Marty Cortland, Sly Devil: We’re Coming For You

We all have our guesses about who Marty Cortland, the new back page columnist at D Magazine, really is. Some have guessed that the scribe may be a nom de plume of Tim Rogers, or our own senior editor Glenn Arbery, or maybe Glenn Hunter at DallasCEO, or maybe his Better Half. It turns out that the man or woman behind Cortland did his or her research; Martin Cortland was a character in the 1941 Fred Astaire/Rita Hayworth movie “You’ll Never Get Rich.” (How appropriate for a columnist who waxes poetic about the burden of having too many servants, and said of illegal immigration, “when something is that beautifully broken, you need to just leave it alone.”) In “You’ll Never Get Rich,” Cortland was played by Robert Benchley, a newspaper columnist, satirist, and member of the Algonquin Round Table known for his work in Vanity Fair and The New Yorker. I have my guesses about who Cortland really is, and I’m on a mission to find out for sure. Any help from the readers would be greatly appreciated, especially now that Alibaster Abernabther has jumped ship and signed on with that other paper. Hats off to you, Cortland, whoever you are.