Algonquin Round Table Events,News Bedtime with the Algonquin Round Table

Bedtime with the Algonquin Round Table

Bedtime With The Algonquin Round Table

natalie ascencious

The Algonquin Round Table by Natalie Ascencious.


For those trapped indoors now there is relief coming from 1920: Weekly “Bedtime with the Algonquin Round Table” to be held on live video conference via Zoom, hosted by Kevin C. Fitzpatrick, author of The Algonquin Round Table New York: A Historical Guide and A Journey into Dorothy Parker’s New York.

The schedule will be 9:00 p.m. Eastern; check your time zone to watch live via the World Clock. The schedule is April 1, April 8, April 15, April 22, and April 29. The stream is free to watch but you must watch via Zoom.

Join Zoom Meeting Here
Meeting ID: 481 153 606
Password: 1920

Bedtime With The Algonquin Round Table

Bedtime With The Algonquin Round Table

Each week we will hear about different members of the Algonquin Round Table, which began meeting in June 1919 at the Hotel Algonquin. There is a list of members here. You will find out about them, hear stories they wrote or worked on, and have a fun time as we take a deep dive into New York City history. You can participate in the live chat, ask questions, and engage with others if you wish. All events are pet friendly.

Each week you can get clues about who we will be hearing about via Instagram on the Dorothy Parker Society Instagram account here.

April is also National Poetry Month, so we will talk a lot about the poets and writers of the group. If you have any questions, contact us or post it on Facebook or Instagram.

Related Post

Marxfest

Marx Brothers Festival Returns in May 2024Marx Brothers Festival Returns in May 2024

It is exciting to announce that the Marx Brothers Festival is returning in May 2024 exactly ten years after the first successful Marxfest in New York. This week, the Marxfest committee announced the festival dates (May 17-19 and May 24-26), and revealed the names of just three of the many great events being planned:

ROBERT KLEIN REMEMBERS: The comedy legend on the Marx Brothers and their influence, in conversation with Jason Zinoman of The New York Times.

UNHEARD MARX BROTHERS: Audio Rarities with collector extraordinaire John Tefteller.

THE THRILL OF I’LL SAY SHE IS: The ultimate centennial experience.

MarxfestThere will be two weekends of Marx entertainment, May 17-19 in Manhattan and May 24-26 in Coney Island. The full calendar of events and ticket sales have not been announced yet. Currently a crowdfunding campaign is underway, and this supports the festival operations and expenses.

Noah Diamond of the committee wrote, “Donate to our crowdfunding campaign. Of course, this is another dreamy, fan-driven project with limitless reserves of nerve, moxie, pluck, vim, and vigor, but other resources are in shorter supply. We’re reliant on donations from fellow Marx Brothers fanatics to help defray expenses like space rentals, printing, equipment, and administration. You will not be surprised to hear that there are fabulous donor rewards described on our crowdfunding page — or that through our fiscal sponsor, Fractured Atlas, donations are tax-deductible to the fullest extent permitted by law!”

Noah sent us a fantastic tie of the Marx Brothers to the Algonquin Round Table. Harpo Marx was a member, and he was close friends with Dorothy Parker and Alexander Woollcott. Noah dug up the 1924 Robert Benchley review from Life, following the Broadway debut of the Marx Brothers:

We are happy to announce that the laughing apparatus of this department, long suspected of being out-of-date and useless, is in perfect running order, and can be heard any evening at the Casino Theatre during those magnificent moments when the Marx Brothers are participating in “I’ll Say She Is.” Not since sin laid it’s heavy hand on our spirit have we laughed so loud and so offensively. And as we picked ourself out of the aisle following each convulsion, there rang through our soul the joyful paean: “Grandpa can laugh again! Grandpa can laugh again!”

“I’ll Say She Is” is probably one of the worst revues ever staged, from the point of view of artistic merit and general deportment. And yet when the Marx Brothers appear, it becomes one of the best. Certainly we have never enjoyed one so thoroughly since the lamented Cohan Revues, and we will go before any court and swear that two of the four Marxes are two of the funniest men in the world.

We may be doing them a disservice by boiling over about them like this, but we can’t help it if we feel it, can we? Certainly the nifties of Mr. Julius Marx will bear the most captious examination, and even if one in ten is found to be phony, the other nine are worth the slight wince involved at the bad one. It is certainly worth hearing him, as Napoleon, refer ti the “Marseillaise” as the “mayonnaise,” if the next second, he will tell Josephine that she is as true as a three dollar cornet. The cornet line is one of the more rational of the assortment. Many of them are quite mad, and consequently much funnier to hear but impossible to retell.

