Wonderful Nonsense: The Algonquin Roundtable | Historical Documentary | Lucasfilm

New York City, 1920. The First World War was over. Flush with victory and dreams of riches, America was ready for something new. Manhattan was the place to be. New Yorkers were feeling confident and sassy. We had close to 20 newspapers. There was almost 80 Broadway theaters. The subways cost a nickel. Babe Ruth was playing in the Bronx. People are watching the invention of the assembly line. The whole idea of the middle class is being invented. The idea of middle class leisure and middle class consumerism. We see the invention of the radio as we know it. We see the first talkies. With the wedding bells ringing merrily, the organ booming forth its impressive message. Oh, shut up. There's a kind of awestruck mood at how much is going on. The connoisseurs of the new culture could be found at a daily lunch. At a circular table inside a hotel called the Algonquin. They became known as the Algonquin Roundtable. They were underemployed writers and editors. They just enjoyed each other's company and they all had an affection for the English language. All the things I really like to do are either immoral, illegal or fattening. That woman speaks 18 languages and can't say no in any of them. Why don't you get out of that wet coat and into a dry martini? Every day for 10 years, this group of wisecrackers, wordsmiths, poets and cynics would breathe new light into American humor and captivate the public with their effortless wit. Anything can happen, but it usually doesn't. Beauty is only skin deep, but ugly goes clean to the bone. It was the era of, like they said, wonderful nonsense. The Algonquin Roundtable was part of a decade that, while it lasted, would be unlike any in history. The famous Algonquin Roundtable began as a prank. A one time lunch intended to poke fun at the era's most notorious writer, Alexander Wolcott. Alec Wolcott was the drama critic for The New York Times. Everyone read his reviews and he was very acerbic in his reviews and could be very bitchy. The lead actor should have been gently but firmly shot at sunrise. He was larger than life. He was fat. He was indulgent. He drank about 40 cups of coffee a day. He was always on. And he could be very nice or he could be really vile. So somebody had the idea of having a roast for Alec Wolcott. The theme was Wolcott's much bragged about service in World War One. Although he was only a driver for the troops, Wolcott bombarded his friends and anyone else who would listen with exaggerated tales of action and adventure on front lines he had never seen. So they had a lunch and they all told fantastic stories and made fun of him every way they could and thought this would get the point across that he should maybe cut down on obloviating. He thought it was such great fun. He said, let's do this again. The group came back the next day and the day after that. And soon a growing number of writers, theater critics and columnists were gathering every day at lunchtime for a little food and lots of banter. They did a lot of wordplay, a lot of word games. Satire was very important to them. Parody was very important to them. Along with Wolcott, the celebrated guests were more than a dozen literary types, including the diminutive Dorothy Parker, the self-deprecating Robert Benchley, the razor sharp Harold Ross and the meticulous Edna Ferber. You could not have been in that group and have had no sense of humor. You had to have a highly developed sensitivity to what was funny and what was not and to pushing the envelope of what was funny. They all did that. We'll each put up a dollar and the pot will go to the person who can say in the space of a minute the most words beginning with a given letter. A letter given by who? Given by whom? They took pride in calling themselves the Vicious Wits. Now, when your minute begins, I'll give you a letter. Are you ready? Get set. L. Elevator. Elephant. Any strangers who happened in the midst were in great peril, particularly if they tried to trade barbs. I mean, that was suicidal. He said maybe twice. Well, there are two kinds of mazes, one you eat and when you get lost in. Oh, I'll bet you didn't think of that to laugh. You have a nasty, suspicious little mind, if any. If Alexander Wolcott was reigning king at the roundtable, poet and critic Dorothy Parker was queen. Parker was the drama critic for Vanity Fair. She was a big show off and got a lot of attention for her reviews because they could be so funny and so critical. This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force. Someone who could cut you off at the knees with a quip or a quote. She was under five foot tall, dark hair, bangs. And so she just became kind of like this poster child for, you know, funny New Yorker style wit and humor. First thing I do when I wake up in the morning is brush my teeth and sharpen my tongue. Brevity is the soul of lingerie. If all the girls at the Yale prom were laid end to end, I wouldn't be a bit surprised. I love a martini, two at the most. Three, I'm under the table. Four, I'm under the host. She was