As a young American infantry officer in London awaiting his D-Day orders, Gardner Botsford met an English couple – a civilian accountant, middle-aged and very pleasant, and his middle-aged very pleasant wife – who invited [him] to drop in at their flat in Chelsea that evening after dinner. To Botsford’s surprise, the little party featured not well-cooked rationed food, but a striking woman. She wore nothing but tiger-skin patches on her stomach and back. And she was striking the many guests with a six-foot leather whip:
With her first snap, the room erupted in tumult. All around me, men and women were leaping out of her way as they tried to shed their clothes. The tiger lady had them circling the room like cats in a cage, laying a jolting snap behind the laggards at every circuit.
Botsford escaped with the only other clothed visitor, a Scottish officer in a kilt, to fight a good war in France and Germany. By his own admission, courage was not his most obvious quality. His childhood French, polished on summer trips to France, at his prep school and at Yale, qualified him for intelligence work and spared him some of the worst infantry duty. He landed at Omaha Beach on D-Day, made reconnaissance missions beyond the Allied lines and shot a German sniper in a window with his revolver. He tells it all with a lightness that belies what must have been terrifying experiences. Somehow, Botsford distances himself from all experience as if life itself were a stroll along Park Avenue in this entertaining memoir.
At wars end, Botsford self-described bargain basement Odysseus knocks at the door of his fashionable New York flat pondering his reception by the wife he has not seen in three years and the daughter he has never met. At that moment, the book jumps back to his privileged American childhood wealth, servants, custom cars and celebrated family friends. His father was a sometime actor, journalist and playboy, his mother a society beauty whom the young Gardner once spied on the sofa kissing Harpo Marx. Born in Quincy, Illinois, as Ruth Gardner, she left Alfred Botsford for Raoul Fleischmann. The Fleischmanns were a flamboyantly wealthy Austrian-Jewish family whose fortune came from margarine and other commodities. (They had a reputation as bad gamblers. My grandfather used to win large sums from the then scion of the family at backgammon until, my grandmother told me, he felt so sorry for the elder Fleischmann that he took his side in a game and won back for him the $100,000 he had just lost.) Raoul also happened to own the New Yorker, where Gardner despite the family connection spent most of his working life as an editor. Ruth left Raoul for a Nazi-lover named Peter Vischer, whom Gardner detested. Vischer severed his Nazi connections at just about the time Gardner and his two brothers went off to war.
On summer vacation from Yale, Botsford worked as a cowhand on a dude ranch in Nevada. There, he had an affair with a married woman named Nell who had come to Reno for a divorce. The couple learned about gambling from a casino owner named Sid in Carson City. First, scar-faced Sid taught them how to cheat at blackjack. Then they played roulette on the level, among friends.
The ball fell first on zero, then double zero. Goddam! Sid said Games over. Take your money. Somethings gone wrong with the wiring.
Botsford never played roulette in America again.
After telling of his youth up to the war, Botsford returns to the New York door that he was waiting for his wife Tass to open. He had made so much of the anticipation that I expected him to find her in flagrante with a draft-dodger. But nothing happens. Slowly, he is absorbed back into family and civilian life. For him, that life was lived mostly at the New Yorker and little mention is made of family, close friendships, affairs of the heart or anything else that might expose a little of what was going on inside the delightfully contrived character named Gardner Botsford. As amusing as the stories are, Botsfords reticence about his private life borders on the pathological. It is only during a long disquisition on the problems the New Yorker faced in the final days before it fell into the Newhouse empire that he casually mentions that his wife Tass, to whom he had been married for thirty-four years, had died of cancer three years earlier and that he had wed the writer Janet Malcolm. Talk about American Wasp self-restraint.
A Life of Privilege, Mostly is a good read. Long quotes from the letters that Maeve Brennan wrote him when he was her Much-Feared Editor at the New Yorker demonstrate two things: that Botsford was a loyal friend in whom a savvy dame like Brennan could confide, and that Brennans own letters should be published in full. She is hilarious:
Oh, I nearly forgot. Do you remember I told you I thought there was trouble brewing at the Lieblings? Well, I am telling you. I knew Jean Stafford would wear Joe Liebling out, but it still is not altogether her fault he despises women writers, and she has more talent than he has, and more intelligence. I may be making a mountain out of a well, really, Much-Feared, what do people usually make mountains out of?
Botsford laments her death, forgotten and alone in a nursing home in 1993, as he does the many other New Yorker writers who killed themselves, drank themselves to death or sank into obscurity from the Olympian heights of what was once Americas finest journal of letters.
Book reviewed
A Life of Privilege, Mostly
By Gardner Botsford
(Granta Books 272pp £12.99)
