With this post (No. 413), we mark the tenth anniversary of The New Yorker. Since I began A New Yorker State of Mind in March 2015, I’ve attempted to give you at least a sense of what the magazine was like in those first years, as well as the historical events that often informed its editorial content as well as its famed cartoons. Those times also informed the advertisements; indeed, in some cases the ads give us a better idea of who was reading the magazine, as well as their changing tastes and buying power as we moved from the Roaring Twenties to the Depression, and from Prohibition into Repeal.
I have also chosen this time to go on hiatus, and hopefully resume this blog when The New Yorker celebrates its centennial next February (this site will remain active and available, and I will continue to monitor comments and messages). Let us hope that the editors use the original Rea Irvin cover for that occasion, and restore his masthead above “The Talk of the Town” section. Perhaps some enterprising soul could start a petition.
Moving on to the tenth anniversary issue, we find E.B. White recalling the world of The New Yorker’s first days. Given the massive economic and societal shifts that occurred from 1925 to 1935, those first days seemed distant to White, who felt old, “not in years but events.”
White also noted a new craze that had originated around the same time as the birth of The New Yorker…
White concluded with these parting words, tinged with world-weariness, writing “More seems likely to happen.” One wonders if he imagined The New Yorker at 100, which in our day is just around the corner. Like White, many us have grown weary of this angry world, where indeed more seems likely to happen. Let us hope it is for the best.
Now, some unfinished business. We need to look at the previous issue, Feb. 9, 1935, before we close out the decade.
We stay on the lighter side, joining critic John Mosher at the local cinema to appreciate Leslie Howard’s dashing performance in The Scarlet Pimpernel…
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From Our Advertisers
Cigarette manufacturers employed every angle from sex to health claims to move their product…not to be left out of any niche market, Chesterfield even went after the little old ladies…
…by contrast, the makers of Old Gold cigarettes featured a clueless sugar daddy and his leggy mistress in a series of ads drawn by famed pin-up artist George Petty…
…Otto Soglow would do well with advertisers during his career, promoting everything from whiskey to Pepsi and Shredded Wheat to department stores…in this case Bloomingdale’s…after William Randolph Hearst’s King Features Syndicate wrested The Little King away from The New Yorker in September 1934, this was the only way you would see the harmless potentate in the magazine…
…another New Yorker artist earning some ad dollars on the side was Constantin Alajalov, here adding a stylish flair for Coty…
…and then there’s James Thurber, who continued to contribute his talents on behalf of the Theatre Guild…
…and we move along to the Feb. 9 cartoons, with Thurber again…
…the issue also featured two by George Price…
…and Howard Baer supplied some life to this little party…
…now let’s return to the Feb. 15, 1935 issue…
…where John Mosher was back at the cinema, this time enjoying the story of a “beautiful stenographer”…
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More From Our Advertisers
In its bid for survival during the Depression, the luxury brand Packard introduced its first car under $1000, the 120. Sales more than tripled in 1935 and doubled again in 1936…
…meanwhile, Hudson was hanging in there with innovations such as the “Electric Hand”…it was not a true automatic transmission, but it did allow drivers to shift gears near the steering wheel…
…as demonstrated here…
…whatever you were driving, Goodyear claimed it would keep you the safest with their “Double Eagles”…
…I include this ad for Taylor Instruments because it features an illustration by Ervine Metzl, who would become known for his posters and postage stamp designs…
…Metzl’s design of a three-cent stamp commemorating the 1957–1958 International Geophysical Year…
…on to our cartoonists, we begin with this Deco-inspired artwork by an unidentified illustrator…
…one of Helen Hokinson’s “girls” was going about her daily rounds…
…Garrett Price gave us a gatekeeper not quite up to his task…
…Gilbert Bundy was seeing stripes rather than stars…
…while James Thurber’s medium was getting in touch with an equine spirit…
…scientific inquiry knew no bounds in Robert Day’s world….
…and in the world of Alain (aka Daniel Brustlein), old habits died hard…
Above: W.C. Fields was a well-known juggler and vaudeville performer decades before he became even more famous in the movies of the 1930s.
William Claude Dukenfield was a vaudeville juggler who distinguished himself from other “tramp acts” by adding sarcastic asides to his routines. Internationally known for his juggling skills, by the turn of the century the man who billed himself as “The Eccentric Juggler” would become much better known by another name: W.C. Fields.
In the first of a three-part profile, Alva Johnston pondered the secret behind Fields’ genius, an “inborn nonchalance” that he considered “the rarest of gifts.” Johnston surmised that some of that genius derived from the volatile relationship Fields had with his father, and the street-smarts he gained as a runaway at age eleven. It is no surprise, however, that these childhood stories of hardship were significantly embellished by the great wit himself.
Johnston also described Fields’ acting style and demeanor, noting that the actor’s asides were likely inspired by his mother, Kate Spangler Felton, who was known for her doorstep witticisms.
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Macabre Diversions
In the days before television and the internet, folks got their dose of the sensational and macabre from the tabloids, or, on occasion, in real life. Before crime or accident scene investigations became more sophisticated, it was not uncommon for crowds to mob grisly death scenes, including the car containing the bullet-riddled bodies of notorious bank robbers Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow. Their Ford automobile, pocked with 112 bullet holes, became a popular traveling attraction at fairs, amusement parks, and, in February 1935, at a car dealer’s showroom in Missouri. E.B. White explained:
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Saar Kraut
Janet Flanner mused on the recent plebiscite in the Saarland, which following World War I was seized from Germany and placed under the governance of a League of Nations commission. Much to the dismay of the French, the majority German population voted to return the Saar region to Germany, and its Nazi leadership.
