Anything Goes_ A Biography of the Roaring Twenties - Lucy Moore [90]
The Round Table was more a lunchtime meeting of friends, “wits, poker and cribbage players, critics and writers,” than a networking opportunity. None of them, in the early years, were especially successful but all were ambitious. In 1920 Franklin Pierce Adams, known as FPA, was at thirty-nine the oldest member of the group. He chronicled this insular little coterie in his Saturday column in the New York Tribune (up to 1922) and then in the World, the “Diary of our own Samuel Pepys.” His chief pleasure was promoting the work of up-and-coming writers—many of whom, like Dorothy Parker who quipped that he “raised her from a couplet,” were Round Table regulars.
Several were drama critics, like the morose ladies’ man George Kaufman (also a director and playwright) and the effeminate Alec Woollcott, nicknamed Louisa May Woollcott. They invited their theatrical friends, including Noël Coward, who had arrived in New York with £17 in his pocket in 1921 on the first of several visits, the as-yet-unknown Harpo Marx and his brothers, the hard-drinking but charming womanizer John Barrymore and a dazzling teenager, Tallulah Bankhead, whose chief desire in life at that time was to seem more experienced than she really was. The drama critic and editor George Jean Nathan occasionally brought along the movie star Lillian Gish, with whom he had an enduring affair. She said that when she lunched with Nathan and Henry Mencken both talked “at once, neither listening to the other, each keeping up a barrage of observations and witticisms . . . . Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald often joined us, drinking their whiskey as if it were water and with seemingly no effect.”
Journalist-editors like Mencken—“the personification of shrewd good nature” and the voice of his generation—joined columnists like Heywood Broun and fiction writers like Ring Lardner, venerated by his contemporaries, who occasionally abandoned his splendid isolation in Great Neck, Long Island, to grace the Algonquin and flirt with Dorothy Parker. Bob Benchley was a noted humorist; lanky Bob Sherwood, with his Chaplinesque moustache, was an editor and, later, playwright and screenwriter. He was so shy that he dictated his copy sitting on the floor with his back to the stenographer, but at the Algonquin he blossomed.
Although female Round Tablers were outnumbered by their male counterparts they held their own. Jane Grant was the first female writer placed on general assignment by the New York Times. Along with her friend Ruth Hale, a Broadway press agent, she founded the Lucy Stone League, a feminist advocacy association named for a nineteenth-century activist; both women fought to retain their maiden names after they married. Anita Loos, whose husband lived off her earnings, was an early member of the League.
Dorothy Parker, the only female drama critic in New York, had started her career writing captions for the fashion pages at Vogue. One of her first assignments was to write the copy for an underwear spread: “Brevity is the soul of lingerie.” She had been sacked as a staff writer at Vanity Fair in 1920 for observing in print that the powerful impresario Florenz Ziegfeld’s actress wife was too old for ingénue roles. Supported by friends and colleagues Bobs Benchley and Sherwood, Parker was the best-known woman at the Round Table—or the Vicious Circle, as it was known.
Vicious maybe; merciless assuredly. Even Parker’s own wit could not always defend her from that of her friends. Unhappily married to an alcoholic and morphine addict and herself prone to severe depression, she returned to the Algonquin after one suicide