The Invisible Observer

"She sits there like a little mouse, looking so cute," says Barnaby Conrad Jr., the author and West Coast restaurateur, "but there's nothing but vitriol in her typewriter." Movie Director John Huston calls her "the best reporter I've ever known." Says Bill Mauldin, Chicago Sun-Times cartoonist: "Anybody who holds still for an interview by her is taking an awful chance, because he could very well lose a lot of skin." These contradictory observations stem from a common experience. Conrad, Huston and Mauldin all held still for interviews by Lillian Ross. Their names appear, amid a host of others, in her latest book, Reporting (Simon & Schuster; $6.50), an anthology of articles that first appeared in The New Yorker. A writer for that magazine since 1946, Lillian Ross has established a reputation as an effective, unusual, unassuming, controversial, versatile and needle-pointed journalist.

Our Old Piece. Hollywood lies light-years distant from Indiana's papaw country, but Reporter Ross's collection successfully encompasses both. In The Yellow Bus, she recounts a New York visit of the Bean Blossom Township High School's 1960 senior class -- a narrative so coldly and devastatingly honest that, even today, at least one Bean Blossom faculty member cannot think about it without getting mad. In Picture, she exhaustively tracks the course of John Huston's film, The Red Badge of Courage, from conception to box office -- where it flopped. After that dissection, doors slammed shut on Lillian Ross all over Hollywood.

Partisans of the late Ernest Hemingway charged furiously that her 1950 profile cut him to ribbons. From it, they said, emerged the picture of a man who swilled from a pocket flask while touring art galleries, and who talked baby talk ("Was fun for country boy like me"). But if Hemingway had been sliced, he did not bleed noticeably. Permitted a prepublication look at the article, he approved it with one minor deletion. And when the critics began to scream, he sent Miss Ross a friendly note: "About our old piece--the hell with them."

Hanged by Words. As a source of controversy, Lillian Ross seems totally miscast. Seated in the Algonquin Hotel lobby, a favorite and convenient haunt --it is just around the block from The New Yorker--she becomes just any 37-year-old woman, as inconspicuous as her chair. Her private life is a carefully protected secret: she once expressed regret at having made the mistake of publicly admitting as much as the place of her birth.*

This self-effacement accompanies her on her professional rounds. Her reportorial technique is that of the sound camera, neutrally and exhaustively recording the scene. In any Ross article, the author does her best to become totally invisible; the reader takes her place as observer. "The Hemingway profile was a Rorschach test for people," says Reporter Ross. "People found in it what they were looking for." "She was so unobtrusive on The Red Badge of Courage set that you could feel it," says Bill Mauldin, who had a bit part in the picture. "John Huston and a lot of the other guys fancied themselves as raconteurs and were always telling jokes. Lillian would tag along every time, practically in lock step, filling up her notebook, and when the point came, she'd say, 'I don't get it. Please explain.' After a little of that, all joke telling stopped."

Curious Restriction. By choice, Reporter Ross declines assignments that do not interest her; she avoids subjects who show the least resistance to holding still. And even where the landscape is expansive, she applies a curiously restrictive principle. "In my work I don't make judgments of people," she says. "I think you should let them be the way they are."

Whether they are what they are is what brings on the argument. For what they are is how they were observed, and therefore judged, by Lillian Ross.

* Syracuse, N.Y., a fact duly noted on the dust jacket of Reporting.

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