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Over the Rainbow
In a previous column, Lois Long took aim at the Rockefeller Center’s new Rainbow Room, dismissing it as a tourist trap filled with interminable strains of organ music. In her latest column, Long retracted some of that vitriol, finding the entertainment (and, one supposes, the food) more to her liking.
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From Our Advertisers
As Lois Long mentioned in “Tables for Two,” British actress and singer Beatrice Lillie was appearing at in the Rainbow Room on the 65th floor of Rockefeller Center; according to the ad below, also featured were ballroom dancers Lydia and Joresco and bandleader Jolly Corburn…
…at first I though this was Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne shilling for Luckies, but the resemblance isn’t quite there, plus I’m not aware of the Broadway legends ever endorsing any product, let alone cigarettes…
…the folks at Hormel continued to feature notable Frenchmen who were known to enjoy French onion soup, although this particular image doesn’t do much for one’s appetite…
…the Bermuda Trade Development Board continued to feature colorful ads that enticed New Yorkers away from the late winter blahs…
…this ad for Schaefer is a bit odd…I guess the artist wanted to suggest a handbill, and therefore tilted the image it at an angle, unsuccessfully, one might add…
…The Theatre Guild once again called upon the talents of James Thurber to advertise their latest production…
…which segues into our cartoons, with Thurber once more…
…Al Frueh did his part to promote the stage with this illustration for the theatre section…
…Otto Soglow offered his spin on pairs figure skating…
…Gardner Rea explored the world of art appreciation…
…Helen Hokinson aptly supplied this cartoon for Lois Long’s fashion column…
…Whitney Darrow Jr. showed us the consequences of classified advertising…
…Barbara Shermund clued us in on the latest gossip…
…and we close with Peter Arno, and one butcher’s cold greeting…
Above: Charles Sellen as Mr. Muckle and W.C. Fields as shopkeeper Harold Bissonette in the 1934 film It's a Gift.
Rea Irvin featured the New York Auto Show on the cover of Jan. 12, 1935 issue—the extravaganza of cars at the Grand Central Palace was one place New Yorkers could go to chase away the winter blues. The other was at one of the city’s RKO theatres, where a classic W.C. Fields comedy was gracing the silver screen.
It’s a Gift was a showcase of Fields’ vaudevillian talents, tied together in a story about grocer Harold Bissonette (Fields) whose various tribulations included a pompous wife (who insisted on pronouncing the surname “biss-on-ay”), bratty children, and challenging customers (the hilarious Charles Sellen as Mr. Muckle). Writing for BFI Film Classics, Simon Louvish calls the film a chronicle of the “many titanic struggles between Harold Bissonnette and the universe. There will be battle of wills between father and daughter, between male and female, between man and a variety of uncontrollable objects.” Here is John Mosher’s review for The New Yorker.
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By Another Name
E.B. White led off his column with a note about Persia, which had officially changed its name to Iran. To mark the new year, Reza Shah had officially asked foreign delegates to use the new term, which referred to the native name of the people who inhabited the region.
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Hot Rods
The New Yorker was back at the auto show, where correspondent “Speed” noted the appeal of the Auburn Speedster to a college-age crowd. The $2,500 price tag (equivalent to about $55k today) was apparently within reach for some of the lads at Columbia and other Ivies. Speed also admired the limousine version of the Chrysler Airflow, but the real car of his desires was a bottle-shaped milk truck.
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From Our Advertisers
The proprietors of Essex House tapped into the popularity of the Auto Show to market their economical, yet deluxe accommodations…
…the anti-war group World Peaceways continued its ad campaign with this image of the “most powerful man in America,” that is, the average citizen who should not be tricked into “the absurd business of war”…
…United Airlines used the endorsement of journalist and radio commentator Edwin C. Hill to tout the safety and comfort of its airliners…
…at the time, United’s flagship airplane was the Boeing 247…
…”Mrs. William LaVarre” (Alice Lucille Elliott) was the latest adventurous soul to endorse the energizing effects of Camel cigarettes…
…it was no coincidence that the Camel and Chesterfield ads both featured women, the tobacco companies’ biggest growth market in the 1930s…
…on to our cartoons, we go bowling in this spot by George Shellhase…
…a doctor’s bedside manner, in James Thurber’s world of the battling sexes…
…two of Helen Hokinson’s “Girls” were left breathless by the exploits of Elias Burton Holmes, an American photographer and filmmaker who apparently coined the term “travelogue”…
…for this next cartoon by Robert Day, a snippet from the Auto Show will shed some light…
…and we close with Carl Rose, and some hijinks among the statuary…
Above: Ringing in the New Year at Times Square, 1934.
We bid adieu to 1934 with some odds and ends, beginning with E.B. White’s observations for the upcoming year, which if anyone had noticed the uptick in Ascot tie purchases, just might be a bit rosier than previous years of the decade.
White was also hopeful for a new year with a less dreadful press, particularly the pandering type promulgated by William Randolph Hearst.
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Dr. Peeper
“The Talk of the Town” noted that Dr. Allan Dafoe, the country doctor who gained fame for delivering the Dionne Quintuplets, expressed a desire to see Sally Rand perform her bubble dance during his visit to Gotham. “Talk” also looked in on the some of the technical aspects of the burlesque dancer’s signature act:
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Leading Ladies
Film Critic John Mosher noted the continued rise of two leading female stars, twenty-seven-year-old Katharine Hepburn and six-year-old Shirley Temple. Mosher recalled Hepburn’s recent performance in Little Women, and proclaimed that she “succeeds again” in The Little Minister.
Although Mosher admitted he was a “disagreeable adult” who doesn’t enjoy seeing children on the screen “more than necessary,” he acknowledged Shirley Temple’s talents as well as those of child actor Jane Withers in Bright Eyes.
