The Algonquin Games

Saturdays were Special at the Algonquin Hotel's Round Table, the favorite luncheon spot of New York's literary and artistic set in the Twenties and Thirties. Unlike the lunches on other days of the week, which were generally leisurely and ended with the participants' going their separate ways, the male lunchers at the Saturday sessions hurried through their meals, got rid of their (continued on page 238)Algonquin Games(continued from page 113) wives and girlfriends and moved upstairs to a small second-floor suite provided for them, free of charge, by Frank Case, owner of the hotel. The suite was the site of a weekly poker game.

The poker players, who eventually began to call themselves the Thanatopsis Literary and Inside Straight Club, usually got down to business about five o'clock in the afternoon and played until the small hours of Sunday morning. Sometimes, when the game was fairly even and there was no big winner who developed a sudden case of exhaustion, or what Franklin Pierce Adams, the columnist, called "winner's sleeping sickness," the game continued all day Sunday and into Monday morning. (Adams also had a name for the opposite illness. He called it, with a nod toward another columnist, Heywood Broun, "loser's insomnia, or Broun's disease.")

The name of the card-playing group has been erroneously credited by some historians to a press agent named John Peter Toohey, probably because Toohey was so quick in coming up with the right name when The New Yorker was being organized. There had been quite a debate about the appropriate title for the new magazine, but the choice seemed to Toohey to be obvious. "You keep saying it'll be a magazine about New York," he reminded the publication's founder and editor in chief, Harold Ross. "Why don't you, for Crissakes, call it The New Yorker?" The name of the card club, however, was actually Adams' invention. The most famous use of thanatopsis is, of course, as the title of William Cullen Bryant's classic poem, written in 1811, but Adams' concentration on the word resulted from a more recent use. He came across the word in Sinclair Lewis' novel Main Street, looked it up because he wasn't sure of its meaning and discovered that it meant "contemplation of death." (Thanatos is a figure out of Greek mythology, the personification of death, and opsis means "sight or view.") The word seemed appropriate to poker because, as Adams explained to the other people at the Round Table, you often contemplate dying hopes when you pick up your hand and see the terrible cards you've been dealt; so he began to call the poker group the Young Men's Upper West Side Thanatopsis Literary and Inside Straight Club. This was later shortened to the permanent name.

The game was a direct descendant of an earlier poker group that had begun when Adams, Ross and Alexander Woollcott, the Santa Claus-shaped theater critic and book reviewer, were all working on Stars and Stripes during World War One and eating at a tiny Paris restaurant named Nini's, located on Place du Tertre. The little restaurant contained two long tables located at opposite ends of the room and three small tables in the center and the food was excellent, particularly after the three men began to slip the proprietor their ration tickets. They usually went to the place only on Saturdays, because it was located at the top of Montmartre, all the way across town from the Stars and Stripes office, but stayed on all day and sometimes all night, eating, drinking and gambling. Sometimes the game was dice, and sometimes the proprietor produced a shoe and set up a game of chemin de fer, but most of the time it was poker.

Other people began to join the game, nearly always taken there by Adams, Woollcott or Ross, because the bistro was so far off the beaten track that few Americans discovered it on their own. Steve Early, then an A.E.F. captain and later Franklin Delano Roosevelt's press secretary, was a frequent player, as were Grantland Rice, the sportswriter, then an Army lieutenant, Richard Oulahan, who had given up his post as the Times's Washington bureau chief to serve as a war correspondent, and John T. Winterich, later an editor and expert on rare books. George T. Bye, who worked for a civilian news service but contributed occasionally to Stars and Stripes, was also part of the group. He later became an immensely successful literary agent who confined his client list to 12 people and would not take on a new client unless one of the 12 left him or quit writing or died; Eleanor Roosevelt was one of the people he represented. Jane Grant, a beautiful young girl who was in Paris working for the Y.M.C.A., and later married Ross, was allowed to watch but never to play, and caused considerable grumbling because Ross developed so strong an interest in her that he occasionally neglected his game. Broun and Ring Lardner, the sad-eyed, sad-faced man who became one of the world's great humorists but looked more like an undertaker, also showed up now and then; Broun had convinced the newspaper for which he was then working, the Tribune, to give him a stint as a war corresponddent and Lardner was doing pieces on the war for magazines and newspaper syndicates.

