Genius in Disguise

by Thomas Kunkel

  In this fizzy climate, Ross and Jane decided to elope. Their relationship had advanced to the point where, by March of 1920, they were discussing marriage. In such matters Ross was the soul of convention, and he proposed an engagement, with the usual ring and six-month incubation. But Jane despised convention and offered a counterproposal: why don’t we get married this Saturday? The idea rattled Ross, not only for its rashness but because just then the future of The Home Sector had become quite precarious; he literally didn’t know how much longer he would have a job. But Jane had an answer for that, too: they could keep the marriage secret until Ross’s future cleared up. He would continue to room with Winterich, Jane would keep her own small place, and they would steal away on weekends. The elopement was on.

  Needing help with arrangements on such short notice, they brought Woollcott, a conspirator of the first rank, into their confidence. He enthusiastically helped Jane select a wedding ring, found a minister, and arranged for a discreet little ceremony at the Church of the Transfiguration (better known as the Little Church Around the Corner) in Murray Hill. So it was that on Saturday afternoon, March 27, 1920, Jane and Ross were married—and immediately afterward returned to their respective jobs pretending nothing had happened. That evening Woollcott dined with the newlyweds at the Waldorf-Astoria before putting them on a train to Philadelphia, where they had a one-day honeymoon at the Bellevue-Stratford. That Monday, Woollcott presented them with an itemized, $218.85 bill for services rendered—including $18.75 for dinner at the Waldorf and $100.00 for “personal wear and tear.” The bill was tossed onto a tall pile of gambling IOUs between Woollcott and Ross and reconciled later with the rest of the debts.

  As a wedding present, Ross surprised Jane with his new contract, signed that very morning, as editor of the American Legion Weekly. The Weekly, the official organ of the fast-growing new veterans organization, had preceded The Home Sector by several months and now wanted to expand its reach. Ross’s magazine had gone gamely along for twenty-three issues, but it simply never caught on. Beyond the question of editorial focus, The Home Sector sustained an early devastating blow; after just four issues, a New York printers’ strike forced it to suspend publication for two months. By March 1920, Butterick was looking for an exit, and when the Weekly offered to absorb The Home Sector, it jumped. Ross was offered the editorship of the combined publication, at the same salary as before.

  It was a melancholy decision. As much as Ross supported the American Legion and believed in the cause of veterans, he didn’t really want to edit a house organ. His own magazine interests were broadening, and this was the narrowest kind of endeavor. But with marriage pending and no other immediate employment prospects, and with much still to learn about publishing, he bowed to expedience. He packed up his Home Sector staff and editorial backlog and, without missing a beat, settled into his prosaic new job. His office was in a dingy building on West Forty-third Street almost at the Hudson River. There was a constant clatter from the freight trains just outside, as well as the vivid aroma of a neighboring slaughterhouse.

  Ross and Jane Grant’s elopement didn’t surprise their friends, but her decision to retain her maiden name did. (Jane Grant Collection, University of Oregon)

  It took only two uncomfortable weeks of sneaking around for Jane and Ross to decide to divulge their secret. Besides, his immediate future, unappetizing as it might be, had firmed up faster than either of them had imagined. Their friends were hardly surprised at the marriage but were taken aback by Jane’s news that she would be retaining her maiden name. It turned out the bride had been jarred when, after the ceremony, she was congratulated as “Mrs. Ross.” (The phrase rattled the groom, too, for that matter.) Jane was proud of her independence, and one of her guiding principles was that a woman’s worth had nothing to do with whom she happened to marry. It was Jane Grant who had abandoned Kansas for the big city, fought her way up through the oppressively chauvinist Times, and taken care of herself in the middle of a war, and Jane Grant she would remain. As for Ross, in this instance his appreciation for nonconformity outweighed his traditional bias; he was both amused by and proud of his wife’s brave decision and seems to have been generally supportive—despite the confusion it invariably caused when they registered in hotels and the steady ribbing Ross took from friends. For instance, in 1926, when the New Yorker staff marked Ross’s birthday with a lampoon edition, a Talk of the Town item referred to the editor as Harold Grant, but quoted him saying, “I’m calling myself Ross now, you know.”

