Bon Mots, Wisecracks, and Gags Page 8

  In a letter to a friend whom he had offended publicly, Woollcott wrote—when he had decided it was time to make up: “I’ve tried by tender and conscientious nursing to keep my grudge against you alive, but I find it has died on me.”

  A self-portrait which reportedly hung in Woolleott’s bathroom depicted him sitting on a toilet, the caption reading, “Laxation and Relaxation.”

  Aleck had scant praise for Hollywood, although the promise of big, easy money lured him into an occasional film. On this subject he remarked: “When I was a freshman at Hamilton I was thrown into the college fount. In the early days of the last war, I had to take care of the bedpans in an Army hospital. But never have I been so humiliated as on my few appearances in the movies.”

  Woollcott achieved varying degrees of success as a radio commentator, and seemed to take the position seriously. With customary disdain for the general public, however, Aleck commented that radio listeners would be content to hear “the multiplication table if broadcast with sufficient emotion.”

  Heywood Broun once complained over lunch that current writers were overusing the word “wistful,” thus turning it into a chiché. “If they have to be wistful,” he said,”why can’t they get a book of synonyms and look up a good clean name for it?”

  Aleck, who was himself partial to using the word, said to Broun, “Coming from one who, during his entire adult life, has bumped along on the flat wheel of wistfulness, 1 find this capsule critique ill-advised.”

  As theater critic for the New York World, Woollcott often had no more than twenty minutes to turn out copy on a play he was reviewing. Concerning this nerve-racking and, in his opinion, absurd pressure, he remarked, “It was like engaging Balto to rash a relief supply of macaroons to Nome.”

  When Beatrice Kaufman gave Woollcott as a reference to the school in which she was enrolling her daughter, she received what at first she took for a carbon copy of Woollcott’s letter to the headmistress: “I implore you to accept this unfortunate child and remove her from her shocking environment. . . .” (The letter reportedly went on to describe the fictitious nightly orgies that took place in the Kaufman home. )

  A women’s club group once presented a citation to Woollcott, who accepted it with a humble bow. “Only a bow?” the chairman chided. “Won’t you say just one word?”

  Woollcott relented, addressed this group with a formal stare, and uttered one word: “Coo.”

  Robert Sherwood

  1 From Harpo Speaks, Bernard Geis Associates, 1961.

  2 From The Letters of Alexander Woollcott, eds. Beatrice Kauf man aM Joseph Hennessy, Viking Press, 1944.

  3 Ibia., p. 89.

  4 Ibid., p. 198.

  5 Ibid., p. 103.

  Completing the Circle

  THE SUPPORTING CAST of Round Tablers is composed of various celebrities, many of them wits in their own right, others of them professional humorists who, while not constant Algonquin lunchers, nonetheless deserve representation as “fringe* members of the group. The three “regulars’ who will be featured in the following pages are novelist Edna Ferber, playwright Robert Sherwood, and New Yorker editor Harold Ross.

  Edna Färber

  Preparing to leave for Europe one summer, Edna Ferber confided to interviewers, “I want to be alone on this trip. I don’t expect to talk to a man or woman—just Aleck Woollcott.”

  During an interview, a reporter kept stressing the full scope and epic qualities of some of Miss Ferber’s novels, for example, Ice Palace. “The canvas is probably rather big,” Miss Ferber conceded. “I don’t do miniatures.”

  Growing tired of what she considered Aleck Woollcott’s “professional waspism,” Miss Ferber dubbed him “the New Jersey Nero who mistakes his pinafore for a toga.”

  Speaking about reviewers who seemed unable to render honest, objective critiques on the works of such writers as had won the Nobel Prize, Miss Ferber described them as “awestruck by the Nobelity.”

  After writing Ice Palace, which required extensive travel and research, Miss Ferber said she was so tired of traveling that her next novel would be a “stark, red-hot love story about two people in a telephone booth,” entitled But, Operator, I Did Drop My Dime.

