Laughter's Gentle Soul - The Life of Robert Benchley by Billy Altman Norton 382pp, £22.50 in UK
From his film appearances, one would have taken Robert Benchley to be of middle height, whereas in reality he was a six-footer. In 1919, he was managing editor of the monthly Vanity Fair, which had as its drama critic the four-foot-eleven Dorothy Parker. The editorial assistant was Robert Emmet Sherwood, a giant at six-foot-six and a half inches. Walking along 44th Street, the three of them resembled - to quote Benchley's son, Nathaniel - a walking pipe organ. (Actually, Benchley and Parker were riding shotgun for Sherwood, who was being tormented by a troupe of malevolent circus midgets.) The trio took lunch together at the convenient Algonquin Hotel and struck up an acquaintance with other literati, including the future begetter of the New Yorker, Harold Ross, and the fat and waspish Man who would one day Come to Dinner, Alexander Woollcott. It was the beginning of the Algonquin Round Table or, as is it was more fittingly termed, the Vicious Circle. At this remove, one winces at the mental image of a dozen or more rampant exhibitionists, topping each other's one-liners while pretending to be unaware that they were grandstanding for the benefit of tourists.
It might be said that Benchley's life, until then, had been wholly prologue. He was born in Worcester, Massachusetts, in 1889. His father began to drink when a boy soldier during the civil war, and saw no reason to desist when peace broke out. Robert grew up to hate both war and drink. Although his pacifism remained intact, he would die of cirrhosis of the liver, aged 56, and would probably be the first to say with a smile that one out of two was not bad.
The rather cloying title of Billy Altman's biography is apposite: Robert Benchley was a gentle soul. He fathered two sons, which was a remarkable feat since he was hardly ever at home. When his wife Gertrude, who brought up the boys single-handed, was asked if she had ever contemplated divorce, she was incredulous. "We never," she said, "spoke a cross word."
At Harvard, the young Benchley made a name for himself as a public speaker and a practical joker. With a friend, he knocked at the door of a strange house and told the maid: "We've come for the davenport," pointing to a sofa that was visible in the hall. They carried it out and into the next street, where they knocked on another strange door. "We've come to deliver the davenport," they said, which they then did. After college there were many jobs, in journalism and out of it. Vanity Fair seemed a safe haven of sorts, until Dorothy Parker was fired for a review which poked fun at the actress Billie Burke. In an act of friendship, Benchley went with her (the other member of the trio, Robert Sherwood, had already been sacked).
He became drama critic for Life magazine and, in that same annus mirabilis, took his first drink of speakeasy liquor: an "orange blossom`". As a critic, he enjoyed himself. If a play was bad enough, he reviewed the programme instead. He forecast the imminent demise of Abie's Irish Rose, and to his dismay it ran for five years. Among Benchley's most hated weekly chores was having to write a thumbnail summing-up of the play that refused to go away. One of these was, simply: "See Hebrews 13: 8." Those who do not have a Bible handy might like to know that in its entirety the verse referred to reads: "Jesus Christ the same yesterday, and today and for ever."
In the course of a play called The Squall, a half-clad gipsy girl said "Me Nubi. Nubi good girl. Nubi stay here." Alexander Woollcott was to write that at this point "The dramatic critic of Life rose and started for the open air. On his way towards the exits, he was heard by his scandalised confreres to murmur: `Me Bobby. Bobby bad boy. Bobby go away.' "
In 1922, the Vicious Circle performed an invitation-only stage revue of their own, and Benchley's contribution was a stand-up sketch called "The Treasurer's Report". It was the hit of the show. He later performed it as part of the Music Box Revue for a fatally tempting $500 a week. In 1928, he starred in it again, when it became the first continuous sound picture made by a major studio.
In time, he would go to Hollywood, absenting himself for ever longer periods from the infant New Yorker magazine to which he contributed a column called "The Wayward Press". He thought of himself primarily as a writer, working on screenplays, but he was pressed into service to act in his own series of film shorts in which his persona was that of a befuddled Everyman at the mercy of machines, women, head waiters, zip-fasteners, party etiquette, bow ties, parking a car and other evils. He played supporting roles in such films as China Seas, often as a chronic drunk. Hitchcock cast him most happily in Foreign Cor- respondent and asked that Benchley write his own dialogue. He saw even less now of his wife and two sons - Nathaniel became a writer, too, and long after Robert's death his grandson, Peter, would write Jaws. He lodged in a Hollywood bungalow complex known as the Garden of Allah, where his best friend was a comic actor named Charles Butterworth, who played lugubrious milquetoasts. They kept open house and drank prodigiously. Benchley's humour was low-key and self-effacing, and to his dismay he was often cast in trashy knockabout roles - he was only suited to the low-key playing of Robert Benchley.
Once, at a party, he met his old friend Robert Sherwood who had since written The Petrified Forest and Idiots' Delight, as well as winning a Pulitzer Prize for Abe Lin- coln in Illinois. Benchley, who was very drunk, pointed at him in horror. "Those eyes!" he said. "He's looking at me and thinking of how he knew me when I was going to be a great writer - and he's thinking, now look at what I am!"
The truth was that Benchley never had the makings of a great writer, and neither had any of the Vicious Circle - George S. Kaufman and perhaps Dorothy Parker excepted. Even the sententious plays of Robert Sherwood are today virtually forgotten. What Benchley had in abundance were the perishable virtues of good fellowship, gentleness, loyalty and self-mockery. When he died, his friend, Charles Butterworth, was inconsolable. Butterworth perished when his car crashed on Sunset Boulevard, and there were those who believed it was deliberate. Benchley's theatre criticisms have been published and do him little service; at this remove, they are flat and nudgingly complicitous.
Mr Altman's book is a work of love and charmingly done, and one best remembers Benchley as when he learned that his wife had gone into labour with their second child. He arrived at her bedside, bearing flowers, and found her sleeping peacefully, so he sat by the bed and began to read. When a nurse came in bearing an infant, he chucked it under the chin and asked whose baby it was. She told him it was his. "What?" the father shrieked. "Well, I've never had a baby so easily in all my life!"
Hugh Leonard is a playwright