Free The Irregulars by Jennet Conant Page B

town in Washington. He frequently made the local society columns for being one of the luminaries at a British Embassy function or war relief fund-raiser, or for serving as one of the distinguished “patrons under 30” at special concert series for the young people in the nation’s capital. He developed a wide range of contacts, becoming pals with Bernard Baruch, a millionaire and influential presidential adviser, who happened to be a bridge-playing crony of Marsh’s Texan pals Jesse Jones and Will Clayton. Dahl, who could not resist any form of cards, had already joined a poker school and managed to lose his first magazine paycheck—the whole $900—to Harry Truman, a senator from Missouri.
    Dahl’s tales of derring-do had made him a distinctly glamorous figure. His byline was appearing in the best American magazines, and he enjoyed the same respect—even reverence—reserved for the better-known war correspondents of the day. He made friends with writers and reporters whose skill and reputation far outstripped his own modest achievements, but they accepted him as a veteran whose record of courage they admired. In time of war, the British writer Evelyn Waugh once noted, “danger justified privilege,” and Dahl’s recompense for having fought on the front lines was ready admission into the most vaunted circles in Washington. Creekmore Fath took him along to the White House, where he met the bright, blond Martha Gellhorn, famous for her war dispatches for Collier’s and recent marriage to Hemingway. Gellhorn, who was obsessed with the war in Europe, was immediately interested in Dahl’s RAF connections as she was always planning the next story that would get her back to the front. Her first impression of Dahl, she recalled, was of someone “very, very attractive and slightly mad,” which she attributed to his “hitting the ground.”
    Marsh’s friend Ralph Ingersoll introduced him to the playwright Lillian Hellman, an old flame who was even further to the left than he was. Hellman’s current beau, the detective-story writer Dashiell Hammett, had helped launch Ingersoll’s PM , bringing in all his New York literary pals, including such names as Heywood Broun, Dorothy Parker, Donald Ogden Stewart, and George Seldes, and earning the publication a reputation for being a Communist mouthpiece in the early days of its inception. PM was hardly a Stalinist front but a rather schizophrenic cross between a high-minded journal of opinion and a tabloid. It was the journalistic dream child of Ingersoll, a veteran editor of Time , the creator of Life , and the publisher Henry Luce’s longtime lieutenant. When Ingersoll left the Time organization to start PM in 1938, one of his largest backers was Marshall Field, the department store heir, who was at the same time financing another newspaper start-up, the Chicago Sun . According to Marsh, who took an early interest in PM , the paper was losing more than a half million dollars a year and probably always would, but this was a matter of no great concern to man like Field.
    Ingersoll, who made no claim of being objective—and often said there was no such thing as “objective journalism”—was one of the first editors to campaign all-out for aid to Great Britain. He frequently ranted in print about America’s embarrassing “kibitzing” while London burned and was so rabid in his attacks on isolationists like Charles Lindbergh and William Randolph Hearst that it had led to rumors that he was being subsidized by that “man across the sea,” i.e., Churchill. He was almost as big and loud and opinionated as Marsh himself, and over his usual liquid lunch of two martinis and black coffee, followed by a chain of mentholated cigarettes, he had fought and won the war a hundred times over. So much so that when the forty-one-year old editor was drafted into the army in July 1942, it became a cause célèbre, with Field petitioning the appeals board that he was “indispensable” in