Bartlett's Book of Anecdotes

by Clifton Fadiman

  KALLIO, Kyösti (1873–1940), Finnish statesman; prime minister (1924–25, 1929–30, 1936–37) and president (1937–40).

  1 In the Winter War of 1939–40 the Finnish army with nine divisions held off forty-five Soviet divisions for 105 days after the unprovoked Soviet onslaught. The Finns, inevitably, were crushed, and terms were imposed upon them in a treaty signed in Moscow in March 1940. As President Kallio picked up the pen to sign, he exclaimed, “Let the hand wither that signs this monstrous treaty!” Within a few months his arm had become paralyzed.

  KAMES, Henry Home, Lord (1696–1782), Scottish lawyer and psychologist.

  1 Meeting his old rival Lord Monboddo in an Edinburgh street shortly after the publication of Elements of Criticism, Lord Kames inquired whether Lord Monboddo had read it. “I have not, my lord,” was the response. “You write a great deal faster than I am able to read.”

  KANT, Immanuel (1724–1804), German tran-scendentalist philosopher.

  1 In 1802 Kant discharged Lampe, the faithful servant who had been with him for years. But he could not dismiss him from his mind, and this began to trouble him greatly. He therefore made an entry in his memorandum book: “Remember, from now on the name of Lampe must be completely forgotten.”

  KARL ALEXANDER (1818–1901), grand duke of Saxe-Weimar (1853–1901).

  1 About Karl Alexander cluster many anecdotes, most of them based on his absent-mindedness and the difficulty he found in paying attention to matters that didn’t interest him. In the course of his duties he frequently had to receive and welcome the reserve officers of his Eisenach battalion. One such occasion is well remembered:

  “Your name?”

  “Schulze, Your Highness.”

  “And what do you do?”

  “I am chief forester, Your Highness.”

  “Where do you come from?”

  “Strassburg, Your Highness.”

  A look of joyful recognition appeared on the archduke’s face. He gave the young officer a hearty handshake and exclaimed, “Ah, then you must be Chief Forester Schulze from Strassburg!”

  KAUFMAN, George S[imon] (1889–1961), US dramatist, wit, director, and journalist.

  1 Kaufman looked in at the theater while William Gaxton was starring in Of Thee I Sing to make sure that all was running smoothly. He was appalled at the liberties that Gaxton was taking with the script. In the intermission Kaufman hurried out and sent Gaxton a wire: “Am sitting in the last row. Wish you were here.”

  2 Walking on Fifth Avenue one day, Mrs. Kaufman saw so many acquaintances from her home town of Rochester that she observed, “All Rochester seems to be in New York this week.”

  “What an excellent time to visit Rochester,” suggested George Kaufman.

  3 The head of the great Bloomingdale’s department store in New York once backed a Kaufman production, which opened out of town. Early the following morning Bloomingdale was in touch with Kaufman for news of how the play had fared. “Close the play and keep the store open nights,” advised Kaufman.

  4 (Marc Connelly tells this story:)

  George C. Tyler [a producer] commissioned George Kaufman to adapt Jacques Deval’s French farce Someone in the House. George did a good job, but a weak cast plus a city-wide epidemic of influenza shortened its life. Tyler reluctantly turned down George’s suggestion for an advertising slogan for the faltering play: ‘Avoid crowds, see Someone in the House at the Knickerbocker Theater.’ ”

  5 Kaufman went on business to the office of theatrical producer Jed Harris, notorious for doing outrageous things to attract attention to himself. When Kaufman was ushered in, he found Harris seated at his desk completely nude. “Jed, your fly is open,” said Kaufman.

  6 Though Dorothy Parker was half-Jewish, Kaufman could not always count on her support against Alexander Woollcott, who liked to pretend to be anti-Semitic. At the Round Table one day Woollcott loudly addressed Kaufman as “you Christ-killer.” Kaufman stood up and announced, “I will not stay here and listen to any more slurs on my race. I am now leaving this table and the Algonquin.” He turned on his heel, then paused and glared at Dorothy Parker, who was sitting silent. “And I hope Mrs. Parker will follow me — halfway.”