  In California, Miss Ferber was introduced to Tess Slesinger, a young lady writer whose work was often said to imitate that of Dorothy Parker. A reported coolness developed between the two. Later, when Miss Ferber was ready to return to New York, a group of Hollywood writers—including Miss Slesinger—went to the depot to see her off. Before leaving, Miss Ferber wandered over to the book counter and asked the salesman, “Where’s my book?” The younger authoress also inquired, “And where’s my book?” Miss Ferber reached for a copy of Dorothy Parker’s Enough Rope and said: “Here it is.”

  The writer Louis Bromfield was known as a cosmopoli" tan, sophisticated, and very pleasant conversationalist. At one point during his career, however, he fell in love with the earth and took up farming. His monologues, as a result, often spanned the gap between high society and life on the farm so freely that the Round Tablers found it annoying, if not pretentious. One day, after Bromfield had switched his talk from vacationing on the Riviera to what he fed his pigs, Miss Ferber said, “For godsakes, Louis, brush the caviar off your blue jeans.”

  Miss Ferber, who was fond of wearing tailored suits, showed up at the Round Table one afternoon sporting a new suit similar to one Noel Coward was wearing. “You look almost like a man,” Coward said as he greeted her.

  “So,” Miss Ferber replied, “do you.”

  While collaborating on their play The Royal Family, Edna Ferber and George Kaufman often worked in Miss Ferber’s suite at the Algonquin. One midnight a new and conscientious desk clerk telephoned the suite and asked, “I beg your pardon, Miss Ferber, but is there a gentleman in your room?”

  “I don’t know,” Miss Ferber replied. “Wait a minute and I’ll ask him.”

  Miss Ferber, who held a lifelong ambition to be a stage actress, admitted in her autobiography, “To this day I regard myself as a blighted Bernhardt.”

  Edna Ferber sent the following letter to Harold Ross of The New Yorker after the magazine had reviewed a movie based on a Ferber novel: “Will you kindly inform the moron who runs your motion picture department that I did not write the movie entitled Classified? Neither did I write any of its wisecracking titles. Also inform him that Moses did not write the motion picture entitled The Ten Commandments,”

  Dining on chicken hash at the Colony in New York, Miss Ferber remarked, “I find it strangely decadent to order hash in the most expensive restaurant in New York. It means we’ve come full circle, in a way.”

  “Being an old maid is like death by drowning, a really delightful sensation after you cease to struggle.”

  Robert E. Sherwood

  Robert Sherwood, who at one time served as speech-writer to Franklin D. Roosevelt, was invited to dinner at the White House, the evening’s highlight being a special film presentation of his play Abe Lincoln in Illinois. Sherwood’s brother Arthur—a staunch Republican— asked Robert to bring him a souvenir. “What would you like,” asked the playwright, “his scalp?”

  Discussing modern presidential history, Sherwood once stated: “All Coolidge had to do in 1924 was to keep his mean trap shut, to be elected. All Harding had to do in 1920 was repeat ‘Avoid foreign entanglements.’ All Hoover had to do in 1928 was to endorse Coolidge. All Roosevelt had to do in 1932 was to point to Hoover.”

  One of the members at a Playwrights’ Company meeting remarked that he was “on tenterhooks” as to whether he would succeed in procuring the services of a certain actor for a forthcoming production. Interrupting the speaker, Maxwell Anderson appealed to the group for a definition of the term tenterhooks. Sherwood complied: ‘They are the upholstery of the anxious seat.”

  At a meeting of the Playwrights’ Company a foreign manuscript came under discussion in which the author’s meaning was cloaked in symbolism and the general tone abstruse. She
rwood commented drily, “I prefer the plays of Robert Emmet Sherwood. He hasn’t got much to say but at least he does not try to say anything else.”

  Sitting down to a Thanatopsis poker game at the Algonquin, the playwright punned, “Only the brave chemin de fer.”

  As a movie reviewer for Life, Sherwood once commented on the cowboy hero Tom Mix: “They say he rides like part of the horse, but they don’t say what part”

  While writing speeches for an F.D.R. campaign, Sherwood accompanied the President to Philadelphia, where, after Roosevelt had made what seemed to be a successful address, Sherwood complimented him on his “timing” in delivering certain lines. The President smiled and asked his writer, “Do you think your Alfred Lunt could have done it any better?” “Yes,” Sherwood replied, followed by the roar of Roosevelt’s laughter.