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That Youthful Feeling
Given that William Shakespeare’s star-crossed lovers Romeo and Juliet were mere teenagers (the ages 13 and 16 were given to Juliet and Romeo, respectively), many productions featured actors more than twice that age. That was the case in 1933 when the play was revived by actress Katharine Cornell and her director husband Guthrie McClintic, who took the play on a seven-month nationwide tour before it was revised and opened on Broadway in December 1934. Critics dubbed the 41-year-old Cornell “the greatest Juliet of her time,” and it seems Robert Benchley heartily agreed in this excerpt from his stage review:
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The New Yorkiest PlaceÂ
In 1930 gossip columnist Walter Winchell called the new Stork Club “New York’s New Yorkiest place on W. 58th,” and when it relocated to 3 East 53rd Street in 1934Â it further defined itself as the ultimate New York night club. In her “Tables for Two” column, Lois Long found the new location much to her liking. An excerpt:
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So Long?
Clarence Day, best known for his Life with Father stories, also contributed a number of cartoons to the magazine, accompanied by satirical poems and humorous shorts. Day would die at the tender age of 61—after a bout with pneumonia—in December 1935, about a year after this  cartoon was published in The New Yorker. I assume he was signing off from the magazine in order to arrange publication of his Life with Father book, which was published shortly after his death.
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From Our Advertisers
Sunny California beckoned those who had the means and leisure to head to warmer climes during the New York winter…
…for those who stayed behind, they could wrap themselves in a chic winter coat such as this one sported by Camel endorser Mrs. Langdon Post (Janet Kirby)…
…another colorful ad with a not-so-colorful message from World Peaceways, a 1930s anti-war organization that characterized soldiers (and future soldiers, seen here) as pawns in the corrupt games of the rich and powerful…
…the distributors of French champagne rang in the New Year by suggesting that Doyen was worth your very last cent…
…we kick off our cartoons by welcoming the New Year with George Price…
…Robert Day contributed a spot drawing that offered a new twist to ice hockey…
…I should know this artist, but it escapes me for the moment…nevertheless, a great illustration to stretch across the bottom of an opening page…
…a closeup of the signature…
…another from George Price, still up in the air in the final issue of 1934…
…Garner Rea introduced us to the life of the party…
…”Miss Otis Regrets” is a 1934 Cole Porter song about the lynching of a society woman after she murders her unfaithful lover. Porter wrote the song as a parody of a sad cowboy song he heard on the radio. The song was further workshopped for fun at “smart set” cocktail parties…on to our next cartoon, and a moment of keen insight from James Thurber…
…Garrett Price went on the town with some students of anatomy…
…and we say Happy New Year with the help of Helen Hokinson…
Above: The Cat and the Fiddle (Pete Gordon) and Mickey Mouse (a monkey in a very creepy costume) were featured in 1934's Babes In Toyland.
We close out the old year and ring in the new with a bit of song and dance from three musicals that entertained New Yorkers in the waning days of 1934.
The work of composer Jerome Kern and lyricist Oscar Hammerstein II were prominent in two of those films, adapted from successful Broadway productions—the romantic comedy Music in the Air and the sentimental Sweet Adeline. Success on the stage did not necessarily translate to the screen in either case, according to critic John Mosher.
And there was Babes in Toyland, a Hal Roach film headlined by the comedy duo Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy. The film was well received by critics, including Mosher, who wrote that Babes in Toyland “was far more successful than [1933’s] Alice in Wonderland, and the children will probably be far less bored by it than they generally are by those films designed especially for them.” However, similar to Alice the costumes seem creepily crude, such as the weird rubber pig costumes and the almost terrifying Mickey Mouse, portrayed by a hapless monkey dressed to resemble the big-eared icon. It was apparently the first and last time Walt Disney allowed the Mickey Mouse character to be portrayed outside of a Disney film. No wonder.
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Alms for the Poor
Woolworth store heiress Barbara Hutton was one of the richest women in the world in the 1930s, and her lavish lifestyle in the midst of Depression attracted the attention, and the ire, of newspaper columnist Ed Sullivan. In his “Notes and Comment,” E.B. White made this observation:
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Oh Baby
Most of us know something about the weird and somewhat tragic tale of the Dionne quintuplets, raised from infancy before the public gaze and exploited to sell everything from dolls and books to soap and toothpaste. When E.B. White made this brief mention in his “Notes and Comment,” the story of the quintuplets was still a jolly one, and their delivering physician, Dr. Allan Roy Dafoe had gone from being a country doctor to one of North America’s most trusted medical authorities. Dafoe would become the childrens’ guardian and impresario, and make a fortune marketing their story and images.
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In the Year 2400
“The Talk of the Town” examined the “Buck Rogers” craze, fed by a cartoon strip, a radio show, and an array of toys.
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What’s It All About, Alfie?
Art and architecture critic Lewis Mumford offered praise for Alfred Stieglitz’s latest exhibition at the photographer’s gallery, An American Place. Mumford noted Stieglitz’s “astringent quality” that rose above the philistine tastes and “stupidities” of American life.
