Mr. and Mrs. Irving Berlin in 1926, returning from their honeymoon. NY Daily News Archive / Getty

During my senior year in college, forty-two years ago, I spent a lot of time reading old issues of The New Yorker. My purpose was to write an English honors thesis about them, if possible. I had no real focus; my brother, who had been sick for a while, died soon after I started. I sat in a remote study carrel in the library’s stacks, next to a narrow, dim window with an interior view, and idled through the brittle pages in bound volumes. In the end, I turned in the thesis (such as it was) too late and graduated in General Studies. The one success I can point to is that I read every issue, more or less cover to cover, from the magazine’s first three years—from February 21, 1925, until sometime in 1928.

Harold Ross, The New Yorker’s founding editor, envisioned it as a magazine of sophisticated humor. According to the historic marker on a building where he lived on the West Side, Ross once said, “If you can’t be funny, be interesting.” What I found in the old issues may have been both or neither, but I couldn’t really tell. Humor tends to evaporate with time, and what is interesting in 1925 will probably be less so almost half a century later. The first piece I came across that connected with me—in fact, the only piece I still remember from my reading—appeared in the issue of November 28, 1925. It was called “Why We Go to Cabarets: A Post-Debutante Explains.” The byline at the end was Ellin Mackay.

I didn’t understand it much better than the other articles, but somehow I kept rereading it. The piece was a personal essay—a telling-off, essentially—centered on an Upper East Side, high-society problem. The young woman essayist was saying that social events involving débutantes and the “stag lines” of suitable young men who asked these young women to dance were oppressive and boring. The young women preferred the far more exciting and democratic experience of dancing with their dates in cabarets, she said. I didn’t get some of the language. To prove she was not unfastidious, Miss Mackay wrote, of the people one met in cabarets, “We do not particularly like dancing shoulder to shoulder with gaudy and fat drummers.” I wondered why the guys in the cabaret’s band would be on the dance floor, and why the band would have such a large percussion section. Years later, I learned that “drummer” also meant “travelling salesman.”

Miss Mackay was so scathing about the young men in the stag lines, so confidently snobbish. “There is the gentleman who says he comes from the South,” she wrote, “who lives just south of New York—in Brooklyn. There is the partner who is inspired by alcohol to do a wholly original Charleston, a dance that necessarily becomes a solo, as you can’t possibly join in, and can only hope for sufficient dexterity to prevent permanent injury to your feet.” I identified with the stag-line duds and winced for them. At that age, you think that when a woman you want to like you calls you boring or pompous or stiff or idiotic, the verdict is final. Later, you learn that those all can serve as positive attributes in the right circumstances. I now see that what chimed with me, beneath the essay’s apparently rarefied subject matter, was the anger. She was twenty-two when she wrote the piece; I was that age when I read it. At twenty-two, I was confused and stressed out. At that age, as I later learned, so was she.

Ellin Mackay made her début in society in 1921, when she was eighteen. Her father, Clarence H. Mackay, the president of the Postal Telegraph-Cable Company, gave her a dance at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel attended by more than a thousand guests. She had blue eyes and blond hair and a face that could be cute, beautiful, or interesting, depending on the light. Débutantes in New York in those days rose to movie-star levels of celebrity. The unusual spelling of her first name, combined with the cool, Irish-tough pronunciation of her last—“Mackie”—made her what today might be called a brand, though the concept would have repelled her.

Her coming-out was covered in the Times, which led with her name in the headline. During her years of fame, it and other papers—the Herald Tribune, and tabloids like the News, the Sun, and the Mirror—ran many stories about her, while the Wall Street Journal focussed on the business dealings of her father. Later books about The New Yorker and its beginnings almost all mentioned her, especially Ralph McAllister Ingersoll’s autobiography, and “Ross, The New Yorker, and Me,” by Jane Grant. The book that describes her best, and the one I learned the most from, is “Irving Berlin: A Daughter’s Memoir,” by Mary Ellin Barrett.

Ellin Mackay, deb extraordinaire, married Irving Berlin, the most famous songwriter in the world, six weeks after her article on cabarets appeared. The ceremony took place in the Municipal Building, downtown, with Berlin’s longtime business partner and his wife for witnesses and none of Ellin’s family present. A call she made immediately afterward, at a pay phone in a nearby drugstore, was a heads-up to Harold Ross. When he answered and addressed her as “Miss Mackay,” she replied, “Oh, no—it’s Mrs. Berlin. I’m not a Lucy Stoner. The fact is I shan’t be able to get my piece in on time. I’m leaving town in about twenty minutes.”

Lucy Stoners were women who kept their maiden names after marriage, following the example of the women’s-suffrage leader. The piece that Ellin referred to, the one that she did not have time to get in, remains a mystery. Two weeks after the cabaret article, Ross had printed another essay by her, called “The Declining Function: A Post-Debutante Rejoices.” After that, she never published anything else in The New Yorker, though she wrote about a dozen short stories for The Saturday Evening Post and other magazines, as well as four novels, all under the name Ellin Berlin.

My father was a chemical engineer who read The New Yorker every week and paid close attention to the articles whether he understood them or not. When John McPhee visited my high school, and I even talked to him, my father was powerfully impressed. Other New Yorker regulars had less cred. To my announcement, after college, that I intended to be a writer, he replied, “Whatever you do, don’t write like that guy Barthelme.” (Of course I then did try, unsuccessfully, to write like Donald Barthelme.) My father often said funny things without cracking a smile and could listen to them just as inexpressively. Try as I might, I rarely got him to laugh. Once I came upon him sitting in a chair in the living room reading a book and laughing out loud. The sight so shocked me that I had to see the title—“The Years with Ross,” James Thurber’s memoir of the editor.

After reading that book, Dad seemed to think of Ross as someone he knew personally. He referred to him simply as “Ross,” following the lead of Thurber and of Ross’s other New Yorker colleagues, and I needed to remind myself that Ross was long dead and he and my father had never met. Later, when I came to the magazine, I learned with surprise that people there did not like “The Years with Ross.” Robert Bingham, then the executive editor, told me that the book made Ross look like a buffoon when he was in fact a brilliant and sensitive editor, the greatest of his day.