After the war, Ross and Winterich shared an apartment for a while on West 11th Street, and the game continued there on a regular basis. The apartment was given up when Ross married Miss Grant and Winterich decided he couldn't afford the place on his own, but the Rosses then took a small apartment at the Algonquin and invited the players over there every once in a while. That, too, didn't work out for long, because the games were infrequent and too many players, filled with card hunger, showed up whenever there was a game. Toohey, now a popular member of the group, came up with a solution: He suggested a regular Saturday game and offered the players the hospitality of his own large apartment on West 114th Street. He had his reasons for suggesting his own place: His wife was beginning to object strongly to his absences for poker sessions and wanted him where she could watch him and make him quit if he started to lose too much. The games at the Toohey apartment were the real start of the Thanatopsis group, which soon included George S. Kaufman, the brilliant and sardonic playwright, two other playwrights, Marc Connelly and Robert E. Sherwood, and many other well-known people. The other players gave Toohey the title of Our Beloved Founder and formed the habit of standing up and bowing gravely in his direction whenever he entered the room, and the games continued on West 114th Street and elsewhere until Case offered the Algonquin suite.

The Thanatopsis sessions quickly revealed some new and unexpected eccentricities in some of the players. Woollcott, who would have sneered at a display of superstition on the part of anyone else, became the victim of a weird superstition of his own. He developed a strange compulsion about the king of clubs: He became convinced, for some reason he was never able to explain himself, that the card was a winning portent if it showed up early in his own hand and sure death for him if it turned up in somebody else's. As a result, if he was dealt the king of clubs as his first or second face-up card, he immediately raised and continued to raise to the limit; conversely, if the game was stud poker and one of the first two open cards dealt to someone else was the king of clubs, he immediately folded. Since he sometimes drew the king of clubs when the rest of his hand consisted of a five of hearts, an eight of spades and a three of diamonds, and since he sometimes folded three aces when the opponent who had drawn the king of clubs had nothing to go with it, he was a fairly constant loser at the games. Kaufman, an otherwise skillful player who had learned the game from experts as a young newspaperman, had one strange weakness, too. The most diffident man in the world when it came to assessing his own abilities as a writer, he often became overconfident to the point of madness, no matter what cards happened to show up in his hand. On those occasions, he bet a pair of tens as though they were a royal flush and was genuinely surprised when someone else turned up a pair of jacks.

He put a bright face on it all. "Like the Arabs," he said the night the jacks topped him, "I fold my tens and silently steal away." And he summarized a hand in which he'd been hoping for high cards and gotten instead a two and a three by saying, "I've been trey-deuced." But it was easy to see that he felt betrayed when a hand didn't hold up.

The oddest oddity of them all, however, was Broun's. Broun was normally the most generous and trusting of men; he gave money to causes to the point where he sometimes found himself without funds for his own needs, and he had the reputation of being one of the world's softest touches for anybody who asked him for a loan. But at the poker games—despite the fact that he was playing with the people he knew and liked best in the world—he became almost psychotically suspicious and distrustful, in agony if another player lost more than he had in cash and offered to pay off with a check. He tried at all costs to avoid taking the check, sometimes settling for the other player's cash even when the available cash was much less than the amount owed and the check would certainly have been good.

One particularly soul-scarring incident occurred when Woollcott began to invite Harpo Marx to the games, and Harpo began to invite his brother Chico, and Chico lost $1200 to Broun. Chico started to write a check, but Broun didn't want a check; he told Chico he'd settle for $1000 in cash. "I haven't got a thousand with me," Chico said.

Broun hesitated and then said, "All right, I'll settle for seven hundred and fifty." Chico admitted that he didn't have $750, either. Broun was now extremely nervous. "How much do you have?" he asked. Chico pulled out his wallet and counted his money.

"Eighteen dollars," he said.

Witnesses to the incident insist that Broun actually considered accepting the $18 in full settlement but finally decided that that was too much of a drop even for him. He accepted the check and was at Chico's bank at nine o'clock Monday morning. His worst fears were justified; the bank told him there weren't sufficient funds in Chico's account to cover the check. Broun rushed over to see Chico—"roaring," Harpo said in telling the story, "like a wounded bear."

