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By Root 590 0

the guest list for a typical “tea party” (a comic euphemism for a drinkathon) at the Kaufmans’: Ethel Barrymore, Harpo Marx, Heywood Broun, Edna Ferber, Helen Hayes, George Gershwin, Alfred Lunt, Alexander Woollcott, Leslie Howard, Dorothy Parker, Robert Benchley, Robert Sherwood, Herbert Bayard Swope. More or less the same group might have assembled another day at Woollcott’s country place in Vermont, or the uptown studio of the artist Neysa McMein, or even at a rented place in the south of France. Theater is, of course, an inherently collaborative medium, but what is still remarkable about the circle of the 1920s is the extent to which they were a circle—a group of people who lived an almost collective life, and whose work was in many ways the record of that charmed, overheated, fiercely competitive society. It was the special privilege and delight of the audience, both in the theaters and in living rooms across the country, to eavesdrop on this wicked and inspired conversation.

The wits of Broadway wrote with each other, for each other, and about each other. Dorothy Parker, the most mordant and perhaps the most heartbreaking of the whole circle, began her career as a theater critic at Vogue in 1916 and moved on to Vanity Fair, where she was edited by the playwright Robert Sherwood and his fellow Robert, Benchley, later a comic stage performer and then a mainstay at The New Yorker; she was ultimately fired after trashing Ziegfeld’s wife, Billie Burke, in the Follies. Woollcott, in many ways the central figure of the group, as well as the presiding genius of the Algonquin Round Table, the famous lunchtime gathering of wits at a hotel just off Times Square, virtually made a career out of writing about his friends. Besides reviewing their plays, and often composing charmingly facetious prefaces for the plays’ published editions, Woollcott wrote two magazine profiles of Kaufman as well as both a profile and a full-length biography of his friend Irving Berlin. In 1929 he began simultaneously writing a weekly column for The New Yorker and, more important, broadcasting a weekly radio show that told the world of Broadway doings and often featured Broadway stars. Woollcott played a Woollcott-like figure—a fat, indolent, waspish kibbitzer—in S. N. Behrman’s Brief Moment. Much later, in 1939, Kaufman and Hart wrote a play about Woollcott, The Man Who Came to Dinner.

The effect of all this nonstop collaborating, chronicling, criticizing, lunching, and drinking was to push the art of the period in the direction dictated by the circle’s collective sensibility: wit, speed, sparkle, savoir-faire. Irving Berlin, the peerless manufacturer of hummable, lovable tunes, was certainly the most mainstream, the most conventionally successful, of the figures who joined, or at least regularly visited, the Algonquin Round Table. But intimacy with Woollcott, Dorothy Parker, and the rest turned him in a different direction. Berlin’s biographer describes him writing “What’ll I Do?,” a song that sounds as much like Cole Porter as it does like Berlin, in a setting that is sheer Cole Porter: arriving with a bottle of champagne at a party given by Parker and Neysa McMein, Berlin sat down at the piano and began composing. When Berlin first met the beautiful young socialite Ellin Mackay, who was to become his wife, she told him how much she admired “What’ll I Do?”

The limitation of the Round Table was that it tended to inspire gag writing and brilliant buffoonery; but over time, Kaufman and his collaborators evolved a form of satiric drama that was rooted, more or less, in character. In 1929, Kaufman and Ring Lardner, the great and mordant sportswriter and essayist, wrote June Moon. In the play’s prologue, two strangers on a train try so hard to make contact with each other that neither listens to the other, and each natters on about people whom the other couldn’t possibly know. The situation is painfully human, though at the same time ridiculous; and indeed, Fred, the songwriting-star-to-be, is consigned to that special circle of hell Kaufman reserves