Fabbulous Monster

A. WOOLLCOTT, His LIFE AND His WORLD -- Samuel Hopkins Adams --Reynal & Hitchcock ($3.50).

At the age of ten, the late Alexander Woollcott was asked at a party to name his ambition in life. He wrote: "I would rather be a Fabbulous Monster." Fifty years later, the letters from Woollcott's acquaintances which Samuel Hopkins Adams received as he prepared to write this biography indicated that this boyhood ideal had been realized in full. The letters ranged in tone from rage to pleading.

"I want no part of Woollcott, dead or alive"; "Be kind to him. He was so kind himself, to so many"; "Selah to you in your efforts to make a man out of a mouse"; "He must have been misunderstood. . . . He must,"

Biographer Adams, who is an old chum of Woollcott's and a fellow alumnus of Hamilton College as well as a practiced journalist and storyteller (Revelry; The Gorgeous Hussy; It Happened One Night), deals both gently and sharply with a personality who, outside politics and crooning, may quite possibly have stirred up more love and loathing than any U.S. contemporary.

Some readers may balk at Adams' often gawky, round about sentences, his fondness for such words as "ilk" and "ichor." But they will be grateful to him for having followed with vigorous impartiality the twists and turns of a morbidly fascinating, often tragi-comic life.

Life with Father. "Don't you let them get you down," urged a col lege friend, after "Putrid" Woollcott (also known as "Slimer") had been tossed into the campus fountain for the ump teenth time. "You're going to be a greater [Samuel] Johnson." Young Woollcott agreed -- though there is no evidence that he ever had the slightest conception of what macte Samuel run.

There was no money in the bank when Alexander Humphreys Woollcott was born (January 1887). Roving, British-born Father Woollcott was an eccentric parent ; he played cards suspiciously well, became a natty secretary to the Kansas City Light & Coke Co., once went to bed for two years (he was tired), and spent his last years in an institution. His mother's fam ily were among the remnants of a once-flourishing, 19th-Century Utopian colony who lived in a rambling, 85-room house near Red Bank, N.J. Father Woollcott visited his wife, said "his disgruntled in-laws, "chiefly for breeding purposes." and little Aleck's arrival was considered "a scandal and a calamity."

The only dependable man in the Utopia was Grandfather Bucklin, a rangy 88-year-old who strode the porch in a bathrobe and forbade the children to utter a word. Right after Grandfather Bucklin's funeral, the hitherto-speechless Aleck burst into a torrent of verbiage that left his mother speechless with admiration. It is no wonder, says Biographer Adams, that Woollcott grew into "a devoted crusader for free speech and independent thought."

Once, when Father Woollcott came home and kissed his son, little Aleck tried to stab him with a fork. Dressing up in his sister's clothes was his favorite pastime. By the time he went to school, the boy was a weak-eyed, skinny mollycoddle and prig, already "pathetically conscious of being a misfit." He would jeer at anyone who had a squint or a clubfoot; homely girls made him burst into hysterical laughter. He thrilled with the hope of being kidnapped. Charles Dickens and Louisa M. Alcott were his idols. To confidants he showed a collection of photographs of Broadway celebrities, remarking: "That's what I'm going to be ... a dramatic critic." He kept a diary, whose cryptic opening words were "Shakespeare. Circumcision."

Disastrous Mumps. Campus fashions were conservative in 1909, and Hamilton sophomores raged at Freshman Woollcott's "excessively wrinkled and bagged trousers, a misshapen corduroy coat, grimy sneakers . . . red fez with gilt tassel." He became the best-hated man on the campus. He wrote plays with such titles as Mabel, the Beautiful Shopgirl, and played the feminine leads himself. Sex-obsessed, he sat up nights reading Krafft-Ebing and Havelock Ellis, poring over accounts of the trial of Oscar Wilde. He fought every boy in sight, bought a .45-caliber revolver and talked sullenly of suicide. "It may well be," says Biographer Adams mildly, "that he was still in some confusion about himself."

The confusion was soon resolved in disaster. Young Woollcott had barely enjoyed the triumph of being hired as a reporter for the New York Times when he was stricken with mumps. The already abnormal youth left his bed "if not totally neutralized, permanently depleted of sexual capacity." His skinny frame took on "the unhealthy fat of semi-eunuchism." It was no wonder that his vindictiveness became so "swift . . . shocking and poisonous," that his fellow reporters, used to less skillful insult, feared and avoided him. But Woollcott made his unpopularity a badge of honor, turned his brashhess into a ruthless faculty for "stepping through or over obstacles."

