The New Yorker journalist Lillian Ross was an early practitioner of the “new journalism” who differed from its other flamboyant figures – Truman Capote, Tom Wolfe, Hunter S Thompson – in preferring a personal invisibility in her work. In the New Yorker at that time, the story was everything, and the journalist as personality was far from the magazine’s preferred style. Ross, who has died aged 99, did not want to be a public person, and she kept her opinions out of her journalism. Her attitude could be inferred by tone or quotation. And context was all-important.
Her first major assignment for the magazine was a 1947 profile of the Brooklyn-born matador Sidney Franklin. Ross had little taste for bullfighting, but allowed Franklin to reveal himself, in his ripe egotism and vanity, without comment. She was appointed to the staff the following year, which gave her greater freedom to write her own stories. While working on the Franklin profile she visited Ernest Hemingway in Idaho, and struck up a friendship with him and his wife, Mary. When they visited New York, Ross wrote a career-making piece, published on 13 May 1950.
The profile presented what Hemingway did and said over several days in Manhattan. It became a model for New Yorker profiles, and was an inspiration for Capote and countless other writers. James Thurber wrote that “she has added a new dimension” to the profile form, “and a new spark”. The image of Hemingway that Ross crafted never dissipated: the coarseness of his conversation, his drinking and his bullying contributed to the sharp decline of his reputation. Hemingway wrote in 1951 that “Lillian Ross wrote a profile of me which I read in proof, with some horror. But, since she was a friend of mine and I knew that she was not writing in malice, she had a right to make me seem that way if she wished.”
Ross’s next assignment, to write about the making of John Huston’s movie The Red Badge of Courage, based on Stephen Crane’s novel of the same name, took her out of New York for more than a year. The large cast of figures involved was led by Louis B Mayer, the ferocious head of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, who “stared with a sort of fierce blankness” at “phony artistic pretensions”. Ross wanted to turn the proposed series of New Yorker articles into a “novel-like book because of the way the characters may develop and the variety of relationships that exist among them … a fact piece in novel form or maybe a novel in fact form”. The origins of the new journalism can be dated to the five articles she published on Huston’s movie in May and June 1952. The New Yorker humorist SJ Perelman hated it, thinking her account of Hollywood was “a ratty job, vicious in a professional sense”. Hemingway thought the account, later published as a book entitled Picture, made “a better story than most novels”.
Ross had opportunities other journalists might dream about – unchaperoned time with Huston, studio executives, and the corporate bosses in New York who actually pulled the strings of the whole system. She must have been extraordinarily charming, sitting there, smiling and taking notes, while people spoke frankly about the daily rushes, the editing, studio rivalries, the budget for the movie, Huston’s direction, and inevitably the production code that demanded the removal of unacceptable language (“damn”, “Lord”, “hell to pay”) in a movie about civil war soldiers.
The story arc of Ross’s articles is one of rising enthusiasm and respect across the MGM studio for the work of Huston, only to be shattered by the cruel preview cards filled in by a largely teenage audience. The studio lost confidence, and one conference after another explored “compromises” needed to save the film: changes in the script, plot line and cinematography. Ross widened the perspective of the story when she attended the annual stockholders’ meeting of MGM’s backers and heard executives speak frankly about their attitude towards the movie business.
In collaboration with her sister Helen, in 1962 Ross published The Player: A Profile of An Art, which contained monologues by 55 actors discussing the business and craft of acting. In Vertical and Horizontal (1963), her only novel, she took a satirical look at medicine as practised in Manhattan. With the publication of Reporting (1964), Ross brought together her journalism of more than 15 years. The anthology is her strongest book, and makes her most enduring claim as a writer. Talk Stories, her collection of New Yorker columns, was published in 1966. Reporting Always: Writing from the New Yorker (2015) collected the best of her work.
Born in Syracuse, upstate New York, Lillian was the daughter of Edna and Louis Rosovsky. The family moved to New York City when she was in junior high school, and she was originally hired by the New Yorker to fill a gap in the staff occasioned by second world war service. She wrote for the Talk of the Town pages, which appeared in the opening section of the magazine. There were three kinds of “Talk” stories: “originals”, “fact” pieces and “visits”. Ross and the other female journalists hired as Talk reporters were expected to submit reports, which were turned over to rewrite men, who provided the mandatory male point of view that the magazine expected. Ross contributed more than 400 Talk pieces to the New Yorker. She edited The Fun of It, a generous sampling from the “Talk” pages from the magazine’s history, published in 2001.
By then, the very private Ross had published a startling memoir, Here But Not Here (1998), in which she revealed that for more than four decades she had been the lover of William Shawn, the editor of the New Yorker. Though she rejected the term, she was his mistress. Her beautifully crafted portrait of Shawn permanently altered the public’s understanding of the man. He was a shy and unassertive person, someone who did not handle everyday things particularly well, but who was supremely confident in his judgments on writing and writers. He was not, by Manhattan standards, a “smart” figure: he was short, balding, a little overweight and softly spoken. In his relations with his writers he would go to great lengths to avoid conflict.
Shawn and Ross had much in common. They were both children of non-observant eastern European Jews. Friends saw few signs of their Jewishness. Neither had any formal religious upbringing. In her memoir Ross said that “the ‘ism’ I identified with in my youth was socialism, not Judaism”. Shawn shared with Ross his feelings of being devoured by the ceaseless editorial demands upon him (he did not believe in delegating work), to the point where he thought his own identity and creative ambitions had been swallowed up. She waited six years after Shawn’s death in 1992 before publishing Here But Not Here, but nonetheless was criticised for revealing the story of their affair while Shawn’s wife was still alive.
In April 1965, Wolfe took aim at Ross and Shawn in his notorious articles Tiny Mummies! The True Story of the Ruler of 43rd Street’s Land of the Walking Dead!, which appeared in the Herald Tribune. Wolfe’s mockery was obliterating: Shawn appears as an “embalmer” of the outdated snootiness and tiresome traditions of the New Yorker. Wolfe’s article aroused consternation in the corridors of the magazine. What may have particularly offended Shawn was that Ross was mentioned six times in Wolfe’s articles: she was one of Shawn’s “inties” (intimates), whom he called “all the time” and they were regularly seen drifting off together to the local deli. Reading between the lines, Wolfe had outed their relationship and Shawn was angry. Wolfe’s articles were ignored in the New Yorker, and Wolfe has never been published in the magazine.
Ross had begun to think about having a baby with Shawn, but underwent a hysterectomy. She adopted a Norwegian boy, Erik, in 1964, and considered Shawn his father. Ross won a Guggenheim fellowship in 1974 to study the meaning of children’s play.
In the 80s Ross’s contributions to the New Yorker tapered off, and they ceased altogether in 1987 when Shawn was fired. Ross resigned over the sacking, and contributed nothing to the magazine for five years. After Shawn’s death in 1992, the new editor, Tina Brown, invited Ross to return to the Talk pages, which she did. Her later pieces included articles in 2007 on the emerging creator of the musicals In the Heights and Hamilton, Lin-Manuel Miranda, and in 2010 about her old friend JD Salinger, published two weeks after his death.
Ross is survived by Erik.
• Lillian Ross (Lillian Rosovsky), journalist, born 8 June 1918; died 20 September 2017
