The Oak Room at the Algonquin Hotel, for more than a half century on the premier locations for cabaret in Manhattan, has closed. Prior to its musical incarnation, the Oak Room was famous for being the home of the celebrated Algonquin Round Table, where gathered the great witty writers of the 1920s and 1930s. Pictured in the famous Al Hirschfeld cartoon reprinted above, clockwise from lower left: Dorothy Parker, Robert Benchley, Lynn Fontaine and Alfred Lunt, Frank Crowninshield, Alexander Woollcott, Heywood Broun, Marc Connelly, Frank Case, Franklin P. Adams, Edna Ferber, George S. Kaufman and Robert Sherwood.

Isn’t it kind of divine that in the same week that Tim Thomas, the goalie of the Boston Bruins, refused to attend a White House reception in honor of the team’s championship last spring, Buckingham Palace released the names of 277 people who between the years 1951 and 1999 declined to accept one of the Queen’s Honors, including, in some cases, knighthood, and with it the right to be be called Sir or Lady. Among the refusniks were Roald Dahl, Graham Greene, Aldous Huxley, JB Priestley, Lucian Freud, Robert Graves, FR Leavis, LS Lowry, Henry Moore, Philip Larkin and CS Lewis.

In a statement he posted on Facebook, Thomas was plain about his decision. “I believe the Federal government has grown out of control, threatening the Rights, Liberties, and Property of the People.This is being done at the Executive, Legislative, and Judicial level. This is in direct opposition to the Constitution and the Founding Fathers vision for the Federal government. Because I believe this, today I exercised my right as a Free Citizen, and did not visit the White House. This was not about politics or party, as in my opinion both parties are responsible for the situation we are in as a country. This was about a choice I had to make as an INDIVIDUAL.” Thomas has been tut-tutted by such political philosophers like Michael Wilbon and Tony Kornheiser, who on ESPN played establishmentarian court jesters, saying that when one has been invited by the President, one ought to go, out of respect for the office.

Nonsense. First, this has nothing to do with the country. President Obama is merely copying a move pioneered by John Lindsay, who in the midst of tight mayoral race in New York City in 1969, barged into the locker room of the World Series-winning Mets and inserted his head under waterfalls of champagne. (The ploy worked; he won a narrow plurality in a three-way race.) President Nixon soon began rewarding winning coaches with congratulatory phone calls. Now it’s receptions. Clearly these are held as publicity opportunities for the incumbent, and I have no problem with Tim Thomas or any of these other jocks exercising his right to absent himself. The White House is such a bubble, it’s good when this or any president hears some disagreement.

Indeed, I wish it was plainer why the 277 would-be honorees in Britain declined their invitations; no reasons were cited, and the Palace took care in its response to a BBC request to release only the names of people who are dead. Over the years, explanations have been provided by some people who are not on the list. According to the New York Times, the writer J. G. Ballard said he did not want to be named a Commander of the British Empire because the whole thing was a “preposterous charade.” The poet Benjamin Zephaniah (left) refused membership in the Order of the British Empire, saying “Stick it, Mr. Blair and Mrs. Queen.” David Bowie declined a C.B.E. in 2000, saying “I seriously don’t know what it’s for.” (Selling records, duh!) In 1992, Doris Lessing declined a knighthood, saying “Surely there is something unlikable about a person, when old, accepting honors from a institution she attacked when young?” But eight years later, she accepted another title, the Companion of Honor, saying she liked that “you’re not called anything” special.

And that’s the point–we don’t know if these folks were trying to raise an objection, or to avoid being used as a monarchical prop, or simply because they were holding out for a better honor. After all, Alfred Hitchcock turned down a C.B.E. in 1962, then later accepted being named a Knight Commander of the British Empire. But I like what Terence Blacker wrote in the Independent. Noting that the opt-outs “have little in common politically or personally beyond the fact that their work is the product of uncompromising individuality,” Blacker suggests that “Simply by accepting a bauble of thanks from the nation, they would be sacrificing what was best about them – their apartness. Once they became part of the national community, their voice, their eyes, their strength would be changed. They neither accepted the honour nor, in what has become a new form of boasting, told the world that they had rejected it.”

