[3/15/2011] Wolcott Gibbs Tonight: Part 1 of "One with Nineveh" -- Gibbs's reencounter with Lucius Beebe (continued)

Charles Clegg and Lucius Beebe in the office of the Territorial Enterprise newspaper, Virginia City, Nevada (from the jacket of their book Steamcars to the Comstock, 1957). Wikipedia: "By the standards of the era, the homosexual relationship Beebe and Clegg shared was relatively open and well-known."

"Just who is this Mr. Beebe?" [my 16-year-old daughter] asked as we sped in the taxi from Eighty-second Street to the foot of Forty-second, where the ferry Utica lay.

"A friend," I replied. "A fashion plate. A sport."

"You and your friends," she said with habitual derision, but pressed the point no further. My answer was a poor one, though, and I am trying now to amplify it in my mind.

-- Wolcott Gibbs, in "One with Nineveh"

For a present-day take on Lucius Beebe, you might check out this Book Patrol blogpost.

One with Nineveh

Part 1

One recent Sunday afternoon, following a well-blazed trail, I went over to Weehawken, New Jersey, for cocktails with Lucius Beebe and Charles Clegg, whose private car was moored there on Track 1 in the New York Central yards. A strange excursion for a Sunday afternoon -- strange for my wife and me, to whom Mr. Beebe and, to a lesser extent, Mr. Clegg are memoranda from the remote and jocular past; strange indeed for our sixteen-year-old daughter, who has seen few millionaires in the flesh, and none ever on a siding.

"Just who is this Mr. Beebe?" she asked as we sped in the taxi from Eighty-second Street to the foot of Forty-second, where the ferry Utica lay.

"A friend," I replied. "A fashion plate. A sport."

"You and your friends," she said with habitual derision, but pressed the point no further. My answer was a poor one, though, and I am trying now to amplify it in my mind.

It was, I find on reference to Who's Who, in 1929 that Mr. Beebe first swam hugely into the life of this metropolis. He was twenty-seven then, and his career already had certain legendary aspects. He had attended Yale but, proving too vivacious for the faculty, had moved on to Harvard, where he was graduated, though not without some official misgivings, as a Bachelor of Arts. His bent, in the undergraduate years, was poetic, and he had issued feuilletons on Villon and Edwin Arlington Robinson. He also wrote verse of his own, and, for some inscrutable reason, a fragment that won the Richard Memorial Prize at Yale in 1923 is still in my possession. The first and final stanzas will suffice:

I am weary of these times and their dull burden,
Sweating and laboring in the summer noontide,
And the hot stench of inland forges
Sickens my nostrils.

Soon there will be no more metals to plunder,
There will be no more forests to slash and dismember,
Then, O chosen people, nation of fortune,
Where is thy glory?

This poem, I am in a position to add, was reviewed, in question-and-answer form, in the Yale Daily News:

Q. What is the theme?
A. Defeat, foreseen or expected, lying in wait for American materialism.
Q. What does the author indicate will remain after said defeat?
A. Nothing.

Other and less spiritual tidings preceded the youthful Beebe into town. At Yale, it was his merry custom, on returning from weekends in New York, to attend his first Monday-morning class in full evening dress, wearing a monocle and carrying a gold-headed cane, and the News, stunned by such gloss in a contemporary, reported that "two hemispheres knew him at nineteen." At Harvard, his room contained a roulette wheel and a bar equipped to make any drink a guest could name. His departure from New Haven was partly the result of his appearance in a stage box at the Hyperion Theatre extravagantly bearded and brandishing a bottle and shouting that he was Professor Henry Hallam Tweedy, of the Divinity School. His stay at Harvard was enlivened by his circulation of a ballot to determine how the college stood on trading President Lowell and three full professors for a good running backfield. These exploits and several like them, being so accurately part of the climate of a peculiar time, were widely reported in the press, and Mr. Beebe showed up in this parish trailing, if not clouds of glory, at least a certain antique and fashionable radiance.

Reading over what I have written, I can see that it will convey little to young and sober readers, who almost surely have no idea how whimsically celebrity was come by in the twenties. The New York chapter of the saga, I'm afraid, will be hardly more illuminating. I remember I thought about that as the Utica cleared her slip and, lurching and clanking, set out for the western bank. The cabin of the ferry was a good place to think about the past, since, except for the advertisements on the wall, it differed little from those in the old sidewheelers that used to take me to and from Palisades Park. The ladies in my party, assailed by many searching aromas (less vehement, however, than those diffused by the horses of my youth) and highly suspicious of a craft with a propeller at each end, behaved rather badly on the seven-minute passage, but my own mind was calm and clear. I am soothed by anachronisms, being, I suppose, so nearly one myself.

