Algonquin Round Table News Al Hirschfeld Podcast Celebrates Round Table Century

Al Hirschfeld Podcast Celebrates Round Table Century

Al Hirschfeld Illustration

Kudos to David Leopold and Katherine Marshall-Eastman, co-hosts of the excellent Al Hirschfeld Century Podcast. The new episode celebrates the centennial of the Algonquin Round Table, which began in June 1919. There is currently the third annual Hirschfeld gallery of art on display in the Algonquin Hotel lobby. David and Katherine, who run the Al Hirschfeld Foundation, review most of the names in the famous drawing of the Vicious Circle from 1962. David has an encyclopedic knowledge of old shows and stars, and ticks off the history of all the members. Katherine displays an excellent knowledge of people who have been dead for 75 years, and gamely plays along while David schools her in Algonquin trivia. It’s a fantastic podcast. Be sure to visit the hotel while you can to see the artwork on display.

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F.P.A. Diary Entries For His BirthdayF.P.A. Diary Entries For His Birthday

FPA

Franklin P. Adams and his second wife, Esther Root, on their honeymoon, 1925.

Franklin P. Adams wrote his diary from 1911-1941; by his estimate more than two million words. It began June 11, 1911, in the New York Evening Mail. The column was called Always in Good Humor. On January 1, 1914, F.P.A. joined the New York Tribune staff and changed the name to The Conning Tower. He remained there until December 31, 1921, when he joined The World. When The World folded, he moved to the New York Herald Tribune on March 2, 1931. His column appeared there until 1937. His column ended in the New York Post in 1941, by which time F.P.A. was a radio star on Information Please.

Editor’s note: These entries are taken directly from the collection The Diary of Our Own Samuel Pepys, published by Simon and Schuster in 1935. All of F.P.A.’s idiosyncratic spelling and grammar usage is left intact. Editorial notes in [brackets] are from the editor and in some cases F.P.A. himself. None of the entries have been altered.

Adams was born in Chicago on November 15, 1881, and died on the Upper West Side of Manhattan on March 23, 1960.

* * *
Sunday, November 16, 1919
All day in the country, and had a pleasant day, playing croquet. Home, when I find E. Ferber [Edna Ferber] and Janet Grant and Miss Rosalind Fuller [an English actress and singer]; and A. Woollcott [Alexander Woollcott], very grand in a silk hat, and H. Ross [Harold Rosss]; and we had a frugal supper, and all left before eleven. Read [William] Congreve’s poems, indifferent stuff.

* * *
Thursday, November 15, 1923
Up and to the office early away and met Mistress Beatrice Gunsaulus Merriman [spouse of Rev. Robert Noel Merriman], who has come from Bethlehem to have a birthday party with me to-day and to-morrow. So we to Dottie Parker’s, where was a great crowd gathered to honour me, and a great shower of presents, tyes, and kerchiefs and a neck-scarf. So now home with Beatrice [Kaufman] and thence to a great and gay gathering at Mistress Ruth Fleischmann’s [Quincy, IL, native, spouse of baking heir Raoul], where I had the merriest birthday party anyone ever gave me, but they told me it was H. Miller’s [Henry Wise Miller, banker, spouse of Alice Duer Miller] and G. Kaufman’s [George S. Kaufman] and A. Krock’s [Arthur Krock, newspaperman, won Pulitzer 1935] and Beatrice’s, and that Ruth and Raoul had been married this day three years, yet by 10 o’clock I was certain the party was entirely in my honor and was not disinclined to think that the universe had been constructed for the same delightful purpose. So home, despite all in the car counseling to drive with more caution, and we had to walk up the stairs, and Beatrice lost an earring, which distressed her, but I told her we should find it in the morning.

* * *
Sunday, November 15, 1925
For a walk in the warm sunshine, and to luncheon at L. Dodd’s [Lee Wilson Dodd, playwright, novelist, poet, died 1933], and my wife told a tayle of some children who, being warned not to express astonishment when the ice cream was borne upon the table, did carol forth, “We have it all the time! We have it all the time!” So by steam-train to the city, and thence to the office, and so to R. Fleischmann’s, to a great party, and met Miss Fay Compton the play-actress, as fair and sweetly spoke a lady as ever I saw.

