During a vaudeville stint, actress Ethel Barrymore once stopped, looked out at the audience and asked "Who are you, anyway?"
Barrymore kept a regular table in the Palm Room of the Plaza Hotel in New York, where reporters tracked her and made note of her avid public cigarette smoking. Newspapers fed the public's obsession with the actress by describing details of her loosely pinned hair, her low voice, and her opinions on literature. The press also followed her once-famous father's public tirades and hallucinations (later attributed to syphilis-induced dementia) and her brothers' emergence as theatrical stars and notorious drinkers.
The Barrymore family presided over a dining table in their corner of the Algonquin Hotel long before drama critic Alexander Woolcott settled his crowd there. Barrymore looked down on the members of the Round Table as interlopers, and though once acolytes they quickly turned on her.
The "Baby of the Round Table" Tallulah Bankhead remained a fan and noted with admiration Barrymore's "imperious manner, the scorn in her voice, the contempt in her eyes, the great reputation in which she was cloaked."
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