Bon Mots, Wisecracks, and Gags Read online

  BON MOTS,

  WISECRACKS,

  AND GAGS

  The Wit of Robert Benchley,

  Dorothy Parker, and the

  Algonquin Round Table

  edited by Robert E. Drennan

  introduction by Heywood Hale Broun

  Skyhorse Publishing

  Copyright© 2012 by Robert E. Drennan

  All Rights Reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without the express written consent of the publisher, except in the case of brief excerpts in critical reviews or articles. All inquiries should be addressed to Skyhorse Publishing, 307 West 36th Street, 11th Floor, New York, NY 10018.

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  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.

  ISBN: 978-1-61608-713-5

  Printed in China

  To the Memory of T.A.D. and E.C.U., Connecticut Wits

  Acknowledgments

  The editor wishes to thank the following for permission to reprint the material included in this book:

  Ring Lardner, Jr., for selections from Say It With Oil by Ring Lardner, published by Doubleday & Co., copyright 1923 by G. H. Doran Co., and from The Ring Lardner Reader, published by Charles Scribner’s Sons, copyright 1963.

  The Viking Press, Inc., for The Letters of Alexander Woollcott, edited by Beatrice Kaufman and Joseph Hennessey, copyright 1944.

  American Heritage Publishing Co., Inc., for AI Hirsch-feld’s drawing of the Round Table group which appeared originally in Horizon magazine, 1962.

  Bennett Cerf for access to his several published collections of anecdotes by and about various Round Table figures.

  Special thanks also to the Misses Jamey Frucht, Brenda Fisher, and Jacqueline Pierce for secretarial assistance, and to Michael MacRae for whatever it was that he contributed.

  Finally, sincere thanks to A. A. Anspach of the Algonquin Hotel for his many gracious services (editorial suggestions included!) during the making of this book.

  Contents

  Introduction by Hey wood Hale Broun

  Cast of Characters

  Franklin Pierce Adams

  Robert Benchley

  Heywood Broun

  George S. Kaufman

  Ring Lardner

  Dorothy Parker

  Alexander Woollcott

  Completing the Circle

  Selected Bibliographies

  Introduction

  Sitting in the lobby of the Algonquin Hotel in a thronelike chair which had been carefully recovered to look as if it hadn’t been recovered, Marc Connelly looked forward to his 90th birthday and back to the great days of the Algonquin Circle as he tried to explain them to me.

  “We all loved each other/’ he said, and his great baby face relaxed into an affectionate smile as he saw in his mind’s eye some long lost summer day when the jokes flew and the hopes bounced, and the young people around the table in the Algonquin dining room knew that sophisticated New York was waiting for the table’s judgment about books, plays, actors, pictures, and music.

  Perhaps he was remembering the day when, the Ziegfeld Follies having just opened to unanimous raves, he walked up to the table, rapped on it, took one of those dramatic pauses at which he was so good, and asked, “Well, shall we let it run?”

  “Loving each other,” Marc continued, “we would get together for lunch and then just stay together in a pack all day, ending up at somebody’s house for supper and word games, or back here at the hotel to play poker.”

  The wit at the poker table tended to be less sophisticated than the luncheon banter—one can’t consider the possi™ bilities of a three-card flush and simultaneously create nifties—but it was at the poker table that the Round Tablers revealed, in their firehouse funnies, their substantially small town origins. Every one of them came from the hinterlands except my father, and he was born in Brooklyn.

  Such hometowns as Niles, Michigan (Lardner), Mc-Keesport, Pennsylvania (Connelly), Worcester, Massachusetts (Benchley), and Emporia, Kansas (Murdock and Brock Pemberton), had sent their promising youngsters to make their way in the Big City and by Jiminy they were doing it.

  It was Emporia wit which brought about the first Algonquin lunch. Murdock Pemberton set it up as a presumed honor to Aleck Woollcott and arranged to have banners strung up in which Aleck’s hard to spell name was misspelled in every possible variation.

