Edna Ferber's name for the literati who lunched at the Algonquin Hotel in 1920s New York was "the Poison Squad". They in turn dubbed her "Etna", in honour of her explosive temper. The Pulitzer prize-winning writer described herself as "a stagestruck Jewish nun" - although she wasn't refering to her religious affiliations, so much as to her habit of hiding indoors and working. In a 60-year career, she wrote 12 novels (including Show Boat), two memoirs and four collections of short stories, and co-wrote 10 plays, several with George S Kaufman.
Among the latter was a brittle comedy called The Royal Family, a spoof of the lives of the Barrymores, a real theatrical dynasty. This week, Peter Hall is reviving the play at London's Haymarket Theatre Royal. Judi Dench stars as the monstrous matriarch Fanny Cavendish, who was based on the actress Georgiana Drew. Drew's daughter, Ethel Barrymore, had starred in Ferber's first play, and the role of Julie Cavendish bore more than a passing resemblance to her. Tony Cavendish was based on Ethel's brother John - Drew Barrymore's grandfather. Shamelessly, Kaufman and Ferber asked Ethel Barrymore to play Julie; insulted, she threatened to sue, but never got round to it.
Such behaviour was typical of Ferber. She had a nose job long before rhinoplasty was commonplace; she bobbed her hair because "I always felt I had a good line at the back of my head and I wanted to see for myself." Her sparring partner at "the Gonk" was critic Alexander Woollcott, who jibed: "Why Edna, you look almost like a man." She retorted: "Why Aleck, so do you." Kaufman found her indomitable: when she asked what she should do for the war effort, he quipped: "You could be a tank."
Jerome Weidman wrote in the New York Times that she had "the strength of character... to scoop up the metropolis, and pin it to her shoulder like a corsage". Ferber was certainly successful; and yet romance eluded her, and her love affair with the stage was unconsummated. She didn't just want to write, she wanted to be a star.
Ferber was born in Kalamazoo, Michigan in 1885, and began her career aged 17, as a reporter on the Appleton Daily Crescent. Later, at the Milwaukee Journal, she worked so hard that she collapsed. While recuperating, she wrote her first short story, The Homely Heroine.
Her most famous character was a travelling petticoat saleswoman called Emma McChesney, who starred in over 30 stories. Ferber took her inspiration from her mother, whose business aplomb had discomfited Appleton's stay-at-home Jewish matrons. McChesney became a spokeswoman for New Women - she ran businesses but still baked pies.
After her first play, Our Mrs McChesney, appeared on Broadway in 1915, Ferber moved to New York. The skyscrapers, she said, gave her an "edifice complex". She tried to get work as a war correspondent, begging her friend William Allen White: "Isn't there a Red Cross job for me? I could come back and talk about it to audiences, if nothing else."
In 1924 - the year she won the Pulitzer prize for her blockbuster So Big - Ferber started working with Kaufman. It was a deeply satisfying relationship, which their friend Margalo Gillmore called "a literary roll in the hay". In 1927, the night after the opening of Show Boat, the musical based on her tearjerker about a floating Mississippi theatre, their second play, The Royal Family, hit Broadway.
Where Show Boat had sentimentalised theatre, The Royal Family treated it with irony. Ferber is most cruel about the vanity of ambition: one character snaps, "When I married you, you were an offstage noise!" But she still cherished a dream of going on stage, and suggested to Kaufman that she play Julie Cavendish. He laughed. In 1940, cast as Fanny in a revival, the reviews were enough to terminate her belated stage career.
Her novels kept her busy, as did the 20-odd films based on them. She particularly enjoyed Giant, which was made into a film starring Rock Hudson and James Dean. During filming, Dean bought his fatal Porsche, and raced the 71-year-old Ferber around in it.
She had fans, but remained alone; in fact, her biographer and great-niece Julie Gilbert thinks that Ferber may never have had a sexual relationship. She wrote longingly about love, as in Show Boat: "They loved each other. Over and above and through and beneath it all, thick and thin, warp and woof, they loved each other." But she always stopped at the bedroom door. In her diaries she mocks the available beaux - "Boy flappers bore me to death with their limpid eyes and their sex talk" - but in her memoir, A Kind of Magic, she wistfully concedes: "I should have married."
She died of cancer, aged 83, on April 16, 1968. She wasn't the sexiest of the 1920s glitterati, but she ought to be more famous than she is. After all, the force of her writing prompted Dorothy Parker, the vicious circle's glamour girl, to write: "I wish there were more words - All I can keep saying is 'Greatness!' "
Thanks to Mike Kennedy for sending me this article which appeared in The Guardian (UK) on October 31, 2001.