The forming of the Algonquin Hotel table round is formed. The chiefs take places…
…In May 1920, Dorothy Parker, Robert Benchley and Robert Sherwood again found themselves together in New York, only this time they were without Vanity Fair. In their months on the magazine they had grown accustomed to lunching and dining together so as not to interrupt the serial that was their conversation. Naturally, they had sought some welcoming and agreeable place nearby. Vanity Fair was at 19th West Forty-fourth Street. Had men’s clubs in those days augmented their income by admitting women, the three might have gone to the Harvard Club, a few doors away, as Benchley and Sherwood did when Mrs. Parker was not with them. Since she generally was, they got in the habit of going a little farther down the block to the Algonquin.
![---‘It was impossible for them to separate work from play, because the work done by the people in the communicative arts, by those in publishing, in the theatre, on the staffs of magazines and newspapers, involves the free play of ideas. This was particularly true at Vanity Fair, which by Mr Crowninshield’s definition looked at all of life from the cheerful point of view of the optimistic satirist. So the triumvirates discussions in the office were scarcely different from their table talk at the Algonquin, and so happy was the ambience created whenever the three of them, or any two of them, were together that, in the evenings, they would attend the theatre together on the free tickets available to them through the magazine. They each seemed to be, in his or her own way, something of an innocent in an inexplicable but fascinating wilderness, and they each found this quality in one another to be refreshing; they would happily apprise one another of the absurdities and curiosities to be found in this world.” [from pages 42-43, You Might As Well Live, The Life and Times of Dorothy Parker, by John Keats, published by Penguin]---click image fro source...](/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/algonquin1.jpg)
—‘It was impossible for them to separate work from play, because the work done by the people in the communicative arts, by those in publishing, in the theatre, on the staffs of magazines and newspapers, involves the free play of ideas. This was particularly true at Vanity Fair, which by Mr Crowninshield’s definition looked at all of life from the cheerful point of view of the optimistic satirist. So the triumvirates discussions in the office were scarcely different from their table talk at the Algonquin, and so happy was the ambience created whenever the three of them, or any two of them, were together that, in the evenings, they would attend the theatre together on the free tickets available to them through the magazine. [from pages 42-43, You Might As Well Live, The Life and Times of Dorothy Parker, by John Keats, published by Penguin]—click image fro source…
When Sherwood, Benchley, and Mrs. parker found themselves among its new habitues, the Algonquin was not so much an old-fashioned place as a place settled, long livedi n, and loved. Some likened it to Brown’s Hotel in London, Louis Bromfield to old Frau Sacher’s, about which Sherwood was to write in Reunion in Vienna. It did not need a welcome mat. “Welcome” was in the air.
—The Algonquin was already the haunt of actors, playwrights and novelists, ‘a publicist’s dream’. This kind of bohemian circle was familiar enough in Vienna, Paris and Berlin; but it was new to America, a ‘culturally insecure’ nation. The Algonquin, which attracted Hemingway and Fitzgerald as well as second-rate hangers-on, proved that one could be ‘talented, sophisticated, intellectual even — and still be an American. It was, in its way, a major revelation.’ Mrs Parker herself, thinks Leslie Frewin, proved that American females too could he right up there with the boys, calling the shots.
But this was New York, not Europe. Everything had to be played for laughs, and for public consumption. ‘It was the terrible day of the wisecracks,’ said Mrs Parker in her gloomy old age.—click image for source…
There were plenty of other hotels and restaurants in the Broadway neighborhood that might have won the theatre’s trade and the legendary name that came to the Algonquin in the twenties. But none of these had Frank Case as a master of the inn. He was the one who persuaded his boss, its builder and first proprietor, not to call the hotel the Puritan but the Algonquin, because a visit to the public library had revealed to him that the Algonquins were the first and strongest people of the neighborhood. Some argued that the new tribe, which moved in with the establishment of the Round table, used tomahawks with inherited skill and were also master scalpers. ( to be continued)…
ADDENDUM:
(see link at end)…Parker, Benchley, and Robert Sherwood (also of Vanity Fair) lunched regularly at the Algonquin Hotel with a small group of self-publicizing writers eager to create a legend out of their own banter, bons mots, insults, and decrees. In addition to the Vanity Fair trio, the “Algonquin Round Table” included newspapermen Alexander Woollcott and Harold Ross (who would found the New Yorker magazine in 192 5) and, in subsequent years, Edna Ferber, Harpo Marx, Tallulah Bankhead, and other notable figures in literary and theatrical circles. The Round Table was the perfectforum for Parker’s incomparably quick tongue, and soon her quietly dropped words became those most listened for. Asked during this period to use the word “horticulture” in a sentence, she famously responded, “You can lead a horticulture, but you can’t make her think.” She rarely failed to
But despite her growing fame and the endless parties where she always took center stage, Parker was miserable. Lurking behind her quest for fun was a growing sense of desperation, as her short poem “The Flaw in Paganism” indicates:
Drink and dance and laugh and lie,
Love, the reeling midnight through,
For tomorrow we shall die!
(But, alas, we never do.)
Her insistent hopefulness always seemed to be sideswiped by catastrophe or disappointment-as she put it, “laughter, hope and a sock in the eye.” She was deeply dissatisfied with the free-lance magazine writing she did in the 1920s, had serious money problems, and was involved in a succession of painfully brief love affairs with men who cared little for her. All these troubles led to two failed suicide attempts, in 1923 (following an abortion) and 1925. Her marriage to the morphine-and alcohol-addicted Edwin Parker finally ended in 1928. Through her worst years, Parker maintained a tough-talking and hard-drinking public exterior, scoffing at her own misery with blasé humor.
At the suggestion of a friend, she collected a volume of her poetry in 1926 to pay for an overseas trip, although she herself felt her verse was not good enough for a book. To her great surprise, Enough Rope became an instant best-seller, rare for a book of poems. In this and subsequent successful volumes of poetry—Sunset Gun (1928), Death and Taxes (1931), and Not So Deep as a Well (1936)—Parker poked fun at her own heartbreak, masochism, and hopefulness. Her most effective verse captures the breadth of her dreams and disappointments with bitter irony and perfect turns of phrase, but only hints at their depths. Read More:http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/biography/parker.html
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