Chico reassured him. "Put the check through again tomorrow," he said. "But not before noon." The check bounced again, and again Broun went shouting to Chico. "For God's sakes," Chico said, "I told you to wait until twelve o'clock."

"I did!" Broun said. "I did! I even waited until five after twelve."

"That," Chico said, "was too late." Chico eventually made the check good, but Broun never really recovered fully from the effects of the occurrence. Thereafter, Kaufman, a more trusting type, served as the group's banker, accepting and cashing all checks.

Depending on how the cards ran, the games were sometimes bad and sometimes good, but the conversation was always good. Robert Benchley, another writer of scintillating humor, once showed up late for a game. He was quite an energetic lover, despite his mild appearance; his close friends were not surprised when the leading madam of the day, Polly Adler, who wrote her autobiography under the title A House Is Not a Home, kept mentioning that one of her most active customers was "a writer named Bob" and the writer turned out to be Benchley. Benchley was then deeply involved with a young actress named Helen Walker. "Where've you been?" Adams asked.

"I've been cuing Helen Walker," Benchley said.

"Please!" Adams said. "No baby talk at the table."

One of Kaufman's most famous puns was also coined at a Thanatopsis game: "One man's Mede is another man's Persian." And another classic line was born when, shortly after The Green Hat had become a great success on Broadway, with Katharine Cornell starring, Woollcott took its author, Michael Arlen, to a game. Arlen, who was an Armenian despite his ultra-British mannerisms (his real name was Dikran Kouyoumdjian), proceeded to win nearly every hand for hours. Herman Mankiewicz, a screenwriter who later shared an Academy Award with Orson Welles for Citizen Kane, was seated next to Arlen and regarded him sourly. "Let's start kittying out for the Turks," he suggested.

The Thanatopsis group often had trouble with strangers and irregulars. One such was Prince Antoine Bibesco, the minister from Romania, who came in from Washington to play in a game, admitting shyly that he wasn't a very good poker player and sometimes wasn't even sure whether two pair were better than three of a kind. He proceeded to clean out the game and was never invited again; the group didn't mind a winner, but it hated a phony, even a royal one. Another was an actor, Herbert Ranson, who embarrassed the regulars because his expressions were so easy to read. His joy at receiving good cards and his gloom at receiving good cards were so obvious that Adams, Kaufman and the others never lost to him because they knew exactly when to stay in or drop out. Adams finally suggested a new rule for the club. "Anybody who looks at Ranson's face," he said, "is cheating."

Herbert Bayard Swope, the executive editor of the World, a man so regal and imperious that members of his family were in the habit of leaping to their feet when he entered a room, didn't go very often, because the games were too tame for him. He was only a salaried employee on the newspaper, but he had a lot of important friends in financial circles and was getting some good stock tips, so he'd begun to play poker for astronomical figures—sometimes for amounts even beyond his skyrocketing income. He played in one game with Samuel Goldwyn in which Goldwyn won $155,000; but in a game two weeks later, Goldwyn lost $169,000. Swope's gaming became so heavy that one year he kept a meticulous diary of his wins and losses and discovered that, even after making the gentlemanly gesture of deducting his wife's losses of $11,975, he was still ahead $186,758. The biggest game in which he ever played was a four-man session in Palm Beach with Florenz Ziegfeld, then raking in money constantly with one successful Follies after another; Joshua S. Codden, an oil millionaire who was worth $75,000,000 and owned a 300-acre estate on Long Island with its own 18-hole golf course; and J. Leonard Replogle, another millionaire. The game went so well for Swope that he told himself he'd quit when he was $150,000 ahead, but before he knew it, he was ahead more than that. When the game was finally over, he had won $470,300. And even though $294,300 of this amount was owed by Ziegfeld, and the producer reneged and eventually died broke with most of the debt remaining unpaid, it was still a fair night's work.

All this made the Algonquin games kid stuff for Swope, but he still showed up now and then, because he liked the company and the quick wit. This was true even when the wit was used to deflate some of his pretensions, such as his effort to appear more and more WASPish even though he was Jewish. "Did you know," he once remarked at a game, "that I've got a little Jewish in me?"