  7 Kaufman, though deploring the liberties taken by the Marx Brothers with the text of Animal Crackers, which he and Morrie Ryskind had written specially for them, could do little to control their ad-libbing. At one performance, he and Ryskind were talking quietly together at the back of the theater, when Kaufman suddenly broke into what Ryskind was saying: “Excuse me, Morrie, but I think I just heard one of the original lines.”

  8 Dropping in on a matinee performance in New York, Kaufman was incensed to discover that the Marx Brothers were up to their usual tricks and went backstage to protest. “Well, they laughed at Edison, didn’t they?” said Groucho defensively. “Not at the Wednesday matinee, they didn’t,” replied Kaufman.

  9 During a game of bridge Kaufman’s partner asked to be excused to make a visit to the men’s room. “Gladly,” said Kaufman. “For the first time today I’ll know what you have in your hand.”

  10 Actress Ruth Gordon was telling Kaufman about her latest play. “In the first scene I’m on the left side of the stage,” she explained, “and the audience has to imagine I’m eating dinner in a crowded restaurant. Then in scene two I run over to the right side of the stage and the audience imagines I’m in my own drawing room.”

  Kaufman was unimpressed. “And the second night,” he said, “you have to imagine there’s an audience out front.”

  11 The Canadian stage and screen actor Raymond Massey clearly reveled in his tremendous success in the role of Abraham Lincoln. “Massey won’t be satisfied until he’s assassinated,” commented Kaufman.

  12 Kaufman became embarrassingly famous when the diary of the film actress Mary Astor was disclosed, revealing the playwright as Public Lover No. 1. Subpoenaed to appear at Miss Astor’s divorce trial, he fled Hollywood and remained secluded for some time. When the case was settled, he returned to Hollywood, and thereafter is said to have asked every woman who attracted him, “Do you keep a diary?”

  13 Asked to suggest his own epitaph, Kaufman came up with “Over my dead body!”

  14 A famed hypochondriac, Kaufman disliked touching doorknobs with his bare hands and seemed to be under a doctor’s care continually. Once he tested a new doctor by demanding his right to smoke, even though he was a nonsmoker. Only when the doctor disagreed did Kaufman trust him. The only kind of doctor he would not see was a psychiatrist. He had tried one out, but quickly stopped. “She’s asking too damn many personal questions,” he told his friends.

  KAUNITZ-RIETBURG, Wenzel Anton, Prince von (1711–94), Austrian statesman and diplomat.

  1 Empress Maria-Theresa relied greatly upon Prince von Kaunitz, but she disapproved of his personal morals. Once she rebuked him for riding openly through the Viennese streets with his mistress seated beside him. To this von Kaunitz replied, “I have come here, madame, to speak about your affairs, not mine.”

  KAZAN, Elia (1909–), US film director.

  1 Kazan, who hoped for a career in the movies, was advised by a Hollywood studio executive to change his name to Cezanne. “You make just one good picture,” Kazan was told, “and nobody will ever remember the other guy.”

  KEATS, John (1795–1821), British Romantic poet.

  1 In the spring of 1819 Keats was staying with his friend Charles Armitage Brown and found great pleasure in listening to the song of a nightingale that had built its nest near Brown’s house. One morning he took his chair out into the garden for two or three hours. When he returned, Brown noticed that he had some scraps of paper in his hand that he was quietly tucking behind some books. Knowing Keats’s habits of composition, Brown got his friend to show him the almost illegible scraps and together they arranged the stanzas. The poem was “Ode to a Nightingale,” and at once Brown instigated a search for other scraps of paper tucked into books or carelessly abandoned, and in that w
ay rescued a number of poems. After that Keats agreed that Brown should make fair copies of everything he wrote.

  2 (Keats’s medical training left him in no doubt about the nature of the disease that was to kill him. Charles Armitage Brown was with Keats at the moment that he realized that he had tuberculosis.)