A fellow reporter who had been trying vainly to get details about a lynching out of a sour, close-mouthed town official was about to stamp out when in minced the cherubic Woollcott, pencil poised. "Mr. Shallcross," he piped to the official, "I represent the New York Times, which must insist that you take immediate measures to fetch the perpetrators of this wholly unnecessary outrage to book or justice or whatever your quaint custom may be here.

. . . The Times will not overlook reticence on your part." The Times had reason to be pleased with Reporter Woollcott. In 1914 it fulfilled his "life's ambition."

The youngest (27) dramatic critic in the U.S., he soon became a "formidable figure on Broadway." Woollcott liked to toughen his skin by jumping into the most nauseating jobs. Rejected for combat service in World War I, he got over to France, measured corpses for coffins and "had the time of my life" as an attendant in a venereal ward. Later, he became reporter for Stars & Stripes, wrote front-line stories that were "one long whoop of glory." He was blissfully happy. One of his friends was asked: "Where was Aleck while we were celebrating [the Armistice]?" "Probably in a corner, crying his eyes out," was the reply.

Lush & Gush. By the time he was 35, Woollcott's lush, melodramatic writings were earning him $2,000 a month (from the New York Herald), while his passionate, often indiscriminate hero worship poured out in a gush of famed personality sketches for The New Yorker, Cottier's, the Saturday Evening Post. No superlatives were too strong for his variegated heroes and heroines. Walt Disney's Dumbo he termed "the best achievement yet reached in the Seven Arts since the first white man landed on this continent." The story of Lizzie Borden, the ax-murderess, was "on the plane with Shakespeare and Sophocles" (later, Woollcott horrified the Borden Milk Co. by urging them to give the name Lizzie to an offspring of their prizewinning cow at the World's Fair). Woollcott believed that Harpo Marx had the makings of a great poet, and the silent Harpo obliged with one dry couplet:

Nashes to Hashes;

Stutz to Stutz.

The ideal of the Fabbulous Monster was attained early. Large, floppy, green hats became Woollcott's favorite headgear. On Fifth Avenue he wore a red waistcoat embroidered with headless bodies and bodiless heads. He built himself a magnificent bathroom, decorated it with a tile which showed Woollcott on the toilet seat. His language matched his man ners. He would say to a guest: "You faun's rear end, I hoped we'd seen the last of you," or "Here's our withered harpy back again." "Thank you, you mildewed sheeny," was his way of acknowledging help from Dorothy Parker.

"I was born in Macy's show window," he explained. "If you're going to do any good in New York, you've got to be noticed." Behind the Show Window. But behind the show window Woollcott concealed the real drama of his life. "I don't know what's wrong," he once told a friend who mentioned his endless babbling, "I hear myself going on and on and on and I can't stop." He longed to have children, and his vain attempts to love and marry preyed terribly on his mind. To stir his "torpid passions," he picked artificial "lovers' quarrels" with the women he most admired.

His friends were often disgusted by Woollcott's grossness, sickened by his gush, ashamed when, for example, he hurled himself on his knees before Novelist Somerset Maugham in a crowded elevator, crying "Maitre!" But many of them loved and respected the man inside the Fabbulous Monster. They knew that Woollcott was boundlessly kind and generous without ever admitting it, that out of his swollen income he gave away huge sums--to friends, charities, young men trying to get a start in life. But sometimes the very combination of Christian and Monster seemed intolerable. "Your brother has a heart of gold," said Novelist James M. Cain to Will Woollcott, "and how I hate the son-of-a-bitch."

Since the day Woollcott scrawled I AM SICK at a radio forum, and was carried out to die of a cerebral hemorrhage, his friends and enemies have tried to explain what manner of man he was. Some may agree with Critic Edmund Wilson's verdict: "In the days of totalitarian states and commercial standardization, he did not hesitate to assert himself as a single, unique human being." Others may ponder Woollcott's raging scream, made when a tactless lecture-chairman referred to his youthful success in female roles: "Look at me, boys and girls; half god, half woman!"

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