The man across the table from him was Paul Robeson, another occasional player. "Is that right?" Robeson said. "Did you know I've got a touch of the tarbrush?"

Another time, Swope asked Adams, who was an enthusiastic gardener, how his flowers were coming along. Adams answered tartly, because he suspected that Swope was not really interested but was just using the personality-course trick of talking to the other fellow about his interests. "Well," Adams said, "my peonies are doing fine, because I've been keeping my eye on them. And I've discovered that if you watch your peonies, your dahlias take care of themselves."

Situations often started at the card table and ranged outward around the world. Once Woollcott, Broun and Harpo Marx shared a taxi going home from a game, and Broun and Woollcott continued in so animated an argument about the game that they were still quarreling when the cab reached Harpo's apartment and the driver looked inquiringly at him for further instructions. "Take my friends," Harpo said, "to Werba's Flatbush." The theater he named was a broken-down burlesque house a dozen miles away in Brooklyn, and it was a winter night with the roads icy and heavy snow falling, but the driver shrugged and proceeded on his way. Harpo learned afterward that Woollcott and Broun didn't notice what was happening until the car had crossed the bridge and was entering Brooklyn. He also learned that the taxi had broken down on the return trip and the two men, neither of them sylphlike, had had to trudge for miles through the arctic weather before they could find another cab. Harpo was awakened at six o'clock the next morning by a phone call; a voice, unmistakably Woollcott's, said savagely, "You son of a bitch!" and hung up. But he was forgiven by the time the next game rolled around.

On another occasion, two publishers, Bennett Cerf of Random House and Harold Guinzburg of The Viking Press, showed up for a game. This time the shoe was on the other foot for Broun; he lost $1500 to Cerf and Guinzburg and had neither enough cash nor a check to give them, and they were leaving the next morning for a tour of Russia. The publishers decided to make Broun's life miserable by berating him via telegraph for his failure to settle a legitimate debt, and they sent him a page-long cable every day of their trip. Broun was properly chastened but was also certain, looking at the length of the cables, that the publishers had taken leave of their senses. The thing he didn't know was that, because of the favorable position of the dollar at that time in relationship to the ruble, the cables were costing Cerf and Guinzburg only about 35 cents apiece.

There was also the occasion when Crosby Gaige, a leading producer of the period, thought he saw an opportunity to make Woollcott lose some of his cool. He lost $3500 to Woollcott at one of the Thanatopsis games but was able to pay him only $2500 that night and promised to pay the additional $1000 at "first opportunity." He made sure the opportunity occurred when Woollcott, in his capacity as critic for the Times, arrived at a theater to review Gaige's newest production. Gaige waited until Woollcott was surrounded by people and then approached him and, ostentatiously and leeringly, handed him a $1000 bill. The ploy didn't work. Woollcott calmly tucked the bill into the ribbon of his hat and left it there, with the amount showing, for the remainder of the evening.

A more prolonged situation was the one that might be called the case of Dave Wallace and his mysterious middle initial. Wallace was a publicity man who was very popular with the group because he knew every young actress in town and was always ready to arrange introductions for any Thanatopsis member who expressed a desire to meet a particular actress or just any actress. But the players found themselves piqued with curiosity when it developed, during a desultory card-game conversation, that Wallace had a middle initial but, for some reason, was apparently as ashamed of it as Kaufman was proud of his adopted S. (Kaufman had started out in life as just plain George Kaufman but later added S. to his name because he decided that it added rhythm and balance to his by-line. The S., he told people who inquired about it, stood for absolutely nothing. And if people persisted and asked, "Then why is it there?" he had a prepared speech ready for them. "Listen," he said, reeling off a roll call of prominent theatrical figures, "if Al H. Woods, Charles B. Dillingham, Henry B. Harris, George C. Tyler, William A. Brady, Sam H. Harris, Jake J. Shubert, A. L. Erlanger, H. H. Frazee and George M. Cohan can't get along without a middle initial, why should I try?") Wallace, however, felt the opposite way about his middle initial, and, after some investigation, it was learned that Wallace's middle initial was H., leading to rumors that he was embarrassed about it because it stood for either Horatio or Hepzibah. This was never proved. Nevertheless, the players were spurred on by Wallace's insistent secrecy to publicize the neglected initial, and this became easy after Ross founded The New Yorker. The magazine didn't come up with the idea of using funny typographical errors from other magazines and newspapers and books as fillers until later, so every column that ended short was filled with a pointless quote credited to Wallace's full name. "As David H. Wallace says," ran one filler, "tea and coffee are good to drink, but tennis is livelier." "David H. Wallace, the monologist, convulsed his set with a good one the other evening," ran another filler. " 'It seems there were two Irishmen,' Mr. Wallace began, but could not go on for laughing." Unlike Wallace, the fillers went on and on, making his middle initial one of the most famous in New York. They stopped appearing only after Wallace admitted at a game that he was growing fond of the H.