  Jane had a kindred spirit in friend Ruth Hale, a theatrical press agent who was married to New York Tribune (later World) columnist Heywood Broun. Her brand of feminism was so ardent that she even insisted her husband see other women, though the reluctant libertine often just looked up a poker buddy instead. In mid-1920, when Ross and Jane’s hunt for a suitable apartment was stymied by the housing shortage, it was Broun and Hale who came to their rescue by letting them stay awhile in a spare bedroom. Between Ruth and Jane the man-bashing got intense at times. After one particularly ferocious discussion, Ross said, “Aw, why don’t you two hire a hall?”

  The following year they did. The two women founded the Lucy Stone League, an advocacy organization named for the New England feminist who a century before had fought for women’s rights, including that of keeping her maiden name after marriage. Ruth Hale was president, Jane Grant, secretary.

  ——

  In the summer of 1919, just as Ross, Woollcott and Company were getting reacquainted with civilian life, a Broadway press agent named John Peter Toohey was contemplating a problem. He was trying to drum up publicity about a precocious new playwright, Eugene O’Neill, whose dark work had yet to attract any Broadway producers. By this time Woollcott was back at the Times, and Toohey wanted to plant an item about O’Neill in Aleck’s Sunday column, “Second Thoughts on First Nights.” Since Toohey didn’t know Woollcott, he called Murdock Pemberton, who handled public relations for the Hippodrome and had known Aleck since childhood. Pemberton set up lunch for the three at the Algonquin, a small but stylish hotel on West Forty-fourth Street, across from the Hippodrome and also convenient to the Times.

  Woollcott wasn’t overly interested in what Toohey had to say about O’Neill; instead he turned the conversation, as was his wont, into a monologue about his own wartime exploits. Afterward Pemberton and Toohey conspired to good-naturedly prick Aleck’s self-absorption. They drew up a gag press release for a luncheon the following week that would feature a dozen different reminiscences of the war. All twelve speakers were Alexander Woollcott, his name mangled twelve imaginative ways. Invitations to the lunch were sent to theater journalists and friends. Algonquin owner Frank Case gave over the Pergola Room (later renamed the Oak Room) to the affair, and the Hippodrome’s prop department festooned it in military bunting. A huge, gold-embossed banner read “AWOL—COTT.” Three dozen people attended and Woollcott, far from being offended, was delighted. The gathering was so much fun that Toohey, it is said, suggested they meet again soon. And they would—over and over and over again.

  So much has been written and recounted about the Algonquin Round Table—true, false, and somewhere in between—that it is easy to forget that, for all the eventual fame and forced drollery, in the beginning it was simply a high-spirited gathering of friends at a convenient, affordable restaurant. Of course it didn’t take these savvy, ambitious people (least of all the opportunistic Case) long to realize the self-promotional value of their association. But the Round Table didn’t start out to be a salon, or a cascade of wit. Ross once described it this way to Mencken: “I was there a lot and I never heard any literary discussion or any discussion of any other art—just the usual personalities of some people getting together, and a lot of wisecracks and quoting of further wisecracks. It was always about the same as a dinner with you, Nathan, and a couple more—Grant Rice and Paul Patterson, say—at ‘21.’ No cosmic problems settled; merely laughs.”

  It is easy to forget,
too, that in that summer of 1919 the principals were mostly young—late twenties and early thirties—not terribly accomplished, and little known beyond their circle. Of the core group, the venerable F.P.A. (a graybeard at thirty-seven) was the only genuine celebrity and serious wage-earner, and thus the informal dean. Woollcott, who tended to preside like an impertinent ringmaster, was just thirty-two and years away from his “Town Crier” fame. Ross, twenty-six, and Jane, just turned twenty-seven, toiled in good, albeit nondescript, jobs. Heywood Broun, thirty-one, had yet to reach his peak popularity as a columnist and champion of labor. George S. Kaufman, twenty-nine, was a second-string drama critic for the Times who on the side had written several undistinguished shows. His soon-to-be collaborator, Marc Connelly, twenty-eight, also had a few flops to his credit. Harpo Marx, thirty, and his funny brothers were still waiting for a breakthrough show. Robert Benchley, twenty-nine, and his attractive, brooding sidekick, Dorothy Parker, twenty-five, were working for proletarian wages at the aristocratic Vanity Fair.