There is no winching possible at the pantomime of Mr., Arthur Marx. It is 110 proof artistry. To watch him during the deluge of knives and forks from his coat-sleeve, or in the poker game (where he wets one thumb and picks the card off with the other), or—oh, well, at any moment during the show is to feel a glow at being alive in the same generation. We hate to be like this, for it is inevitable that we are prejudicing readers against the Marx boys by our enthusiasm, but there must be thousands of you who have seen them in vaudeville (where almost everything that is funny on our legitimate stage seems originate) and who know that we are right.

Do not miss this absolutely fun program of events around New York, all times to the centennial of “I’ll Say She Is.”

Brock Pemberton

Brock Pemberton, From Kansas to the Great White WayBrock Pemberton, From Kansas to the Great White Way

Brock and Margaret Pemberton

Brock and Margaret Pemberton


Today is the anniversary of the birth of one of the most overlooked members of the Algonquin Round Table, namely, Brock Pemberton. His brother, Murdock Pemberton, gets barely more attention than his far more successful sibling. Let’s take a short dive into his life. All of the material is from The Algonquin Round Table New York: A Historical Guide.

It sounds like the story in a Broadway musical: hick conquers metropolis. However, this story was Brock Pemberton’s, and it really did happen that way. He went from Kansas newspaperman to powerful Broadway producer, and was the father of the annual Tony Awards.

Ralph Brock Pemberton was born December 14, 1885, in Leavenworth, Kansas. He grew up about 100 miles southwest, in Emporia, where his father worked as a salesman. He and his younger brother, Murdock, went to Emporia High School. Brock graduated in 1902 and attended the local College of Emporia for three years, before transferring to the University of Kansas. He got his A.B. degree in 1908 and returned home. Pemberton had known the legendary editor William Allen White of the Emporia Gazette since he was a boy, and White hired him as a reporter. Pemberton was a dynamo on the tiny staff.

Pemberton thrived on the Emporia newspaper under White’s tutelage. White had earned a national reputation for his provocative editorials, and made frequent trips to the East Coast. In the age-old way of newspaper employment, he spoke to a New York City editor on Pemberton’s behalf. With that, the 24 year-old booked a one-way ticket for Manhattan in 1910. Arriving on Park Row after a 1,300-mile train trek, he learned that the position was not going to materialize. But as luck would have it, someone gave him a note to hand to Franklin P. Adams, who was at the New York Evening Mail at the time. Just as F.P.A. would later stick his neck out for Robert Benchley and George S. Kaufman, he went to bat for Pemberton. He landed a job as a reporter.

After a few months Pemberton was transferred from the city desk to the drama department at the Mail. On his first assignment, he was sent to attend a musical called “Everywoman” at the Herald Square Theatre. Pemberton innocently reviewed the show as if he was an audience member in Emporia, with hilarious results. The staff found his hayseed review backslapping funny, and the edition became a collector’s item, to Pemberton’s embarrassment. He had to learn to be more hard-edged.

In 1911 he moved to the New York World drama desk, where he got to know the bustling theater business intimately. A few years later he was offered the position of assistant drama editor at the New York Times, working under Alexander Woollcott, who was the paper’s chief drama critic. His contacts grew. Pemberton had spent six years in New York journalism when producer Arthur Hopkins offered him a job in 1917. Hopkins was one of the most successful producers in the city, and Pemberton was put to work in every capacity, from set construction to directing. It was his new career.
Pemberton stayed in the Hopkins organization for just three years, but he learned the skills a producer would need. When Hopkins passed on producing a three-act comedy called “Enter Madame” in 1920, Pemberton asked if he could produce it. He took the biggest gamble of his life, and it paid off. The show ran for two years at the Garrick; he also directed the show. He was a newly minted Broadway producer at age 35. Soon after, Pemberton tapped Zona Gale to adapt her bestseller “Miss Lulu Bett” into a play, and he opened it two days after Christmas 1920. It was a smash success at the Belmont, and won the Pulitzer Prize as the year’s best drama the following year.