It was mostly good-natured, even when things were outrageous, such as when Adams, whose first marriage had failed, married again and was given a beautiful poker set, complete with ivory chips, as a wedding present—but only on condition that he and his bride go to the Algonquin directly after the ceremony and spend their first night at the poker game. Adams and his new wife, Esther, met the condition and showed up but were so amiable about it that they were released at about two A.M. to go on to better things. Sometimes there was a brief flare-up, as when a temperamental player like Marc Connelly became so incensed at the cards he was getting that he seized the deck and tore it to pieces. But more serious disputes were so rare that the only one on record is a fistfight between Broun and a stockbroker named Joe Brooks.

Broun and Brooks happened to take seats next to each other at one of the games, which was unfortunate, because ten minutes of conversation revealed that they disagreed on every imaginable subject. By the time both men had left the game, they had argued bitterly about everything from politics to the theater to women, but it might have ended there if Broun had been able to fall asleep when he got homes He was so agitated that he tossed and turned for hours, and he finally told his wife that he was getting dressed and going over to punch Brooks in the nose. His wife tried to talk him out of it; she made some disparaging remarks about the protuberance above his belt, pointed out that Brooks had no such protuberance and added that Brooks had been an all-American football player. Broun would not allow himself to be dissuaded. He dressed quickly, took a taxi from his house on West 85th Street to Brooks's apartment on East Tenth Street, leaned on the doorbell until Brooks opened the door, and hit him.

The stockbroker immediately hit him back. The fight lasted only a few minutes and Broun got the worst of it. Brooks received only superficial bruises, but Broun got two black eyes and he was rolled around on the floor so much that his clothes were literally torn to bits. He had to go home in a suit borrowed from Brooks. The night, however, ended triumphantly for him after all. He found Brooks's address book in one of the pockets of the suit, meticulously kept and containing the names and phone numbers of every one of Brooks's girlfriends, and he spent the rest of the night pulling out page after page and ripping each one into shreds.

Women were rigidly banned at first from the Thanatopsis games, except for special occasions like the command appearance of Esther Adams on her wedding night. Adams, who felt strongly on the subject, wrote an article about it, calling it, unequivocally, Women Can't Play Poker. Women, he pointed out, lost all sense of mathematical reality when it came to poker; if a woman was winning $22 and her husband was losing $218, she invariably insisted that they call it a night, because she was so blinded by her small victory that all she saw was that they were ahead $22, not down $196. He also expressed the view that women could never remember the values of the various colors of chips, that women were never satisfied with conventional forms of poker and varied the game more and more, until male players became unsure as to whether an ace was a good card or a bad card, and took wild risks. Woollcott, he said, had even coined a name for Esther Adams' particular folly, which was her habit of holding two cards of the same suit in the hope of drawing three more; he called a hand with two cards of the same suit an Esther flush. And most heinous of all, Adams concluded, was the fact that women always told the truth. If they won or lost $72, they actually told people they had won or lost $72. Men, as every man knew, were a much more civilized sex. If you asked a man about a game's outcome, you could always count on being told that he'd ended up even and you'd never have to worry about feeling either envy or pity.

Kaufman also wrote something along similar lines: He wrote a devastating one-act play called If Men Played Cards as Women Do, which was played at the Booth Theater on Sunday, February 11, 1923, for the benefit of the Girls' Service Club. The one-acter was also revived years later in the Paramount film Star-Spangled Rhythm, where it was performed by Ray Milland, Fred MacMurray, Franchot Tone and Lynne Overman and was easily the funniest thing in the film. But nothing could halt progress. After a while, a few women were allowed to attend the games as spectators, and eventually Beatrice Kaufman, Esther Adams, Neysa McMein, Jane Grant, Margaret Swope and others were permitted to participate as players.