  “On entering the cold sheets, before his head was on the pillow, he slightly coughed, and I heard him say, ‘That is blood from my mouth.’ I went towards him; he was examining a single drop of blood upon the sheet. ‘Bring me the candle, Brown, and let me see this blood.’ After regarding it steadfastly, he looked up in my face, with a calmness of countenance that I can never forget, and said, ‘I know the color of that blood; it is arterial blood; I cannot be deceived in that color; that drop of blood is my death-warrant — I must die.’ ”

  3 Keats’s room in Rome was near the Spanish Steps, and he could hear from his sickbed the sound of the water playing in the fountain there. Lines from the play Philaster by the seventeenth-century playwrights Beaumont and Fletcher came into his mind: “All your better deeds / Shall be in water writ.” He told his friend Joseph Severn, who was nursing him, that he wished for no inscription upon his grave, nor even his name, but simply the words: “Here lies one whose name was writ in water.”

  KEKULÉ VON STRADONITZ, [Friedrich] August (1829–96), German chemist.

  1 The structural formula for benzene eluded Kekulé for a long time. He claimed that the initial insight came to him in 1865 while he was dozing before his fireplace in Ghent. He saw atoms dancing before his eyes and then things like snakes, which contorted and took their tails in their mouths, thus creating rings. The ancient alchemical symbol of the snake biting its tail suggested that the two ends of the benzene chain were joined, and the Kekulé formula for benzene was thus established.

  KELLER, Helen Adams (1880–1968), US social worker and writer.

  1 With her teacher, Anne Mansfield Sullivan, Helen Keller lectured all over the country, answering questions from the audience that were communicated to her by Miss Sullivan. A stock question was: “Do you close your eyes when you go to sleep?” Helen Keller’s stock response was: “I never stayed awake to see.”

  KELLY, George (1887–1974), US playwright, uncle of actress Grace Kelly.

  1 On his deathbed Kelly was visited by his sister Mary’s daughter, who had come to see her uncle for the last time. As she learned forward to kiss him the old man whispered softly, “My dear, before you kiss me goodbye, fix your hair. It’s a mess.”

  KELLY, Michael (?1764–1826), Irish singer, actor, and composer.

  1 In 1802 Kelly embarked on a new venture as wine merchant. He proposed to put up a shop sign reading, “Michael Kelly, Composer of Music, Importer of Wine.” His friend and colleague Richard Brinsley Sheridan suggested that this should be amended to read “Michael Kelly, Importer of Music, Composer of Wine,” for “none of his music is original and all his wine is, since he makes it himself.”

  KELVIN, William Thomson, 1st Baron (1824–1907), British physicist.

  1 Kelvin worked out an improved method for measuring the depth of the sea, using piano wire and a narrow-bore glass tube, stoppered at the upper end. While experimenting with this invention, he was interrupted one day by his colleague James Prescott Joule. Looking with astonishment at the lengths of piano wire, Joule asked him what he was doing. “Sounding,” said Thomson. “What note?” asked Joule. “The deep C,” returned Thomson.

  2 Lost in a scientific reverie at lunch one day, Kelvin suddenly became aware that his wife was discussing plans for an afternoon excursion. Looking up, he asked abstractedly, “At what time does the dissipation of energy begin?”

  KEMBLE, Charles (1775–1845), English actor, father of Fanny Kemble.

  1 Kemble had received and ignored insistent demands for income-tax payment. Eventually, however, he was forced to give in. As he presented the money to the tax collector he remarked: “Sir, I now pay you this exorbitant charge, but I must ask you to explain to Her Majesty that she must not in future look upon me as a source of income.”

  Richard Kowalski was one of the greatest black marketeers in the history of modern Poland. He was a total illiterate poor Jew whose wife, mother, and three children had been slaughtered by the Germans. He blamed his fate on poverty. In the 1960s he sold to the state 26 million zlotys’ worth of water, a remarkable coup in view of the fact that the contract called for wine. When his increasing wealth could no longer be ignored, the militia called him in for interrogation. The interrogator said, “Mr. Kowalski, do us a favor. Stop making money. Don’t you understand our economic system?” Kowalski reflected sadly, then said, “I never learned to read and I never learned to write. What else is there left for me to do but make money?”

  — FROM STEWART STEVEN, The Poles

  KEMBLE, Fanny [Frances Anne] (1809–93), British actress.

  1 Wishing to explore the countryside of Massachusetts, where she was spending a summer vacation, Miss Kemble hired a local farmer to drive her around. As they set off on their first excursion, the farmer embarked on a detailed description of the area. Fanny brusquely interrupted him: “I hired you to drive me, not talk to me.” The farmer said no more until the end of the holiday, when he presented his bill. Miss Kemble studied it for a moment or two. Pointing to one entry, she asked: “What is this item?”