On Dec. 30, 1915, Pemberton married Margaret McCoy in East Orange, New Jersey. He was 30 and she was 36. She sometimes would work as a costumer on her husband’s shows.

In 1919, when the Round Table began, he was living at 123 East 53rd Street, between Park and Lexington avenues. The building has since been demolished. In 1918 he lived at 123 E. 53rd Street. He lived at 115 East 53rd Street in 1920, 1927, and 1931. In 1948 he was living at 455 E. 51st Street.

In 1925, the offices of Pemberton Productions, Inc. and Brock Pemberton, Inc. were at 224 West 47th Street. That building was demolished and is today the Hotel Edison, which opened in 1931.

Pemberton carved out a 30-year career in the theater business. He took on risky shows and had many hits, and several flops. He brought out the first plays by Maxwell Anderson and Sidney Howard. Among the many actors whose careers he launched onstage were Walter Huston, Miriam Hopkins, Claudette Colbert and Frederic March. In 1928 he lost $40,000 on a show, but bounced back the next year with the light comedy “Strictly Dishonorable” that began a long association with the actress-director Antoinette Perry. The pair had a string of hits together; some said they also had a long-running romantic relationship. The pair was among those that helped form the American Theatre Wing in 1939; the group put on the Stage Door Canteen shows for troops during the war. After Perry’s death in 1946, Pemberton pushed for the creation of the American Theatre Wing’s Antoinette Perry Awards for Excellence in Theatre — the Tony Awards.

Laurence Stallings

A Look at Laurence Stallings, WriterA Look at Laurence Stallings, Writer

Laurence Stallings

Laurence Stallings

Laurence Tucker Stallings is mentioned about three times a year by the pop culture world. Usually it has to do with his screenwriting hits The Big Parade or She Wore A Yellow Ribbon appearing on television. There has only been one book about him, a not very good academic tome (by Joan T. Brittain, Laurence Stallings, Twain, 1975). When I was working on the book, I did reach a person who was connected to his late children. The man was so unhelpful, and unpleasant, that I am still incredulous at his lack of wanting to perpetuate the life story of Stallings. Today is the anniversary of his birth, in 1894, which is a good reason to present some of my information about him.

I’ve always liked the Stallings story. He served as a U.S. Marine in World War I, and was grievously wounded. Stallings joined the staff of the New York World in 1922 to write book reviews and editorials. The war veteran was passionately liberal; when he referred to a black man as “Mr.” in print, he angered readers in his Georgia hometown.

Stallings and Maxwell Anderson were both working at the World when they decided to collaborate on a play. Stallings, who’d lost a leg in combat as a Marine, knew he wanted to write an antiwar drama. The pair co-wrote What Price Glory? for producer-director Arthur Hopkins, and it exploded at the Plymouth Theatre on September 5, 1924. It was the first play to use the profanity-laced speech of soldiers, and its grim view of war was riveting. The story of First Sergeant Quirt (William Boyd) and Captain Flagg (Louis Wolheim) in the trenches of France, the script used Stallings’ experiences in World War I. It ran for 433 performances and got the playwrights contracts in Hollywood.

Not much is ever written about him, and a lot is not accurate or focuses just on his movies. Here is a little more on an overlooked American writer.

The Algonquin Round Table considered Laurence Stallings a hero because of his sacrifices as a WWI combat veteran; many members had also served in the A.E.F. His combat experience would provide him the inspiration to write passionately about war in a bestselling book, a gritty Broadway drama, magazine stories and fiction, and a smash hit silent film.

Laurence Tucker Stallings, Jr., was born November 25, 1894, in Macon, Georgia. He graduated from Wake Forest with a B.A. in 1915. His first job was a reporter on the Atlanta Constitution in 1915.

In 1917 Stallings enlisted in the Marines and was sent to France, where he participated in some of the bloodiest campaigns of the war. He received a battlefield commission, and took over command of a Marine outfit. At the Battle of Belleau Wood near the Marne River, Stalling was wounded in June 1918. Awarded the Purple Heart and the Croix de Guerre, Stallings spent eight months recovering in France before being shipped home after the Armistice was signed.

Once home, he married his college sweetheart. Helen Poteat was the daughter of the Wake Forest president, William Louis Poteat. The wedding was on March 6, 1919, at the campus in Winston-Salem. After the wedding, the couple moved to Washington, D.C., where Stallings joined The Washington Times as a reporter and earned his M.A. from Georgetown. His writing career was taking off, however, Stallings never fully recovered from his combat injuries, and in 1922 had to have his right leg amputated.

