Algonquin Round Table History Crazy for Games, Sports, and Puzzles

Crazy for Games, Sports, and Puzzles

Woollcott and Ferber

Alexander Woollcott and Edna Ferber, at the home of Margaret Leech and Ralph Pulitzer (Photo courtesy of Kate Pulitzer Freedberg)


Sports and leisure were important to the Round Table. They loved professional sports—with baseball and boxing being the chief attractions. F.P.A. was an amateur tennis star. Their leisure time was taken up with parlor games, mind-benders, word play, and gambling. Their poker games were soul-crushing feats of gambling (Broun won and lost his house at a poker table). Charades and croquet consumed them.

Neysa McMein was credited with “inventing”—or at least popularizing—Scavenger Hunts. F.P.A. wrote about it in “The Conning Tower” on July 28, 1925:

“To Jane Grant’s, where was a party for Alice Miller’s birthday, and had a merry time of it, save for a silly treasure hunt, a craze that hath become widespread while I was not here to crusade against it.”

While playing I Can Give You A Sentence, Dorothy Parker was tasked to use “horticulture” which led to the oft quoted, “You can lead a horticulture, but you can’t make her think.” Baseball was a passion, especially New York Giants games at the Polo Grounds. F.P.A. wrote “Baseball’s Sad Lexicon” one of the most famous baseball poems of all time following a Giants game. Broun is in the Baseball Hall of Fame’s sportswriters wing in Cooperstown.

The friends were crazy for crossword puzzles; they even wrote a book of them together. On January 4, 1925, the first Intercollegiate Cross Word Puzzle Tournament was held in the auditorium of the Hotel Roosevelt, 45 East 45th Street. With hundreds of cheering fans in the audience, Yale edged out Harvard, Princeton and the City College of New York. On the Harvard team were Broun (who never really graduated) and Robert E. Sherwood. Poet Stephen Vincent Benet and Jack Thomas made up the Yale team. The contest was held in rounds and each word was tackled individually. First Broun won a round by correctly guessing the name of a German poet with five letters (Heine). Then Sherwood backed him up with a seven-letter word meaning “honest in intention” (sincere). However, a foul play was called when the judge, Ruth Hale, sat beside her spouse, Broun.

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Robert Benchley

Listen to The Secret Life of Walter MittyListen to The Secret Life of Walter Mitty

Today is the 74th anniversary of recording The Secret Life of Walter Mitty (1944).

“The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” with Robert Benchley. Recorded for CBS on Dec. 20, 1944. Based on the 1939 short story by James Thurber, this is the full radio dramatization. It comes from “This Is My Best” radio series. Thurber praised Benchley’s performance, and didn’t like the 1947 Danny Kaye musical comedy version. Mogul David Selznick approached Benchley in 1940 about making a short film based on the Mitty story that first appeared in The New Yorker, but it didn’t work out. Less than a year after this recording was made, Benchley died in New York. “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” is included in “Thurber Writings and Drawings” (Library of America series).

From The Algonquin Round Table New York: A Historical Guide (Lyons Press, 2015), by Kevin C. Fitzpatrick, with a foreword by Anthony Melchiorri.

Robert Benchley

Marking the 75th Anniversary of the Death of Robert BenchleyMarking the 75th Anniversary of the Death of Robert Benchley

Robert Benchley

Robert Benchley

Seventy-five years ago today, hard-working Robert Charles Benchley died in his hospital room. He was just 56 years old. Benchley, once the country’s premier humorist, had stayed active until the end. In 1933, he began his first radio show, broadcast on CBS. He also appeared in 46 movie shorts between 1928 and 1945. Columnist Sidney Carroll wrote in 1942, “The movies get a comedian and the literary muse seems destined to lose her most prodigal son for good. Literature lost out because so many people in Hollywood think Robert Benchley looks much funnier than he writes. And they keep him busy looking at the cameras instead of writing for them.” At the time, Benchley was on the Paramount lot making two forgettable films: Out of the Frying Pan and Take a Letter, Darling.

Throughout World War II Benchley kept up an extremely busy pace in Hollywood. He lived in a bungalow in the Garden of Allah and worked steadily in movies and radio. In his early fifties Benchley eventually suffered from health problems exaggerated by his heavy drinking. He was diagnosed with cirrhosis of the liver and high blood pressure. In late 1945 he returned to New York for a break, but his health slid downhill. He collapsed in his room at the Royalton Hotel on West Forty-fourth Street. He died in the Harkness Pavilion at the Columbia University Medical center on Fort Washington Avenue, on November 21, 1945.

Following a private service his body was cremated and the ashes were given to his family. At the cemetery in Nantucket, however, the family discovered that the urn was empty. When the correct cremains were located, his ashes were interred properly. His headstone, chosen by his son, Nat, was carved with his New Yorker byline, an em dash before his name. His beloved wife, Gertrude, is buried next to him. She died in 1980.