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From Our Advertisers
The back cover of The New Yorker was coveted by tobacco companies, the makers of Camels and Lucky Strikes (seen here) both featuring sumptuous photos of stylish women using their product, women being a key growth market for the companies…
…same for the brewers, who also sought out female consumers to bolster sales of their brands…
…Ponds continued to roll out the seeming legions of socialites and lower-tier royalty to sell their jars of cold cream…
…the magazine’s ads were often directed at middlebrow class anxieties, as we see here…
…by constrast, this ad from Bonwit Teller (graced by fashion illustrator W. Mury) took us out of the stuffy parlor and onto the beckoning beaches of the Caribbean…
…we move on to our cartoonists…all of the spot illustrations in the issue were holiday-themed, and here are a few choice examples…
…Daniel ‘Alain’ Brustlein introduced a bit of color to a monastery’s dining hall…
…James Thurber continued to explore the dynamics between the sexes…
…Barbara Shermund did a bit of dreaming with her modern women…
…Carl Rose gave us Christmas cheer, with some reservations…
…and lastly, Perry Barlow with something for the holiday procrastinator…
Above, left, a 1935 portrait of Gertrude Stein by Carl Van Vechten; right, Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas arriving in New York aboard the French Line’s SS Champlain in 1934. (Library of Congress/AP)
Much of America’s literary world was abuzz about the arrival of Gertrude Stein in New York after her nearly three-decade absence from the States. Audiences were mostly receptive to Stein’s lectures, even if they were largely unintelligible, but The New Yorker would have none of it.
Stein (1874–1946) visited the U.S. at the urging of friends who suggested that a lecture tour might help her gain an American audience for her work. She crisscrossed the country for 191 days, delivering seventy-four lectures in thirty-seven cities.
Writing for the Smithsonian Magazine (October 2011), Senior Editor Megan Gambino notes that publishing houses regarded Stein’s writing style as incomprehensible (Gambino writes that shortly after her arrival in the U.S., “psychiatrists speculated that Stein suffered from palilalia, a speech disorder that causes patients to stutter over words or phrases”), but in 1933 “she at last achieved the mass appeal she desired when she used a clearer, more direct voice” in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. However, Stein was still best known in the U.S. for her “insane” writings, as one New York Times reporter described Stein’s work upon the writer’s arrival in New York. Excerpts from the Oct. 25, 1934 edition of the Times:
Stein had also achieved success in America via her libretto to Virgil Thomson’s opera Four Saints in Three Acts. Prior to her visit, Stein was featured in a newsreel reading the “pigeon” passage from the libretto, which James Thurber satirized in this piece titled “There’s An Owl In My Room.” Excerpts.
Here is a YouTube clip of the newsreel satirized by Thurber. Stein begins her “pigeon” reading at the 30-second mark:
If Thurber found the libretto ridiculous, it was an opinion not necessarily shared by audiences who attended Four Saints in Three Acts, which premiered in Hartford, Connecticut, before making a six-week run on Broadway.
Since Stein had never seen the opera performed, writer and photographer Carl Van Vechten convinced Stein and Toklas to fly on an airplane for the first time in order to be able to see the play in Chicago.
Thurber wasn’t the only New Yorker writer to throw shade on Stein’s visit. In his “Books” column, Clifton Fadiman described Stein as a “mamma of dada” and a “Keyserling in divided skirts” (Hermann Keyserling was a non-academic German philosopher known for his platitudinous, obscure writings). Excerpt:
Fadiman continued by excoriating Stein’s latest book, Portraits and Prayers, likening its “shrill, incantatory” quality to “the rituals of a small child at solitary play.”
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Over the Rainbow
We leave Gertrude Stein for the time being and check in with Lois Long, who was sampling the fall attractions of the New York nightclub scene in “Tables for Two.” In these excerpts, the 32-year-old Long continued her pose as a much older woman (“about to settle down with a gray shawl”) as she bemoaned the bourgeoisie excess of places like the Colony, once known for its boho, speakeasy atmosphere. And then there was the Rainbow Room, with its organ blaring full blast to the delight of gawking tourists.
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From Our Advertisers
Just one ad from the Nov. 17 issue (more to come below)…the latest athlete to attest to the energizing effects of Camel cigarettes…Cliff Montgomery (1910–2005) was famed for a hidden ball trick play that led one of the greatest athletic upsets—Columbia’s 7-0 win over Stanford in the 1934 Rose Bowl. Montgomery would play one year with the NFL Brooklyn Dodgers, and would later earn a Silver Star for his heroism during World War II…
…on to our cartoonists, we begin with Robert Day’s jolly illustration for the “Goings On About Town” section…
…Rea Irvin looked into fair play among the fox hunting set…
…Garrett Price gave us a tender moment among the bones at the American Museum of Natural History…
…and Peter Arno introduced two wrestlers to an unwelcoming hostess…
…on to Nov. 24, 1934 issue, and the perils of the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade as illustrated on the cover by William Cotton…
…where we find still more scorn being heaped upon Gertrude Stein. “The Talk of the Town” offered this observation (excerpt):
…and E.B. White had the last word on Stein in his Dec. 1, 1934 “Notes and Comment” column:
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There Goes the Neighborhood
Returning to the Nov. 24 issue, Alberta Williams penned a lengthy “A Reporter at Large” column, titled “White-Collar Neighbors,” about the new Knickerbocker Village development in the Lower East Side. Real estate developer Fred French razed roughly one hundred buildings to build what has since been criticized as an example of early gentrification in Manhattan. Williams assessed the development after more than a year of construction, finding that despite federal funding, the leasing company had yet to rent any apartments “to Negroes or Orientals.” Although the development was meant to serve some of the families it displaced, the vast majority were forced to move back into slums due to escalating rents.
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Dollmaker
Raised in rural Nebraska, at an early age Rose O’Neill (1874–1944) demonstrated an artistic bent, and was already a published illustrator and writer when she drew her first images of “Kewpie” around the year 1908. A German doll manufacturer began producing a doll version of Kewpie in 1913, and they became an immediate hit, making O’Neill a millionaire and for a time the highest-paid female illustrator in the world. When Alexander King penned a profile of O’Neill, Kewpies were no longer the rage, but O’Neill was nevertheless determined to find success in a new doll line. Excerpts:
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Last Call
Lois Long was back with another installment of “Tables for Two” and in these excerpts she found the Central Park Casino a welcome place to hang out, apparently unaware that Parks Commissioner Robert Moses had already served an eviction notice to the Casino’s owners (Moses would tear down the Casino in 1936, mostly to settle a personal vendetta). Long also found respite at the Place Piquale, which featured the musical stylings of Eve Symington.
