To Author Edna Ferber, he was a "New Jersey Nero who mistook his pinafore for a toga." To Novelist Charles Brackett, he seemed "a competent old horror with a style that combined clear treacle and pure black bile." Critic Percy Hammond found him "a mountainous jelly of hips, jowls and torso [but with] brains sinewy and athletic." Caustic Wit Dorothy Parker thought that he did "more kindness" than anyone she had ever known.
These descriptions became part of the carefully nurtured legend of Alexander Woollcott. The legend was no more varied than the man. Despite his activities as dramacritic, radio raconteur, cinemactor, women's club lecturer, magazine contributor, author (While Rome Burns, etc.), playwright, Broadway actor, he achieved his greatest success in the tireless, diverse role of Alexander Woollcott—a complex of childish petulance, fierce, blind loyalties, sentimental sophistication, and a cannibalistic curiosity about people and things.
He conferred himself upon the New York Times in 1909, fresh out of Hamilton College, where his fraternity mates were said to have used him to frighten away unwanted prospects. His writing style, which in terms of liquors was a decidedly pink drink, bubbled up in the Times's drama department, where he acquired an unsmiling assistant named George S. Kaufman. When Kaufman eventually satirized him as the waspish subject of The Man Who Came to Dinner, Woollcott declared: "The thing's a terrible insult and I've decided to swallow it."
In a couple of decades Woollcott made himself a notorious wiseacre occupying a Manhattan apartment ("Wit's End") where he expounded his liberal beliefs, struck extravagant attitudes, greeted friends ("Hello, repulsive"), dismissed bores ("I find you are beginning to disgust me, puss. How about getting the hell out of here?").
As radio's Town Crier he got a big audience for his twelve-cylinder whimsies and became a cultural campaigner of such influence as had not been known since the palmy days of William Lyon Phelps. His fee rose to $3,500 a broadcast. His reign covered about eight years (1929-37). He was a national phenomenon.
Alexander Woollcott was ailing when he went to London in 1941 to broadcast. He brought a box of chocolates for Lady Astor ("Of course, they may be poisoned. I shall be so interested to hear"), observed that the "sense of my incurable triviality" had deepened at the thought that he was approaching England bearing silk stockings and lipsticks instead of guns and ammunition.
He was ill, too, last week when he sat beside the microphone in CBS's Manhattan studios with two authors and two college presidents. Their broadcast subject on the People's Platform was "Is Germany Incurable?" Woollcott answered: ". . . it's a fallacy to think that Hitler was the cause of the world's present woes. Germany was the cause of Hitler. ..." They were his last known words. A few minutes later, without the audience knowing it, Alexander Woollcott, 56, suffered a heart attack, and later that evening he died.