Today, what is the legacy of Robert C. Benchley, 75 years after his death? Many of his humor columns were collected in best selling books. They are all long out of print. No major publisher is publishing his work; his words live on in digital archives maintained by his two most famous magazine affiliations, Vanity Fair and The New Yorker. His words do reach new audiences decades after his death; earlier this month the humorist and television writer Merrill Markoe told New York magazine that Benchley was a major influence on her style.

If anyone new to Benchley–born in the last 25 years–they would probably first discover him on TCM. His movies appear often. You can press a button and stream him right now on Disney+ and watch The Reluctant Dragon. The Robert Benchley Society, founded by David and Mary Trumbull in 2003, is the only organization keeping his spirit alive. Like some of his peers from the Algonquin Round Table–Marc Connelly, Deems Taylor, Alexander Woollcott–Benchley is teetering on being lost to history, remembered only by those hardcore old comedy fans that keep talking about him in the way we reminisce about things we’ll never see, such as Vaudeville and the Ziegfeld Follies.

Benchley was a teetotaller until he fell in with the Vicious Circle in the Speakeasy Era in his thirties. Twenty years later, drink did him in. Is it appropriate to raise a glass to him? Since we cannot sit at his table at “21” today, I think it’s more than appropriate, the milestone of today demands it.

For more about Robert Benchley, read The Algonquin Round Table New York: A Historical Guide (Lyons Press), out now in paperback.

Castle of Pierrefonds

Sergeant Woollcott’s 1919 Postcard from FranceSergeant Woollcott’s 1919 Postcard from France

The legends of the Algonquin Round Table trace their roots not to Manhattan but to places such as the Chateau De Pierrefonds. Never heard of it? The Round Table was born in World War I. Half of the 30 members were in France in uniform, or else as civilians working as volunteers or journalists. A postcard that was included in the Franklin P. Adams Archive from 1919 is one part of this legacy.

It is widely known that Capt. Adams, Pvt. Harold Ross, and Sgt. Alexander Woollcott were all members of The Stars and Stripes, the Army newspaper written and edited by Doughboys, for the Doughboys, at the behest of Gen. John J. Pershing. The trio formed a long friendship that would continue after the war.

Castle of Pierrefonds

When the Armistice was declared on Nov. 11, 1918, Adams was already back in New York. He served 196 days overseas and then returned home, arriving in New York on September 8, 1918, and honorably discharged December 3. But Ross and Woollcott remained behind, running the last issues of the newspaper and enjoying their time overseas. When the U.S. military was shipping home hundreds of thousands of men and women in uniform from France to go home, Ross and Woollcott were not on the packed troopships, jammed in with hordes of men who needed a bath. After wrapping up their Army careers, they took their discharges in France and took a civilian ocean liner home after a nice Spring vacation with a cruise around the Mediterranean. They didn’t get back to New York Harbor for several weeks.

FPA ID

Meanwhile, F.P.A. was back at work at the New York Tribune on Park Row. He continued to receive cards and letters from his friends stationed in France. Woollcott sent him a Christmas card of a fat Santa Aleck trying to get down a chimney. In March, a postcard arrived. Woollcott was touring battlefields with Pvt. C. LeRoy Baldridge, the staff illustrator on Stars and Stripes, who would later go on to publish a book of his Army art with Woollcott’s help.

The pair were doing what so many other Doughboys were doing, seeing the battlefields and no doubt collecting souvenirs. The soldiers found themselves at Chateau De Pierrefonds, in the Oise department in the Hauts-de-France region of Northern France. This was where fierce fighting had just occurred mere months before. Woollcott was right where today is the stunning and beautiful Oise-Aisne American Cemetery and Memorial which contains the graves of 6,013 American soldiers who died in battle.

A cheeky Woollcott sent this to F.P.A. on March 2, 1919:

Woollcott Postcard

Baldridge and I are out cruising around the battlefields and having a whale of a time. Pvt. Ross, our boss, says we must be back Tuesday but to hell with him. This little shack was infected with Americans all Summer.
A. Woollcott

[Underneath the Passed as Censored stamp is the name Stephen T. Early, who was an officer who worked in the office with the men, and went on to work for FDR.]

Shortly after this postcard was mailed, the men all lined up to be discharged. “The day after Sgt. Woollcott was demobilized he met General Pershing. “He’s a civilian now,” said Lieutenant Early, who introduced Woollcott to the C. in C. “He looks like a soldier to me,” said the General. “In Sgt. Woollcott’s twenty-two months in the Army, it was the first time anybody had said anything of the kind to him.”

Three months later, on a warm day in June, the Algonquin Round Table met for the first time in the Pergola Room on the Hotel Algonquin. Woollcott later presented a soldier’s portrait of himself–drawn by Baldridge–to Adams and Ross.

For more stories about the Algonquin Round Table, pick up a copy of The Algonquin Round Table New York, A Historical Guide</em> (Lyons Press), available wherever you buy books.