At the Place Piquale, Long was “grateful” to see that silent film star Louise Brooks was also a good dancer. An icon of Jazz Age flapper culture, Brooks loathed the Hollywood scene and the mediocre roles it offered, and after a stint making films in Europe she returned to the States, appearing in three more films before declaring bankruptcy in 1932. A former dancer for the Ziegfeld Follies, Brooks had turned back to dancing in nightclubs to make a living.
…and dance remains a theme with John Mosher’s film review of the Fred Astaire and Ginger Roger musical The Gay Divorcee, which was based on the 1932 Broadway musical Gay Divorce starring Astaire and Claire Luce.
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Using Her Heads
Clifton Fadiman praised Peggy Bacon’s collection of caricatures, Off With Their Heads!, which included drawings of fellow New Yorker contributors as well as various Algonquin Hotel acolytes. Excerpt:
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More From Our Advertisers
“Beautiful Vanderbilts” Mrs. Reginald Vanderbilt and Miss Frederica Vanderbilt Webb wowed one unnamed dermatologist who discovered that both had 20-year-old skin even though they were seven years apart! “Mrs. Reginald” was Gloria Morgan Vanderbilt, who was thirty when this ad was produced (Miss Frederica was apparently twenty-three). We’ve met Gloria Morgan Vanderbilt before, shilling for Pond’s—she was the maternal grandmother of television journalist Anderson Cooper, and earned her “bad mom” rep from Vanderbilt vs. Whitney, one of America’s most sensational custody trials…
…we move from skin care to who cares…in this case how many Spud cigs you smoke…hell, smoke three packs a day if you like, the cooling menthol will always keep you feeling fresh even as your lungs gradually darken and shrivel up…
…and here’s a lesson from the makers of Inecto hair dye, no doubt a company solely run by men, who schooled wives with the advice that you’d better color that gray hair pronto or your hubby will kick you to the curb…
…the New York American was a Hearst broadsheet known for its sensationalism, however it did claim Damon Runyon, Alice Hughes, Robert Benchley and Frank Sullivan among its contributors…the morning American merged with the New York Evening Journal to form the American and Evening Journal in 1937. That paper folded in 1966…
…illustrator Stuart Hay drew up this full page ad for the makers of Beech-Nut candy and chewing gum…when I was a kid we used to call this “grandpa gum”…
…on to our cartoonists, we begin with a Thanksgiving spot by Alain (Daniel Brustlein)…
…Barbara Shermund delivered another life of the party…
…George Price was finally bringing his floating man back to earth…
…Otto Soglow gave us an unlikely detour…
…Gardner Rea signaled the end to the 1933-34 Chicago World’s Fair…with a boom…
…Leonard Dove dialed up a familiar trope…
…and we close on a more pious note, with Mary Petty…
Darryl F. Zanuck (1902–1979) was an unlikely Hollywood mogul. Born in a small Nebraska town with an unusual name (both his and the town), Zanuck dropped out of school in the eighth grade, apparently bitten by the acting bug during a brief childhood sojourn in Los Angeles.
In the first part of a two-part profile, Alva Johnston began to probe the mystery of the boy from Wahoo who would rise to become one of Hollywood’s most powerful studio executives.
Johnston took a quick look at Zanuck’s humble origins, including his first encounter with the film industry at age eight. There must have been something in the water at Wahoo, a town of just 2,100 residents when Zanuck was born. Other Wahoo notables contemporary to Zanuck included Nobel Prize laureate and geneticist George Beadle, Pulitzer Prize–winning composer Howard Hanson, and Hall of Fame baseball player Sam Crawford, among others.
After writing dozens of scripts for Warner Brothers (including many for their popular canine star, Rin Tin Tin), in 1933 Zanuck would leave Warner and form 20th Century Pictures with Joseph Schenck. By the time Johnston penned the New Yorker profile, 20th Century had risen to be the most successful independent movie studio of its time.
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One-Way Street
It goes without saying that the interwar years of the 20th century were a time of extreme foment; Bolsheviks, communists, anarchists, fascists and other political agitators seemed to be constantly at each other’s throats as Europe prepared for its second act of self-annihilation. In the middle of it all was the Balkans, its many feuds always simmering near the boiling point.
After the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in 1914 (which, along with other factors, triggered World War I), you would have thought Europeans would have abandoned the practice of parading dignitaries through crowded streets. In 1934 they were reminded of its risks.
That year was King Alexander I of Yugoslavia’s thirteenth on the throne, but his time was running short in a country constantly beset by civil war. Fearing that the German Nazis and Italian Fascists would take advantage of the instability, on Oct. 9, 1934 French Foreign Minister Louis Barthou invited Alexander I to Marseille to sign a Franco-Yugoslav solidarity agreement. While Alexander and Barthou were being slowly driven in an open car through the city’s streets, a Bulgarian gunman, Vlado Chernozemski, stepped from the crowd, hopped onto the car’s running board, and shot Alexander along with his chauffeur. Barthou also died in the melee, killed by a stray bullet fired by French police (three women and a boy in the crowd were also fatally wounded by stray police bullets). Struck down by a policeman’s sword, Chernozemski was subsequently beaten to death by the enraged crowd. It was one of the first assassinations to be captured on film.
