I have had 40+ year obsession with the Algonquin Round Table Group. As always, I had over researched a stage role I was preparing. I had been cast in The Man Who Came To Dinner, a near perfect piece of theatre comedy confection by George Kauffman & Moss Hart. I played the role of Banjo, a thinly disguised caricature of Harpo Marx. In a crazy coincidence, I would play Harpo Marx a year later in a rather good musical, ready to be revived- Minnie’s Boys. The Man Who Came To Dinner is based on a real incident at writer & closeted gay- Moss Hart’s home involving the well-known radio & press celebrity of the 1930s & 1940s- Alexander Woollcott, who was gay.
Woollcott inspired at least 3 different characters in first-rate famous films with his articulate quips. He was a pillar of the Algonquin Round Table, a group of writers, actors & personalities who gathered regularly to match wits over a great deal of alcohol. He was a critic & commentator for The New Yorker (he devised the Shouts & Murmurs column still used today), & had his own CBS radio show.
He had famously intense & possessive relationships with many powerful, talented women, including lesbian actress Katherine Cornell & fellow Algonguin Round Table member Dorothy Parker.
Starting in 1929, his “This is Woollcott speaking” became his unmistakable catch phrase on the radio. Woollcott was the first on-air book reviewer, responsible for successes like James Hilton’s Lost Horizon, a power untapped until Oprah. He appeared in advertisements endorsing products & in movie trailers. He was a frequent White House guest, & had his favorite cocktail, the Brandy Alexander, named after him. He was loved & loathed, feared & fawned over.
Woollcott could be bitingly brutal & sourly sappy in his radio broadcasts. The 3 characters based on Woollcott were: Sheridan Whiteside, the sophisticated tyrant tethered to a wheelchair in The Man Who Came to Dinner; Waldo Leydecker, the writer & radio commentator who develops an obsession with his young protégé in Laura; & Addison Dewitt, the contemptuous critic, played by George Sanders, in All About Eve. The gay stereotype of an effeminate, snobby, cultured controller of young ladies isn’t around much in the 21st century.
He was so smart that he toured, rather successfully, in the very play with the wicked caricature of him.
My experience in The Man Who Came To Dinner was 40 years ago, but there in my bookshelf sits The Woollcott Reader & The Letters Of Alexander Woollcott.
He had famously intense & possessive relationships with many powerful, talented women, including lesbian actress Katherine Cornell & fellow Algonguin Round Table member Dorothy Parker.
Starting in 1929, his “This is Woollcott speaking” became his unmistakable catch phrase on the radio. Woollcott was the first on-air book reviewer, responsible for successes like James Hilton’s Lost Horizon, a power untapped until Oprah. He appeared in advertisements endorsing products & in movie trailers. He was a frequent White House guest, & had his favorite cocktail, the Brandy Alexander, named after him. He was loved & loathed, feared & fawned over.
Woollcott could be bitingly brutal & sourly sappy in his radio broadcasts. The 3 characters based on Woollcott were: Sheridan Whiteside, the sophisticated tyrant tethered to a wheelchair in The Man Who Came to Dinner; Waldo Leydecker, the writer & radio commentator who develops an obsession with his young protégé in Laura; & Addison Dewitt, the contemptuous critic, played by George Sanders, in All About Eve. The gay stereotype of an effeminate, snobby, cultured controller of young ladies isn’t around much in the 21st century.
He was so smart that he toured, rather successfully, in the very play with the wicked caricature of him.
My experience in The Man Who Came To Dinner was 40 years ago, but there in my bookshelf sits The Woollcott Reader & The Letters Of Alexander Woollcott.
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