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Abstract
The events include nightly cabaret performances about Dorothy Parker, Robert Benchley, Alexander Woollcott, George S. Kaufman and their tablemates.
Besides Parker and her humorist pal Benchley, there were columnists Franklin Pierce Adams and Heywood Broun and playwrights Kaufman, Robert Sherwood and Marc Connelly. Novelist Edna Ferber, songwriter Irving Berlin and Harpo Marx sometimes took places at the table too.
Brendan Gill agreed. He was friends with Round Tablers Connelly and Harold Ross, who founded the New Yorker, where Gill has worked for almost 60 years.
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It started simply as a press agent's gag.
It went on to become a 10-year lunch, a nationally famous gathering of young critics and Broadway's best, where the quips and razor-sharp retorts were served up with relish.
It was the Round Table at the Algonquin Hotel -- and in the 1920s, there was no more urbane or sophisticated a place to be in America.
Even today, the term summons up visions of a talented group of people given to sparkling repartee and their own brand of ham-on- wry.
In New York this week, the birthplace of brunch with a snide order of bromide celebrates the group's 75th anniversary. For without the Algonquin, there would have been no Round Table.
The events include nightly cabaret performances about Dorothy Parker, Robert Benchley, Alexander Woollcott, George S. Kaufman and their tablemates.
The shows take place in the same room where the group first munched celery sticks and popovers and downed drinks on their way to becoming a literary institution -- and where they helped found another one, the New Yorker magazine.
Fans admit Round Table members weren't the best authors of their day. It's just that they symbolized urban worldliness at a time when the country was ready for it.
"They epitomized sophisticated wit, the kind of wit found in the lyrics of Cole Porter," said John Aldridge, a professor emeritus of 20th century literature at the University of Michigan.
Their legend is strong enough that a Robert Altman-produced film about the group will be released this fall.
Called "Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle," the movie stars Jennifer Jason Leigh as the mordant writer-poet known for her biting observations on men, life and suicide.
In preparation for the role, Leigh moved into the Algonquin for a week last year to gather stories about her character.
Today, the clubby charm of the place, with its paneled lobby, grandfather clock and overstuffed chairs, still draws authors, actors and playwrights as guests.
The lobby looks much the way it did in June 1919 when a press agent named John Peter Toohey decided to play an elaborate trick on Woollcott, then drama critic of the New York Times.
Woollcott had covered World War I for an Army publication and was known for boring colleagues with his endless war stories.
As a payback, Toohey planned a grand luncheon attended by the other critics in town to welcome him home from the war.
As part of the gag, his name was intentionally misspelled on the banners, programs and invitations.
Instead of getting mad, the portly critic had a great time. So did the others and they decided to do it agein.
At first, they called themselves the Luigi Board, after their favorite waiter. A Brooklyn newspaper cartoonist soon dubbed them the Round Table. Conscious of the acidic nature of their wit, they preferred to call themselves "the Vicious Circle."
Besides Parker and her humorist pal Benchley, there were columnists Franklin Pierce Adams and Heywood Broun and playwrights Kaufman, Robert Sherwood and Marc Connelly. Novelist Edna Ferber, songwriter Irving Berlin and Harpo Marx sometimes took places at the table too.
At the time, most were in their 20s and beginning their careers. They were encouraged by hotel manager Frank Case, who moved the group to a round table in the Rose Room, just off the lobby.
"It was great for business," said Aldridge. "More and more people began coming there to have lunch and to eavesdrop."
For those who couldn't make it, the columnists obligingly reprinted their lunchmates' witticisms, adding to the fame.
With the arrival of the Depressmon and their changing careers, things stopped being so funny and the group went their separate ways.
Ferber said she realized the party was over when she showed up in the Rose Room one day in 1932 and found the big table occupied by a family from Kansas.
Like others, Aldridge thinks the Round Table is unlikely to occur again.
"There's a place for that kind of wordplay but the temper of our times discourages it," he said.
Brendan Gill agreed. He was friends with Round Tablers Connelly and Harold Ross, who founded the New Yorker, where Gill has worked for almost 60 years.
"Today, everything is more intense, more difficult," Gill told an interviewer. "You can't imagine the equivalent of these people today."
But in places like a certain hotel on New York's West 44th Street, they still make it a point to remember.
Caption: Jennifer Jason Leigh will portray Dorothy Parker. r Robert Altman directs the Roundtable film.
Credit: KNIGHT-RIDDER NEWSPAPERS
1994 The Hamilton Spectator. All rights reserved.