Word: benchleys
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Adams could remember a happier and a more literary time, when a handful of dedicated writers and editors, among them Robert Benchley, Alexander Woollcott, George S. Kaufman, Ring Lardner, and Harold Ross of The New Yorker practiced their art with a lapidary's care. Clinging together for mutual support, they met weekdays as the Vicious Circle, a social group that lunched at the Algonquin Hotel and traded mots and puns, Saturday nights over the poker table of the Thanatopsis Literary and Inside Straight Club. Of them all, none set journalism's banner higher than the cigar-smoking, pool...
...Garden of Allah Hotel-everyone, that is, who was part of the Hollywood elite in the old days when the town still managed to be wacky in the grand manner. Through the late, intoxicated '20s and '30s, the Garden was more house party than hotel. Robert Benchley was resident clown; John Barrymore kept a bicycle there so as not to waste drinking time walking between the separate celebrations in the sprawling, movie-Spanish villas. Woollcott, Hemingway, Brice, Olivier, Welles, Bogart, Dietrich all lived at the Garden during its green years...
Splash in the Night. Everyone was delighted when Humorist Benchley moved in, accompanied by Columnist John McClain, who trundled Bob from party to party in a wheelbarrow when walking was out of the question. At the Garden Benchley created some of his most memorable epigrams. There, when a friend said that drink was a slow poison, Bob, nose down in a beaker of martinis, answered: "That's all right. I'm in no hurry...
...call girls. The last big spender was a happy drunk from Kansas City who made his fortune turning out horror pictures for the kiddies. For months last year, all drinks served in the Garden bar were put on his tab, and eventually he broke the record rung up by Benchley and his pals...
Russell Juarez Birdwell, a slimmed-down, mustachioed version of the late Bob Benchley, has a secretary in constant attendance to record his every word, suggests that his glibness is an inheritance from his father, a Texas revivalist preacher. From his mother, says the Bird, he got an appetite for cash. "She always insisted that we work and save. When I was small, I made money by trapping and skinning skunks.'' Young Birdwell soon learned that there are as many ways to make pocket money as there are to skin polecats. In high school and the University of Texas...