May 7, 1998

A Guarded Love: Lillian Ross and William Shawn

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Obituary: William Shawn (December 9, 1992)

The New York Times on the Web: Books

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By JANNY SCOTT

EW YORK -- A the end of Lillian Ross' memoir of her 40 years as the other "wife" of William Shawn, the longtime editor of The New Yorker, she tells how she learned of his death in December 1992. She dialed the number of the private telephone he had installed for her beside his bed in the apartment he shared with his wife.

Shawn's wife, Cecille, answered the telephone for the only time in what Miss Ross describes as her long life together with Shawn, a life that included their setting up house 10 blocks south of the Shawns' apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan and jointly raising Miss Ross' adopted son, Erik.

"He's gone," Mrs. Shawn told Miss Ross. Miss Ross writes that she and Erik then rushed to the Shawns' apartment, where they were met by the Shawns' son Wallace, who seemed afraid to admit them. "Let them in," Mrs. Shawn said. Miss Ross embraced her. And Mrs. Shawn said, "He died in my arms."

Miss Ross' memoir, "Here but Not Here: A Love Story" (Random House), due in stores this month and awaited with considerable curiosity, describes in significant if selective detail a part of Shawn's private life that had remained discreetly guarded.

In an interview this week, Miss Ross said she never had any qualms about writing the book, which took her four years. She said she had done it simply "because it's my life," and because Shawn "was fed up with having been pictured as a character he wasn't."

As Miss Ross tells it in the book, she and Shawn fell in love after he had hired her in 1945 as a writer for The New Yorker. He was about 20 years her senior. By the mid-50s, they had settled into a domestic routine that she contends was more solid, more purposeful, more satisfying and more socially responsible than most "conventional arrangements."

For many years, Shawn would spend Thanksgiving with his family and Christmas Eve with Miss Ross. Every New Year's Eve, if they were apart, he would call her at midnight, Miss Ross writes. During one period, they ate every meal together; he would drop her at home after dinner, then return in time for the 11 o'clock news.

During the '60s, they considered conceiving a child, Miss Ross says. But she had a hysterectomy and ended up traveling to Norway to adopt Erik alone. Shawn used to read to Erik, play the piano for him, teach him to catch a baseball, even attend his parent-teacher conferences.

The relationship was not kept secret from Mrs. Shawn, Miss Ross says. But Mrs. Shawn declined to leave her husband, and he would not unilaterally divorce her. The Shawns' children were expected not to discuss the relationship with either parent "in accord with Cecille's wishes," Miss Ross writes. They were told that their father's absences were necessitated by his work.

"Bill told me I was his 'wife,"' Miss Ross writes. "I felt I was."

Asked in the interview whether she had thought about the book's impact upon Mrs. Shawn, now in her 90s, Miss Ross spoke slowly, as though taking pains to make herself understood: "That isn't the way one thinks when one is a writer. You don't think about what the impact is going to be on other people. You think about what you're writing."

So, she was asked, she was saying she never thought about it?

"It wasn't a question," she said. "It didn't come up."

Neither of Shawn's sons, Wallace and Allen, returned telephone calls from a reporter this week asking if they wished to comment on Miss Ross' book.

In the book, Miss Ross describes Shawn, who was the editor of The New Yorker from 1951 to 1987, in terms that are positively saintly: He is selfless, honest, forgiving, meek "in the biblical sense." He tips taxi drivers twice the fare, turns down honorary degrees, never reproaches his children.

But she also tries to debunk what she says is the myth of Shawn as "a shy little man obsessed with privacy" who ate nothing but corn flakes. She offers lists of foods he liked and women he was attracted to, from Hannah Arendt to Evonne Goolagong and Madonna. At the same time, he comes off as a man who was deeply tormented. He feared everything from his own death to paper cuts. He was haunted by guilt. Claustrophobia kept him from visiting his sons' apartments (though, Miss Ross notes, he had no problem in the ones he shared with her).

Miss Ross states repeatedly that Shawn felt imprisoned by his job but thought he could not abandon the writers who depended upon him. He would ask Miss Ross, "Who has blotted me out?"

Their "liaison," as she called it in the interview, is described in idealized terms. In 40 years together, she writes, they had just two arguments (one about whether Pierre Salinger was a good press secretary to President Kennedy, the other about the characterization of Puerto Ricans in "West Side Story").

Miss Ross insists she felt no rage toward him or Mrs. Shawn; she has never had a single regret. She felt "no deprivation, no frustration, no absences, no holes, no misshapenness, no unanswered needs." No husband or father she has ever known gave more than Shawn gave to her and Erik, she writes.

"After 40 years, our lovemaking had the same passion, the same energies (alarming to me, at first, in our early weeks together), the same tenderness, the same inventiveness, the same humor, the same textures as it had in the beginning," Miss Ross writes.

She does make it clear that she deferred to Shawn. He decorated their apartments and taught her taste and judgment about clothes. "Bill disliked the odor of cigarettes," she writes. "I immediately gave up smoking. He was afraid of 'drinking.' I gave up martinis." Early on, she says, she fled the relationship in confusion, first to Hollywood for a year and a half, later to Paris. Each time, he pursued her relentlessly with letters, cables and telephone calls, serving up advice, begging her to come home.

In 1953, while she was in Paris, he suggested she look up his old haunts from a trip he had taken there in 1929 with Cecille. So Miss Ross dutifully "marched around the Left Bank, finding and taking photographs of every place he asked me to visit." Then she sent him the photographs.

Certain other episodes seem to slip by, relatively unexplored.

For example, Miss Ross mentions in passing in the book that relatives and others tried to intervene with her and Shawn, but she offers no details. She alludes to "a string of psychoanalysts" that was "enlisted in pursuit of Bill," but does not say who enlisted them or to what effect.

She writes that early in the relationship she would occasionally "explode" and "ask him to leave me alone." But she offers little elaboration. Yet the book includes all sorts of other details, like the price of a ticket on the Concorde and everything she ate one day at lunch at "21."

Asked in the interview why she had chosen not to elaborate on, for example, the story about the psychoanalysts, she said sharply: "There weren't any details to give. What are you going to tell?" Asked how she decided in general what to leave out, she said, "You write out of your passion and out of your being and out of your soul."

A small, animated woman with curly gray hair and an elfish face, Ms. Ross refuses to reveal her age. "It's the one thing I won't even tell my son," she said. One literary reference work, Contemporary Authors, lists her age as 70, which would have made her 17 when she went to work at The New Yorker.

The author of 11 books, she grew up in Syracuse and New York City and worked briefly for the newspaper P.M. before moving to The New Yorker. There, she became one of the better known practitioners of a style of fly-on-the-wall reporting in which the writer never directly imputes motivation.

"I don't intellectualize too much," she said, when asked about the motivations of the characters in her memoir. "I'm not particularly comfortable with it. You feel what you feel, and you go on what you feel. And you're guided by your own instincts, your own principles."