  Present at that Woolcott (Wolcot, Woolcot, et al.) occasion were both my father and my mother, Ruth Hale, a fierce feminist who helped found the Lucy Stone League made up of women who kept their own names. Ruth soon dropped out of the Algonquin group, perhaps on the occasion when, during one of her crusading speeches, one of the more incautious wits accused her of having no sense of humor.

  “I thank God” said Miss Hale with that cock of one eyebrow which was the sign that her arrow was on its way. ‘That the the dead albatross of a sense of humor has never been hung around my neck.”

  Heywood, on the other hand, even rehearsed his humor, and would sometimes take me along to lunch so that I could pipe out straight lines for laborious puns which I now remember with affection but not enough admiration to repeat.

  Perhaps because of the love which Marc Connelly remembered, the anxiously smiling man and the solemn little boy always got their laugh.

  Sidney Smith, the 19th century English wit, once said that upon his death he hoped to climb a celestial stairway to a door which a footman would fling open to announce Sidney to an eternal luncheon party.

  I like to hope that Marc, last chief of the Algonquin tribe, puffed up those stairs when he left us in his 91st year, and went in to the table where jokes would always be new and affection would always be old.

  HEYWOOD HALE BROUN

  Cast of Characters

  MALE LEADS

  George S. Kaufman, Robert Sherwood—playwrights

  Franklin Pierce Adams (F.P.A.), Heywood Broun— columnists

  Ring Lardner, Robert Benchley, Alexander Woollcott —writers

  FEMALE LEADS

  Dorothy Parker—writer and critic

  Edna Ferber—novelist and playwright

  SUPPORTING PLAYERS

  Harold Ross—editor of THE NEW YORKER

  Art Samuels—editor of HARPER’S BAZAAR

  Frank Crowninshield—editor of VANITY FAIR

  Herman Mankiewicz—-press agent (later, the Hollywood producer)

  John Peter Toohey—theatrical press agent

  Harpo Marx, Paul Robeson, Noel Coward, Alfred Lunt —theatrical stars

  Margalo Gilmore, Peggy Wood, Tallulah Bankhead, Lynn Fontanne—actresses

  Beatrice Kaufman—Mrs. George S.

  Charles MacArthur—humorist and playwright

  PLACE

  New York City. The Algonquin Hotel’s Rose Room, known for its patrician charm and sparkling conversation.

  TIME

  The 1920s, a period in American history remembered for its gaiety, lawlessness, prosperity. A time of relief, following “the war to end all wars”; significant value-changes—urbanity, sophistication, literacy, taste, fashion replacing the old frontier spirit, the call of adventure and the unknown; Pr
ohibition, bootlegging, speakeasies —all goals immediate (if not quite real).

  In 1920, when Frank Case, owner of the Algonquin Hotel, installed a large round table in the hotel’s Rose Room for the apparent purpose of catering to a group of young, unknown literati, no one—least of all the group itself—presumed so much as to attach any historical significance to the gesture. Case himself would have argued that the move was simply practical; the young men and women, for better or worse, had chosen the Algonquin as their favorite luncheon place, originally meeting in the Oak Room and then migrating to the Rose Room, where, until they were given their special table, complete with private waiter and free relish trays, their expanding group overflowed daily into the aisles. The Algonquin became in fact as well as in spirit the focal point of much of the group’s activity. A typical incident was the time New Yorker editor Harold Ross broke a dinner engagement with Aleck Woollcott (without telling him why) so that he could go to the theater with playwright Marc Connelly. Connelly and Ross made the mistake of dining at the Algonquin, where they were spotted by Woollcott, who obviously took it as a personal insult. Later that night Woollcott received the following telegram:

  Dear Aleck,

  1 find myself in a bit of a jam. If anyone asks you where I was tonight would you mind saying I was with you?

  (signed) Ross

  Actually, it was Connelly who sent the telegram in Ross’s name.