  Sherwood served in the Canadian Black Watch Regiment during World War I (his extreme height kept him out of the U.S. Army). In one of his first letters home, the 6’7”-lad wrote, “By no stretch of the imagination can I be called an attractive fellow in kilts, but at least 1 can say that Fm imposing.”

  Harold Ross

  While editing the American Legion Weekly as a young man, Ross received a letter from one of America’s foremost short-story writers. Not only were the author’s name and address engraved on the letterhead, but laudatory critical quotations as well. Before answering the letter, Ross had a new letterhead engraved on the upper left-hand corner of his own notepaper. It read:

  “A fine fellow.”

  —Alexander Woollcott

  “Among those present was Harold Ross.”

  —F.P.A., New York World

  On hearing that Time editor Henry Luce objected to a profile of himself published in The New Yorker—on the grounds that not one nice thing was said about him in the whole piece—Ross told him, “That’s what you get for trying to be a baby tycoon.”

  Aleck Woollcott’s personality lent itself so readily to caricature that most of his friends and acquaintances at one time or another tried their hand at capturing his general image. Ross once described him as “a fat duchess with the emotions of a fish.”

  During the F.D.R.-Thomas Dewey battle for the Presidency, The New Yorker, allegedly a neutral weekly, appeared to slant its humor more against Dewey than against Roosevelt. When Ross was chided about this, he replied, “If the GOP’s wrote funny stuff we’d print that too.”

  In the early 1930s, when fiction began growing markedly introspective, Ross commented on the flood of “grim” O’Hara-type stories which he printed but rarely approved of: “If a man in these goddam stories doesn’t shoot his wife, he shoots himself.”

  Ross once stated emphatically to Robert Benchley: “Don’t think I’m not incoherent.”

  Ross once caught Thurber in the act of imitating him, a routine that Thurber often repeated for the entertainment of his office-mates. “What’s so funny about me?” Ross demanded, revealing all the gestures Thurber had just finished mimicking. “I don’t do anything anybody can imitate.”

  Marc Connelly

  Leaving the Round Table one afternoon, brushing impatiently at some lint a new napkin had left on his suit, Marc Connelly glided by Algonquin owner Frank Case and murmured, “I’m going to have a suit made of lint and see if I can pick me up a blue serge.”

  Frank Sullivan

  On the Round Table: “Admission to this charmed circle is difficult, the reason being that the first and prime requisite is that the candidate must have the price of his lunch.”

  Returning from a lecture tour, Aleck Woollcott reported to a table of Algonquin lunchers that he had spoken to “ten thousand women in St. Paul.”

  “What did you tell them,” asked Sullivan. “No?”

  Receiving an award at a Columbia Jester* banquet for being the man who had done most for humor writing, Harold Ross, never fond of speech-making, uttered one drawn-out word: “Jesus!” Frank Sullivan, who was seated next to Ross, voiced the following criticism: “Your speech was too long, Ross. ! got bored after the first Syllable.”

  * Humor magazine of Columbia University.

  Harpo Marx

  For years, Benchley the critic carried on a war with the notorious Broadway hit Abie’s Irish Rose. Near the close of the play’s record run Benchley posted a prize for the best critical comment on the show. Harpo Marx won the contest with his capsule critique: “No worse than a bad cold.”

  In the spring of 1928, Aleck Woollcott invited Harpo Marx to spend the summer with him on the French Riviera. Harpo refused, protesting, “1 can think of forty better places to spend the summer, all of them on Long Island in a hammock.”

  (An interesting postscript: On Saturday, May 19, Aleck Woollcott, Beatrice Kaufman, novelist Alice Duer Miller, and Harpo sailed for Europe. )

  Herman Mankiewicz

  Watching his Round Table friends leaving the Algonquin one afternoon (when they were still young and relatively unsuccessful), Herman Mankiewicz (not yet a Hollywood producer) said to Murdock Pemberton, ‘There goes the greatest collection of unsaleable wit in America.”

