Algonquin Round Table News The Flop of 1934, Divided By Three Fails to Find an Audience

The Flop of 1934, Divided By Three Fails to Find an Audience

Divided By Three

Eighty-five years ago the Algonquin Round Table members Peggy Leech and Bea Kaufman were licking their wounds after their debut collaboration flopped on Broadway. The two friends worked for about a year on a drama that failed to succeed. Divided by Three was the first play to open the Ethel Barrymore Theatre. It had a popular cast, led by megastar Judith Anderson, with a young Jimmy Stewart in a supporting role.

Divided By Three has not been published and is not available. It ran for just 32 performances in October 1934. Among the tepid reviews were this one from Time, 10/15/1934:

Divided by Three (by Margaret Leech Pulitzer and Beatrice Kaufman; Guthrie McClintic, producer) was written to make room for the superb abilities of smoldering Judith Anderson. It borrows the plot of Eugene O’Neill’s Strange Interlude and puts Miss Anderson back in the role she enormously enjoyed for a year. In Divided by Three again she is divided by: 1) her aggressive middle-aged lover (James Rennie); 2) her incredibly unsuspecting putterer of a husband; 3) her son (James Stewart). She finds it desirable and, until the second act curtain, possible to accept all three simultaneously.

It is her son who learns of her adultery, through the kindly offices of his priggish fiancée. As priggish as she, he calls his mother a whore and withdraws his love from both mother and fiancée. The last act allows everyone (still except the husband) to become readjusted to the situation. The son still feels that adultery is wrong; his mother is still determined to have what she wants. But just as she decides to come clean and divorce her husband, he comes home with the news that he has been wiped out in the stock market. Like the noble character she is, she drops the divorce plans. Her lover, after a minute’s anguish, decides after all to stay for dinner.

Only Judith Anderson makes this implausible story a moving and challenging affair. She bats her heavy-lidded eyes, settles her welterweight shoulders and makes her audience feel that something important is happening. Noteworthy are Donald Oenslager’s handsome settings.

Divided By Three

Judith Anderson rehearsing with director Guthrie McClintic for “Divided by Three” in his garden. ©The New York Public Library.


More newsworthy than their first play are Divided by Three’s authors.

Margaret Leech Pulitzer is the second wife of that studious, shy Ralph Pulitzer whom newspapermen have never forgiven for letting his late great father’s New York World be sold, and whom they howled out of accepting the post of administrator of the NRA newspaper code.

Beatrice Bakrow Kaufman is the wife of playwright George S. Kaufman (Of Thee I Sing, Once in a Lifetime, Dinner at Eight, Merrily We Roll Along), who lives on meat and chocolate peppermints, talks to himself on the street and is on the administration committee of the NRA theatre code.

Both Mrs. Pulitzer and Mrs. Kaufman are ringleaders of Manhattan’s first-nighting, croquet-playing, waggish literary-theatrical-social set. Mrs. Pulitzer has a two-year-old daughter; Mrs. Kaufman has a nine-year-old daughter. Mrs. Pulitzer graduated from Vassar, has written three competent novels, hates bridge, likes travel. Mrs. Kaufman quit Wellesley after a year; quit the University of Rochester to marry Mr. Kaufman. She is convinced she is No. 1 woman croquet player of the U. S.

Last week Manhattan critics tried to like their friends’ first play but only half of them succeeded.

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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.

Ruth Hale, feminist

Ruth Hale the IconoclastRuth Hale the Iconoclast

Ruth Hale

Ruth Hale, circa her post-college days.

There was no bigger iconoclast sitting at the Algonquin Round Table than Ruth Hale; None of the members had a gloomier end to their life than she did. She is one of the six female Algonquin regulars that are overlooked. Today Hale is completely forgotten by everyone except the most serious American women’s rights scholars, a name lost to history for a cause she deeply believed in. Hale devoted all of her time and energy to equal rights during the Jazz Age.

The writer-publicist was married to Heywood Broun—but nobody dared call her Mrs. Broun. Hale was the co-founder, with Jane Grant, of the Lucy Stone League, an organization whose motto was “My name is the symbol for my identity and must not be lost.” A biographer termed Hale “nearly fanatical” about women’s rights. She attacked “head-on and without humor, except for mordant satire.” Hale’s cause led her to fight for women to be able to preserve their maiden name—legally—after marriage. Hale sued the U.S. State Department and challenged in the courts any government edict that would not recognize a married woman by the name she chose to use.

Hale was Southern by birth, but she did not fit the stereotype of easygoing grace, charm, and humility. She was born in Rogersville, Tennessee, on July 5, 1886. Her father was an attorney and her mother a high school mathematics teacher. When she was ten her father died and three years later Hale was sent to boarding school at the Hollins Institute (today Hollins University) in Roanoke, Virginia. At sixteen she left to attend Drexel Academy of Fine Art (today Drexel University) in Philadelphia, where she studied painting and sculpture. But writing was her true calling.

