Contracted Circle

As sentimental occasions go, this one was only slightly more nostalgic than a session in night court. To honor the 50th anniversary in the theater of Actress Peggy Wood (Bittersweet, Blithe Spirit), ANTA last week collected round her most of the remaining members of the much-chronicled Algonquin Round Table. The late great wits were missing, of course--Alexander Woollcott, Franklin P. Adams, Robert Benchley, Herman Mankiewicz--and, significantly, the reunion was held not at the old rear-center table in the Rose Room of the Algonquin but in the grand ballroom of Manhattan's Hotel Edison, five blocks and 90 light-years away. The most notable living absentees were George S. Kaufmann, who is ill, and Dorothy Parker, who was accused of probably missing the invitation because she never opens her mail.

But, among other aging celebrators, Playwrights Marc Connelly and Russel Crouse were there, Writer-Feminist Jane Grant (first wife of The New Yorker's Harold Ross), Actress Margalo Gillmore, Composer Deems Taylor, and Author Margaret Case Harriman, who helped preserve the nights and noons of the Round Table with her book, The Vicious Circle. But the contracted circle no longer showed any viciousness, only a kind of vintage grace along with mild confessions and geriatric observations. "There must be a gang such as ours somewhere today," said Jane Grant. "But, of course, times have changed. For one thing, the writers nowadays all marry cuties. In our day, writers were sometimes drawn to more intellectual girls." And the girls (at least in retrospect) were brighter, such as the time, someone remembered, that Nonresident Member Noel Coward looked across the table at Edna Ferber and said sweetly, "You almost look like a man.'' Said Edna Ferber: "So do you."

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