FIRST JOB

1 8 6 Y F I R S T J O B J O H N H E R S E Y Vol. 76, no. 2, Winter 1987 One morning in May 1937, back from a year’s study at Clare College, Cambridge, I sat reading Gone with the Wind in the New York apartment of my former Yale roommate Chester Kerr, wondering what to try next in the job line. A hoped-for spot on Time had fallen through. The phone rang, and the call was for me – from another Yale classmate, Henry McKnight, who was working at the Herald Tribune. He said he had heard from Dorothy Thompson, then a columnist for the paper, that her husband Sinclair Lewis was looking for a secretary. Why not take a shot at that? He gave me Lewis’s phone number. The Nobel laureate himself answered my immediate call and invited me for an interview that very afternoon. He directed me to an apartment on Central Park South. McKnight had not told me why Lewis needed a new secretary, and indeed I was not to learn the reason until many years later, when Mark Schorer, who was writing Lewis’s biography, told me what it was. I was dimly aware of some of Lewis’s notorious capers, such as his fisticu√s with Dreiser, but I had no idea that he was an alcoholic, and that most of his scrapes were boozy. He had had to be hospitalized once, in 1935, to dry out. His drinking had ruined 1 8 7 R his marriage, and he and Dorothy Thompson had separated on 28 April, less than a month before my appointment with him. A few days after the split, a friend called Thompson to tell her that Lewis had disappeared. Experience made her fearful for him, and intuition put her right to work. She got a list of inns in Connecticut and called them one after another. Sure enough, she finally located him in Old Lyme. With him was Louis Florey, a professional stenographer whom Lewis had employed o√ and on for years. Son of an illiterate French-Canadian blacksmith, Florey had served, as Schorer would put it, ‘‘as drinking companion and audience, valet and bootlegger, at least as much as he served as typist.’’ He told Thompson that Lewis had had a bad fall. She drove to Old Lyme and found Lewis in a frenzy of delirium tremens . Furious at Florey for having let things get so far out of hand, she fired him, and she drove Lewis to the Austin Riggs Center, in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. Although the sanitarium did not ordinarily treat alcoholics, they discovered he had three broken ribs and took him in. Schorer told me that Lewis was famous for swift and spectacular recoveries. Once, while drinking on a farm in the Michigan dunes with the Chicago News drama critic Lloyd Lewis and his wife, and Florey as well, he passed out in the midst of uttering a sentence; Florey hauled him to a bed; an hour later he reappeared, clearheaded and fresh, and picked the incomplete sentence up in the middle and finished it. And now, within days, he was back in New York, on the wagon, and – to my eyes, as I first met him – full of sparkling energy and great charm. The first impression, as he walked ahead of me into his living room, sat down, and lit a cigarette, was of a thin man put together with connections unlike those of most human beings. All his joints seemed to be universal. His long, slender hands seemed to turn all the way around on his wrists. Wolcott Gibbs had once described his emerging from a car – ‘‘a tall man, getting up in sections.’’ Next, piercing pale blue eyes, the bluer for being lashed into the pink face of a redhead. Thinning light-red hair, ill-brushed and tufted, over a wide dome of a forehead. Then, in better focus, terrible cheeks, riddled, ravaged, and pitted where many precancerous keratoses had been burned away by dermatologists’ electric needles. Narrow, dry lips, and a slender chin. I would have sworn that he was hideously ugly until...