On This Date October 19, 1942: The FBI file on Donald Ogden Stewart is more than 1,000 pages. I conducted a Freedom of Information request several years ago to get it all. The government kept tabs on him for 30 years. I have some of it in the new book. Of all the Algonquin Round Table members, Stewart paid the biggest price for his political beliefs and convictions.
FBI Page
Robert Benchley
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.
Laurence Stallings
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
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.
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.
Brock and Margaret Pemberton
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.