Assignment to Hell (7 page)

O
N THE EVENING OF
J
UNE
6, 1946, the second anniversary of D-Day, A. J. Liebling was at the Palace Bar and Grill, a West Forty-fifth Street watering hole run by a cigar-chomping barkeep named Joe Braun. Liebling loved his saloon chum; Braun spoke Liebling’s language, the gritty patois of “side-street New York.”
⁹⁰
The
New Yorker
writer had come alone to Braun’s joint that night, beleaguered by thoughts of Easy Red and Normandy.

Liebling sat on a barstool and drank quietly. After a while he looked up and asked Braun, “Have you ever seen a deck awash with blood and condensed milk?” Braun didn’t say anything and went off to chip ice and serve someone else. Liebling, thinking his friend callous, was irked.

But a few moments later Braun stood in front of Liebling, put his cigar on the bar, and said, “If you seen that, Joe, it will stay with you.” Liebling, Cronkite, Rooney, Bigart, and Boyle “seen” much in the Allies’ crusade to right a world gone hideously wrong—and it stayed with them.

A decade after the war ended, Liebling wrote that if you leave memories alone, “they’ll come home, wagging their tails behind them. In time, they recur in forms so implausible that you must go back and make sure the events they represent were real.”
⁹¹

F
or a stubby man with flat feet, Joe Liebling was amazingly agile. Acquaintances in London during the war were startled to see him jogging through Hyde Park, a towel tucked inside his sweatshirt, tossing jabs and uppercuts, à la a boxer doing roadwork. While covering combat in North Africa and France, Liebling surprised reporter pals and platoon sergeants with his stamina and quickness afoot.

Still, whether at the Hotel Aletti in Algiers, Scott’s Bar in Piccadilly, or a dumpy café in La Rive Gauche, Joe Liebling did some of his best work sitting on a barstool. It was in a gin joint near the
New Yorker
offices in the fall of 1939 that Liebling wheedled his way to Paris. Janet Flanner, the
New Yorker
’s longtime Paris correspondent who wrote under the pseudonym Genêt, had a family situation that required her to return to the States. Liebling, who’d studied at the Sorbonne in 1926 and adored everything French, had always coveted the Parisian beat, especially now that his
héros
in the French army were, for the second time in two decades, facing down their foe from the east.

His immediate superior, fellow writer St. Clair McKelway, was impressed by anyone who could converse in a foreign tongue. So after Liebling plied him with alcohol and began not only babbling in French but also offering paeans to Gaulic culture and cuisine, McKelway, who’d been cool to the idea of his chubby thirty-five-year-old friend heading to Paris with Hitler’s forces massed along the Maginot Line, crumbled.

But before Liebling could book passage on the Pan Am Clipper, the move had to be blessed by Harold Ross, the
New Yorker
’s irascible founder. Ross loved Liebling’s writing but fretted that Joe’s appetite for
ooh la la!
might do him in. “But for God’s sake stay away from the low-life!” Ross barked as the ebullient Liebling plotted his return to the City of Light.
²

In truth, it was Liebling’s passion for New York’s raffish underground that made him such an invaluable contributor to Ross’ magazine. There was no shortage of
New Yorker
writers familiar with Manhattan’s upscale haunts. But no one else at the journal knew the city’s gambling dens and boxing havens and forbidden speakeasies.
³

Indeed, it was a back-alley assignment that got Liebling hired in the first place. That and the fact that McKelway was almost as big a screwup—which, given Liebling’s checkered academic and professional past, was saying a lot. McKelway, remembered
New Yorker
editor Katharine S. White, had been assigned a 1935 story about a black evangelical faith healer accused of bilking his flock. Although a gifted stylist, McKelway was a slipshod interviewer and note taker. Liebling, who could be methodical when he put his mind to it and had connections to bunko artists that could prove helpful, was signed on as McKelway’s legman.
⁴
Their partnership worked beautifully, the story turned out edgy, and Liebling was given a job at the only publication in America suited to his tastes and talent.

His
New Yorker
colleague Brendan Gill marveled at one of Liebling’s devastating interview techniques: Joe liked to sit in stony silence, his ovoid head cocked to one side, staring at the interviewee, until the poor thing cracked.
⁵
It was said of Ring Lardner, one of Liebling’s sportswriting idols, that he talked in grunts. Liebling, wrote First Army public relations officer Lieutenant Roy Wilder, Jr., was the obverse: Joe talked in chuckles.

When provoked, however, chuckling Joe was prone to fisticuffs. One
night at Bleeck’s Artist and Writers saloon on West Fortieth, John Parsons O’Donnell, a lippy America Firster with the
New York Daily News
, loudly disparaged the Roosevelt Administration. Liebling unleashed a couple of haymakers before friends hauled him away.
⁶
Another night at Bleeck’s he flattened a loudmouth—supposedly with one punch—who was spewing anti-Semitic garbage. It was one of Joe’s prouder moments.

Katharine S. White, E.B.’s wife, was around Liebling for decades. She was astonished that, unlike the other temperamental writers in her orbit, Liebling never seemed to suffer from writer’s block.
⁷
Liebling’s colleagues, most of whom agonized over every word, would shake their heads as they walked past Joe’s office with its clattering typewriter. Within minutes he’d be prowling the hallways, eager to show off his immaculate copy.

