Algonquin Round Table History,News Franklin P. Adams Day

Franklin P. Adams Day

FPA

Today is the natal day of Franklin P. Adams, born on this day in 1881 in Chicago. During his days in New York City, he famously had joint birthday parties with his pal and poker-playing friend, George S. Kaufman (Nov. 16). There are many, many stories about FPA online and in The Lost Algonquin Round Table and The Algonquin Round Table New York: A Historical Guide. But there is news today, on his birthday.

FPA

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

Recently I was given the huge honor by the descendants of FPA to safeguard his papers and archives. Tony Adams, last surviving son of FPA and his second wife, Esther Root Adams, gave to me FPA documents, letters, photographs, and ephemera. I will be using some of that material for my next book, The Lost Algonquin Round Table 2, due out late next year. One thing about FPA, he saved everything. So on this birthday, raise a cocktail to FPA. He deserves to be remembered today and every day. Look for his books on eBay and in used book stores. He has been out of print since the 1960s, which is pretty sad to me. If you are a fan of FPA, drop me a line.

Also, be sure not to miss the post today from Trav SD about FPA.

Related Post

The Years With Ross

The Years With Ross by Thurber Gets A RebootThe Years With Ross by Thurber Gets A Reboot

The Years With Ross

The Years With Ross

James Thurber was not a founding member of The New Yorker, he joined about one year after the first issue rolled off the presses in February 1925. He was hired by cofounder Harold Ross because Thurber had newspaper experience, which counted more than a college degree to the ink-stained Ross. The two worked closely for the next several years and it was at the magazine that Thurber hit his stride as a writer. It was also while working for the magazine that he started publishing his cartoons, which made him equally famous.

The Years With Ross was the book of memoirs that Thurber wrote in the years after Ross died in December 1951. It is based on his memories (which a few insiders didn’t agree with). The book was a hit and continues to sell on the backlist of the successor to his original publisher. It also seems like every dozen years or so, sometimes more, a new edition comes out. If you tried to collect every edition and cover of The Years With Ross from 1959 to today, it would take up a small bookshelf. In 2001 Harper Perennial reissued the book with a new foreword by Adam Gopnik, the longtime writer for The New Yorker, who seems to get all the writing gigs when it concerns the magazine.

A new edition was brought out during the pandemic, in December 2020. It has a more colorful cover, using a stock news photo of Ross on the jacket. The photo is from the time Ross was in the public eye, testifying against public address announcements in Grand Central Terminal. It includes one of Thurber’s dogs.

The paperback still has 336 pages. It has stories about Charles Addams, Peter Arno, Robert Benchley, Ogden Nash, Dorothy Parker, and Alexander Woollcott. One thing it lacks is anything of value about Ross’ first wife, Jane Grant, who helped launch the magazine. She gets written out of any and all histories of The New Yorker, starting with this one. The book is a light read. It might also be useful if you plan to watch the upcoming Wes Anderson movie, The French Dispatch, which looks a lot like The New Yorker of the Harold Ross era.

Finally, a note to the HarperCollins art director. A cover blurb from the New York Herald Tribune is funny to see, since it has been defunct since 1966.

You can order the book here from Amazon, and the nine cents from Amazon will go to pay the hosting costs of this very website. More books about Round Table members are listed here.

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.

Mank

5 Things You Don’t Know About Herman J. Mankiewicz5 Things You Don’t Know About Herman J. Mankiewicz

The trailer has been released for the new David Fincher-directed film Mank, about Citizen Kane screenwriter Herman J. Mankiewicz. The movie will come out in theaters in November and on Netflix in December. Mank is only the second biographical film about a member of the Algonquin Round Table; Alan Rudolph’s Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle (1994) was the first.

Mankiewicz was one of the great screenwriters and producers of the Golden Age of Hollywood. He is one of the 30 members of the Vicious Circle whom I wrote about in my book The Algonquin Round Table New York: A Historical Guide. There are many facts about his incredible life (for example, he produced the three best Marx Brothers movies); and most probably will not make it into this film, sadly, but I’ll share them here.

1. He was born in New York City in 1897 but as a child grew up in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, where his father was a teacher. As a boy his beloved bicycle was stolen. That was the inspiration for Rosebud in Citizen Kane.

2. He was incredibly gifted and entered Columbia when he was just 15, graduating three years later and then onto graduate school. He was a voracious reader, and it’s said that his book collection in Hollywood was among the greatest private libraries in the city.

3. Mankiewicz enlisted in the U.S. Marine Corps and served in World War I. Because he spoke fluent German, this helped him in post-war Germany, where he worked for the Red Cross and as a newspaper correspondent.

4. He did not join the Round Table until he moved to New York in 1922, brought there by George S. Kaufman. Mankiewicz worked at the World, where he met Franklin P. Adams and Heywood Broun. He then transferred to the Times. All of these newspaper experiences are in Citizen Kane.

5. Mank was hired by Harold Ross and Jane Grant as one of the first writers for The New Yorker. Alexander Woollcott called him “the funniest man in New York,” and Robert E. Sherwood said he was “the truest wit of all.”

He quit journalism and went to Hollywood in 1926, right when silents transitioned to talkies. He famously sent a telegram back to New York to Ben Hecht: “Millions are to be grabbed out here and your only competition is idiots. Don’t let this get around.”

For fans of the Algonquin Round Table, it looks like the cast has other characters with names familiar to the group and The New Yorker. There are roles in the film for George S. Kaufman, Charles MacArthur, Ben Hecht, and S.J. Perelman. The always-great Gary Oldman plays Mankiewicz.

The trailer and the photos from the film look amazing. Fincher of course is a meticulous auteur, and if the film is anything like his previous work such as The Social Network or The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, this movie will do justice to the tragic life and brilliant career of Herman Mankiewicz.