Word: woollcott
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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This is the life. Hard work has made Berlin a multimillionaire, but just how many multi or millions he has, nobody knows, and he's not telling. (His first, and last, authorized biography, written by Alexander Woollcott, was published in 1925.) Berlin may have lost the knack for writing hits -- his last show, Mr. President, was a 1962 flop -- but the old downtown hard sell has never deserted him. He guards his copyrights with a care that borders on niggardliness, even though he's outlived some of them (notably Alexander's Ragtime Band), and he is fiercely, even pettily, protective...
DIED. Howard M. Teichmann, 71, witty playwright and biographer of George S. Kaufman, Alexander Woollcott and Henry Fonda; of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (Lou Gehrig's disease); in New York City. A stylish writer and raconteur, the Chicago-born Teichmann scored a solid hit on Broadway with his 1953 comedy, The Solid Gold Cadillac, co-written with Kaufman...
...each other in years are on speaking terms again today, including the bride and groom." A corrosive reviewer, Parker once slated a hapless author as a "writer for the ages. For the ages of four to eight." She could be equally cruel to her nearest and dearest. When Alexander Woollcott, a fellow jouster at the Algonquin Round Table, recalled an afternoon of book signing with the smug rhetorical question "What is so rare as a Woollcott first - edition?", Parker replied deadpan, "A second edition." Presumably it was the memory of such moments that prompted Woollcott to term...
...brief, provocative assessment of her talents. Parker was, after all, the one person George Bernard Shaw asked to meet at a 1926 Riviera party full of glitterati. On being introduced to the pert, poised lady, Shaw cut to her tragic core as he turned and said wonderingly to Woollcott, "I'd always thought of her as an old maid...
...persistent complaint of the dilettante: envy. Gaping at the writers headed for the Algonquin Round Table, she "longed to know such people, share their brilliance, know what they took to be important. She wondered if she could hold her own with Bob Sherwood and George Jean Nathan and Woollcott and Mencken, but she would probably never meet them...