raised in an era in New York City at the turn of the century where women were nicely mannered and kept their voices low and they didn't curse and they didn't drink and they were ladies. So the combination of her ladylike affect and she had a breathy little voice combined with the rawest, vilest, grossest wit and her favorite words were four letter words. In one of the Roundtable's popular word games, Dorothy Parker was asked to use the word horticulture in a sentence. She famously replied, you can lead a horticulture, but you can't make her think. The Algonquin Roundtable, probably more than any other group, was able to use humor in a more widespread way to poke fun at the pieties of American culture. Being an old maid is like death by drowning. A really delightful sensation once you cease to struggle. The witty banter of the Algonquin lunches might have faded into obscurity were it not for Franklin Pierce Adams, or FPA, who published their one liners and goings on in his popular newspaper column, The Conning Tower. He was their publicist in a way. Literate New Yorkers got up in the morning, they had their bowl of shredded wheat and their coffee and the first thing they did was to read his column. He was that kind of an addiction and his column very often said what had happened to people at the Roundtable. Then their stories began to appear in more and more publications and they gained a certain notoriety through their writing and then through the width of their lunchtime conversation. And it was like a snowball effect. Manhattan had eagerly seized its position as the country's hub of culture and commerce. There were skyscrapers above and speakeasies below, ads on the billboards and jazz on the airwaves, and a hunger in the people for new ways to describe it all. It may be the decade in which people sense that more is changing more rapidly than at any other time in the history of the United States. This was one of the central concerns of the 1920s. You know what? The old language just isn't doing it anymore. We can't write that way. We can't think that way. We need a new language. For the Algonquin members, that language was irreverence. They weren't out to change the world with their wit, just deflate some of the giddiness from it. There literally got to be a point when people would sit there and write down what they were saying, take note of it. The comings and goings of the Algonquin Roundtable became really much more important than they should have been. A record number of Broadway shows opened in the 20s, giving New Yorkers more opportunities for live theater and the Algonquin critics more opportunities to panic. The scenery was beautiful, but the actors got in front of it. This wasn't just plain terrible. It was fancy terrible. This was terrible with raisins in it. There was a famous incident when Robert went to see a play called The Squall, ostensibly about a South Sea island. And one poor woman, all done up in makeup to look Tahitian, was forced to utter the line, me newbie, me bad girl, me stay. And grabbing his hat and coat and just about controlling his gag reflex, Robert, the critic, was heard to stand up and say, me Bobby, me Bobby, bad boy, Bobby, go. And walked out in the middle of the show. Benchley drew raves for his sarcastic review, but it was his self-deprecating style that made him a household name and gave birth to the modern situation comedy. The others prided themselves on being known as the vicious wits. He didn't. He couldn't do it. All of his humor was directed at himself and making himself look silly or small. You want to put anything on it but the clock. Honey, what kind of kid is this? He wrote a film called How to Sleep. This was part of his genius, was to take tiny fragments of life and make something funny out of them. How to sleep, how to get to sleep, how to stay asleep. So he began the piece as a lecturer, as so often behind a desk, looking very serious and very knowledgeable. And he said, if you remember in our last lecture, we took up the subject of how to keep awake. And on looking about me, I noticed that many of you did not seem quite to catch the idea. Today, therefore, we are taking up the subject of how to sleep. And I am hoping for a little better response. I will take up first the causes of sleep, second methods of inducing sleep, third methods of avoiding sleep. While Benchley's style differed from Dorothy Parker's, the two shared a darkly comic side and an obsession with death. Both subscribed to a monthly Undertaker's magazine just for fun. And Parker enjoyed wearing a perfume commonly used for corpses. At a party one night, someone saw Dottie Parker and Robert Benchley together across the room and turned to his companion and said, would that be Mrs. Benchley? And the companion replied, well, it would be if there weren't already a Mrs. Benchley. When Parker was fired from her job for writing a scathing review that offended Vanity Fair's biggest advertiser, Benchley resigned in protest. Parker called it the greatest act of friendship she'd ever known. The two set up a tiny office in midtown Manhattan, an inch