Dorothy Parker and highbrow playwright Clare Booth arrived at the single-file door held open for them by a man with epaulets. “Age before beauty,” said Booth, gesturing toward the door with an exaggerated sweep of her arm. In one of the great all-time comebacks, Parker accepted the gesture and went through the door first, correcting Booth with “Pearls before swine.”
Who Was Dorothy Parker and What Was the Algonquin Round Table?
Dorothy Rothschild joined the Vogue editorial staff in 1916 as a caption writer after being educated at Miss Dana’s School for Girls and the Blessed Sacrament Convent School. The nuns threw her out for defining the Immaculate Conception as spontaneous combustion. Her explanation for doing so? “At birth, the devil touched my tongue.”
In 1917 she married stockbroker Edward Parker, a man she much later described as beautiful, but not very smart. Neither family attended the wedding.
That same year she became Vanity Fair’s drama critic
There she met the Roberts: Benchley and Sherwood. Sherwood was a writer just back from the war. Benchley was the work husband humorist who shared an office with Parker, who described the office as “so tiny, if it were an inch smaller it would have been adultery.”
The three became fast friends
When she was fired for insulting a powerful man’s wife, Benchley and Sherwood resigned in protest.
These three writers (all brilliant, witty, and unknown at the time) went straight to the Algonquin Hotel to eat lunch, drink, and play word games for hours
Franklin Pierce Adams, Alexander Woollcott, and Edna Ferber soon joined them there for daily cocktails and wordplay, calling themselves The Vicious Circle. Dozens of other writers, playwrights, and actors came and went during this ten-year tradition that became known as the Algonquin Round Table.
Parker became a freelance writer and book reviewer
She wrote about the human situation, which she described as “simultaneously tragic and funny.” Her comments were described as quick, inventive, cynical, and acerbic. “Big Blonde,” one of her most widely read short stories, won the O. Henry Award in 1929. It’s a good read and you can download the free .pdf here at scribd.com.
When she was broke, Parker went to Hollywood to write screenplays and bits of witty dialogue
Her most famous work, A Star Is Born, earned her an Academy Award nomination for Best Writing, Screenplay. She hated Hollywood and loved the money.
For sport, the Roundtable gang used their quick wits and extensive vocabularies on each other and were mighty good at it
A typical exchange of insults was the day Woollcott said, “You look almost like a man today, Edna.” “So do you, Alec,” said Ferber.
Robert Benchley was a humorist and drama critic who commented on the world’s absurdities.* He wrote hundreds of amusing pieces, theater reviews, and commentary for The New Yorker and Vanity Fair. He later appeared in movies as a common man overwhelmed by simple tasks.
- “It took me fifteen years to discover that I had no talent for writing, but I couldn’t give it up because by that time I was too famous.”
- “Why don’t you get out of that wet coat and into a dry martini?”
- “Infants need the most sleep. Stunning them with a soft, padded hammer is the best way to ensure they get it at the right time.”
Robert Sherwood was awarded Pulitzer Prizes for biography and drama and wrote the screenplay for The Best Years of Our Lives, winner of seven Academy Awards.
- “To be able to write a play a man must be sensitive, imaginative, naive, gullible, and passionate. He must also be something of an imbecile, something of a liar, and something of a damn fool.”
- “We all come from our own little planets. That’s why we’re all different. That’s what makes life interesting.”
- “The trouble with me is, I belong to a vanishing race. I’m one of the intellectuals.”
Franklin Pierce Adams was best known for his witty and satirical column The Conning Tower. He was a man with firm opinions.
- “The trouble with this country is that there are too many politicians who believe – with a conviction based upon experience – that you can fool all of the people all of the time.”
- “There are plenty of good five-cent cigars in this country. The trouble is they cost a quarter.”
- “Prohibition is an awful flop. We like it. It can’t stop what it’s meant to stop. We like it. It’s left a trail of graft and slime. It don’t prohibit worth a dime. It’s filled our land with vice and crime, Nevertheless, we’re for it.”
Alexander Woollcott was a drama critic and commentator. At college he edited the student magazine and founded a drama group. His nickname was “Putrid.” In World War One, he was one of a half dozen men chosen to create and write for Stars and Stripes, a morale-building newspaper for American G.I.s.
- “All the things I like are illegal, immoral, or fattening.”
- “The scenery in the play was beautiful, but the actors got in front of it.”
- “Reading Proust is like bathing in someone else’s dirty water.”
