn’t that we could tell the difference between it and the orchestra at the Roxy, but for Stokowski, everybody wanted that pass because this was the thing to do. We used to put our names in a hat, and the two who drew the lucky numbers got the passes for the afternoon concert.
One day I drew one of the winning numbers, and the other was picked by a boy I had never paid any attention to before—he was a freshman and I was a big-shot upperclassman. His name was Donald Klopfer, and we went together to hear the concert. I liked Donald immediately. He was as tall as I was, had an interest in literature, and most important of all, had a good sense of humor. When we came out of the hall he told me that he had to pick up some theater tickets; he was going to take his girl to see the Portmanteau Players perform Lord Dunsany’s The Gods of the Mountain. He asked me to go to the ticket office with him, and as we walked along together, Donald went on and on about the troubles he was having with his girl, sixteen years old, very rich and spoiled within an inch of her life. I couldn’t have cared less, and since I didn’t respond, Donald probably thought I hadn’t heard a word he said. I have a habit to this day of listening with one ear. This quirk of mine astounds my friends, because they often think I’m not paying attention, but I know everything that’s going on. What Donald was saying about his girl registered somehow or other. After that occasion we’d say hello to each other around the campus, but he transferred to Williams the second semester and I didn’t see much of him for a while. Certainly I never guessed that he would become my best friend and lifelong partner in business.
In June, 1919, I found I needed only a few more points to finish up, so I spent that summer at school and graduated, according to plan, with two degrees—bachelor of arts from Columbia College and bachelor of literature from the School of Journalism. I didn’t have much general education, but I had gained valuable experience writing and editing for Jester and Spectator. From commercial school and by working for a certified accountant, I had learned a little bit about business. Everything worked out beautifully. I’ve just been lucky all my life.
I didn’t have to be much concerned about money; I could rely on the income that came to me after my mother’s death, and I had saved a little bit in the year I had worked. But I began meeting people who had far more money than I had, and I suddenly found myself in a world that I hadn’t known existed, where belonging to country clubs was taken for granted and girls were having big coming-out parties at the Ritz. It was very easy for me to get accustomed to this kind of life. I learned there was such a game as golf and that young men actually owned their own automobiles. I bought a dreadful second-hand car, and once when I drove it up to the White Mountains, it broke down six times.
Bennett (3.1 illustration credit)
Uncle Herbert (3.2 illustration credit)
At the beginning of the 1920’s a graduate of the Columbia School of Journalism could almost automatically have a job down at the Tribune—it was still the New York Tribune, not the Herald Tribune yet. On the other hand, my Uncle Herbert had become enamored of the stock market, and one of his best friends was a young stockbroker named Irving Sartorius. My uncle took to going down to Wall Street, and he was fascinated by the ticker, the old-style big ticker with a glass dome over it. In those days the board boys had their fraction tabs in a belt around their waists and would slap up the price changes on the board. By the time I had graduated, my uncle had made a lot of money in the market and was a very valued customer at the office of Sartorius, Smith and Loewi. Now, here I was in a quandary: Was I going to go into journalism? Or was I going down to Wall Street, where the job would be handed to me on a platter? I decided to try both.
By this time Merryle Stanley Rukeyser, the boy who had lived in our apartment house up on 157th Street, had become assistant financial editor on the Tribune. So when I went to call on the newspaper for a job, instead of just applying routinely, I went directly to Rukeyser and told him I was about to go to work in a brokerage office. The result was that I had two jobs at the same time: one at Sartorius and one on the financial page of the Tribune. This seemed to me a wonderfully winning combination for learning things fast.