smaller, Parker remarked, and it would have been adultery. As the decade wore on, the Algonquin Roundtable members became so close they had a hard time ever separating. Their lunches extended into all night drinking sessions at the nearby speakeasy and vacations together at Alexander Wolcott's private hideaway in Vermont called Neshebe. Wolcott needed people to feed his ego, and one of the reasons that he bought Neshebe, the estate in Vermont, was so that he could have everybody up there and they would all play games on his rules. It was amazing to me how closely they stuck together. The time seemed to me like it was a matter of separation anxiety. They just couldn't face being apart. The Algonquin members turned tales of their inside jokes and private vacations into public columns, entertaining their readers with stories of their scheming antics. But for those on the receiving end, it wasn't all fun and games. Harpo Marx was a frequent guest, but his brother Groucho refused to play. In his mind, he wrote it off as saying that the admission fee required a viper's tongue and a half-concealed stiletto. The Algonquin Roundtable were seen as elitists who were poking fun at others as a sort of snooty, tony, elite crowd. And I think that had a great deal to do with their humor, the way in which their humor assumed you already shared their assumptions and maybe even shared their leisure, maybe even shared their ability to take a three-hour lunch. Lots of people reacted badly to that. In 1925, hoping to appeal to those who did share their humor, two Algonquin regulars, Harold Ross and Jane Grant, created a new magazine called The New Yorker. Harold Ross said he wanted a magazine that duplicated the luncheon talk at the roundtable, the way people talked, funny, but funny with an edge. The motto of The New Yorker is not for the little old lady in Dubuque. It's meant for sophisticates, for people who think of themselves as part of a cosmopolitan national culture. Through this magazine, they can feel themselves part of a literary life that's centered in Manhattan, that's involved with the Algonquin Hotel Roundtable and the writers and wits who congregated there. Although some Algonquinites would find a home on its pages, their individual output as writers paled in comparison to their celebrity. During the 10 years they lunched together, few produced a major literary masterpiece. The exception was novelist and playwright Edna Ferber, who was too busy to be clever every day. Ferber had this work ethic. She wrote five days a week from nine to one. She went into her workroom. She took into the room a glass of water and some chewing gum. She stayed in the room all morning with instructions to whoever was outside. Do not knock on this door unless somebody in the family dies. The results of Ferber's work were some of the era's most popular books and plays. But around the table, she got no special treatment. She came to the Algonquin Roundtable looking like a million dollars because even though Ferber was not any great beauty, she had this great sense of fashion. She liked tailored suits. But on Ferber, they look more tailored than on other people, I think. So one day she got to the table and Alec Walcott said to her, looked at her suit and he said, why Edna, you almost look like a man. And she said, so do you. But while the Algonquin wits sat smugly on their thrones, bigger issues were emerging around them, displacing the giddiness of the early part of the decade. We have to remember that on the one hand, this is a decade that's breaking down the old conventions, that's trying to, in a sense, free itself from the old constraints. But even as that's happening, it's the decade that sees more lynchings than at any other time in the history of the American nation. It's the decade that sees more restrictive immigration quotas than at any other time in the history of the United States. There was also a reaction against New York City in the 1920s and the rest of America. Many people were uneasy with this cosmopolitan New York ideal and the ideal of self-expression, the ideal of racial and ethnic mixing. One case symbolized the growing storm, the 1927 trial of immigrant radicals Sacco and Vanzetti, who some believed were prosecuted more for their foreign born status than their alleged participation in a robbery and homicide. The Sacco and Vanzetti case charged two Italian anarchists who were participating in a robbery and murder in Massachusetts. But it was widely seen as an investigation of a whole sense of radical politics. There was widespread interest in the case in New York City, demonstrations, letter writing. Amid the protesters maintaining Sacco and Vanzetti's innocence was Dorothy Parker. A lot of her friends in the 20s did not take her politics seriously, but she picketed for Sacco and Vanzetti. She went to visit the jail on the night of the executions. The dark edges of the decade threw Parker into deeper thoughts about the world around her and her role in it. Just months after the Sacco and Vanzetti executions, she was ready to give up her own life. There's little in taking or