Word: woollcotts
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...48th birthday last week Alexander Woollcott was still enough of a newspaper reporter to go to Flemington, N. J. to cover the fourth week of the Hauptmann trial for North American Newspaper Alliance. Proud is he of his early experiences as a Manhattan newshawk in the days of the Herman Rosenthal murder and the sinking of the Titanic. Yet he can, on occasion, forget his reporter's training long enough to put extra barbs on some paragraph of gossip, or to roll a log for one of his favorites. His humor has much of the feminine savagery of Dorothy...
Town Crier Woollcott lives in the same apartment house as the Ralph Pulitzers and Alice Duer Miller at the foot of East 52nd Street, overlooking the East River. Dorothy Parker named the place "Wit's End." He lives in Sybaritic ease, attended by a youthful Negro servant named Junior. When he writes at home, he customarily dictates to a male secretary. Breakfast or cocktail guests are likely to include the Ben Hechts, Charles MacArthurs, Neysa McMein, Harpo Marx, Noel Coward, Herbert Bayard Swope. With Editor Harold Ross he maintains a perpetual Potash & Perlmutter squabble, which last week came...
...Story Teller Alexander Woollcott's hobbies is collecting folk tales which bob up month after month, year after year, sometimes with different characters and settings but always with the same set of basic facts. One such story concerns the European peasant boy who leaves home, makes his fortune, returns in manhood to surprise his aged, indigent parents with a money gift. The parents, who keep the village inn, fail to recognize him when he asks for lodging. Planning to surprise them in the morning, the son retires for the night. But the greedy innkeepers, who have seen their guest...
Four years ago Mr. Woollcott discussed that story, "the perfect specimen of folk lore," with English Journalist Valentine Williams, who testified to its recurrence in English, French and German newspapers about every six-months for the past 25 years. Nearly always it is issued from, some remote town in Eastern Europe. Two weeks after the Woollcott-Williams conversation, the same old story landed on the front page of the New York Herald Tribune as an Associated Press dispatch from Warsaw, with the headline: PARENTS KILL RICH SON POSING AS A STRANGER Pole, Home After 18 Years...
...Norris is the joy of her family, a delight to the most successful wits in Manhattan, whose books, plays, columns or magazines may deride the very qualities Kathleen Norris' novels champion. George Kaufman, Harold Ross, Franklin P. Adams, Alexander Woollcott are doting friends. She remains abstract in any crowd, never gives the appearance of listening. When Corinne Roosevelt Robinson tried to tell her once that her brother liked her book, Mother, Mrs. Norris vaguely got him confused with a doctor in Buffalo, made a mental note that it was probably the obstetrical parts of her story that appealed...