Dorothy, the Algonquin hotel and how the legend just kept growing

New York's Algonquin Hotel, site of the famous Round Table gatherings of Twenties wits, has been sold, and the new owners are pledging to renovate the 100-year-old hotel. Refurbishing the plush velvet is going to be much easier than restoring the reputation for sophistication it enjoyed during the Jazz Age.

The Round Table (which wasn't, at the start, round, but two oblong tables pushed together) began in 1919. It brought together drama critics such as Dorothy Parker and Alexander Woollcott, columnists Robert Benchley and Ring Lardner, reporters like future script writer for the Marx Brothers George S Kaufman and Citizen Kane author Herman Mankiewicz, and theatricals like Tallulah Bankhead and Noël Coward.

This talented bunch gathered in the Algonquin's dining room at 1pm every day. Realising their promotional potential, hotel manager Frank Case had the table moved to the centre of the room, and soon their talk (regularly recorded in their own columns) was the talk of the town. When Edmund Duffy, artist on the Brooklyn Eagle, caricatured them in knight's armour, the Round Table legend was born.

Its potency has been sustained for 80 years by the recycling of their choicest one-liners. Dorothy Parker, asked at a Hallowe'en party to join in "ducking for apples": "Change one letter in that phrase and you have the story of my life." Woollcott's note to Harold Ross, founder of The New Yorker: "I think your slogan 'Liberty or Death' is splendid and whichever one you decide on will be all right with me." Kaufman, when a play of his trying out up-country got better notices than it deserved: "What I suggest is that we leave the show in Philadelphia and bring the notices to New York." And actress Ina Claire, seeing Harold Ross's bouffant hairstyle: "I'd like to take off my shoes and wade in Ross's hair." But not every bon mot was theirs. "Let's get out of these wet clothes and into a dry martini" was never actually said by Robert Benchley, but dreamt up by a press agent working for him. And sometimes the verbal jousting got a little too much. Clare Booth Luce: "You couldn't say 'pass the salt' without somebody trying to turn it into a pun or trying to top it." Groucho Marx, an occasional but never comfortable visitor, said: "The admission fee is a viper's tongue and a half-concealed stiletto." (Brother Harpo, content not to compete, was a regular, but Chico hardly ever went. The poker stakes were too low and there were no chorus girls to chase.)

By the early 1930s, the Table had broken up, many of its stars gone to Hollywood. Woollcott, later immortalised in The Man Who Came To Dinner, played the acerbic critic to the end. But there was another, sadder side to him, discovered by Anita Loos, author of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. After she attacked the Table in an article, he invited her to tea and tearfully confessed he had always wanted to be a woman. As Dorothy Parker once wrote: "There are things that never have been funny and never will be."