So Big (36 page)

There were various reports about who were the chosen few at the Round Table and who did the choosing. It is without dispute that Woollcott was a founding member—never to be deposed because he outlasted everyone, in terms of food consumption and bon mots. As for the others, it varies with sources. There were the illustrious visitors such as Katharine Cornell, Harpo Marx, Charles MacArthur, and Ben Hecht; there were the sitters, Margalo Gilmore, Louis Bromfield, Peggy Leech Pulitzer, Kathleen and Charlie Norris; and there were the active members. Ferber belonged to the latter. She lunched and sparred when she chose—never needing an invitation. She couldn't have gone every day or her body of work would have been “So Small.” Marc Connelly recalls the regimen of the Round Tablers. The group would break up shortly past noon, and after putting in a few creative hours, would meet again around 5
PM
at someone's apartment—often for an evening of revelry. It doesn't seem as though Ferber could ingest this sort of diet, yet her diary entries of the late twenties and early thirties list the Algonquin as one of her top social priorities.

“It was all fun,” recounts Katharine Hepburn. “There were individuals in those days. Nobody suffered outwardly. It wasn't cricket.”

More tennis than cricket, they volleyed for service and then smacked their opponent with a cry of “love.” Ferber did very well at this, remaining poised, alert, and ready to move in for the kill.

One day, she and Woollcott, among others, were lunching at the Algonquin. She, just back from Paris, sported a broad-shouldered suit, the outré style of the day.

Woollcott commented, “Why Edna, you look almost like a man.”

Ferber eyed him levelly. “Why, Aleck, so do you.”

When the going threatened to get rough, there was always someone to turn the right phrase and set the table back on its course. Often it was George S. Kaufman, who was present when Ferber and Woollcott got into one of their frequent snarls. Ferber seemed to be bettering Woollcott, whereupon Woollcott, never to be outdone or undone retorted, “You shut up, you. goddamn Christ-killer!”

Kaufman, with back like a ramrod, said with asperity, “I just want to warn you that that's the last time I'll have my race insulted. The next time I'll walk out. And Mrs. Parker, I trust, will walk halfway with me.” (Dorothy Parker happened to be one-half Scottish and one-half Jewish.)

Wit has never been taken seriously, but is appreciated and understood as an entity in America more, perhaps, than in any other country. Whatever the Round Table wasn't, it was very American and very funny. Its members were qualified wit mongers whose rhetoric has been marketed, packaged, sold, and resold to this day. Upon being asked by an actor what he thought of the play he'd just seen, George S. Kaufman quipped, “You should have been sitting in the audience with me.” When Lillian Hellman appeared at lunch at the Round Table, Ferber's response was, “Any side of the table Lillian Hellman sits on, I'll sit on the other side.” Or when a club-woman type stopped Ferber in the lobby of the Algonquin to comment, “Oh, Miss Ferber, I didn't know you were Jewish,” Ferber tossed off, “Yes, but only on my mother and father's side.”

Funny and trenchant were the signatures of this tough bunch.

A
CTUALLY
, I
NEVER
would have called her by her nickname. I think it would have been conceived as disrespectful. Although children were seen and heard in my family, we were taught to be very careful around great aunt Edna, and to mind our p's and q's. We were to write thank you notes immediately after a gift had been sent us and to personally phone her up every couple of weeks, but
never
during the morning hours when she was writing! We were carefully taught early that great aunt Edna was a national, if “peculiar,” treasure. Although she had some well-known idiosyncrasies, we were to cherish her as well as to be grateful to her.

I may have been instructed in this behavior; however, my warm emotions toward her made it easy. We seem to have come from equidistant points, meeting square in the middle, and I never doubted that we were kindred. She called me “dollface,” and “Miss Gomitt” (my maiden name is Goldsmith), and I would throw my arms around her in a bear hug.

I am flooded with favorite memories of our relationship. In the two decades that I knew her, I collected invaluable lessons of wisdom, kindness, and survival tactics. One of the turning points in shaping my own destiny as a writer came at an early age. Every few months or so, Ferber and I would have a “date.” After treating me to an elegant, delicious lunch, we would go to FAO Schwarz's toy store, where a Madame Alexander would be purchased, and then, as a chaser, we would walk into Central Park and choose the perfect bench for people-watching. Perhaps through a rose-colored glass, I seem to recall that whenever we did this, the weather behaved beautifully. So there we would sit—oh, there was often a popsicle involved that we would languorously lick—and scrutinize the passers-by. “What do you think of that fellow?” she would ask me, and then, early on before I was seasoned, give a gentle prompt: “Do you think he had a happy morning?”

“Oh, no,” I'd say, “I think he fell out of bed and then fought with his wife.”

As our game became more sophisticated, the dossiers on the strangers became most involving and rich with detail. It was, as I know so well today, what writers do, love to do, must do.