giving. There's little in water or wine. This living, this living, this living was never a project of mine. Hard is the struggle and sparse is the gain of the one at the top. For art is a form of catharsis and love is a permanent flop. And work is the province of cattle, rests for a clam in a shell. So I'm thinking of throwing the battle. Would you kindly direct me to hell? Parker would struggle with thoughts of suicide her whole life and on several occasions attempted to kill herself. But outwardly, she made light of her self-destructive impulse and expected her friends to do the same. At one point, Robert went to the hospital to visit her after one of her suicide attempts, number two or three, or, you know, he was track. And he sat down next to the bed, looked at this wreck of a woman and said, Daddy, you've got to stop this suicide business. First thing you know, you'll ruin your health. As Parker's life descended into despair, the country around her was bracing for its own bout of depression. Money talks. Money shouts. Don't take much to hear. Like it or not, you need a lot if you're gonna make a life down here. The stock market crash of 1929 wiped out any remaining giddiness from the decade. Makes its presence felt. The government and big business rushed to defuse the panic by predicting an impossibly rosy future. The Wall Street panic, in my opinion, is over. And while I have always been optimistic, I still remain so. Everything indicates that general business has turned the corner. Refusing to accept the false optimism, the Algonquin wits publicly mocked the self-serving tone of the so-called experts. Now, what were the primary causes of the depression, as we called it? Overproduction, maladjustments in gold distribution, overproduction, too little thyroid secretion. Much of what they derided, what they made fun of, the source of their wit, was the idea that people would just blindly follow the PR experts. And in fact, people didn't. The Algonquin roundtable knew it. They made it a great joke. Too much vermouth, overproduction, and by the same token, underproduction. But the dim reality of the economy was not a joke. Many Algonquin wits were forced to leave the roundtable behind and move west to find work. Movies shifted the focus of popular culture to California. Hollywood, whose budgets were big and writers were scarce, represented a goldmine for the Algonquin wits. These were people who wanted to make money, and so they simply shifted from one coast to the other. I think it was Herman Mankiewicz who sent a telegram from Hollywood saying, there's millions to be made out here. Don't let it get around. Some of them went and said, I'm just going to go for a while. I'm not going to stay there. Dorothy Parker turned a depressing tale of lost celebrity into the movie A Star Is Born and quickly struck it rich. The movie became one of the year's most popular pictures, earning Parker an Oscar nomination for screenwriting. Robert Benchley won an Oscar for his short film How to Sleep and enjoyed a successful career as an actor. He tried to revive their literary lunch club, but it was too late. Nervous replaced giddy, fear replaced fun. In a new world of deprivation, irony was a luxury people could no longer afford. The roundtable by 1930 was dead. It withered away. People just stopped going. Ferber said that she went there one day and she saw a family from Indiana or something sitting at the table and she knew it was over. While doing a radio show in 1943, Alexander Wolcott collapsed and died. Two years later, Robert Benchley died. Both were just 56 years old. Despite her many suicide attempts, Dorothy Parker outlived almost everyone else who sat at the Algonquin roundtable and became the most widely read and quoted of the famous scribes. By the time of Parker's death in 1967, Manhattan was well into a new era. The 20s had belonged to a special moment in American history. So, too, did its circle of wits. The members of the roundtable hit upon the right moment in history for them, for their personalities, for their style. And unbeknownst to a lot of them, they captured it and wrote it. And they may not have created a style of humor, but they certainly perpetuated it and put it on steroids. I think most of us look back on these as magical moments and we idealize them and we romanticize them. So we love to think about these groups and to talk about them because I think we long for them. I wish I had gone to those lunches. Who wouldn't want to be at that lunch? I'd rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy. They say that drinking is a slow death. So who's in a hurry? Men seldom make passes at girls who wear glasses. A woman can look both moral and exciting if she also looks as if it was quite a struggle. The suffering of the audience was beyond words. Perhaps too much of everything is as bad as too little. A dog teaches a boy fidelity, perseverance and to turn around three times before lying down. It's a freelance writer. Can't stand the feeling in my heart To spend a night without you There's a place for us, we can find We'll build a love nest for two