When Hale was eighteen she became a journalist in Washington, D.C., writing for the Hearst syndicate. Hale was a sought-after young socialite, and attended parties at the White House when President Woodrow Wilson was in office. She worked at the Washington Post until she went back to Philadelphia to become drama critic for the Public Ledger. She also dabbled in sports writing, which was uncommon for women to do at the time. At an early age, Hale was working in a man’s world. One of her biggest accomplishments was to lose her Southern accent, which she took pride in achieving.

Hale moved to New York City about 1915 and was a feature writer for the Times, the Tribune, Vogue, and Vanity Fair. Hale also did a bit of acting, and posed for artistic nude portraits for fashion photographer Nickolas Muray. She became a sought-after theatrical publicist, and worked for the top producers on Broadway.

She was introduced to Broun at a New York Giants baseball game at the Polo Grounds. They were married on June 6, 1917. When Broun was sent to France to report on the war, she went along too, writing for the Paris edition of the Chicago Tribune. The couple left Paris before the war ended when Hale became pregnant. Returning to New York, the couple set up house on the Upper West Side at 333 West 85th Street. The unusual marriage had Hale on the first floor and Broun occupying the second floor.

In 1918 Hale gave birth the couple’s only child, Heywood “Woodie” Broun III (later as a sports broadcaster, Woodie added his mother’s name to his, and was professionally known as Heywood Hale Broun). The couple led completely separate lives. Broun even squired actresses and showgirls around town.
Early in 1921 she took a stand with the U.S. State Department, demanding that she be issued a passport as Ruth Hale, not as Mrs. Heywood Broun. The government refused; no woman had been given a passport up until that time with her maiden name. She was unable to cut through the red tape, and the government issued her passport reading “Ruth Hale, also known as Mrs. Heywood Broun.” She refused to accept the passport, and cancelled her trip to France. So did her husband.

In May 1921 she was believed to be the first married woman to be issued a New York City real estate deed in her own name, for an apartment house on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. Not long afterward, she was chosen president of the Lucy Stone League. Broun was among the men present; other Lucy Stoners were Franklin P. Adams and his second wife, Esther Root, Janet Flanner, Jane Grant, Beatrice Kaufman, and John Barrymore’s playwright wife Michael Strange (Blanche Oelrichs). In August 1927 Hale took a leading role in protesting the executions of accused anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti. She traveled to Boston as part of the defense committee, along with Dorothy Parker and John Dos Passos. The men were put to death despite international protests. The campaign had a galvanizing effect on her, leading her to fight against capital punishment.

Ruth Hale

Ruth Hale (illustration by Ralph Barton) from the collection Nonsenseorship (1922). Broun can be seen in the window, running a still.

During the 1920s Hale continued to write. She was among the earliest contributors to The New Yorker’s “Talk of the Town” in 1925. Hale worked as a theatrical press agent and reviewed books for the Brooklyn Eagle. She also ghost wrote many of Broun’s columns and reviews. As the decade closed, Hale spent considerable time on women’s rights causes and less time in journalism. Hale and Broun were quietly divorced in Nogales, Mexico, in November 1933.

The last years of her life were filled with sadness. At one time she was a lively and feisty presence on the metropolitan scene, writing for the best newspapers and magazines, married to the supreme raconteur, and hosting brilliant house parties on the Upper West Side. But as the Twenties drew to a close she withdrew from life and spent her days alone at Sabine Farm, in Stamford, Connecticut, living in a rural shack with almost no amenities, cutting herself off from her old friends and alienating Broun and their teen-age son, Woodie.

By late 1933 she had been a recluse for almost five years. She went to Mexico, and obtained a quiet divorce, on the grounds she and Broun lived apart for more than five years. It did not come out in the papers until three months later. By then she was telling friends, “ ‘Ruth Hale, spinster,’ I like it quite well. I can go back to my friends as Ruth Hale. At least I won’t have that god-awful tag, ‘Mrs. Heywood Broun.’ ”

However, the divorce did little to calm her soul. She was forty-seven and not well. “After forty a woman is through,” she told a friend. “I’m going to will myself to die.” Her health deteriorated rapidly. She lost the use of her legs. Hale became weak and stopped eating and refused medical care. On September 18, 1934, she lapsed into unconsciousness at Sabine Farm. Broun rushed her to Doctors Hospital, 170 East End Avenue, but it was too late. Her son said later, “At her own wish she was cremated, and because she had not wanted one, there was no sort of memorial service. One day she was there and the next day she was gone…”

Hale’s mother took her ashes back to her Tennessee hometown without telling Broun or their son. She secretly buried her daughter’s remains in the family plot in the Old Rogersville Presbyterian Cemetery, under a headstone that completely ignored any of her accomplishments. It omits her lifetime’s passion for independence and feminism:

Ruth Hale
Daughter of Annie Riley and J. Richards Hale
And For 17 Years the Wife of Heywood Broun

Adapted from The Algonquin Round Table New York: A Historical Guide (Globe Pequot Press). Book information here.

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.