Personal Life
On June 7, 1917, Broun married writer-editor Ruth Hale, a feminist, who a few years later co-founded the Lucy Stone League, an organization that fought for women to keep their maiden names after marriage, in the manner of Lucy Stone. At their wedding, the columnist Franklin P. Adams characterized the usually easygoing Broun and the more strident Hale as "the clinging oak and the sturdy vine." They had one son, Heywood Hale Broun.
Along with his friends the critic Alexander Woollcott, writer Dorothy Parker and humorist Robert Benchley, Broun was a member of the famed Algonquin Round Table from 1919-1929. He was also close friends with the Marx Brothers, and attended their show The Cocoanuts more than 20 times. Broun joked that his tombstone would read, "killed by getting in the way of some scene shifters at a Marx Brothers show."
In November 1933 his wife obtained a divorce. In 1935 he married a widowed chorus girl named Maria Incoronata Fruscella Dooley (stage name Connie Madison).
Seven months before his death, Broun, who had been an agnostic, converted to Roman Catholicism after discussions with Fulton Sheen. Broun died of pneumonia, at age 51, in New York City. More than 3,000 mourners attended his funeral at St. Patrick's Cathedral, New York. Among them were New York City Mayor Fiorello La Guardia, columnist Franklin Pierce Adams, actor-director George M. Cohan, playwright-director George S. Kaufman, New York World editor Herbert Bayard Swope, columnist Walter Winchell and actress Tallulah Bankhead.
Broun is buried in the Cemetery of the Gate of Heaven in Hawthorne, New York (about 25 miles north of New York City).
Read more about this topic: Heywood Broun
Famous quotes containing the words personal and/or life:
“The terrible thing is that one cannot be a Communist and not let oneself in for the shameful act of recantation. One cannot be a Communist and preserve an iota of one’s personal integrity.”
—Milovan Djilas (b. 1911)
“We have good reason to believe that memories of early childhood do not persist in consciousness because of the absence or fragmentary character of language covering this period. Words serve as fixatives for mental images. . . . Even at the end of the second year of life when word tags exist for a number of objects in the child’s life, these words are discrete and do not yet bind together the parts of an experience or organize them in a way that can produce a coherent memory.”
—Selma H. Fraiberg (20th century)