  Others in the circle included the Pemberton brothers—Murdock, who would become The New Yorker’s first art critic, and Brock, soon to bolt the Times to become a producer; the dapper editor of Vanity Fair, Frank Crowninshield; music critic and composer Deems Taylor; Harper’s Bazaar editor Arthur Samuels; Robert Sherwood, later editor of the original Life and a Pulitzer-winning dramatist; writers Edna Ferber, Alice Duer Miller, Donald Ogden Stewart, and Herman Mankiewicz; playwright-to-be Charles MacArthur; and the beautiful artist Neysa McMein, already a successful illustrator for such magazines as Woman’s Home Companion and The Saturday Evening Post. Eventually Ring Lardner joined in, and there was a corps of Round Table irregulars, many of them performers. These included the Lunts; Helen Hayes (later Mrs. MacArthur); Paul Robeson, whose singing career Woollcott championed; and Noel Coward, who became especially friendly with Ross.

  Two other irregulars were Raoul Fleischmann and his wife, Ruth. Through Adams, Fleischmann had joined via the Table’s ancillary poker game. He managed his family’s large East Side bakery, but his extended family had famously made its fortune in yeast. Raoul Fleischmann was Harold Ross’s obverse: as polished as Ross was rough, as polite as Ross was profane. But they had one thing in common: both loved to gamble.

  On any given day the number at lunch was usually ten or twelve; admission was more or less by invitation and subject to the whim of the court. One must be amusing, preferably witty, and somewhat masochistic, for no foible or accident of birth was beyond the Round Tablers’ needle. They made sport of Parker’s pitiful suicide attempts (“Dorothy, if you don’t stop this sort of thing you’ll ruin your health”); Kaufman’s Jewishness; Broun’s dubious hygiene; Woollcott’s dubious sexuality (“Louisa May Woollcott”). They jabbed at one another’s neuroses, clothes, even bridge skills (when his partner asked if he might be excused to go to the bathroom, Kaufman snapped, “Fine, this is the first time this afternoon I’ll know what you have in your hand”). Those among them who had spent the war toting a pen instead of a rifle—an enduringly sensitive issue—were targets too. At a poker game Woollcott was riding publicist David Wallace mercilessly about his infantry career. At last the normally mild-tempered Wallace could hold his tongue no longer. “At least I’m not a writing soldier,” he blurted. There was a long and awkward silence, until Ring Lardner finally said, “You sure swept the table that time, Dave.”

  To enhance the luncheon’s visibility, Case moved the group from a long table in the Pergola Room to a round table in the back center of the Rose Room. There they dubbed themselves the Vicious Circle.

  Though a founder, the unlikeliest member of the circle was Ross. To this day when the Round Table is recalled he is generally relegated to something like junior-partner (or, less charitably, mascot) status. Even Case, who was close enough to Ross to know better, described him as “a sort of adopted child, taken in on approval before the final papers were signed.”

  The slight is unfortunate but understandable. By this time, Ross had taken to wearing his hair in a tall, stiff pompadour, a shock-coif that seemed as implacable as a privet hedge. The extra three inches conveyed the impression, no doubt intended, that Ross was even taller than he was. (It was this remarkable thatch that the actress Ina Claire had in mind one spring day when she declared to Case, “Frank, I feel so wonderful I’d like to take off my shoes and stockings and wade in Ross’s hair!”) The quality of his clothes was improving with his station, but his slouch and his ill-proportioned, Lincolnesque body—overly long arms, thin legs, big hands and feet—always made tailoring a challenge. His fashion sense remained so retro that he still wore high-top, lace-up shoes.

  Kibitzers marveled at Ross’s gat-tooth countenance and curious behavior—long periods of quiet punctuated by “teamsterlike snorts” or explosive, left-field interjections. He did not seem as intellectually agile as his friends. Rebecca Bernstien, who lunched at the Round Table occasionally in the company of her newspaper colleague Broun, said of conversations with Ross, “He looked at you as if he were listening hard, not quite getting whatever you said.” He laughed often, but sometimes too heartily, betraying a trace of insecurity. Ross’s intellect was as keen as any at the table, but he wasn’t suited to verbal swordplay. His humor tended to be offbeat, understated, evident in his “daring felicity of phrase and freshness of thought” (Edna Ferber’s assessment) and, unique for this group, in his self-deprecation. For instance, Ross once received a manuscript from a writer who had included some of his credits in the letterhead. Immediately thereafter, when friends got letters from Ross, these testimonials appeared beneath his name: “ ’A splendid fellow.’—Alexander Woollcott” and “ ’Among those present was H. Ross.’—F.P.A. in the New York World.”

