Algonquin Hotel, birthplace of the famed Round Table, and the Dorothy Parker Society are celebrating the 90th anniversary this month of that “Vicious Circle” which set the standard for wit and sophistication.
The Round Table of New York lit wits, headed by oft-quoted quipster queen Dorothy Parker, had a 10-year daily lunch date beginning in June 1919, originally at an oblong table. Parker dubbed it “The Vicious Circle” and termed the Algonquin “The Gonk”. She lived in, and tried to die in, what is now the hotel’s Dorothy Parker Suite #1106.
The Round Table writers, actors, and critics strongly influenced Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald, and also helped found “The New Yorker” Magazine.
Anniversary celebrations, dubbed Parkerfest, begin with a Roaring Twenties speakeasy party June 6 and 7 (the anniversary of Parker’s death) on Governors Island in New York Harbor off the southern tip of Manhattan. Highlights of the high times include live jazz by Michael Arenella and his Dreamland Orchestra, vintage clothes and cars, plus readings by members of the Dorothy Parker Society and the F. Scott Fitzgerald Society. Click here for a schedule of the rip roaring fest. Round Tabler and author of “Giant” and "Show Boat", Edna Ferber, called the group “the Poison Squad”. She wrote, "They were actually merciless if they disapproved...But if they liked what you had done, they did say so publicly and open-heartedly."
Later in June, The Algonquin will hold a Round Table lunch (details to come).
Others seated at the table were:
· George S. Kaufman, best known for his Marx Brothers filmscripts including "Animal Crackers" and "The Cocoanuts", which the brothers occasionally followed. Kaurman's career began in DC at the old (not the current) "Washington Times" in 1912. His humorous column was called "This, That and a Little of the Other".
· Harpo Marx, who certainly talked at the Round Table, although never in Marx Bros. films.
· Alexander Woollcott, acerbic “New York Times” drama critic and role model for “The Man Who Came to Dinner”. No, that was not based on his stay at FDR's White House. Woollcott once said, "His huff arrived and he departed in it." Hemingway once called him "that fat capon".
· Quadruple Pulitzer Prize-winning writer (“Abe Lincoln in Illinois”, etc.) Robert Sherwood. He served another president, FDR, as speechwriter.
· Pulitzer Prize-winner Marc Connelly (“The Green Pastures”), who said, “Conversation was like oxygen to us. We breathed each other in our remarks.”
· Actor Robert Benchley, who was fond of saying, "Anything can happen, but it usually doesn't." Perhaps he was refering to his DC job as a secretary at the Aircraft Board during World War One.
· Harold Ross, who founded “The New Yorker” in 1925. Ross termed it a “comic weekly”.
Here are other links to sites relevant to the Round Table and its members.
The Algonquin has always been a favorite with literary, film, and theater stars including:
· Lerner and Loewe, who composed some of the scores to “My Fair Lady” and “Brigadoon" in Loewe's suite, now the called the Lerner and Loewe Suite.
· Curmudgeon journalist H.L. Mencken, who uncharacteristically declared The Algonquin “the most comfortable hotel in America.”
· Douglas Fairbanks, who once sold soap to the hotel management, long before he became a swashbuckling actor and a founding member of United Artists.
The Gonk’s second floor was the site of Round Table members’ Thanatopsis (“death sight”) Literary and Inside Straight Club poker game. Its stakes, and players, were usually stratospherically high.
Parker was often high, and often very low due to drinking and depression despite her extraordinary successes. She co-wrote about 20 filmscripts including "A Star Is Born", Lillian Hellman's "The Little Foxes", and Alfred Hitchcock's "Saboteur" until Parker was blacklisted after appearing at Joseph McCarthy's House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC).
Parker wrote about her attempts in her poem "Résumé": "Guns aren't lawful; Nooses give; Gas smells awful; You might as well live."
But in "A Fairly Sad Tale", she wrote also, "I must go on, till ends my rope, Who from my birth was cursed with hope.”
Fortunately, she lived longer than any other Round Tabler. Parker died at age 73 -- from natural causes.
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