  Mankiewicz once explained to a Round Table audience: “You know, it’s hard to hear what a bearded man is saying. He can’t speak above a whisker.”

  Irvin S. Cobb

  F.P.A/s upper extremity, the angular beak-nosed countenance supported by a long, bony neck, once caused humorist Irvin Cobb, on seeing a stuffed moose head, to remark, “My God, they’ve shot Frank Adams.”

  Alice Duer Miller

  Novelist and Round Table frequenter Alice Duer Miller once paid off a loss at cards to Aleck Woollcott, informing him: “You, sir, are the lowest form of life—a crib-bage pimp.”

  Charles MacArthur

  Aleck Woollcott and playwright Charles MacArthur once took a voyage to Europe together. After their ship had been two days at sea, MacArthur emerged onto the deck to join Aleck, confiding to him, “I can’t get over the feeling that I’m on a boat.”

  During a period when Benchley roomed with Charles MacArthur at the Shelton Hotel, MacArthur took a temporary job as a public relations counsel for a mausoleum in New Jersey. As his first promotional campaign, MacArthur convinced the firm that it should establish a “Poet’s Corner” and change its name to Fairview Abbey. Next, he decided that the firm should at least try to obtain the bones of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and inter them in its new Corner. To show his sincere intentions he sent a letter to James Michael Curley, mayor of Boston, saying that Boston had forfeited its right to Longfellow’s bones on the grounds that a Longfellow poem—lines from which read, “Life is real! Life is earnest!/And the grave is not the goal”—obviously proved that the poet did not wish to be buried in an ordinary grave, but rather in a crypt, or, best of all, in a Poet’s Corner—like the one at Fairview Abbey.

  When Curley sent back a sincere reply to the effect that some mistake must have been at the bottom of this action, and that, at any rate, Longfellow was buried in Cambridge, under the present jurisdiction of Mayor Flynn, MacArthur got Benchley to team up with him. The two sat down and made out a series of messages to Curley, including such threats as: THE COUNTRY DEMANDS THE BODY OF HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFEL-LOW; IF YOU VALUE YOUR JOB YOU WILL FORWARD IT TO ME IMMEDIATELY, and COME CLEAN WITH THAT BODY, and ROLL DEM BONES. Curley made serious attempts at getting warrants for their arrests in New Jersey.

  Frank Crownlnshield

  Frank Crowninshield, Vanity Fair editor and Round-Table occasional, once observed with Lardnerian wisdom: “Married men make very poor husbands.”

  Tallulah Bankhead

  Dorothy Parker gave a party one night at the Algonquin, and guest Tallulah Bankhead, slightly inebriated, carried on in a wild, indecorous manner. After Miss Bankhead had been escorted out, Mrs. Parker called in from an adjoining room, “Has Whistler’s Mother left yet?”

  The next day at lunch Tallulah took out a pocket mirror, examined herself painfully, and said, with a glance at Mrs. Parker, ‘Theless I behave like Whistler
’s Mother the night before, the more 1 look like her the morning after.”

  After sitting through the preview of a strikingly bad movie made by an independent producer, Tallulah observed, “What I don’t see is what that producer has got to be independent about.”

  Attending an unsuccessful revival of the Maeterlink play Aglavaine and Selysette, Tallulah Bankhead commented to Aleck Woollcott, “There is less in this than meets the eye.”

  Paul Robeson

  Negro singer Paul Robeson was an occasional guest at Thanatopsis poker games. One Saturday night when Robeson was present, Herbert Bayard Swope (editor of the New York World) happened to ask the group, “Did you fellows know that I have a little Jewish blood?”

  “And did you-all know that I got a tinge of the tarbrush?” asked Robeson.

  Beatrice Kaufman

  Beatrice Kaufman, who held little appreciation for music of any sort, once accompanied Oscar Levant to Carnegie Hall to hear Stokowski conduct Bach’s B Minor Mass. While en route to the theater Beatrice realized that they were going to be late and urged her escort, “In heaven’s name let’s hurry or well miss the intermission!”