Shouter & Murmurer

U. S. sophisticates last week clucked over a new tidbit about Alexander Woollcott, roly-poly chatterbox of The New Yorker. According to the New York World-Telegram, Mr. Woollcott was out of The New Yorker, ostensibly because the editors disapproved of ribald anecdotes with which he had lately spiced his "Shouts & Murmurs" page.

The report was half true. Woollcott was out, not for bawdry but for fatigue. His weekly radio broadcast, on top of his weekly New Yorker gossip articles, made a severe regimen for anyone as sedentary as Mr. Woollcott. Editor Harold Ross of The New Yorker proposed that he reduce his contributions to one a month, a thought which Mr. Woollcott could not endure. With him, it had to be all or nothing, and therefore nothing. He sent his resignation to Editor Ross, immediately hopped a train to Chicago to escape arguments. Well aware that the Woollcott page was among the most popular features of his magazine, Editor Ross peppered him with telegrams, but Woollcott was adamant. He got what he wanted: indefinite suspension.

Alexander Wollcott's retirement from The New Yorker occurred at what many observers considered the peak of an extraordinary career. Once the ranking dramacritic of Manhattan, he had become a sort of glorified gossip columnist, a genteel Walter Winchell, and a peevish prophet of arts & letters. Few men can tell a story as entertainingly as Alexander Woollcott, and few would dare to be as malicious. As Cream of Wheat's "Town Crier" on the radio, he received more "high class" fan mail than any other single entertainer on the Columbia network. Sales of his book, While Rome Burns, approached 90,000. Like bumboat boys diving for pennies, book publishers scrambled for Woollcott words of praise for a new work, to splash on the volume's jacket as the blurb of blurbs. He prefers to "discover" some inconspicuous novel and, like a testy old sage, rebuke his public for lack of appreciation. He is the William Lyon Phelps of the 1930's.

On his 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 Parker's.

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 to an end when they parted professional company.

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