Paris correspondent Janet Flanner offered some thoughts about the incident in her “Paris Letter.” Excerpt:
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The Traffic Machine
In his “A Reporter at Large” column, Morris Markey sang praises for the Triborough Bridge project, which was making visible progress on the massive public work that commenced in 1930. City officials had dreamed for years about a project that would at once connect Manhattan, Queens and the Bronx, but it wasn’t until the power broker Robert Moses got involved as the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority chairman that things really started to move. Moses biographer Robert Caro wrote that “Triborough was not a bridge so much as a traffic machine, the largest ever built.” A brief excerpt:
As noted by Markey, the “people in charge” were forthright about the bridge’s completion date of July 1, 1936. And they kept their word. The bridge was substantially complete by June 1936, and would be dedicated on July 11, with Moses serving as master of ceremonies.
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The common zipper was a relatively new invention in 1934. It had been more or less perfected by 1920, and in 1923 the B. F. Goodrich Company would coin the onomatopoetic word to describe the newfangled fastener on its galoshes, but it would take a while for the fashion industry to adopt the zipper as a replacement for buttons on garments, including men’s trousers. And so we get this staid-looking ad from Wetzel that signaled its entry into the brave new world of zippers (Talon was the dominant U.S. producer of zippers for many years)…
…this next ad is kind of amazing, a 1935 Auburn for only $695, which roughly translates to $15,000 or so today—still a bargain…known for cars that were fast, good-looking and expensive (and favored by Hollywood elite), Auburn struggled mightily during the Depression…along with its sister marques Duesenberg and Cord, the company would fold in 1937…
…during Prohibition distillers were allowed to keep stocks of whiskies produced before the 18th Amendment went into force…some of these were distributed through pharmacies during Prohibition for “medicinal purposes”…what was left over was sold after repeal, a stock of “pre-prohibition casks” that would be exhausted before Christmas, or so the ad rather alarmingly suggested…
…we first met tennis star Ellsworth Vines Jr a few issues ago when he was touting the health and energy benefits of Camel cigarettes…here he promotes an unlikely “stimulant”—Pabst Blue Ribbon ale…Vines testified that “the demand for more and more speed in sports calls for a finer and finer ‘edge’ of physical condition” and observed that PBR was “a great preventive of overtraining and staleness”…yep, after a few brewskies who feels like doing anything, let alone play tennis?…
…on to our cartoonists we open with a couple of spots by George Shellhase…
…and Gregory d’Alessio…
…William Crawford Galbraith gave us a fish out of water (the caption reads: You New Yorkers didn’t know we were so sophisticated in Detroit, did you?)…
…George Price still hadn’t come back to earth in his latest installment…
…Gardner Rea illustrated the results of charitable acts by the Junior League…
…and we close with James Thurber, and kindness from a stranger…
Klemperer also guest conducted a number of orchestras in the U.S., including the New York Philharmonic, where his larger than life presence caught the attention of “The Talk of the Town.” Excerpts:
Lauded internationally as a great orchestral commander, in 1939 Klemperer would begin experiencing balance issues. After a tumor the size of a small orange was removed from his brain, he would be left partially paralyzed on his right side; bouts of depression and a manic phase would later land him in a mental hospital. However, by 1946 he would recover his health enough to return to conducting in a career that would last until 1971.
The conductor’s daughter, Lotte Klemperer (1923–2003), would serve as her father’s secretary, negotiator and administrator until his death in 1973. Otto’s son, Werner Klemperer (1920–2000), would become a stage, screen and television actor, most notably portraying Colonel Klink in the 1960s comedy Hogan’s Heroes. Although the role would garner Werner two Emmys, his father never fully understood the series or even the concept of a sitcom. Reluctant to pursue a musical career while his father was alive, Werner would later join the Metropolitan Opera Company in the 1970s, appear in Broadway musicals, and serve as a narrator with a number of American symphony orchestras.
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Vanished in the Haze
In his “Notes and Comment,” E.B. White lamented what appeared to be the transformation of the familiar night club; high above Manhattan in the Rockefeller Center’s Rainbow Room, the comforting haze of “cigarette smoke, talc, waiter’s venom” had been displaced by air conditioning, and to add to the horror, an organ had been installed that tinged the fox trot “with an odd piety.”
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There Oughta Be a Law
While E.B. White was mourning the demise of the smoky nightclub, art and design critic Lewis Mumford continued his tirade against the pretentious and mediocre buildings that were popping up all over the city, including the new Federal Court Building on Centre Street that was, in Mumford’s words, a supreme example of bad design and fake grandeur.
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Crime of the Century
That is what the press called the kidnap and murder of the infant son of Charles Lindbergh and Anne Morrow. In September 1934 a German immigrant carpenter named Bruno Hauptmann was arrested for the crime, and a trial date was set for the following January. In his “A Reporter at Large” column, Morris Markey examined the ransom money trail that led to Hauptmann’s ultimate arrest. Excerpts:
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Should Have Stayed Lost
A film version of Willa Cather’s 1923 novel A Lost Lady was first made as a silent by Warner Brothers in 1924 (the film itself is lost) but in 1934 Warner had another go at the novel with a sound version starring starring Barbara Stanwyck, who was emerging as a major star. But Stanwyck’s talents could not overcome a script that critic John Mosher described as bleak, blank nonsense. Cather was so dismayed by the film that she refused to permit another adaptation of any of her novels during her lifetime.