  Such involuted pranks helped create the atmosphere in which the Algonquin Round Table was conceived; now all that remained was for the twenty-odd habitues to become successful, each according to his or her own natural talents. The speed and seeming felicity with which this second step was accomplished is, in retrospect, the most astonishing characteristic that the Round Tablers shared. The group’s average age was not much older than the century itself, and before its members had passed into the next decade, each had achieved his respective niche in contemporary American letters or theater.

  The men and women who eventually made up the “Round Table”—or “Vicious Circle/’ as they preferred calling themselves—came together, as any in-group must, because of mutual interests. To begin with, each possessed, or was possessed by, the spirit of his times, and each, as if touched by a common muse, found natural direction in the urge to record that spirit under the elusive mask of comedy. On the one hand, they embraced the “Roaring Twenties” for the fun-loving hell of it, setting the pace, telling the jokes, pulling the pranks, ignoring the future. As humorist-writer Robert Benchley admitted, “The trouble with me is I can’t worry. Damn it, 1 try to worry, and I can’t.” On the other hand, they took issue with the general feeling of apathy, the moral and social indifference so characteristic of the period, their humor lashing out at the inadequacies and injustices of the Establishment under which they flourished.

  It was not uncommon, if slightly incompatible, for a contingent of Round Tablers to be found gathered at the Puncheon Club or Tony Soma’s—two of New York’s more popular speakeasies—trading critical jokes on Mayor Walker’s corrupt techniques and civic disinterest. Rather than excuse such inconsistencies, they were much more likely to make note of them, usually in a self-deprecating manner, as when Benchley took his first illegal drink, grimaced, and exclaimed, ‘This place ought to be closed by law!”

  In accord with their times, the Algonquin Wits did not take themselves too seriously. Heywood Broun, an ardent social reformer who founded the American Newspaper Guild, once arrived late to dinner at Averell Harriman’s and explained, “I was down in the kitchen trying to persuade your butler to strike for higher wages/’ With Broun and Benchley, as with their comrades in wit, no subject, however solemn or personal, escaped humorous comment. The comic interpretation, whether invoking simple laughter, pathos, or moral disapproval, seemed always to stand as their final statement on whatever issue stirred their fancy.

  To discuss such names in the 1960s is rather like reviewing a Who’s Who scroll of past American writers and entertainers, with certain outstanding exclusions. But in the early twenties the same names would scarcely have raised an eyebrow. It is important to remember that the Round Tablers sought each other out before they themselves became the sought-after celebrities of Manhattan. Generally speaking, all were young, fun-loving, and ambitious; all took a strong interest in theater, sports, politics, and social problems; and, most noteworthy, all were gregarious, loquacious, articulate.

  Their common bond and peculiar genius was, of course, wit, although their excellence in conversation, repartee, and bon mots may have caused them to undervalue their contributions to the community of letters. Alexander Woollcott, called by one critic “the worst writer in America/’ evidenced this when he said, “I’m potentially the best writer in America, but I never had anything to say.” Ring Lardner, perhaps the best-remembered, most respected member of the group, died thinking of himself as a hack writer, successful but second-rate, although Heywood Broun, stating his own regrets, declared on his deathbed that he envied Ring Lardner “because he wrote what he wanted to.” Even the widely anthologized Benchley openly regarded himself as a failure. He once remarked, with as much sincerity as irony, “It took me fifteen years to discover that I had no talent for writing, but I couldn’t give it up because by that time 1 was too famous.” George Kaufman, who wrote all but one of his shows with a collaborator, referred to himself derisively as “a play doctor.” And the others: F.F.A., whose love for the verse form endured as his guiding literary inspiration, considered himself as ultimately a newspaper columnist. Dorothy Parker, as capable a poet as any of her contemporaries, said of herself, wryly, “I was following in the exquisite footsteps of Miss Edna St. Vincent Millay, unhappily in my own horrible sneakers.”

