Bores Off Bounds

THE Vicious CIRCLE (310 pp.)--Margaret Case Harriman, illustrated by Al Hirschfeld--Rlnehart ($3).

She was an innkeeper's daughter, and none of the big shots dazzled her. To little Margaret Case, the celebrities who hung around father Frank Case's celebrated Algonquin Hotel in Manhattan were just a lot of gabby customers. Doug Fairbanks Sr., who had just made his first picture, was a real pal and used to skip rope with her on the roof. But the bunch that ate lunch together almost every day, at a round table in the Rose Room, had little time for her; they were too busy trying to top each other's wisecracks.

They called themselves the Vicious Circle, and one day as they trooped out after lunch--Robert Sherwood, Dorothy Parker, George Kaufman, Bob Benchley, Heywood Broun and the rest--a pressagent paid them his passing respects. "There," said he, "goes the greatest collection of unsalable wit in America." Not too long after, most of them were naming their own prices.

Who Said It? Margaret Case Harriman has culled the anecdotage about the Round Table, sifted her own recollections, and bound it all into a lively book. The Vicious Circle is neither weighty nor frowningly significant, but it is about people who were intensely and hilariously alive, many of them brilliant, most of them naturals.

Author Harriman says the Round Table was formed by accident and mutual attraction in 1920. It was an informal company, but one that no one dreamed of trying to crash. The charter members--including Alexander Woollcott, Harold Ross, George Kaufman and Edna Ferber --had violent dislikes that kept membership low and bores off bounds.

Besides sustenance, the lunches were meant to provide bright talk and character assassinations, and the hero of the day was the man with the fastest comeback. The circle also respetted good writing. Among young U.S. writers of the '20s and '30s, acceptance at the Round Table was an accolade second only to a publisher's acceptance.

The "unsalable" wits were not exactly unknown even in the early days of the Round Table. Everybody read F.P.A.'s "Conning Tower" in the Tribune; Deems Taylor was the World's bright young music critic; George Kaufman was the influential drama editor of the Times; Harold Ross, editor of the American Legion Weekly, was soon to embark on his New Yorker venture; and Dorothy Parker was living, as usual, on the edge of disaster--she had just lost her drama critic's job at Vanity Fair* (at Showman Florenz Ziegfeld's request because Dottie had roasted Mrs. Ziegfeld, alias Billie Burke).

The Vicious Circle's gags ran from harmless to vicious. Dorothy Parker, who once hung up the sign MEN on her office door because she was lonely, was also one of the champion acid-throwers. Said she to a lady writer who bragged about holding her husband for seven years: "Don't worry, if you keep him long enough he'll come back in style." Franklin P. Adams was generally somewhat kinder. Asked how Harold Ross, no beauty, had looked tobogganing over the weekend, F.P.A. replied: "Well, you know how he looks NOT tobogganing."

Whatever Became of It? At this distance, the Round Table period seems like the beginning of a bright new world in which young writers could be themselves and write like nobody else. Death, depression, marriage, success and Hollywood broke up the Vicious Circle in the '30s.

Before his death in 1946, Host Frank Case was asked, "Whatever became of the Round Table?"

"Whatever," asked Case, "became of the city reservoir at Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street?"

*When she was fired, two other young Vanity Fair editors quit in protest: Robert Benchley and Robert Sherwood

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