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We kick off our sponsors with this two-page center spread from Hiram Walker & Sons, who introduced their new line of playing card-inspired whiskies…
…the New Yorker’s Janet Flanner wrote in 1938 that Elsie de Wolfe invented interior design as a profession, so who was to argue with de Wolfe’s suggestion that the leisure class should linger in bed with the aid of a Wamsutta bed-rest…the small print beneath the logo indicated that the bed-rest was “hair-filled,” which I assume was horse hair, still used today in some luxury brands…
…if de Wolfe was queen of interior designers, then Hattie Carnegie was the “First Lady of Fashion,” or so this ad claimed…
…here are images of the two titans of fashion and good taste…
…and speaking of fashion, here is a llama cloth coat from B. Altman, trimmed in silver raccoon, suitable for Yale football games…based on inflation, that coat today would set you back at least $2,000…
…this condescending ad offered merchants a way to reach the “hitherto strange and aloof women of New York” through daytime advertising…
…Plymouth enlisted the talents of Alan Dunn to tout their car’s ride and durability…
…and on to our cartoonists, another from Dunn, a bit of spot art featuring a not so subtle commentary on Lawrence Lee Bazley Angas’s book The Coming American Boom…
…and some spot art from Isadore Klein…
…Miguel Covarrubias contributed to the theater review section…
…James Thurber entertained a house guest…
…George Price was still up in the air…
…Helen Hokinson took a spin with a celebrity look-alike…
…and Barbara Shermund offered another glimpse into the life of a modern woman…
…on to Oct. 20, 1934…
…in which E.B. White offered up a new lament, namely the pervasiveness of nostalgia and sentiment in contemporary literature…
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Fifty Years Young
“The Talk of the Town” marked the Dakota’s 50th year at Central Park West, and made note of its loyal and prominent clientele…back in the day it served as a residence for actors such as Lillian Gish, Boris Karloff, and Teresa Wright, and in later years such luminaries as Lauren Bacall, Judy Garland, Rudolf Nureyev, and, of course, John Lennon and Yoko Ono.
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The Matson-Oceanic Line offered a “millionaire’s idea of a vacation” at an affordable price, and offered this sumptuous image as proof…
…E.B. White wasn’t crazy about the smokeless dazzle of the Rainbow Room, but it proved to be popular among the city’s elite…
…in case one was concerned about the provenance of one’s mink coat, Saks posted this helpful ad. Their high-end, natural-skin minks were priced at $8,000 (roughly $180,000 today); there was, however, a caveat regarding the cheaper models…
…Bergdorf Goodman offered up another ad featuring an impossibly attenuated model posed with a cigarette, her defiant gaze suggesting her modernity and individualism…
…Plymouth went back to the stable of New Yorker cartoonists, this time featuring the adventures of Helen Hokinson’s “girls”…
…and we segue to the rest of our cartoonists, including this spot by Constantin Alajalov…
…and this by George Price…
…who also gave us another update on the trials and tribulations of his floating man…
… James Thurber occasionally ignored scale in rendering his characters, which didn’t really matter in his strange world…
…Jack Markow had some bad news for two sign painters (the caption size is increased for readability)…
…and we close with Peter Arno, and the winner of most original Halloween costume…
…and before I go…this is being posted on Halloween, 2023, so here are a few images from 1934 to get you in the spirit, including a Saturday Evening Post cover, a 1934 party ideas magazine, and a page from Popular Mechanics featuring a smoking robot costume you could make yourself…in the 1930s, Popular Mechanics often featured Halloween party ideas that were downright lethal, usually involving electric shocks, pistols loaded with blanks, that sort of thing.
Above: Bill "Bojangles" Robinson demonstrating his famous stair dance, which involved a different rhythm and pitch for each step. At left, Robinson in Broadway's Blackbirds of 1928; at right, publicity photo circa 1920s. (Vandamm collection, New York Public Library/bet.com)
Bill “Bojangles” Robinson (1878–1949) is considered one of the greatest tap dancers of all time, introducing a style of remarkable lightness and complexity that was perhaps best represented by his famous stair dance.
St. Clair McElway wrote about the 57-year-old Robinson in a two-part profile that examined his personal life and habits, including his propensity for getting shot. Two brief excerpts:
The New Yorker profile coincided with Robinson’s rising career in films, including four he made with Shirley Temple. For the 1935 film The Little Colonel, Robinson taught the stair dance to the child star, modifying his routine to mimic her movements. Robinson and Temple became the first interracial dance partners in Hollywood history (however, the step dance scene was cut from the film shown to Southern audiences). Temple and Robinson, who became lifelong friends, also appeared together in 1935’s The Littlest Rebel, 1938’s Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm and 1938’s Just Around the Corner.Â
Robinson is remembered for his generous support of fellow dancers including Fred Astaire, Eleanor Powell, Lena Horne, Sammy Davis Jr and Ann Miller, as well as his support for the career of 1936 Olympics star Jesse Owens.
Although Robinson was the highest paid black performer of his time, his generosity with friends as well as his gambling habits left him penniless at his death from heart failure in 1949. Longtime friend Ed Sullivan paid for Robinson’s funeral, and more than 30,000 filed past his casket to pay their respects.
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In a Romantic Mood
That is how St. Clair McKelway found Hollywood in two of its latest offerings, The Barretts of Wimple Street and Caravan. To his relief, he found the Hollywood version of Barretts quite “sensible”…
…as for Caravan, McKelway wrote that he’d “never seen a picture with so much grinning in it.” He found the “peculiar, unreal gleam” of the actors’ teeth a real distraction in closeup shots.
