The New Yorker:

Texas embodies America, and the state’s millionaires embody Texas.

By John Bainbridge

In 1974, a staffer at The New Yorker whom I’d met once called to say that the magazine’s editor, William Shawn, wanted to see me. This was unexpected. I was twenty-three, living in Connecticut, working for another publication. I’d grown up in a family that nobody would’ve described as bookish, and I’d been reading The New Yorker for months, not years. On the train to Grand Central, I crammed James Thurber’s “The Years with Ross,” unable to fathom why I’d been brought in. Mr. Shawn, it turned out, had liked a lengthy Norman Mailer parody that I’d inserted into my college thesis, to pad it out; I’d shared it with someone who’d shared it with Shawn. He offered me a job as a Talk of the Town reporter. Afterward, panic leached into my elation. Hadn’t Mr. Shawn considered that an aptitude for parody might indicate (as I knew to be the case) that I lacked a voice of my own?

My new office was on the same floor as the magazine’s archive, and I was encouraged to graze among black binders containing the work of staff writers. I blissfully plodded through the collections of deceased greats, along with the work of many writers still in, or not far past, their primes. Among the latter was John Bainbridge, an author of deadpan, droll Profiles and reported pieces. A self-effacing Midwesterner turned Anglophile, he had recently expatriated to Bath, England. One of his masterly, unshowy gems was “Toots’s World,” a 1950 Profile of Toots Shor, a gregarious and bibulous saloonkeeper and restaurateur whose circle of pals included Joe DiMaggio, Frank Sinatra, Chief Justice Earl Warren, and a multitude of loyal patrons (a.k.a. “crumb bums”) unbothered by Shor’s liberally dispensed insults. Bainbridge, an assiduous listener who, according to his editor Gardner Botsford, “could get the Sphinx to talk,” had a pitch-perfect ear for dialogue: “Drinkin’—that’s my way of prayin’ ”; “You know what a senator is to me? A guy who makes a hundred fifty bucks a week.”

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