  Whatever regrets they may have experienced in later life, the Round Tablers of the twenties were far too involved in living to worry about long-range goals. They enjoyed good food and drink, camaraderie, talk, travel, and stud poker. Their daily luncheons were inevitably drawn out well beyond the customary hour. Benchley, who readily admitted his aversion for returning to work after an Algonquin lunch, one day summoned a waiter and handed him a pencil to sharpen, remarking after the tool had been returned, “I may need this some day/’

  On Saturday nights, Frank Case provided a room upstairs in which the Round Table men, and an occasional woman, gathered under the auspices of the Thanatopsis Literary and Inside Straight Club (F.F.A. founded it, naming it after a similar group of card-playing writers he had formed in Paris while serving on the Army newspaper, The Stars and Stripes). They would play poker through the night and often through the remainder of the weekend. Harpo Marx was popularly acknowledged as the most proficient gamester; Woollcott was unanimously voted the worst. As the group grew more prosperous the stakes rose higher and big money became less a subject of awe than an objective reality, lofty but attainable. It was reportedly at a Thanatopsis session that Harold Ross secured a $25,000 stake from millionaire Raoul Fleischmann to start a magazine Ross had dreamed of editing for years and which, at John Peter Toohey’s suggestion, he named The New Yorker.

  Ross, no quipster, proved a striking exception among the Round Table regulars. If his old Stars and Stripes buddy, Aleck Woollcott, and their superior officer, Captain Franklin Pierce Adams, were indeed the prototypes of the Algonquin set, then Harold Ross was the original kibitzer, accepted by the others despite the fact that he received more than he contributed. Hard-working—it was said that Ross believed in the twenty-four-hour office-day—straightforward, nonliterary, and never one for verbal calisthentics, Ross nonetheless succeeded in creating and perpetuating a magazine whose idiom, even today, reflects the higher qualities for which the Vicious Circle was noted. His famous “prospectus” for The New Yorker owes much to the spirit of the Round Table:

  Its general tenor will be one of gaiety, wit and satire, but it will be more than a jester. It will not be what is commonly called radical or highbrow. It will be what is commonly called sophisticated, in
that it will assume a reasonable degree of enlightenment on the part of its readers. It will hate bunk.

  With the close of the twenties came the Great Depression and the public lost much of its capacity for laughter. The Algonquin Wits managed to survive on individual grounds, but the Round Table had, for them, lost its lustre, its gaiety. The gilt and sparkle of the Jazz Age had suddenly dissolved, exposing an underlying emptiness. By 1933, Prohibition had come to an end and Wall Street was in the process of rebuilding its crumbled towers. The martini was replacing bathtub gin; even booze had adopted a fresh image, as if its newly acquired respectability qualified it as the businessman’s tool instead of his plaything. Lardner was soon to die, followed by Broun’s death a few years later. For the rest of the Algonquin group, humor became less a way of life than an artistic commodity which they, as humorists, were obliged to manufacture and sell. The market, while still lucrative, was appreciatively less eager. “Comedy has become like castor oil/’ said George Kaufman; “people fight it.” A disenchanted America had grown sober and restrained; there was, after all, a new war to prepare for, and the economy had all it could manage in the urgent task of regaining its equilibrium.

  The Round Table itself endured for two more decades. The New Yorker, with such humorists as James Thurber, E.B. White, and Peter Arno, helped span the gap between the Vicious Circle’s reign and the present, and the famed luncheon spot continued to attract the urbane and sophisticated of each new generation.

  The eighties have not changed things all that much. Go to the Algonquin for lunch any day during the week and you are liable to see such varied personalities as producer Alexander H. Cohen, editor Norman Cousins, lawyer Louis Nizer and such contemporary writers as Norman Mailer, Brendan Gill, Erica Jong, Graham Greene, John Updike and Eudora Welty, to note only a few. Dining with them, in a capacity both social and professional, will probably be Ben Bodne, owner of the Algonquin since 1946, and the man most responsible for perpetuating the hotel’s tradition as a luncheon stop for Manhattan celebrities.