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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."