Word: woollcott
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Actress Gordon read a letter which Maude Adams had written from Missouri to Alexander Woollcott, who had died in the interim (TIME, Feb. 1). Wrote 70-year-old Actress Adams: "The Empire is so dear to me it is difficult to speak of her. It seems almost like praising one's mother." Sixty-nine-year-old Edna Wallace Hopper (looking incredibly young) and 76-year-old Cyril Scott played a scene from The Girl I Left Behind Me in which they had appeared on the Empire's opening night...
...prospects. His writing style, which in terms of liquors was a decidedly pink drink, bubbled up in the Times's drama department, where he acquired an unsmiling assistant named George S. Kaufman. When Kaufman eventually satirized him as the waspish subject of The Man Who Came to Dinner, Woollcott declared: "The thing's a terrible insult and I've decided to swallow...
...couple of decades Woollcott made himself a notorious wiseacre occupying a Manhattan apartment ("Wit's End") where he expounded his liberal beliefs, struck extravagant attitudes, greeted friends ("Hello, repulsive"), dismissed bores ("I find you are beginning to disgust me, puss. How about getting the hell out of here...
Alexander Woollcott was ailing when he went to London in 1941 to broadcast. He brought a box of chocolates for Lady Astor ("Of course, they may be poisoned. I shall be so interested to hear"), observed that the "sense of my incurable triviality" had deepened at the thought that he was approaching England bearing silk stockings and lipsticks instead of guns and ammunition...
...last week when he sat beside the microphone in CBS's Manhattan studios with two authors and two college presidents. Their broadcast subject on the People's Platform was "Is Germany Incurable?" Woollcott answered: ". . . it's a fallacy to think that Hitler was the cause of the world's present woes. Germany was the cause of Hitler. ..." They were his last known words. A few minutes later, without the audience knowing it, Alexander Woollcott, 56, suffered a heart attack, and later that evening he died...