Algonquin Round Table History,News 6 Women You Didn’t Know Were Members of the Algonquin Round Table

6 Women You Didn’t Know Were Members of the Algonquin Round Table

Jane Grant, reporter

This article was written for the Huffington Post.

Dorothy Parker and Edna Ferber were the only women sitting at the Algonquin Round Table, correct? That’s what I thought before I started researching my new book The Algonquin Round Table New York: A Historical Guide. After all, these are the only females among the wits in most accounts, anecdotes, and cartoons. But I was delighted to uncover the names and stories of the other members of the Vicious Circle, women that had fascinating and full lives. Even though their names aren’t as common today as Parker and Ferber, the rich history and accomplishments they left behind are still relevant.

The Algonquin Hotel, 59 W. Forty-fourth Street, sits in the middle of “Club Row” a block west of Times Square. In June 1919, not long after he returned from serving in the army, Alexander Woollcott was treated to a free lunch here. Woollcott was the acerbic theater critic on the Times, and his hosts were two Broadway publicists, Murdock Pemberton and John Peter Toohey. The flacks struck out in interesting him in the playwright they were pitching —Eugene O’Neill of all people — but they did dream up the prank of holding a welcome home luncheon for Woollcott.

The men invited a colorful cast of characters from newspaper city rooms, magazine offices, and the Broadway milieu. As the legends hold, Parker, at the time a Vanity Fair staffer and freelance poet, and Ferber, novelist and short fiction dynamo, were popular members. But among the famous men — columnists Franklin P. Adams and Heywood Broun, composer Deems Taylor, playwrights Marc Connelly, George S. Kaufman, and Robert E. Sherwood, and humorist Robert Benchley — women were always in the midst.

Reading contemporary newspaper columns and sifting through recollections, at least 30 men and women were Round Table members. These half-dozen women are unique and deserve to be remembered, and that’s why they are in my book.

Margalo Gillmore

Margalo Gillmore, actress

Margalo Gillmore was the baby of the Vicious Circle, a Broadway actress barely out her teens when she joined the group for lunch. Her parents and grandparents were also actors, and she started onstage in high school. Growing up, her mother said that if she was working and needed to eat, to go where Ethel Barrymore and Gertrude Lawrence lived: The Algonquin. Gillmore appeared in early O’Neill dramas, including The Straw (1921) and racked up scores of credits. She worked in every medium, from silent pictures to live television. Her father, Frank Gillmore, was a founder of Actors Equity, and she earned one of the first union cards after the 1919 strike that shut down Broadway. She toured constantly and was a working actress for fifty years. In 1954, an audience of 65 million TV viewers saw her in Peter Pan as Mrs. Darling. In 1986 Gillmore was the last member of the Round Table to pass away. I was stunned to discover her gravestone, in Kensico Cemetery in Westchester County, has the Equity logo carved into it.

Jane Grant, reporter

Jane Grant, reporter

Jane Grant has slipped through the cracks as a pioneer feminist and a barrier-breaker in print media. With her first husband, Harold Ross, the two launched a “humorous weekly” in 1925 from their Hell’s Kitchen apartment, a fact long overlooked. In a 1945 letter, Ross wrote, “There would be no New Yorker today if it were not for her.” Grant pushed Ross to realize their dream, introduced him to the chief financial backer, and found some of the most famous names in the magazine’s history, such as Janet Flanner. Leaving out how Grant helped launch The New Yorker, she led a life like few others in the Jazz Age. She was the first female reporter in the city room at the Times. Grant interviewed Caruso and Chaplin, and was the first Times woman to visit China, Russia, and Nazi Germany. In addition, in 1921 she was a co-founder, with her close friend Ruth Hale, of the Lucy Stone League, a forerunner of the Women’s Liberation Movement. The group fought to allow women to maintain their maiden names after marriage. Grant wrote for more than 30 years. When she died in 1972, the Times buried her obituary on page forty-four.

