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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.