“I can write better than anyone who can write faster,” Liebling once boasted. “And I can write faster than anyone who can write better.”
⁸

I
T’S NOT THAT THE FAST-BUT-STILL-GOOD
Liebling couldn’t have been a successful newspaperman. It’s that he chose not to. Of his two years studying at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, Liebling wrote that it “had all the intellectual status of a training school for future employees of the A & P.”
⁹

As a cub reporter at the
Providence Journal and Evening Bulletin
and later a night deskman at the
New York Times
, he exhibited the same cheeky indifference that had gotten him thrown out of Dartmouth College as an undergrad in the early ’20s. In Hanover he was dismissed for repeatedly cutting compulsory chapel service. At the
Journal
, he decided that covering civic meetings and petty crime in a provincial town was beneath him. But the clincher came at the
Times
, where Liebling was unceremoniously dumped for messing around on the overnight sports desk. Liebling somehow thought it would be clever to list the referees for high school basketball games as
Ignoto
, Italian for “unknown.”
¹⁰
Once his recurring gag was uncovered, the
Times
bade him
arrivederci.

He went on to work at the
New York World
(later the
World-Telegram
) in the early ’30s, where, at least on occasion, he flashed lush writing and
reportorial skills. But the daily grind of journalism bored him; in ’35, when the
World-Telly
stiffed him on a raise, he quit.

Liebling’s cockiness was rooted in a pampered childhood of nannies, private schools, and summering at Lake Como. His father, Joseph, although conspicuously nonobservant, achieved the dream of every Jewish immigrant. While still a young man, the Austrian émigré became
balabos far sich
(Yiddish for “one’s own boss”
¹¹
), striking it rich in the furrier trade and real estate. In a few short years, Joseph went from living hand to mouth in Manhattan’s Bowery to basking on the Upper West Side. He married a socially prominent San Franciscan named Anna Slone, whose Judaism was almost as indifferent as his own.

Their first child, Abbott Joseph, born in the fall of 1904, would be raised only nominally Jewish. Abbott, as his parents insisted on calling him, harbored ambivalent feelings about his ancestry, never quite embracing it, but never quite repudiating it, either. “Even Hitler didn’t make [Liebling] an intensely self-conscious Jew,” his third wife, the writer Jean Stafford, remarked.
¹²

Liebling was a pudgy kid who never backed down if a playground tough taunted him about his weight, or his girly name, or his thick glasses. Young Abbott was forever losing his specs when he took them off to mix it up in upper Manhattan or later in Far Rockaway on the Queens/western Long Island border, where the family moved in 1913.

For the rest of his life, Liebling remained an unrepentant New Yorker. Among his first books was a collection of pieces on his passion for life in the Big Apple. The charm of America’s heartland eluded Liebling. “Friends often tell me of their excitement when the train on which they are riding passes from Indiana into Illinois, or back again,” Liebling wrote in
Back Where I Came From
. “I am ashamed to admit that when the Jerome Avenue express rolls into Eighty-sixth Street Station I have absolutely no reaction.”
¹³

He almost never got the chance to extol New York’s virtues. As an eleven-year-old, Liebling contracted typhoid fever. For six months he was confined to bed, a condition that left him delirious for a time but fueled a voracious reading habit. The infirm Liebling devoured what he later called the “literature of fact,” developing a lifelong infatuation for the writing of
“Stendhal,” Marie-Henri Beyle, the nineteenth-century Frenchman considered the father of literary realism. Liebling’s French was so advanced that, as a teenager, he could appreciate Stendhal in the writer’s native tongue. In his youth Liebling read a lot of fiction, mainly Charles Dickens, but never cared as much for make-believe. Years later, Liebling’s efforts at crafting straight fiction proved frustrating, although he loved the detective stories of Frenchman Guy de Maupassant. Joe proudly became “my own Sherlock Holmes,” he said.
¹⁴

Young Liebling also followed the horrors of the Great War—the sinking of the
Lusitania
, the siege at Gallipoli, the early trench maneuvering at the Somme. By the time the French commander at Verdun issued his gallant vow
“Ils ne passeront pas!”
(“They shall not pass!”), Liebling had become a Francophile. He developed a scorn toward everything Germanic. Since his parents had hired a series of fräuleins, spiteful German nannies, to watch over Liebling and his younger sister, it didn’t take much to persuade young Abbott that there was something inherently defective in Teutonic culture.

What Liebling loved most about his old man was that he was street savvy, a guy who talked pure “Noo Yawk,” knew his way around a con game, and palled around with the shady characters Joe loved to call “boskos,” or “gozzlers,” or, most memorably, “Telephone Booth Indians.” Liebling reveled in telling effete friends about how his father, with a well-timed contribution, had snookered Reverend Charles Parkhurst, an antivice crusader, into ridding a certain Manhattan neighborhood of prostitutes. Unbeknownst to the good preacher, as soon as the streetwalkers were ejected, a syndicate headed by Liebling senior swooped in to make a killing on the suddenly “clean” real estate.
¹⁵

A
T ROUGHLY THE SAME TIME
, Homer William Bigart’s father, Homer S., wasn’t providing blood money to ministers or taking his clan on summer jaunts to Switzerland. Bigart senior, in fact, was barely getting by in Hawley, Pennsylvania, a factory and coal-mining hamlet perched in the Poconos between Scranton and the Delaware Water Gap. Old man Bigart
made sweaters for a living, running a shop in which his bookworm son and two daughters toiled after school.

Young Homer, tall and pasty with stringy dark hair, was exceptionally bright but had a debilitating stutter. Homer senior and his wife, Anna Schardt Bigart, were devout parishioners at First Presbyterian, a few steps from their home on Church Street. His Calvinist upbringing, his harsh surroundings, and his social awkwardness all contributed to young Homer’s combative personality, future colleagues surmised. Bigart’s prickliness served him well in the newspaper business. Even his smiles bore traces of “wry exasperation,” recalled Betsy Wade, who worked with Bigart at both the
Herald Tribune
and the
Times
and collected a book of Homer’s best war correspondence.
¹⁶