The first stop in my 2012 Speaking Tour took me out the door, over the bridge above busy Route 9A, and to the basement of the library for a lovely Sunday afternoon reception of the Briarcliff Manor Historical Society. I had been invited to speak about And the War Came, and it was a lot of fun to speak before an interested and attentive audience about one of my favorite subjects. Thanks to Jan Wagner and the rest of the Board for inviting me, and to Josh Parker, Howard and Susan Code, Chip Wagner, my dear wife and so many others for their support, encouragement, and enthusiasm. Next Stop: Ossining Historical Society on June 2nd.

Last week I had the pleasure of meeting Will Leitch, erstwhile prime mover of the very funny and wildly popular Deadspin blog, once and eternally the target of Buzz Bissinger‘s bizarre and overbearing anti-sports blog blast on Bob Costas‘s HBO show, and now Contributing Editor to New York magazine, where he lends his elegant stylings mostly but not exclusively to sports topics. We talked at the blonde piney and micro beery Downtown Bar and Grill on Court Street in beautifully gentrified Bourem Hill, which looks vastly more prosperous since I last stomped its sidewalks some decades ago. A very pleasant afternoon indeed.

Simon Doonan had a wonderful article in Slate last week about his experience designing the installation for the auction of Marilyn Monroe‘s effects for Christie’s in 1999. Doonan says the process of cataloging her belongings took months, but “Right away, I discovered that Marilyn was shockingly and unimaginably slender. She was sort of like Kate Moss but fleshier on top. Didn’t see that coming, did you? When it came to finding mannequins to fit her dresses, I simply couldn’t. M.M.’s drag was too small for the average window dummy.” Doonan says he developed alternate ways to show Monroe’s famous dresses, with the lone exception of the famous Jean Louis number Marilyn wore for JFK’s birthday, for which a custom Lucite mannequin was made. Says Doonan, “When you look at Marilyn on-screen and . . .realize that the busty, ample gal brimming over Tony Curtis in Some Like It Hot is literally one-third your size, you have every right to become suicidal.”

Doonan’s second great observation was that Monroe was not materialistic. “Marilyn Monroe. . .owned diddly-squat. . . . There were no Renoirs or Picassos. Her knickknacks were pedestrian. Her cookware was greasy. Her spatulas were bent. Even her Golden Globe was broken. The majority of her clothing showed surprising wear and tear. She had worn it all repeatedly and there just wasn’t that much of it. Her jewelry? With the exception of her DiMaggio wedding ring it was a bunch of paste danglers and costume crap. Shoes? Yes, there were several pairs of black suede Ferragamo stilettos with worn heels. But Marilyn—brace yourself for another shocker—was more into books than shoes. Her poignant desire to cultivate her mind and give herself an education resulted in an extensive library of first editions.”

I love that!

In one of those bits of harmonic convergence that we used to call coincidence, on the same day I read Doonan’s article, I read that Eve Arnold had died. The brilliant photographer had created many stunning images of celebrities and nobodies alike, but she was perhaps best known for her pictures of Monroe. You can see why.

The peerless Ronald Searle has died in his sleep in France at the age of 91. Best known for a manically gothic style that invigorated his illustrations of the frantically anarchic schoolgirls of St. Trinian’s, the grinning, lustful oenophiles in The Illustrated Winespeak, the Molesworth series, The Rake’s Progress, The Adventures of Baron Muchausen, and his prolific magazine work, Searle’s subjects always seemed to be on the verge of exploding off the page. It was, in a phrase, a lively and comic style, which seems somewhat ironic, given that during World War II, Searle spent three years suffering as a prisoner of the Japanese Imperial Army. Captured during the fall of Singapore in 1942, Searle was among 3270 men selected to work on the Burma-Siam railway, the experience which provided the real-life basis for TheBridge on the River Kwai. “My friends and I, we all signed up together,” he told an interviewer. “We had grown up together, we went to school together … Basically all the people we loved and knew and grew up with simply became fertiliser for the nearest bamboo.” Underfed and undernourished, suffering from tropical diseases and other infections, and subjected to harsh labor and sadistic brutality, Searle not only survived, but he bore witness to the horrific experience with a group
of sketches of his comrades and captors. The miracle is that both the artist and his works survived; the double miracle is that the artist managed to return with a joie de vivre and a comic zest that constituted a triumph of his spirit. I would like to have known him.