Ruth Hale, feminist

Ruth Hale, feminist

Ruth Hale sued the U.S. State Department because she wanted a passport issued in her own name, not as the wife of her husband, Heywood Broun. She lost that fight but brought attention to the cause of the Lucy Stone League, an organization that came to define her. Hale was a writer, columnist, critic, and publicist in pre-World War I Manhattan. She and Broun went to Paris as war correspondents, then came back to New York and became one of the city’s most talked-about literary couples. From West Side apartments she directed efforts to support equal rights for women in the 1920s. Hale also ghostwrote for her more famous husband. Hale quit New York and retired to a farm in rural Connecticut, where she died alone.

Beatrice Kaufman, editor

Beatrice Kaufman, editor

Beatrice Kaufman was not a member of the Round Table because she was married to George S. Kaufman, the newspaperman turned successful playwright. The Vicious Circle didn’t tolerate wives very much, and Bea Kaufman carved her own life for herself as an editor, working under Carmel Snow at Harpers Bazaar. The Kaufmans had an open marriage, so in 1936 when George was mired in a national sex scandal with actress Mary Astor, Bea not only defended her husband, she was the one to move him to Bucks County to avoid the press. Bea was always the first to read his new work, and he leaned on her consistently. She was close friends with the Marx Brothers, Moss Hart, and the Gershwins. Kaufman parlayed her social standing into a job with Samuel Goldwyn as a movie script reader. Late in life she also tried writing plays, but none were successful. Perhaps Bea Kaufman’s best role was as her husband’s sounding board and guardian; following her 1945 death George wrote few hits.

Margaret Leech, double Pulitzer-winner

Margaret Leech, double Pulitzer-winner

Margaret Leech was a Vassar grad who started her career working for the Condé Nast magazines that were not named Vogue or Vanity Fair. She wrote articles and stories, and in her 30s had three romance novels published. With Heywood Broun she co-wrote a bestselling biography of New York’s anti-vice crusader, Anthony Comstock. Leech crafted short fiction for popular magazines, with her most famous, “Manicure,” set in the world of a nail salon, included in The Best Stories of 1929. The collection found Leech sharing company with Willa Cather. Her life took a dramatic turn in 1928 when she married the much-older and wealthy Ralph Pulitzer, scion of Joseph Pulitzer and the president-publisher of the World. Leech had children and travelled the world, and upon her husband’s death in 1939 she returned to writing. She became a serious presidential historian, and devoted the rest of her life to it. Reveille in Washington: 1860-1865 (1941) is considered a classic about the Civil War era. It was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for history. Eighteen years after she won her first Pulitzer Prize, Leech won her second, for In the Days of William McKinley published in 1959. She was the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize in History, and is still the only woman to have won it twice in the category.

Peggy Wood, actress

Peggy Wood, actress

Peggy Wood had a calling to the acting profession that kept her working for sixty years. Born and raised in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, the daughter of a magazine editor, Wood made her Broadway debut in 1911 and worked until the 1970s. She appeared in early talkies with Will Rogers, and was a close confidant of Noël Coward. She was the original Ruth in the three-year Broadway run of Blithe Spirit. When Wood was starring in Coward’s Bitter Sweet, Harpo Marx visited her. “Why didn’t you tell me you were as good as this?” he asked her. “I’d have married you long ago!” When she wasn’t onstage, she was writing about it, for newspapers, books, and magazines. Wood married a fellow member of the Vicious Circle, poet John V. A. Weaver, in 1924. If Peggy Wood is remembered for anything almost forty years after her death, it’s that she co-starred in The Sound of Music in 1965 as Mother Abbess. She was nominated for an Oscar for best supporting actress.

Related Post

Walking Tour

Walking Tours Schedule for 2025Walking Tours Schedule for 2025

The Algonquin Round Table comes alive in the only New York walking tour devoted to the famed literary group. It met from 1919-1929 and is America’s most well-known group of writers.

Walk in the footsteps of the legendary wits Franklin P. Adams, Robert Benchley, Heywood Broun, Marc Connelly, Edna Ferber, George S. Kaufman, Harpo Marx, Dorothy Parker, Harold Ross, Robert Sherwood, Alexander Woollcott, and the rest of the “Vicious Circle.” The tour explores the architectural and historical stories of the buildings and landmarks linked to them.

The tour begins and ends inside the world-famous Algonquin Hotel, a national literary landmark. This 2-hour tour encompasses twenty blocks to explore notable locations, inside and out. Be ready!