The Thanatopsis games continued for about a decade, most of this time in the second-floor suite at the Algonquin. There were occasional temporary departures. Case provided the suite free but assumed that, if the players paused to eat, they would order their food from the hotel. He was mildly irritated to see that, instead, the group either sent one of the players around the corner to pick up sandwiches and beverages at a Sixth Avenue delicatessen—or, if Swope happened to be in the game, phoned the Colony and asked them to send over some of their expensive delicacies. Case's irritation grew stronger when, one hot summer evening, the poker players brought in a freezerful of strawberry and pistachio ice cream from an outside caterer and some of the ice cream melted and made stains all over the carpet. The next time the group met, it saw that Case had tacked an ironic sign on a wall of the suite:

Basket Parties Welcome

The players were amused at first, regarding the sign as a convenient place to jot down phone numbers or do little sums to figure out their winnings or losses. And then, as they thought about it, they became offended. They moved over to the Colony, where the restaurant's owner, Gene Cavallero, provided them with a private room. The Colony was tremendously expensive, so much so that Harpo Marx finally asked, plaintively, "Isn't there anything here you can get for fifty cents?"

"Sure," Kaufman said. "A quarter."

So after two months, they were back in the more familiar and more suitable surroundings of the Algonquin suite. And though they returned to the Colony for an occasional game, played in various members' houses now and then and at least once played by invitation at Alice Brady's house—during which the young actress served pheasant and champagne and then joined the game and lost steadily, causing some worry about her financial well-being until Wallace mentioned that she'd just signed a movie contract paying her $4000 a week—the action remained mostly at the Algonquin.

The poker games finally slowed to a halt for three reasons. The first was that as the players became more and more successful, they became more mobile and far-flung. Woollcott began to tour the country giving lectures and began to move around the world on various social pursuits. The Marx Brothers went out to the Coast to make some pictures and eventually settled there. Kaufman, Connelly and Sherwood began to spend more and more time on out-of-town tryouts of their plays. And suddenly there were some Saturday evenings when not enough people showed up to make a game.

The second reason was the acerbic wit style of many of the participants, which discouraged some slower thinkers from showing up at new games after they'd been chewed to bits at earlier ones. Kaufman, in particular, did not suffer fools gladly and made no secret of his discontent when another player behaved foolishly. Once he watched in horror as Mankiewicz played one of the dumbest games he'd ever seen in his life, and finally exploded. "I know you learned the game this afternoon," he said. "But what time this afternoon?"

Kaufman was equally caustic with another poor player. The man could tell from Kaufman's glower that he was not pleased. Defensively, he said, "Ok, George, how would you have played that hand?"

"Under an assumed name," Kaufman said. This may have been the same player who had a habit of burying his cards at the end of most hands as though he were ashamed of them—as he very probably was, since he nearly always lost. He got up one day, excusing himself to go to the men's room. Kaufman gave him a sour look and said, "This will be the first time today that I'll know what's in your hand."

The third reason was economic: The games began to grow too expensive. The stakes never achieved the dimensions of those in Swope's games, but they kept mounting until they became too rich for many of the players, even those whose income was rising at the same time. Ross, struggling to make The New Yorker a success and not drawing too large a salary, lost nearly $30,000 one night and had to arrange to pay it in installments over a long period of time. Harpo Marx came into town and won $30,000; he later denied this, saying he never won over $1000 or $2000 in a Thanatopsis game, but other people insisted they had been present at the game and the big score really happened. A young author, John V. A. Weaver, who wrote a moderate best seller, In American, lost all his royalties in a single game.

The Thanatopsis players tried a little self-deception. To keep the game looking the same, they allowed the chips to remain valued as before but paid half as much for them and received half as much when they cashed in. But this didn't work, either; Ross won $450 at the end of one game and spent the rest of the night complaining bitterly that he'd have picked up $900 if it had been the week before. And after a while, though the men and women continued to see one another at lunches and other places, they stopped gathering together around a card table.