Laurence Stallings

Laurence Stallings

After recuperating Stallings and his wife moved to New York, where he joined the World. A tall, dark-haired, good-looking Southerner, Stallings sometimes came to the Algonquin Hotel wearing his artificial leg, other times he’d walk in on a crutch. His newspaper co-workers Heywood Broun and Deems Taylor introduced him to the Vicious Circle after it was an established institution.

In 1924 Stallings was writing book reviews three days a week for the World. He was tapped by executive editor Herbert Bayard Swope to be on the “Op. Ed” page with Franklin P. Adams, Heywood Broun, Frank Sullivan, and Alexander Woollcott. He shared an office with Maxwell Anderson, at the time a fellow editorial writer. They collaborated on their first play, What Price Glory? for the powerful Broadway producer Arthur Hopkins, who’d also staged Don Marquis’ hit play The Old Soak. With What Price Glory? Stallings was able to share his real-life experiences about the trauma and heartbreak of soldiers in combat. It was a hit at the Plymouth Theater, 236 West 45th Street, and ran for more than a year.

But he was not finished with the Great War. His novel, Plumes, was a contender for the 1925 Pulitzer Prize, but it was edged out by another Algonquin regular, Edna Ferber, for her novel So Big. Broun weighed in on the subject in his column:

“I have heard that Plumes, by Laurence Stallings, was the second choice of the committee, but this is not official, as the body does not announce any honorable mentions. At any rate, Plumes should be high up on the list. There are things in Plumes which seem to me better than any portion of So Big, but it is a less evenly developed book and is justly placed below Miss Ferber’s novel. If there were such a thing as a pentathlon, or all around prize, Laurence Stallings could not be shut out from victory, since he wrote a novel which proved a contender and collaborated with Maxwell Anderson on a play which ranked near the top.”

His novel was adapted for the silent movie epic The Big Parade that same year, and was among the first blockbusters in the pre-talking pictures era. Directed by maverick filmmaker King Vidor, The Big Parade played to sell-out crowds across the nation. A railroad car was used to transport the orchestra, lighting, and personnel from town to town. The film, made just seven years after the conflict, was the first to show the gritty side of the war on the big screen. The central character, played by John Gilbert, like Stallings, also loses a leg in battle.

Stallings and his wife had two children together during their rocky 17-year marriage. In December 1936 Stalling’s wife sued him for divorce in Reno, Nevada, charging him with cruelty. In a private trial a judge granted the divorce and the 17-year union was over. He walked away from his family and gracious estate in North Carolina, and never saw them again. Stalling was free to marry a girlfriend, Louisa St. Leger Vance, a 25-year-old writer. On March 18, 1937, the couple was married in Manhattan at her parents’ home, 410 East 57th Street. They had two children. Stallings moved to Hollywood, where he remained for the rest of his life.

In the 1930s Stallings had a tumultuous decade. He couldn’t choose between literature or motion pictures. He was close to Robert Benchley and could be spotted at “21” together; both men had the same issues of working for art or commerce. In 1934 Stallings became an editor of Fox Movietone News (offices 460 West 54th Street), and resided at 50 East 77th Street. In 1935 Fox sent him to Ethiopia for what turned out to be a two-year assignment. He was looking for the start of the next war with four cameramen and 50,000 feet of film as they waited for Mussolini to invade. Stallings filed stories for the New York Times on the conflict, and then returned home to America. He abandoned his first wife and two small daughters after his 1937 remarriage. When the U.S. entered World War II, Stallings went back on active duty with the Marines in 1942. He served as an intelligence officer in the Pentagon, and attained the rank of lieutenant colonel.

Laurence T. Stallings gravesite. Photo: Nigel Quinney.

Laurence T. Stallings gravesite. Photo: Nigel Quinney.

Stallings returned to California to write screenplays, magazine articles, and books. He lived in Pacific Palisades and his health deteriorated. Doctors had to remove his other leg in 1963, the same year he published a stirring account of World War I, The Doughboys. Stallings died on February 28, 1968, at his home. He received a military burial with a Marine Corps honor guard. Stallings is interred outside San Diego in Ft. Rosecrans National Cemetery.

Adapted from The Algonquin Round Table New York, A Historical Guide (Globe Pequot Press). Order the book here.