  As Margaret Case Harriman, Frank’s daughter and chronicler of the Round Table, would later point out, it was easy to underestimate Ross, but anyone who did so simply wasn’t looking hard enough. His friends prized him, and not just because he was a good audience. They appreciated the qualities that escaped others: his droll sense of humor, intense powers of observation, and a wide playful streak.

  It didn’t take long for the luncheon rondelet to become celebrated in New York for its wit, both mirthful and lacerating. For this celebrity the Round Tablers had largely themselves to thank. With a handful of influential newspapers and magazines represented in the circle—the Times, the Tribune, Vanity Fair, Harper’s Bazaar, Life—the wits cross-pollinated feverishly. Shrugging off charges of logrolling, they quoted one another in their columns, reviewed one another’s shows, publicized one another’s books. To be fair, many of the glowing notices were deserved—and in any case not all the notices were glowing. Depending on who was feuding with whom, reviews could be as catty and personal as their uglier lunchtime digs. On the whole, however, the arrangement suited everyone nicely.

  By far the most powerful transmitter of Round Table wit was Adams, whose column in the Tribune (and later the World), “The Conning Tower,” was scoured by tens of thousands of New Yorkers for its dollops of quippery and clever verse. Young writers conspired to break into the column, and the appearance of even a four-line snippet was regarded as a triumph. Writers as diverse as E. B. White and John O’Hara always remembered F.P.A. fondly for cracking open the door to them when they were struggling. The formation of the Round Table supplied F.P.A. with a freshet of material, and he wasn’t bashful about using it. A particularly good line from Parker or Kaufman or Benchley might turn up in “The Conning Tower” within hours of its utterance. Similarly, F.P.A.’s “Diary of Our Own Samuel Pepys,” which appeared on Saturdays and recounted his comings and goings in the archaic fashion of the seventeenth-century diarist, was a virtual calendar of the circle’s social whirl. Readers came to follow the Round Tablers as if they were the crazy kids down the hall. Here is an entry from Sunday, March 7, 1920:

  To J. Toohey’s, for a short and silly game of cards, which I ought not waste my time at, and nobody gaining aught but H. Ross,
by stupid good luck, too, albeit he prates ever of his skill and acumen.

  And another, from Saturday, February 9, 1924, when the group had taken the train to Atlantic City:

  So to our inn, and I for six miles of walking with Jane Grant, and pleasant enough when we drew away from the vast crowds of the dullest-looking people ever I saw in one place, and so with H. Ross and H. Broun and George Kaufman to dinner, and we went to a strange and costly inn, and had a fine dinner and cast dice for the reckoning, and some luckless wight paid.

  As is clear, the Vicious Circle worked hard at play; a moment of solitude was a moment wasted. Lunch at the Algonquin, cocktails at Neysa’s studio, après-théâtre at 412. They were crazy for games—cards, charades, cribbage, backgammon, or croquet (at which Ross was routinely accused of advancing the ball with his foot). This was matched only by their passion for pranks, to which Woollcott and Ross were especially addicted. Countless examples, from the sophomoric to the inspired, are recorded, but this is fairly typical: when Woollcott let it be known how thoughtful it would be if his friends banded together to give him the multivolume Oxford English Dictionary for Christmas, they presented him with ten copies of the first volume.

  Perhaps the ultimate expression of the Algonquin set’s exuberance—critics were already calling it obnoxiousness—was a comic revue they wrote and staged, for one night only, in April 1922, before a handpicked house at the Forty-ninth Street Theatre. Their show, called No Sirree!, sent up a Russian revue then popular, Chauve Souris. Described in the program as “An Anonymous Entertainment by the Vicious Circle of the Hotel Algonquin,” No Sirree! was a pastiche of sketches, blackouts, monologues, and musical numbers. Ross was virtually the only Round Tabler who didn’t have a featured spot. His acting was considered so hapless that he was relegated to the role of Lemuel Pip (“an old taxi-driver”), who is referred to repeatedly but never appears on stage. Amusing as it all was, the only truly noteworthy act was provided by Benchley. He had promised to write a skit but, as was his custom, blew his deadline so badly that he wasn’t even listed on the program. Nonetheless, he debuted his celebrated comic monologue “The Treasurer’s Report,” which scored such a success that Irving Berlin immediately signed him to perform it for five hundred dollars a week in his Music Box Revue—and in so doing launched Benchley’s bittersweet career as a performer.