seemed “like a small boy, almost like a child.”
Shawn’s description was not an exaggeration; at eighteen, Truman could have passed for a boy of twelve. He had no visible trace of a beard; he was still unusually short, perhaps not even as tall as his adult height of five feet, three inches; and he remained unnaturally pretty, with wide, arresting blue eyes and blond bangs tumbling over his forehead like a thatch of straw. If his appearance did not shock, his childlike voice did—it was so high, went one unfriendly joke, that only a dog could hear it. Truman may have thought of himself as a bird of prey, but to his new colleagues he seemed like an exotic breed of canary. “For God’s sake! What’s that?” Ross himself demanded when he peered out of his office and saw him drifting down the hall.
Before his first week was out, he was one of the chief topics of hallway conversation. Two of the elevator men were so confused that they bet a dollar on his gender. “You’re going to lose your money,” Ebba Jonsson, the librarian, told the loser. “It is definitely a boy.” One of the women was so vividly impressed by him that she dreamed that his veins were filled with milk—whole or skimmed, she did not say. Truman added to the chatter, no doubt deliberately, by having his lunch delivered not from delicatessens, as everyone else did, but from expensive midtown restaurants, like “21” and Le Ruban Bleu. A rumor circulated that he was rich, and when someone saw him at a nightclub with one of his celebrated girlfriends, the rumor became established fact. Much of the reaction might have been predicted by anybody who knew him and his many ways of gaining attention. What could not have been foreseen, however, and what really caused heads to turn, was something that was in fact remarkable: Truman, almost alone on the staff, had managed to make a friend of Daise Terry, the terrible-tempered office manager.
A short, elderly woman of notoriously mean and cantankerous disposition, Terry frightened everyone, editors and copyboys alike. Very few on the magazine liked her, and she liked very few of them. “She was a wicked, wicked woman,” said Andy Logan, who had just begun her long career as a reporter for the magazine when Truman arrived. “I once saw a copyboy weeping bitterly after one of her tongue-lashings, and I know a man now who was once an office boy here and who will still, in late middle age, wake up in a cold sweat remembering that awful woman.”
How Truman tamed her no one knew, but he had always had a knack, like that of a stray dog, for finding and making himself agreeable to those, like his high school teacher Miss Wood, who could help him. “It’s in his stars, or his destiny, or his health line, or whatever you want to call it, that he travel in the right direction,” said one friend at the time. “His instinct leads him to the people who are on his side.” But opportunism was only half of the equation; he also genuinely liked the people who were on his side. He did not pretend to be Terry’s friend because she could help him; she could help him and that made him her friend. It was a perfect marriage of affection and opportunism.
“She was a very feisty little woman and quite lonely,” he said. “Everybody hated her but me. Even Ross was afraid of her. But she was totally devoted to the magazine, and there wasn’t a thing that went on there that she didn’t know. She thought of me as some sort of child, which I was in a way, and she always used to cover up for me when I did things that were kind of sloppy.” Soon, despite the nearly half-century separating them, that incongruous couple would be seen leaving the office together for lunch, going off to dinner and the theater after work, even meeting on Saturdays, when the office was closed. His friendship was rewarded, and as the other copyboys watched enviously, she became his protector. When it rained, someone else would run errands
Shawn’s description was not an exaggeration; at eighteen, Truman could have passed for a boy of twelve. He had no visible trace of a beard; he was still unusually short, perhaps not even as tall as his adult height of five feet, three inches; and he remained unnaturally pretty, with wide, arresting blue eyes and blond bangs tumbling over his forehead like a thatch of straw. If his appearance did not shock, his childlike voice did—it was so high, went one unfriendly joke, that only a dog could hear it. Truman may have thought of himself as a bird of prey, but to his new colleagues he seemed like an exotic breed of canary. “For God’s sake! What’s that?” Ross himself demanded when he peered out of his office and saw him drifting down the hall.
Before his first week was out, he was one of the chief topics of hallway conversation. Two of the elevator men were so confused that they bet a dollar on his gender. “You’re going to lose your money,” Ebba Jonsson, the librarian, told the loser. “It is definitely a boy.” One of the women was so vividly impressed by him that she dreamed that his veins were filled with milk—whole or skimmed, she did not say. Truman added to the chatter, no doubt deliberately, by having his lunch delivered not from delicatessens, as everyone else did, but from expensive midtown restaurants, like “21” and Le Ruban Bleu. A rumor circulated that he was rich, and when someone saw him at a nightclub with one of his celebrated girlfriends, the rumor became established fact. Much of the reaction might have been predicted by anybody who knew him and his many ways of gaining attention. What could not have been foreseen, however, and what really caused heads to turn, was something that was in fact remarkable: Truman, almost alone on the staff, had managed to make a friend of Daise Terry, the terrible-tempered office manager.
A short, elderly woman of notoriously mean and cantankerous disposition, Terry frightened everyone, editors and copyboys alike. Very few on the magazine liked her, and she liked very few of them. “She was a wicked, wicked woman,” said Andy Logan, who had just begun her long career as a reporter for the magazine when Truman arrived. “I once saw a copyboy weeping bitterly after one of her tongue-lashings, and I know a man now who was once an office boy here and who will still, in late middle age, wake up in a cold sweat remembering that awful woman.”
How Truman tamed her no one knew, but he had always had a knack, like that of a stray dog, for finding and making himself agreeable to those, like his high school teacher Miss Wood, who could help him. “It’s in his stars, or his destiny, or his health line, or whatever you want to call it, that he travel in the right direction,” said one friend at the time. “His instinct leads him to the people who are on his side.” But opportunism was only half of the equation; he also genuinely liked the people who were on his side. He did not pretend to be Terry’s friend because she could help him; she could help him and that made him her friend. It was a perfect marriage of affection and opportunism.
“She was a very feisty little woman and quite lonely,” he said. “Everybody hated her but me. Even Ross was afraid of her. But she was totally devoted to the magazine, and there wasn’t a thing that went on there that she didn’t know. She thought of me as some sort of child, which I was in a way, and she always used to cover up for me when I did things that were kind of sloppy.” Soon, despite the nearly half-century separating them, that incongruous couple would be seen leaving the office together for lunch, going off to dinner and the theater after work, even meeting on Saturdays, when the office was closed. His friendship was rewarded, and as the other copyboys watched enviously, she became his protector. When it rained, someone else would run errands
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