To the best of my recollection, I met Mr. Beebe first during the winter of 1931. It was in one of the speakeasies that then contained so much of our social life, and I remember him, immense, pink, and menacingly groomed, standing at the bar and booming out a denunciation of the Newspaper Guild, which he appeared to regard as a branch of the Maffia. Additional jocosities had already collected around him. His salary as a reporter on the Tribune was, I think, only thirty-five dollars a week, but his private means were boundless and his wardrobe consisted of no fewer than forty suits, none, of course, duplicating another. It was rumored that he had once gone out to report a negligible fire in a morning coat, and a tedious dinner of the Landscape Gardening Society in top hat and tails. His jewelry, according to further material in my files, included three gold cigarette cases, valued at approximately seven hundred dollars each; a Kashmir sapphire cabochon ring, at twelve hundred dollars; a single emerald stud worth five hundred dollars; and a platinum evening watch that cost a thousand. His attitude, in general, was that a decent respect for the profession of journalism demanded all these accessories. "I wear formal clothes, morning or evening, whenever they are called for," he was quoted as saying at the time, "and regard them quite literally as the livery of my business. As a reporter for the Tribune, I would no more think of entering a restaurant in the evening out of dinner dress than I would in swimming shorts."

In spite of this almost sanctified approach, he was, Im afraid, never much of a reporter. For one thing, the outrageous majesty of his appearance was often too much for the people he was dispatched to interview, many of whom suspected him of being an elaborate practical joke on the part of the Tribune's management and clammed up accordingly. For another, he had little interest in the small triumphs and disasters that constitute the bulk of each day's news, and he wrote about them with blank distaste and only a perfunctory attention to the spelling of the names.

The Tribune soon discovered that an error had been made, and the young man was transferred to the drama department, where he lingered long enough to describe Hollywood as "the outhouse of civilization" and the men and women of the theatre, with a few icily cultivated exceptions, as "preposterous bores and mountebanks." It was not a successful experiment. In June, 1934, however, he came at last to what must have seemed the goal of his dreams. This was his appointment to conduct a weekly department called "This New York." In essence, it was a gossip column, but it was different from any seen before or since. Unlike Winchell, Walker, Sullivan, or Lyons, Mr. Beebe was not concerned with the gritty amours of midtown Manhattan, the ineligible suburbs, or the unspeakable cities of the plain. He had no political convictions, except perhaps that all politics are vile, and he was not impressed with the usual objects of public veneration, having other and far more elevated standards of his own. The particular charm of his work lay in the rigid boundaries of its subject matter. "This New York" was concerned exclusively with the goings on of a group of people making up something known as Café Society, and Mr. Beebe's requirements for membership were stern. "A general definition of Café Society," he wrote, "might be: an unorganized but generally recognized group of persons who participate in the professional and social life of New York available to those possessed of a certain degree of affluence and manners." There were, he added, no more than five hundred men and women in all the world fit for the dizzy heights.

The crumbling files yield visions of this spacious life:

Doris Duke has nine Rolls-Royces . . . M. Andre Simon of the Wine and Food Society ordered a bowl of spring flowers removed because it infringed on the bouquet of the Chateau Latour '20 . . . Margaret Valdi Curtis, a relative of Lord Asquith, is around town singing Tahitian songs in a straw skirt . . . Mrs. Graham Fair Vanderbilt's butler is reported to have been dismissed for saying "O.K., Madam" . . . Prince Kyril Scherbatoff, A. K. Mills, and this department discovered the other day they were wearing identical suits. Tony Williams is a wretch to have duplicated them on us.

And:

Cecil Beaton, the languid photographer of folk who count, is back in town from London, and bravely carrying the torch for clothes that set Manhattan's lorgnons a'quiver. He showed up at the Colony for lunch last week in a little number Lanvin had run up for him in a pale shade of apple green, with a darker green waistcoat, double-breasted and buttoned with gold and emerald links. Everyone remarked how fine and brave he was.

I regret to say that I took almost no part in these festivities, partly because I lacked the appropriate suits and partly because my vitality has never been intense. For this reason, I encountered Mr. Beebe only in the lobbies of theatres and in saloons that catered to the working classes, especially newspapermen. His attitude in these establishments now seems to me to have been indulgent. My own is harder to define. I understood, that is, that Mr. Beebe was intended to represent a Charles Dana Gibson illustration for a book by Richard Harding Davis, and I was impressed both by the fidelity of the likeness and by the astounding amount of effort that had gone into producing it. The object of the whole charade, however, was almost completely inscrutable to me.

A satirical pen-and-ink drawing (click to enlarge) by
illustrator Charles Dana Gibson, creator of the "Gibson Girl"

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