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The Oct. 6 issue opened with a study in contrasts: an image of two Civil War veterans swapping stories over whiskey on the inside front cover, paired with an illustration of a lithe model sheathed in the latest fashion from Bergdorf…
…the folks at Campbell’s continued to suggest that their canned soup was a delight of the elite…
…Heinz took a similar tack, showing the smart set having fun with their sandwich spreads…
…Lord & Taylor touted its “tomorrow look” in furniture…
…R.J. Reynolds continued its series of “distinguished women who preferred Camel’s “costlier tobaccos,” adding to their growing list a the “charming debutante” Evelyn Cameron Watts, who later became Evelyn Watts Fiske (1915–1976)…
…in contrast to Camel’s fashionable ads, the upstart menthol brand Kool offered a series of cheap, back-page ads featuring a smoking penguin, here in the Halloween spirit (detail)…
…another recurring back page ad was this weird spot from Satinmesh, a product that apparently helped close a woman’s “gaping pores”…those pores apparently prompted one man to ponder the eternal why…
…on to our cartoonists, we begin with a two-page spot by Carl Rose…
…James Thurber spiced up a game of ping-pong…
…Mary Petty explored the miracle of birth…
…Peter Arno discovered you’re never too old to play with toys…
…Garrett Price offered a young man’s perspective on a father’s avocation…
…Alain (Daniel Brustlein) gave us a disappointed plutocrat on vacation in Mexico…
…George Price continued to mine the humor of his “floating man” series…
…and contributed a second cartoon that featured some office hijinks…
…and Otto Soglow returned without The Little King, offering in its stead the closest thing to royalty in America…
Before we sign off, a note on the Oct. 6 cover artist, Charles Henry Alston (1907–1977). A Harlem-based painter, sculptor, illustrator, muralist and teacher, Alston was active in the Harlem Renaissance and was the first Black supervisor for the Works Progress Administration’s Federal Art Project. In 1990, Alston’s bust of Martin Luther King Jr. became the first image of an African American displayed at the White House.
McSorley’s Old Ale House is probably best known to New Yorker readers through the work of Joseph Mitchell, who was noted for his distinctive character studies in The New Yorker and who in 1943 published McSorley’s Wonderful Saloon, which was later included in a 1992 collection of Mitchell’s works, Up In the Old Hotel.
Among New York’s oldest saloons, McSorley’s was one of the last of the “Men Only” pubs, finally admitting women in 1970 after the state required the saloon to comply with the U.S. Constitution’s Equal Protection Clause. McSorley’s was visited by many famous patrons in its long history, a mixed bunch that included Abraham Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, Harry Houdini and John Lennon. Nine years before Mitchell would pen his account of the saloon, “The Talk of the Town” took a look.
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Of the People
The Italian-American labor organizer Carlo Tresca was a gifted orator and outspoken critic of anyone who stood in his way in his quest for workers’ rights. As political activist and writer Max Eastman pointed out in the lead paragraph of a two-part profile, speaking truth to power also prompted a number of deadly assaults on Tresca (1879–1943), whose campaign for justice was ultimately cut short by an assassin’s bullet in 1943. A brief excerpt:
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Up In Smoke
Lewis Mumford sniffed at much of the new architecture popping up around his city, but he took an especially big whiff of the new incinerator that rose above the neighborhoods at 215th Street and Ninth Avenue. When the incinerator opened in 1934 the city stopped dumping its garbage into the sea (it was fouling the beaches) and began burning the stuff around the clock in Harlem, where residents had put up with the smoke and cinders that were emitted from the supposedly “odorless” plant. Cole Thompson’s website My Inwood is a great place to read more about it.
Mumford brightened, however, at another development in the Turtle Bay neighborhood, where architect William Lescaze (1896–1969) had slipped a bright, modernist house in between two dusky brownstones on East 48th Street. The house featured extensive use of glass block in its construction, an architectural first in the city.
Mumford noted that the recent invention of home air-conditioning systems made it possible for Lescaze to bring light deep into the central core of the building…
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Poser
The novelist and poet Raymond Holden (1894–1972) was a regular contributor to The New Yorker from 1929 to 1943. For the Sept.15 issue he assumed the guise of an economist to pen this cheeky letter to the editors:
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Head in the Clouds
Film critic John Mosher thought Bing Crosby was a fine singer, but he couldn’t quite fathom why the movie-makers at Paramount thought the singer would be even more attractive if he was sent aloft using various camera tricks.
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The advertising department must have been thrilled with the flurry of ads that announced the fall and winter fashions…here are three examples, the first two focused on styles supposedly designed attract the opposite sex…the International Silk Guild promised that the “swish” of silk would turn any man’s head…
…while B. Altman’s “Young Colony Shop” claimed you could get your man with the “swish and billow” of taffeta…
…B. Altman ran a second full-page ad to catch a bit older demographic, less concerned with landing a man and more concerned with sending the proper signals to fellow Anglophiles…
…the folks at Matrix shoes were looking for a way to associate their “Countess” model with modern living, but what they got was an image of people waving farewell to some flying footwear…
…and here is another in a continuing series of ads from R.J. Reynolds that claimed “science” had confirmed the refreshing, energizing effect of its Camel cigarettes…
…we clear the air with this attractive ad beckoning New Yorkers to sun-kissed Bermuda…
…Budweiser continued its series of Rockwellesque portraits of old men enjoying its product…
…and this two-page spread from Fisher—maker of car bodies for General Motors—shows us how young tots travelled in the days before plastic car seats and other restraining devices…
…on to our cartoonists we begin with a couple examples of spot illustrations from the opening pages…
…on to Peter Arno…the caption reads, “I adore driving at night. Once I caught my foot in a bear trap, though”…the humor is lost on me…I suppose she is referring to a speed trap, perhaps set by an amorous cop…
…speaking of amorous, William Steig explored the subject amongst his “Small Fry”…
…Gardner Rea sat in on an unlikely boast…
…Perry Barlow illustrated the doldrums associated with waitressing…
…Garrett Price checked in on the latest developments in deep sea exploration…
…the cartoon refers to the explorations of William Beebe, who along with engineer Otis Barton descended in a bathysphere to a record 3,028 feet (923 m) on Aug. 15, 1934…
…and we close with Gilbert Bundy, and a couple of horse wranglers…