Franklin P. Adams, "The Conning Tower," & The Floradora Girl -- Garbo

 This series of posts looks at the lives of writers I learned about while visiting the Indianapolis Public Library as a teenager in the earl;y 1970s.

On my long list of Things To Do is sending a correction to the movie site IMDb. The following information is wrong:  "Franklin P. Adams was born on November 15, 1881 in Chicago, Illinois, USA as Franklin Pierce Adams."

Wrong! Franklin P. Adams, known to newspaper readers as FPA, was actually born Franklin Leopold Adams and he chose a new middle name at the time of his bar mitzvah. (The IMDb site does have accurate information about the names of Pierce's wives; more on them later.)

Adams, as you probably know, was a member of the Algonquin Round Table, and it's a good thing for his legacy that he was, because information about Adams is sifting down ever more deeply into the sands of time. If it wasn't for his association with Dorothy Parker and Robert Benchley, FPA might be nearly forgotten now, despite having been a household name in America for decades. 

For example, it took some work to unearth the names of Adams' two spouses. When profiling people for this blog, I generally try to get some basic information about their personal lives, and I had a tough time getting any information about Adams' first wife. Not the first time it's happened in doing research for this blog series; there's a reason why Hollywood made a movie called "First Wives' Club."

Research is just part of writing, I know. I'm not really complaining about my hard lot in life. It's not like I'm back at the downtown library in Indy, flipping through the card catalog, one entry at a time, under P. But the modern era has spoiled me, and I want to trust that the folk who obsessively edit Wikipedia entries have filled out full biographies for people I am looking up info about. But then we are talking wives here. There's a reason the arts community runs a grant program called "Anonymous Was A Woman."

 In getting information about Mrs. Adams the First and Mrs. Adams the Second, I finally had to resort to the online version of a reference book called The Dictionary of Midwestern Literature (Adams was famous for his doings in New York, but he was born in Chicago). Even with that resource open on my screen, I still might not have found FPA's listing if I'd had to scroll through pages and pages of  the literary dictionary. Happily his was the first name in the book, under A, and just before Jane Addams. 

Thanks to the Midwestern lit dictionary, I discovered that Minna, FPA's first wife, who looks rather mild in the family portrait above, was a retired Floradora Girl. In case that doesn't ring a bell with you, check out this clip from the 1931 film "Floradora Girl," starring the late great Marion Davies as a daring showgirl of the 1890s. 

"Floradora Girl," by the way, was a big deal, like FPA, in its time. Here's a silent film documenting the gala red carpet opening:

I'm sorry to report that Esther Root, the second Mrs. Adams, didn't fare any better than Minna, in terms of remembrance. Check out the heading of Esther's 1981 NYT obit, which goes on to talk entirely about her husband's career. 

Now (finally!) to the subject of today's post: 

 Franklin Pierce Adams, as a celebrity figure, was best-known as a panelist on the popular radio quiz show "Information Please," which always began with the impish imprecation "Wake up, America!!" accompanied by a rooster crow. Listeners could win up to seven dollars (hey, it was 1930s money) by submitting a question which would stump the panel of experts. This excellent blog has good detailed information on "Information Please," and FPA's role on it. 

For your listening enjoyment, here's an audio recording of a typical "Information Please" radio broadcast, with actress Lillian Gish as a guest star.

"Information Please," like many classic radio shows, attempted a cross-over into early television and didn't fare well. Some film archivist has kindly posted a hard-fo-find (and somewhat wavy) kinescope to YouTube so we can all enjoy FPA's facial expressions as well as his wit. (That's not him in the thumbnail image.) 

Besides his time on "Information Please," FPA was well-known for a piece of what was once known as "light verse." The short poem below was included in literature survey textbooks when I was in school, when there were textbooks. When there was school. Anyway, the oft-quoted single stanza is the second most famous bit of popular culture about the Chicago Cubs:

[A link to he best-known Cubs-related cultural artifact, by the late great Steve Goodman, is below. It's a song called "A Dying Cubs Fan's Last Request." Goodman, of course, was rooting for the Cubs, who hadn't yet won the miraculous pennant in 2016. FPA, a former Chicagoan, had changed allegiance when he'd moved to New York and was rooting for the Giants.]

But "Infiormation Please" and "Baseball's Sad Lexicon" were not what FPA did for this main career. For many years Adams was a well-known columnist for up to four New York newspapers, using the column title "The Conning Tower."

"Conning" is a wartime term, related to "recon." Before there was digital tech, the conning tower was a bulletproof structure on the deck of a submarine or a ship which let the captain or crew members observe battle conditions or make navigation decisions.

Adams was a veteran of the First World War (intelligence work rather than abord ships), and he wrote for Stars and Stripes, edited by Harold Ross, who would go on to become a founder of The New Yorker. 

It was through Ross, of course, that FPA became acquainted with the people who gathered around the Algonquin Round Table. A number of these famous folk contributed to "The Conning Tower," and their work is found in collections of the columns. I snagged this 1926 volume on eBay recently.

Adams himself wrote mostly witticisms and light verse for his column, but he included short essays by many of his prominent friends. In addition to Parker and Benchley, these included Edna St. Vincent Millay, Deems Taylor, John O'Hara, George S. Kaufman, and Moss Hart.

Besides the poetry and observations made in "The Conning Tower" which appeared on most weekdays, FPA had other modes for Thursdays and for Saturdays. On Thursdays, he contributed a modern version of Samuel Pepys' diary, telling his readers where he had gone and whom he had seen. And on Saturdays, FPA wrote seriously about world affairs. 

At a time when anti-Semitism was rampant in polite American society, even as National Socialism was taking over the European continent, Adams (along with Jewish writer Edna Ferber, a regular "Conning Tower" contributor) was outspoken in his Saturday newspaper column about Hitler's oppression of the Jews and the need to intervene as violent attacks grew in number and intensity.

On a lighter note, FPA managed to meld scholarship and Jewish humor during a question about Shakespeare on "Information Please." From Wikipedia:

Shakespeare was not Adams' only area of expertise.  Again, from Wikipedia:

FPA lived to a ripe old age. He had three children from his first marriage, two sons -- Timothy and Anthony -- and a daughter, Persephone, who once lived a couple of miles north of the spot in Maine where I'm writing this post. Here is Franklin P. Adams with his second wife, Esther Root Adams, in 1950.

FPA, it turns out, was the owner of a vehicle made by a company, based in Syracuse, which shared his first name. In the photo below, Franklin poses with his already-antique Franklin. 

In the course of the research for this post, I discovered (from a source other than IMDb or The Dictionary of Midwestern Literare, lol) that FPA once wrote lyrics for a musical comedy called "Lo," for which O. Henry wrote the story. Learning more about that is going on my Things To Do list, after getting IMDb straightened out on Franklin P. Adams' birth name. 

Next week: Two Ednas

                                                 

                                                Garbo