The schedule is here.

Walking Tour

The Algonquin Hotel

Vicious Circle Virtual Tours Begin April 3Vicious Circle Virtual Tours Begin April 3

Algonquin Round Table by Natalie Ascencious

Algonquin Round Table by Natalie Ascencious

I’ve turned the Algonquin Round Table walking tour into a virtual tour. I supply the tour, you can watch with friends and family, and try out your best wisecracks on each other. Plus we can cover a lot more ground together. I’m offering them on Fridays for four weeks, at 2:00 p.m. ET (New York time), which is 11:00 a.m. (Los Angeles), 6:00 p.m. (London), 7:00 p.m. (Paris) but check your time zone for seasonal changes. The tour is 2:00 p.m. in New York City time. Tickets are $10 each and can be purchased in advance here.

The tour will be Friday, April 3, 10, 17 and 24.

The Algonquin Round Table comes alive in the only New York tour devoted to the famed literary group. It met from 1919-1929 and is America’s most well-known group of writers. We will trace the footsteps (from your house) of the legendary wits Franklin P. Adams, Robert Benchley, Heywood Broun, Marc Connelly, Edna Ferber, George S. Kaufman, Harpo Marx, Dorothy Parker, Harold Ross, Robert Sherwood, Alexander Woollcott, and the rest of the “Vicious Circle.” The tour explore the architectural and historical stories of the buildings and landmarks linked to them.

The tour “begins” and “ends” inside the world-famous Algonquin Hotel, a national literary landmark. This 1-hour tour will visit more than 30 places. Tour Highlights:

• See the Theatre District and the landmark Broadway playhouses;
• Visit the locations of the former speakeasies of Rockefeller Center;
• See where the Round Table lived in Hell’s Kitchen during Prohibition;
• Learn about their 1920s friends such as F. Scott Fitzgerald;
• See where The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, and Vogue magazines began.

Not only will you get a taste of New York history, but it’s a great way to learn about the past and also see how little has changed over the decades.

The guide is Kevin C. Fitzpatrick. He is the author of The Algonquin Round Table New York: A Historical Guide (Lyons Press), A Journey into Dorothy Parker’s New York (Roaring Forties Press), and Under the Table: A Dorothy Parker Cocktail Guide (Lyons Press), among others. He’s president of the Dorothy Parker Society.

Heywood Broun

Heywood Broun on Being Fired in the Spring, Summer, and Winter (Summer is Best)Heywood Broun on Being Fired in the Spring, Summer, and Winter (Summer is Best)

Heywood Broun

Heywood Broun

This is one of the very last columns that Heywood Broun ever published. Broun ran his own bi-weekly newspaper, Nutmeg (later called Broun’s Nutmeg) in Stamford, Connecticut, where he resided. It was in operation in the late 1930s, and was concurrent as he wrote a syndicated column “It Seems to Me” for Scripps-Howard and organized the Newspaper Guild. After his contract was allowed to lapse in late 1939, he moved to the New York Post. He only had one column appear in the paper, as he succumbed to pneumonia on December 18 at age 51. This column was written ten days before his death.

Old Newspaperman
By Heywood Broun
December 9, 1939

It happens suddenly. On a Tuesday, perhaps, you’re sitting around kidding back and forth in the City Room and maybe growing reminiscent about some story you covered quite a long time back. Yes, that’s the way it was. It gave an opening to a young squirt reporter and he said, “Uncle Heywood, how did you like Jenny Lind’s first concert?”

Now naturally I never saw Jenny Lind but I did ride in horse-driven buses on Fifth Avenue and I saw Admiral Dewey come parading across Washington Square and we all hollered because he had won the Battle of Manila and made America a world power.

Everybody got to calling me Uncle Heywood and at the drop of a hat I could be induced to talk about Matty and the old, old Giants. And when the mood gripped me I would even go back to the days of Dan McGann. You can always spot an old newspaperman by his tendency to talk and write of things in the past. Every one of us will insist that they don’t grow fighters like Fitzsimmons any more.

There isn’t any set time for becoming an old newspaperman but around fifty is the dangerous age and at fifty-one the line is definitely marked as the groove on the floor of the Alamo.