* * *
Monday, November 15, 1926
This day my birthday, and my wife give me a fine golden knife and H. Miller give me some kerchiefs and A. Samuels [Arthur Samuels, composer, publicist, editor] some tyes, all of which I was very glad to get, not so much for the sentiment behind them as for the value and beauty of the gifts. This day Frank Sullivan back to work, and he come to see me, looking very handsome with his long rest. All day at my office, and so home and did some scrivening before dinner, and my wife telling me that I had misspelled our handmaiden’s name, calling her Dougherty instead of Doherty, so I asked her whether she were a relative of the great lawn tennis players, but she said she never had heard of them. But she is as skilful in her field as they were in theirs, and I would suggest that she would play in the final of any cooking tournament. So to the theatre in Florence Hammond’s [spouse of Herald-Tribune drama critic Percy Hammond] petrol-wagon, and saw Shaw’s “Pygmalion,” and enjoyed it all mightily, in especiall Miss Lynn Fontanne’s and Mr. Henry Travers’s acting. And I did make some vows, on this my birthday, such as to waste no more time in frivolity, and to be more kind to my fellows. Yet last night there was a discussion about murder, and some that they were incapable of killing anybody, and they thought I would be, too; but I thought there was none in that company that might not have murder in his heart at some time; and as for myself, I know many persons I would like to kill, if there were no penalty attached to the act. Lord! if I could murder those I pleased to kill, it would almost be impossible to get a taxicab in this city. So home, and read E. Pearson’s [Edmund Lester Pearson] “Murder at Smutty Nose,” a thrilling compilation, with things in it about the Parkman case, and Dr. Crippen [Hawley Harvey Crippen, the first criminal to be captured with the aid wireless], and others.

* * *
Saturday, November 15, 1930
Early up, it being my birthday, and my wife give me a crimson sweater to wear next summer, and I got letters from my sisters Amy and Evelyn, and so did my work in the morning, and in the afternoon to H. Miller’s to listen to how badly the Yales would beat the Princetons, but they scarcely beat them at all, and so we to Manhasset, to a giant birthday celebration given for me at R. Fleischmann’s, very merry and gay, and I had a pleasant time with Mrs. Delehanty [née Margaret E. Rowland, spouse of John Bradley Delehanty, noted architect], who tells me she is a girl from Phillips, Wis., and she very gifted, shewing me how she can stand on her head, and I had a talk with A. Barach [Dr. Alvan L. Barach, founder of pulmonary rehabilitation and inventor of the oxygen tent] the physician, of clairvoyancy and fortune-telling and palm-reading, we telling each other of the great success we had at these charlatanries, what with the subjects telling us all that we wanted to know, and then being astonished at our magickall powers. But it is a dangerous thing to do, forasmuch as I never shall forget the trouble that I got into by telling a girl that she did not have confidence enough in herself, which is a thing that everybody believes about himself, especially those that have more confidence than they should have. It is also safe to tell people that they are too generous and too tender-hearted. So late to bed, and waked my wife, albeit I was quiet as a million mice.

* * *
Sunday, November 15, 1931
Lay mighty late, and so up and wondering what would be happening on November 15, 1981, I then being 100 years of age, but I fear that this will be the last time that there will be a legal holiday on my birthday, and so read the newspapers with great misgivings about what is going on in Manchuria, and would forecast that a year from now matters will be more troubled and unpeaceful than they are now, and so talked with A. Krock and R. Fleischmann about history and its teachings, and Krock said that he was proficient in its study when he was a boy forasmuch as it was taught with a stress upon dates of wars and deaths of kings and history made so little impression upon me that I forget how it was taught. But I feel that it ought to be taught backwards; that is, that the study should begin with the front page of today’s newspaper and go on from there to last year, and that it might then seem important and personal to the student to read about the Spanish Armada and Eric the Red and the Battle of Stirling and Ticonderoga and General P. T. G. Beauregard and Bannockburn and Themistocles and Hadrian and Ypres and Rutherford B. Hayes and Aguinaldo and the Guelphs and the Franco-Prussian War. So in the afternoon my wife and I beat H. Miller and R. Fleischmann two deuce sets, and in the evening had a very merry birthday party, almost everybody having been born a few years ago today, yesterday, and tomorrow; and so A. Woollcott drove me to the city in a cab, and told me many fascinating things, he being no less laconic than ever, and about how Herbert Wells, the author, had come to see him, and of many other things.

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).

Video From Talk About Vicious Circle WomenVideo From Talk About Vicious Circle Women

For the centennial of the first meeting of the Algonquin Round Table, author Kevin C. Fitzpatrick presented a brief talk at the Algonquin Hotel. He presented the women of the Vicious Circle–the ones not named Dorothy Parker and Edna Ferber. In this talk, learn about Jane Grant, who co-founded The New Yorker; Ruth Hale, who fought to preserve her maiden name after marriage; Neysa McMein, the popular magazine illustrator & artist; Beatrice Kaufman, the editor not ashamed of her husband’s cheating; Margaret Leech, the 2-time Pulitzer Prize winner; and the popular actresses Margalo Gillmore and Peggy Wood, both of whom were onstage for 50 years. Thank you Michele Gouveia for filming this.

For more about this subject, read the 2015 article 6 Women You Didn’t Know Were Members of the Algonquin Round Table.