Another memory-sample of “my” Ferber was the late afternoon that I decided to drop in. One just didn't do this with her. One always made an appointment far in advance. But my callow preteen self decided while strolling up Lexington Avenue that I would buy her a cake and pay a call—friendly style. I stopped at a bakery called Cake Masters, where they had rather garden-variety fare but within my budget. I distinctly remember it was an extremely large, goopy-gooey strawberry cheesecake. I thought it was impressive; in retrospect, it was quite a horror and unlike the fine patisserie she was used to. I doubt I wished to impose my will upon her with a visit and a cake she wouldn't like. I seem to recall it was simply the impetuousness of youth combined with the feeling that I was special to her, and although she might be grumpy to any other “interloper,” she most likely would be pleased to see me.

The cake was bundled into a slightly grease-stained white cardboard box and tied with skinny red-and-white string. I carried it like the Hope diamond up to her building at 71st and Park Avenue.

I was announced, sent up in the elevator-manned lift to the penthouse, and greeted effusively by Molly Hennessey, Ferber's beloved housekeeper. “Miss Ferber! Miss Ferber!” she called out. “She's here!”

Ferber came out quickly with her arms open wide. “Why, Miss Gomitt! I can't imagine anyone I would want to see more!”

After thanking me for the thoughtful cake, Molly whisked it away. I wondered whether they would gobble it when I was gone, or—a cloud passed over me—would they dispense with it immediately, thinking it a crude imitation of what was usually served. The next day Ferber called me to tell me that she refused to weigh herself for awhile after having eaten so much of the sumptuous dessert.

While Ferber lay dying, Kitty Carlisle Hart visited her every day. “I was around for all the good times so I might as well be around for the bad ones,” she said.

I never had a bad moment with Aunt Edna. She was my Glinda.

—Julie Gilbert

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I
F
EVER
AN
AUTHOR
failed to anticipate the public's response to one of her own books, it was Edna Ferber when she was writing
So Big.
Fourteen years after its remarkable success, she confessed, “I never dreamed that
So
Big would be [popular]. I wrote it against my judgment. . . . I wrote my book because I wanted to write it more than anything else in the world. . . . Not only did I not plan to write a best seller when I wrote
So Big;
I thought, when I had finished it, that I had written the world's worst seller. Not that alone, I thought I had written a complete Non-Seller.”

In fact, when Ferber submitted the final manuscript to her publisher, her cover letter to Russell Doubleday said, “I feel very strongly that I should not publish it as a novel. It will, as you know, appear serially in the
Woman's Home Companion.
I think its publication as a book would hurt you, as publishers, and me as an author.”

Doubleday did publish the book, and the critical response was overwhelmingly positive. Reviewing
So Big
for
The New York Times,
L. M. Field called it “a thoughtful book, clean and strong, dramatic at times, interesting always, clear-sighted, sympathetic, a novel to read and to remember.” In the
Literary Review,
J. J. Smertenko went further, noting that “with all its flaws and crudities it has the completeness, and finality, that grips and exalts and convinces. By virtue of these qualities
So Big
is a masterpiece.”

Not for the last time in her career, Ferber was singled out for the distinctly American quality of her prose and subject matter. “There can be no question that
So Big
gets close to the life of its chosen bit of American soil, or that it is persuasively human in its touch,” said the
Springfield Republican.
And C. H. Towne, writing in the
International Book Review,
said, “Here is a young woman who knows the power of the sharp, incisive phrase, dipping her pen into the blood of humanity, bringing us news of life, as she sees it, with no thought of‘serialization' and ‘movie rights'. . . . We need this sort of writing and editing in these United States.”

But no one surpassed Burton Rascoe in his praise. “To Miss Ferber's narrative and descriptive powers I genuflect in homage,” he wrote in the
New York Tribune.
“Her vocabulary is rich and vital; she sees material objects with a penetrating and delightful vision; she has portrayed aspects of Chicago more vividly and with greater distinction than any writer I know; she knows the history of the development of Chicago in the industrial age and she is able to convey in a few words the import of that development; she can describe flappers and debutantes, shop girls and stenographers, tell you how they dress, how they talk, what their working philosophy is, with illuminating flashes.”

Ferber was never happy with the title
So Big,
intending to use it only as a tentative working one. When it was serialized in the
Woman's Home Companion,
it was titled
Selina,
after its heroine, but when it came time to publish in book form, the author could think of no better title, so she reluctantly returned to
So Big.
“I still didn't like it,” she wrote in her 1939 autobiography,
A Peculiar Treasure,
“but it had stuck somehow. I now think that those two short words, their familiar ring, and all the fat round curves in the S, the O, the B and the G helped to make the book a selling success.”

She attributed much of its success to a young staffer at Doubleday, Dan Longwell, who championed the book and mapped out a campaign for selling it. He reputedly made a substantial bet that the book would sell fifty thousand copies—an estimate it certainly surpassed many times over. Whatever Longwell did, it worked. Shortly after the publication date, Ferber embarked on a trip to Europe. On the voyage she encountered so many passengers reading
So Big
that she knew instinctively that she had a best seller on her hands.

Ferber's fourth novel,
So Big,
won the Pulitzer Prize, and was published in Germany, England, Holland, Finland, Sweden, Norway, Hungary, Poland, Russia, and Denmark. It quickly became required reading for English courses at many high schools and colleges.