I’ve been fired in the Spring, the Summer and early Winter. I like it best in the Summer. Three times in thirty-one years isn’t so much to be fired. The first firing is often worse than the last. It’s very discouraging to get canned when you’re young. That’s the way it was with me. I was twenty-one and working on the Morning Telegraph. My stall in the old Eighth Avenue car barn was right next to Bide Dudley. He was getting $35 a week and my salary was $28. I wanted $30 but when I asked for it they fired me.

The next job was a long time coming. Fortunately I was a man of character and living at home and so I didn’t go into insurance or business but just borrowed money from my father and sat around for six months doing nothing. Eventually Burdick gave me a job on the Tribune.

He was a shy city editor and when he mentioned the salary he didn’t want to pronounce the fatal words. He gazed away off at a distant window and wrote on a piece of scratch paper $25. Newspaper work is like that. You can go perfectly straight down once you are over the top of the mountain but detours are necessary as you come up from the valley.

As a matter fact it was a mountain which made me. Burdick gave me the Tribune job on the strength of a recommendation from Fred Pitney, his star reporter. Pitney remembered that when I covered the E. H. Harriman death watch for the Evening Sun, I had crawled up through the woods at Arden and come right to the door of the big house. Getting there didn’t get me anything but a boot from the butler. Still after a year and a half Pitney remembered me as an energetic young man. I’ve seen that hill since and now I couldn’t walk it let alone make the grade on my belly.

Pretty nearly ten years went by before I got fired again. The World did it. I had gone onto the paper on my own volition and through the seductive influence of Mr. Swope.

The Sacco-Vanzetti case has something to do with it but only indirectly. First of all I went on a one-man strike because they said I wasn’t to write about the case anymore. They didn’t disagree with my opinions but they objected to violence of language. “Is Harvard to be known hereafter as Hangman’s House?” Was the sentence which made the trouble.

At the end of six or seven months the good shoemaker and the poor fish peddler were dead and things were patched up for me to go back to the paper. Getting fired was something of a surprise. Being bereft of topics I dashed off a little masterpiece for The Nation saying that I thought the editorial policy of The Morning World was a shade on the timid side. I believe I said, “The World on numerous occasions has been able to take two, three, or even four different stands with precisely the same material in hand. So constant were the shifts during the Sacco-Vanzetti case that the paper seemed like an old car going up a hill.”

Naturally I didn’t expect the editors to like it but after all The Nation isn’t so big and umbrage wasn’t in the scope of my vision. Blithely on the way home I bought a morning paper but I only looked at the sport page. Arriving home I was asked as I came in the door whether or not I had read The World. “Sure,” I replied, “Yankees win, Giants win, Dodgers lose.” Those were the old, old Giants.

“But have you seen your own page?” my wife persisted.

“I’m saving that up for later,” I told her.

“You needn’t,” she said, “you’re fired.”

And so I was. There in my old spot was a box explaining that Mr. Broun had been dropped on account of disloyalty. I did object to the word a little because the casual reader would hardly know whether I had robbed the till or sat on the editor’s hat.

Still it was Summer and I was full of energy and I went around opening my shirt to show my scars and having a fine time in general. And presently I got a job with Scripps-Howard which lasted eleven years. This ran out in the Winter.

Since Nutmeg is a publication which belongs to what the Parisians wittily call “Le Presse Confidentiale,” or French to that effect, I think I may reveal that the farewell conference with Roy W. Howard passed off in entire peace and amity.

He said, “I’ve talked it over with my associates and we’ve decided not to make you an offer. It would be just too much grief. The price of newsprint is going up and we think the place to cut expenses is among the high price specialists in order to protect the run of the mine reporter.”

“Roy,” I said (all Scripps Howard executives are known by the first name even to the humblest employee), “I can’t possibly make any squawk about that because I’ve made that same speech myself at dozens of Guild meetings.”

And so we shook hands and had a drink and everything was very pleasant. But I still think it is better to be fired in the Summer.

For more about Heywood Broun and his newspaper career, be sure to get a copy of The Algonquin Round Table New York, A Historical Guide (Globe Pequot Press).