Robert Charles Bentley was born on September 15, 1899, in Worchester, Massachusetts at the family home at 14 Kingsbury Street. He had the distinction of being the only child born in the city on that particular day. He attended Harvard University where he contributed regularly to the “Harvard Lampoon” and subsequently became its editor. As an undergraduate, he gave his first comic performance as a very confused after-dinner speaker. Everyone on campus now knew him, and the act was so successful that it remained part of his repertoire for the rest of his life.
He became a journalist after graduation and established a niche for himself as a theater critic and writer on metropolitan life. He became the managing editor of “Vanity Fair” magazine, but quit when his friend, Dorothy Parker, was fired. They became the inner social circle of the Algonquin Round Table, a luncheon coterie that included some of the most celebrated literati of the day. Some notables included, Alexander Woollcott, Heywood Broun, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Noel Coward, George S. Kaufman, Edna Ferber and Harold Ross, just to name a few. Benchley lived just across the street from The Algonquin at the Royalton Hotel on West 44th in a room so cluttered that Noel Coward once said of it: “I must say, it looks lived in.”
Benchley was also a night-clubber, particularly the 21 Club, where a brass plaque memorializes his favorite spot by the bar as: ROBERT BENCHLEY- HIS CORNER. He frequented, both as guest and patron, the brothels of New York’s most famous madam of the 1920s and 1930s, Polly Adler, with his friend Dorothy Parker and others, leaving his wife, Gertrude Darling, home and embarrassed by his many “outings.” He was an extraordinary man with extraordinary talents and appetites. Although he claimed to be not quite an actor and not quite a writer, he did both very well and he was without a doubt, one of the greatest American humorists of all time.
He died in 1945 at the age of 56 of a cerebral hemorrhage. He left behind a rich literary legacy and numerous film appearances.
For more information on the writings and wit of Robert Benchley, visit The Robert Benchley Society.