At The Annual White House Correspondents Dinner In Washington DC, May 1, 1999. By Karin Cooper/Getty Images.

Via The New York Daily News, Richard Corkery‘s 1978 photograph of Truman Capote.

I have long admired the critic James Wolcott–his slashing wit, his erudition, his vocabulary, his taste and perception–but although we know many people in common, we have never met. Until I read his new book Lucking Out: My Life Getting Down and Semi-Dirty in Seventies New York, his lively memoir of a youth spent in Manhattan during a decadent, fertile decade, I didn’t realize how very much more we had in common. Wolcott, like me, grew up in Maryland, although his home was not Baltimore but Edgewood, where my sister now lives. He, like I, spent afternoons in libraries sopping up Norman Mailer essays and evenings watching Dick Cavett, trying to absorb their teachings of far-off New York. He mentions making exciting visits to Sherman’s newsstand (on Charles Street, was it? Or Cathedral?), just as I did, where under the dusty posters of Yves Montand and Steve McQueen and the gnarled supervision of the proprietor, Abe Sherman, he eyeballed exotic publications like Ramparts and The Nation and tasted an intellectual world far away. Later, his Old Line State roots served him well when he was able to decode the Baltimore Colt references in Diner for the New Yorker‘s Pauline Kael. Wolcott is a coupla-three years older than I, knew what he wanted earlier than I, moved to New York several years before I, and made important connections sooner; in reading his memoir, I felt like I was being caught up on what I’d missed about scenes that I had entered a few years later in their lives–garbagy, crime-ridden Manhattan, porny Times Square (“Wanna go out?”), punky Greenwich Village, the fesity, glamorous Village Voice and New York magazine, the city’s whole collapsing, Bronx-Is-Burning era. Those were different days,as Wolcott points out, when people didn’t spend much thinking about real estate or their salaries; when the city, as Christine Baranski recently pointed out, was governed by creative people who cared about the arts, not by financiers. It was a city that writers found it worth fighting to get into; now I wonder if it still a city worth fighting to hold onto. In one of the most valuable moments in the book, Wolcott shares the lessons he learned from his days working the front desk at the Voice, taking in over-the-transom submissions from optimistic freelance writers. “Avoid parody, which slides too easily into facetiousness. Avoid political satire, which has the shelf life of a sneeze. Avoid preamble–flip on the switch in the first sentence. Find a focal point for your nervous energy, assume a forward offensive stance, and drive to the finish line, even if it’s only a five hundred word slot: no matter how short a piece, there has to be a sense of momentum and travel, rather than just allotted space being texted in. . . Writing that was too talky lacked the third rail below the surface that suggested untapped power reserves, an extra store of ammo.” And danger, I might add. Thank you, maestro, for the lesson, and for the recollections.

The great reporter and columnist Tom Wicker of The New York Times, died on Friday at the age of 85. In a long and distinguished career, he stood out for his clear thinking, probity, and ethical courage. The defining moment of his career was his performance covering the assassination of John F. Kennedy, which was described beautifully by Gay Talese in The Kingdom and The Power, his amazing book about The New York Times. On the scene in Dallas, Wicker “scribbled his observations and facts across the back of a mimeographed itinerary of Kennedy’s two-day tour of Texas,” wrote Talese. “It was a remarkable achievement in reporting and writing, in collecting facts out of confusion, in reconstructing the most deranged day in his life, the despair and bitterness and disbelief, and then getting on a telephone to New York and dictating the story in a voice that only rarely cracked with emotion.” To read Wicker’s report, click here. Talk about grace under pressure.