  “Sass, five dollar,” drawled the farmer. “I don’t often take it, but when I do I charge.”

  KEMBLE, John Philip (1757–1823), British tragic actor and theatrical manager, brother of Sarah Siddons and uncle of Fanny Kemble.

  1 Playing one of his celebrated roles in a country theater, Kemble was constantly interrupted by the crying of a young child. Finally Kemble came to the front of the stage and announced, “Ladies and gentlemen, unless the play is stopped, the child cannot possibly go on.”

  2 Kemble was once in conversation with a gentleman who had just returned from a visit to Sydney, Australia, and who spoke of the flourishing condition of the theater there. “Yes,” remarked Kemble, “the performers ought to be all good, for they have been selected and sent to that situation by very excellent judges.”

  KEMBLE, Stephen (1758–1822), British actor and theatrical manager; brother of John Philip Kemble.

  1 As an actor Stephen Kemble was eclipsed by other members of his illustrious clan. His main claim to fame was his huge bulk, which enabled him to play Falstaff without any padding. One night, Kemble awoke early at the country inn at which he was staying to find a diminutive figure standing at his bedside. Raising his massive body to a sitting position, Kemble asked for an explanation. “I am a dwarf come to exhibit at the fair tomorrow, and I have mistaken the bedchamber,” replied the intruder. “I suppose you are a giant come for the same purpose.”

  KENNEDY, Edward (1936–), US politician, brother of John and Robert.

  1 In 1964 Kennedy was hospitalized after an airplane crash. When his brother Robert came to visit him, a photographer said to Ted, “Move over, you’re in your brother’s shadow.” “Well,” said Ted, “that’s the way it will be when we’re in the Senate.”

  2 After his disastrous run for the presidency in 1980, a campaign in which he was soundly rejected by voters even before the Democratic nomination was settled, Kennedy was asked how he felt. “Frankly,” he said, “I don’t mind not being President. I just mind that someone else is.”

  3 Kennedy’s brief run for the presidency in 1980 has become famous as an utter disaster. Much of the aura of doom can be laid at the door of the interview Roger Mudd conducted with the candidate, a televised showing that underlined Kennedy’s unsuitability for the job and his own clouded view of his potential role as President. The night Mudd’s interview was shown, a rival television station showed the popular movie Jaws. Of Mudd’s coup de grâce, Senator Bob Dole of Kansas remarked, “Seventy-five percent of the country watched Jaws, twenty-five percent watched Roger Mudd, and half of those couldn’t tell the difference.”

 
KENNEDY, John Fitzgerald (1917–63), US politician; 35th President of the United States (1961–63).

  1 JFK was known as something of a rake during his bachelor days. To further his political career, however, it was clear the junior senator from Massachusetts would have to get married. Asked to describe what he wanted in a wife, he replied, “Intelligent, but not too brainy.”

  2 During World War II Kennedy held a commission in the US Navy and served in the Pacific. In August 1943 in Blackett Strait in the Solomon Islands, a Japanese destroyer rammed his ship. Kennedy, with some others, reached a nearby island but found it was held by the Japanese. He and another officer then swam to another island, where they persuaded the inhabitants to send a message to other US forces, who rescued them. Kennedy’s comment on his reputation as a hero: “It was involuntary. They sank my boat.”

  3 When John F. Kennedy was first persuaded to enter politics, his father orchestrated the campaigns that took him into Congress. Joseph Kennedy remarked, “We’re going to sell Jack like soap flakes,” and did so.

  4 After he had lost the vice presidential nomination to Estes Kefauver in 1956, Kennedy flew to Europe to rest. He was basking in the sun at his father’s rented Riviera home when Michael Canfield, former husband of Jackie Kennedy’s sister, Lee, came by. Canfield asked Jack why he wanted to be President. His eyes still closed, Jack replied, “I guess it’s the only thing I can do.”

  5 During the contest for the 1960 Democratic presidential nomination, Kennedy visited a mine in West Virginia. “Is it true you’re the son of one of our wealthiest men?” asked one of the miners there. Kennedy admitted that this was true.