Smart Aleck: The Wit, World, and Life of Alexander Woollcott

Smart Aleck: The Wit, World, and Life of Alexander Woollcott, by Howard Teichmann (Morrow, 334 pp., $10.95). Forty five years have passed since the Algonquin Round Table disbanded, but the talented and outrageous personalities it comprised live on in what seems to be an unending stream of biographies. Howard Teichmann, who two years ago gave us the first treatment of George S. Kaufman, appears to have become an Algonquiphile. He has here turned out a first-rate volume on the “Vicious Circle’s” ringleader, Alexander Woollcott: drama critic for the Times and the extinct Herald, Sun, and World; author, lecturer, actor, radio commentator, and arbiter of public taste for a generation ; and above all, personality. Woollcott’s unique blend of “vitriol and violets” was the stuff of which close friendships and bitter feuds were made. As The New Yorker commented at the time of his death: “We are glad we knew him well, for he was a most uncomfortable man to know slightly.” Raised in a nineteenth century New Jersey commune, the Phalanx, Woollcott, during his adolescence, grappled with what Teichmann claims was a hormonal imbalance causing effeminacy and a weak and confused sex drive, though not overt homosexuality. From the obituary desk at the Times, Woollcott catapulted to the post of drama critic, which he rescued from its thraldom to the theater owners and the advertising department. His gushing enthusiasms for new talent made American audiences respond to the likes of Eugene O’Neill, Lunt and Fontanne, the Marx Brothers, Will Rogers, Fred Astaire, Abie’s Irish Rose, and Paul Robeson. At the Algonquin Hotel he shepherded a wise-cracking and literate group which included Kaufman, Dorothy Parker, Robert Benchley, Marc Connelly, Edna Ferber, Harold Ross, and Herbert Bayard Swope—and somehow managed to dominate them all, just as he was able to sway the taste of millions by his pronouncements as CBS radio’s Town Crier. Teichmann has done an admirable job of treating previously covered material from new perspectives, and of bringing new information to light. It is the type of book—fresh, gossipy, and witty—that Woollcott himself would have relished.

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David Pietrusza

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Smart Aleck: The Wit, World, and Life of Alexander Woollcott, by Howard Teichmann (Morrow, 334 pp., $10.95). Forty five years have passed since the Algonquin Round Table disbanded, but the talented and outrageous personalities it comprised live on in what seems to be an unending stream of biographies. Howard Teichmann, who two years ago gave us the first treatment of George S. Kaufman, appears to have become an Algonquiphile. He has here turned out a first-rate volume on the “Vicious Circle’s” ringleader, Alexander Woollcott: drama critic for the Times and the extinct Herald, Sun, and World; author, lecturer, actor, radio commentator, and arbiter of public taste for a generation ; and above all, personality. Woollcott’s unique blend of “vitriol and violets” was the stuff of which close friendships and bitter feuds were made. As The New Yorker commented at the time of his death: “We are glad we knew him well, for he was a most uncomfortable man to know slightly.” Raised in a nineteenth century New Jersey commune, the Phalanx, Woollcott, during his adolescence, grappled with what Teichmann claims was a hormonal imbalance causing effeminacy and a weak and confused sex drive, though not overt homosexuality. From the obituary desk at the Times, Woollcott catapulted to the post of drama critic, which he rescued from its thraldom to the theater owners and the advertising department. His gushing enthusiasms for new talent made American audiences respond to the likes of Eugene O’Neill, Lunt and Fontanne, the Marx Brothers, Will Rogers, Fred Astaire, Abie’s Irish Rose, and Paul Robeson. At the Algonquin Hotel he shepherded a wise-cracking and literate group which included Kaufman, Dorothy Parker, Robert Benchley, Marc Connelly, Edna Ferber, Harold Ross, and Herbert Bayard Swope—and somehow managed to dominate them all, just as he was able to sway the taste of millions by his pronouncements as CBS radio’s Town Crier. Teichmann has done an admirable job of treating previously covered material from new perspectives, and of bringing new information to light. It is the type of book—fresh, gossipy, and witty—that Woollcott himself would have relished.