Mary Norris Eavesdropped on Ella Fitzgerald at the Algonquin

Mary Norris a few years after she moved to New York City in 1977. Photo: Nancy Holyoke/Courtesy Mary Norris

Mary Norris came to New York in 1977, hoping to work at The New Yorker; less than six months later, she got there. She worked as a copy editor at the magazine for decades, eventually becoming an expert grammarian and publishing multiple books. (She still writes for the magazine on occasion.) But those first six months, Norris tells me, “seemed like forever.” She considered becoming a taxi driver instead. We spoke with Norris about her first months in the city, sharing a loft in the Financial District with a harp, walking home across the George Washington Bridge, and eating peanuts and eavesdropping on Ella Fitzgerald at the Algonquin.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity. 

I made up my mind to move to New York in the course of a single phone call from my sister. She had been here for at least ten years by then and had a loft on John Street in the Financial District. I don’t think I’d have moved if I didn’t have a job or a place to live, but if I had one, I could figure out something to do about the other. It was the summer of 1977, and I was coming from Vermont, where I’d gone to graduate school.

I drove down in my old 1965 Plymouth Fury II. I had $200, and I put it in the bank like a fool. I had to take it out the very next month and close the account in order to pay the rent. My sister had given me the place to live because she was going to Paris for the winter. The loft was on the ninth floor of a commercial building with just two rooms — one had a bathtub and a loft bed, while the other had a harp. That was the music salon. A friend, Jeanne, shared the cost of the loft to use as a studio for painting. The bathrooms were down the hall, and there was no heat on the weekends. But it was a place to live, and I didn’t know any different. I could lean out the window and see the Twin Towers. They looked like chrome blades against the sky.

A painting by Jeanne C. Fleischmann of Norris’s “music salon” in the loft. Photo: Courtesy Mary Norris

My sister came back, and we did attempt to share the place but it didn’t work out. Dee had a girlfriend at the time, and it was all too crazy. I’d be sleeping and they’d come in and start frying fish or something. So I finally took the hint and I got outta there.

The first job I had when I moved here was as a dishwasher in New Jersey, where a friend of mine had a restaurant. I would take the train up to the George Washington Bridge bus terminal and then a bus to Patterson. She paid for my bus fare and gave me all the beer I could drink, and I washed dishes and maybe made $75 a week. On the way home, I would often get off the bus on the Jersey side of the George Washington Bridge and walk over the bridge. That first summer I ate a lot of bagels and drank a lot of beer. That was my diet. I had to junk the car. I had seen signs saying “We buy used cars,” so I drove it out to Flatbush someplace. And they said, “We don’t mean this used.” But they took the car off my hands and gave me a subway token.

A photo from today of where Norris used to live on John Street in the Financial District. Photo: Google Maps

I wanted to be a writer for The New Yorker. But around Thanksgiving of that first fall I had an interview there and there were no jobs available. So I thought I’d try to drive a cab. I had a chauffeur’s license because I once had a job driving a milk truck. I was on the verge of taking the test for a hack license when my friend Peter said, “Call them back — see if there are any openings,” because he could see disaster looming with me behind the wheel. And then there were. It was February 1978, and I got a job in the editorial library. It was all about taking the magazine apart — we actually carved it up with razor blades and pasted things into scrapbooks. William Shawn was the editor at that time, and he was theoretically open to new writers. But if you have a writer under contract, you’re going to give space to them and not to some freelancer who’s trying to horn in. But eventually he did accept a few pieces from me and that was a great thrill.

Mary Norris, circa 2000, at a New Yorker gathering with cartoonist Victoria Roberts. Bruce Diones.

Mary Norris, circa 2000, at a New Yorker gathering with cartoonist Victoria Roberts. Bruce Diones.

I was really living a hand-to-mouth sort of existence. There was a bar we went to called Tehran that had free hors d’oeuvres at happy hour, so that was mostly dinner. When we were feeling flush, we’d go to the Algonquin, the little tiny blue bar with room for only four people at the bar and two tiny tables. They had peanuts, so you’d buy a beer and have peanuts for dinner. It was a great place for eavesdropping. I was there at the same time as Ella Fitzgerald once. Another time, I met one of John Steinbeck’s sons there. I was a student of the book East of Eden, and the main character has two sons that are like Cain and Abel. I finally realized after talking to him for a while that this was definitely Cain, the bad brother. He ran out on his check.

Everything in New York was so monumental. But I remember after the interview with The New Yorker I walked home and was on the East Side. I saw the World Trade Center and I remember thinking, That’s not so tall. And that’s when I realized, Oh, maybe I can live here.