Edna Ferber, novelist and playwright, said she had never encountered a more hard-bitten group. “Their standards were high, their vocabulary fluent, fresh, astringent, and very, very tough. Theirs was an (invigorating) influence, one on the other, and all on the world of American letters.” Ferber, a charter member, wrote such things as these:
- “There are just two kinds of girls. Those who go downtown Saturday nights and those who don’t.”
- “No one in the United States has the right to own millions of acres of American land, I don’t care how they came by it.”
- “When a new post-war generation has grown to puberty and to youth and to manhood and womanhood, it should read, and it should be realistically told, of the futility, the idiocy, the utter depravity of war. For that matter, this instruction could begin at the age of six with the taking of those toy guns out of those toy holsters and throwing them in the ash-cans where they belong.”
George S. Kaufman was a journalist and playwright who won a Pulitzer prize for drama and a Tony Award for Best Director for the musical Guys and Dolls. In 1917, Kaufman became drama editor of the New York Times.
As the story goes, when asked by a press agent how he can get his play’s leading lady into the newspaper, Kaufman said “Shoot her.”
Harold Ross was founder and editor of The New Yorker magazine. He attributed his publishing success to his love of reading and his lifelong curiosity, both in spite of dropping out of high school and never going to college.
- ”When a dog bites a man, that is not news because it happens so often. But if a man bites a dog, that is news.”
- “Journalism is literature in a hurry.”
- “The American public does not know what it wants until it’s given what it wants,” Fifty years later, this quote impressed Steve Jobs enough that he said, “People don’t know what they want until you show it to them.”
Few knew that the acid-tongued Parker was an advocate for social justice
Shoemaker Nicola Sacco and fish peddler Bartolomeo Vanzetti were convicted of murder during a payroll robbery. Both men had solid alibis. The case went viral as a gross miscarriage of justice against immigrants. The trial judge said “I’m going to get those anarchist bastards good.”
Dorothy Parker joined the protest marchers
The Boston crowd shouted at her, “Red scum,” “Guinea lover,” and “Kill her.” Sacco and Vanzetti were electrocuted.
Parker founded the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League. In one speech she said, “For heaven’s sake, children, Fascism isn’t coming – it’s here. It’s dreadful. Stop it.” She was blacklisted after referring to J. Edgar Hoover, director of the F.B.I., as “the one who chases men for business and pleasure.”
When asked what most troubled her about America, she said, “Injustice, intolerance, stupidity, and segregation.”
When Dorothy Parker died, she left everything to Martin Luther King (the two never met) and the NAACP. And that’s why she was buried at the Baltimore, Maryland headquarters of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.**
Here are only some of the 180 or 332 or 690+ quotes attributed to Dorothy Parker:
- “If you don’t have anything nice to say, come sit by me.”
- “You can lead a horticulture but you can’t make her think.”
- “They say a martini is like a woman’s breast. One ain’t enough and three are too many.”
- I like to have a martini, two at the very most. After three I’m under the table. After four I’m under my host.”
- “If you want to know what God thinks about money, just look at the people he gives it to.”
- “If love is blind, why is lingerie so popular?”
- “Beauty is only skin deep, but ugly is to the bone.”
- “This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force.”
- “What’s the difference between an enzyme and a hormone? You can’t hear an enzyme.”
- “Ducking for apples. Change one letter and it’s the story of my life.”
- “If you wear a short enough skirt, the party will come to you.”
- “If all the young ladies who attended the Yale dance were laid end to end, no one would be at all surprised.”
- “Vice is nice, but liquor is quicker.”
- “Men never make passes at girls who wear glasses.”
*One hundred years later, commenting upon life’s absurdities is what most stand-up comedians do.
**The Associated Press said when the NAACP moved to Washington, DC, Parker’s ashes were moved to the Woodlawn Cemetery in The Bronx, NY. Some who attended the funeral read from Parker’s works and poured some gin (her favorite) on her grave.
Bonus
The word highbrow was used to describe snobbish upper class intellectuals with refined tastes, many of whom Parker skewered.
High brow meant just that. It referred to a racist belief that the distance between one’s eyebrows and hairline indicated intelligence because larger foreheads held larger brains (“Take that, Eli,” said Peyton). This pseudoscience was called phrenology and claimed everything about you is revealed by the shape of your head and the bumps on it.
Here are three highbrow jokes
The idea is you have to be smarter than the average cabbage to appreciate the cleverness of the humor.
- What’s the difference between an etymologist and an entomologist? An etymologist knows the difference.
- How many surrealists does it take to change a light bulb? A fish.
- A Roman walks into a bar, holds up two fingers, and says: “Five beers, please.”
The Algonquin Round Table: The Ten Year Lunch, won the Academy Award for best documentary in 1998.
