CROSS COUNTRY
" THE NEW YORKER" IN HOLLYWOOD
Nobody knew her before she came. Nobody would have paid
the slightest attention to her had she come on her own. She was a pleas–
ant and friendly person, to be sure, but not particularly decorative–
something which ordinarily would have eliminated her immediately from
circulation in Hollywood; she was not even what is known as an "inter–
esting person." There was nothing in her present life that any columnist
would have been interested in-except for the fame into which she was
catapulted by writing a literary portrait of Hemingway. Nor did she
have a "past": she came from a middle-class family, went to Hunter
College, joined
The New Yorker
after graduation, and slowly worked
herself up into the position of a regular staff writer. This is a perfectly
honest and
resp~ctable
background; from the Hollywood point of
view, however, it was strictly dull-except for the fact that she had
joined
The New Yorker
and not
Harpers.
Now the girl from
The New Yorker
had come to Hollywood to do
a full-length study of John Huston and the movie colony. For the as–
signment she had been equipped with a special wardrobe; she had
brought along, as reading material, a complete set of bound volumes
of
The New Yorker;
and she was preceded, upon her entry onto the
stage of Hollywood, by the reputation she had earned from spending
a week end in the company of Mr. Hemingway.
The piece on Hemingway was well written; it displayed all the
finesse and transparent sophistication by which
The New Yorker
sets
the style for those of us engaged in a harmless and vicarious flirtation
with the "finer things" of life: imported perfumes and mink coats, a
new showing of Modiglianis, cartoons by Charles Addams, or insights
into the private lives of Hemingway and Toots Shor. There is some–
thing reassuringly democratic about these intimate glimpses of men of
distinction: through the peep-hole we see them in the right context–
Hemingway side by side with Toots Shor-and feel relieved. After all,
they too are only human, all-too-human, that
is,
right there on our own
level.
The portrait made Mr. Hemingway-one of the great writers of
