Gardner Botsford
By Roger Angell
Every meeting with Gardner Botsford—down the hall; on a street corner, unexpectedly; at your doorway before dinner—began the same way, with your own "How are you, Gardner?" and his firm, upbeat "Never better!" You came to count on this and to laugh at it with other friends and colleagues of his—some of us even began to call him "Old Never Better"—and only with time did you sense how well the riposte served him, diverting attention from sadness or symptoms, encouraging the social or conversational pleasures just ahead, and also stepping off an elegant little distance away from intimacy. Botsford, who died last week at the age of eighty-seven, was an editor with this magazine for almost forty years and a continuing presence around the place in the two decades after he stepped down. His long and famously happy marriage to the New Yorker writer Janet Malcolm—it was the second for both—had its roots in their editor-writer attachment, begun when she was a young contributor of shopping columns, and maintained (through her nine books and ninety-odd reportorial and critical pieces) until the end. Before that, he had edited A. J. Liebling, Joseph Mitchell, Janet Flanner, Mollie Panter-Downes, Richard Rovere, Geoffrey Hellman, and dozens more of the vivid, august figures of the magazine's postwar journalistic flowering.
Hired a couple of times as a young Talk of the Town reporter (the first time didn't take) by The New Yorker's founding editor, Harold Ross, and lured into editing by its brilliant and idolized second, William Shawn, he rose to an easy, semi-anonymous eminence that stood in contrast with the cloistered and convoluted relationships Shawn maintained with his writers and staff and with the world. Botsford was also connected to the magazine through his stepfather, Raoul Fleischmann, The New Yorker's first publisher, and, one could say, through New York itself, where he grew up in the twenties and thirties as a rich East Side, private-school kid, then a fabled charmer (he was a terrific dancer) and early devotée of the city's parties and pleasures.
There was an Astaire-like deftness and sense of style that went into the Botsford editings, which were applied swiftly with a fine-point mechanical pencil and left a galley of type looking leaner and ready to step out on its own. Often a writer—this writer, for one—couldn't quite remember what had disappeared from his text, or find where the scalpel had been slipped in. "Well, yes," Gardner would say, happy with the compliment. "A nice piece and let's enjoy it."
A long-term contributor, Mark Singer, recalls an early Talk piece of his that had grown miraculously stronger after a trip across Botsford's desk but had lost its significant, irreplaceable ending: "I went in ready to do battle, but he just gave me that smile and said, 'Too much is too much.' "
Tall and bald, with a straight back, Botsford wore his beautiful tweeds inconspicuously. Modesty and courtesy came naturally to him, but he was stuffed with surprises. He graduated from Yale but didn't return for reunions or honors; he mistrusted Old Elis and smiled happily whenever the Yale football team took a licking in a big game. Bores and self-important types were "sashweights" in his lexicon. A lifelong liberal and Democrat, he gave Ronald Reagan's name its original "Reegan" pronunciation if it had to be spoken. Women he liked were called "dearie" and trusted male friends "Old Cock." He beamed at the approach of an icy Martini or a lowdown joke—he was an appreciator above all—and his sacramental phrase "The Great Transformation" (for the after-dinner moment when the company shifted from wine to Scotch) fell into disuse only after the advent of Pellegrino and good sense. His laughter was world-class, a collapse into wheezings and gaspings and table poundings: nothing held back.
All this was boyish and complimentary. "He crackled," in the phrase of Alastair Reid. Another old pal, Calvin Tomkins, described him as a Cavalier in an age of Roundheads, and a third, Charles McGrath, recalled a summer when he and his wife, young and short of cash, and with a new baby, were presented with the Botsford cabin, on a lake in Putnam County, for a couple of weeks at no charge. Maybe Gardner and Janet were renting my summer cottage in Maine just then—the time I returned to find a sheet of paper in my old Underwood upright, with the nicely spaced message "The Instrument of the Immortals. Write, Anatole, write—all France is waiting." Botsford or maybe Voltaire—there was no difference.
We thought we knew him, but then in January of last year, well into his eighties, he produced a trim, unweepy memoir, "A Life of Privilege, Mostly," which told us how much he had been keeping to himself. Who could have guessed that he was such a graceful and agile writer, for starters? He had been a rich kid, yes, but who knew about the five live-in servants there at 151 East Seventy-fourth Street, or the runaway trip around the world that he and another playboy college friend had managed, just before the war put an end to such jaunts? He was an infantry officer in Europe after that, but who else would have kept quiet about his intelligence mission (he spoke perfect French) to make contact with a key member of the Resistance a day or two after his own landing at Omaha Beach, or his capture of a valuable collaborator spy? None of this inconspicuous gallantry is dwelt upon, any more than his two serious wounds, his Bronze Star and Croix de Guerre and five campaign stars, or the moment he found himself face down in the snow at the time of the deadly Battle of the Bulge, with an enormous tank of unknown provenance pausing above him in the darkness. The fun of it gets more space—an awol sojourn in Paris in the wild first week of Liberation, and later the appreciations of peacetime and his early days as the Sunday-night man at the magazine, closing the late Cinema and Theatre columns and the Letters from London and Paris. He grows up in the book, without regret, and it finishes with a meticulous sad accounting of the late tenure of William Shawn, a Lear in his old age, wishing obsessively to hold the magazine in his hands forever. What I go back to in my own copy of Gardner's book is a little gallery of photographs in the middle pages, where so many old friends of mine and his—Shawn, Joe Liebling, Maeve Brennan, Janet Flanner, Mollie Panter-Downes, and the eloquently calm Janet Malcolm, each a different kind of genius—once seemed to regard me from the page but are now looking straight at their trusted and lighthearted old companion and keeper.
Published in the print edition of the October 11, 2004, issue.
Roger Angell was a senior editor and a staff writer. He died in 2022, at the age of a hundred and one.