Word: woollcott
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...years he made The New Yorker a synonym for urbanity, but he himself remained a bawling, rough-cut outlander from Aspen, Colo. A catty old friend, Alexander Woollcott, once described him as looking like "a dishonest Abe Lincoln." Rumpled, wild-haired and irascible, Ross talked in an ear-splitting voice, a combination of rasp and quack. He often expressed himself in skid-row profanity, or by mere grunts or gap-toothed grins. He had the energy of a bull, and a bull-like charm. Though he often sounded as crass as a cymbal, he had an amazing sensitivity for words...
...frittered away his career as a roistering tramp newspaperman. He left home at 18, bummed his way for seven years from paper to paper until he enlisted in the Army during World War I. He became editor of the Army's Stars & Stripes, on a staff that included Woollcott, Franklin P. Adams and Grantland Rice. After the war, they forgathered in New York, where their friendship continued at poker parties of the Thanatopsis Literary & Inside Straight Club and at the famed Round Table of wits in the Algonquin...
Author Harriman says the Round Table was formed by accident and mutual attraction in 1920. It was an informal company, but one that no one dreamed of trying to crash. The charter members-including Alexander Woollcott, Harold Ross, George Kaufman and Edna Ferber -had violent dislikes that kept membership low and bores off bounds...
...sense of insecurity led to all sorts of adolescent petulance. Once, when he was not invited to a party on the Riviera, he stood behind a hedge and peppered the guests with garbage. Zelda kept right up with him. At a farewell party for Alexander Woollcott, she kicked off her black lace panties and presented them as a go-ing-away present. When budding Novelist Robert Penn Warren praised This Side of Paradise, Scott truculently replied: "You mention that book again and I'll slug...
...best we can talking all the languages at once, like Marx and Engels in their correspondence, like Joyce in Finnegans Wake, like Eugene Jolas in his polyglot poetry, and like Angelica Balabanoff in these poems." But such tedious stuff is flanked by a charming essay on Alexander Woollcott (who was brought into the world by Wilson's grandfather, a doctor), and a hilarious dissection of the atrocious style of Joseph E. Davies' Mission to Moscow...