Damon Runyon

Patriot News/December 18, 1937

Miami Beach, Florida, Dec. 17.- George Ade says if he had it all to do over again, he probably would get married.

This statement may be taken as in the nature of an important confession from the man who for many years ranked as perhaps the most eligible bachelor in the United States.

He was young, rich, healthy, handsome and famous in the days when his name generally led the list of the male matrimonial desirables of the land.

He was tall, slender, romantic looking. He was a celebrated writer of stories and plays. He was a nifty dresser. He had a fine background. He was the type that attracted attention. The ladies said “00-00” when he went by. He was everything you would think a gal would want in marriage.

Skillful or Lucky?

But Mr. Ade never married. It is conceivable that many a snare and pitfall of matrimonial intent was planted along his path of single blessedness as he journeyed through his twenties, thirties, forties, fifties and even sixties, yet he side-stepped them with amazing skill.

Other gentlemen who were unable to avoid the traps used to eye Mr. Ade’s unhampered ease, and freedom from double responsibilities, with great envy. Some said he was just plain lucky. Mr. Ade himself is not so sure about that as he pointed for the seventy-second year mark, which he will reach next February.

“It’s all right being a bachelor when you are a young bachelor,” he said to other day, “but it’s a tough life when you get to be an old bachelor and find yourself pretty much alone. You have to marry a club then for company. Yes, I guess if I had it all to do over again, and know what I know now, and could find somebody who would have me, I’d probably get married.”

We looked Mr. Ade up in his winter home on Miami Beach. He has lived for the past six winters in a modest little rented house that reflects none of the magnificence of his permanent home, which is a beautiful farm at Brook, Indiana. The number of the house is 1313, showing that Mr. Ade is not superstitious about thirteen, anyway.

Movies and Prize Fights

He lives there alone. He has a housekeeper and a chauffeur. He keeps up his writing, goes to all the movies, big, little, good, bad, or indifferent, and to the race track when the horses are running. He attends the local prize fights, and visits with rich neighbors on the beach from Chicago, like Mr. Johnny Hertz.

In general, Mr. Ade leads a fairly active life. His still luxuriant hair is snowy white. His once towering frame is but slightly stooped. He remains a fine figure of a man, and looks better now, physically, than at any time in the past several years.

Mr. Ade first rose to fame as one of the greatest humorists this country has ever produced when he was writing a daily column for a Chicago newspaper years ago. The column was called “Stories of the Streets and of the Town,” and it saw the birth of “Artie,” “Doc Horne,” “Pinky Marsh,” and “Fables in Slang.”

From Fables to Plays

The last were so enormously popular that Mr. Ade quit daily columning after seven years and did one “Fable” a week for a New York syndicate. That left him with a lot of time on his hands and he turned to writing plays. He wrote “The Sultan of Sulu,” “The College Widow,” “The County Chairman,” “The Fair Co-Ed,” and others, and made a raft of money.

That was when the newspapers used to talk about his matrimonial eligibility, and hook his name up with that of almost every gal he as much as looked at, including various theatrical stars, though these latter hook-ups were mainly the product of the genius of the press agents for the plays Mr. Ade wrote, and the author was just a defenseless bystander.

“But why did you never marry?” we asked.

“Well,” Mr. Ade said, with more levity than a serious subject like matrimony warrants, “in a time when I might have contemplated matrimony, a marriage license cost $2, and I never had the money. By the time I got the $2, I had lost the idea of marriage.

“Kindly be serious,” we said.

“All right,” he said. “I suppose I lived in hall bedrooms too long, and got too thoroughly undomesticated. On top of that, maybe no woman would have had me.”

We did not ask if he ever tried to find out. That would have been a little personal. Of course even now Mr. Ade cannot be considered utterly beyond matrimonial salvage, but we rather inferred that the prospect is somewhat remote, at least at the moment.

However, you never can tell what the Dade county climate will do to, or perhaps we should say for, a man.