Bobbed Hair and Bathtub Gin

by Marion Meade

  As might be expected, sex with Artie failed to make her happy. It did not alter his decision to marry Gladys. And she was too sick to care anyway.

  IT WAS HARD to understand. She should be in Woodlawn lying alongside J. Henry and Eliza Rothschild, under a white tombstone that said, EXCUSE MY DUST, DOROTHY PARKER, 1893-1923. Yet she was alive, saved by the Swiss Alps waiter bringing her dinner, rushed by ambulance to the Presbyterian Hospital on East Seventieth Street, and finally obliged to make polite conversation with puzzled long-lost relatives. Gathered around her bedside were all the Rothschilds and Drostes, behaving as if they had been summoned to an unexpected family reunion.

  Why did she do it? they asked.

  But she had no idea.

  She had botched the job but learned from the experience: dying was harder than advertised, razors need to be really sharp, and the cut has to be deep—none of which she had ever thought about. The truth was, her biggest mistake was ordering from a greasy spoon such as the Swiss Alps, with its speedy delivery service.

  Shortly after her release from the hospital, Dottie faced a ticklish situation when it was her turn to host an evening of her women’s bridge group, which met almost every week to drink cocktails and play cards. The regulars included Jane Grant of the New York Times; Peggy Leech, the writer, who was going to marry Ralph Pulitzer of the newspaper-owning Pulitzers; and Winifred Lenihan, the actress, who had been cast to play Saint Joan in Shaw’s new drama. Dottie, her wrists bound with yards of gauze, knew they would ask questions that couldn’t be answered. The night of the card game, she decorated the bandages by tying black velvet ribbons into giant bows. As each guest arrived, she announced, “I slashed my wrists.”

  Taking a direct approach was a mistake. The entire evening the bridge players struggled to find appropriate words of sympathy, which was the last thing Dottie desired. In fact, none of them knew exactly what to say because they, like all Dottie’s friends, were not acquainted with people who slashed their wrists. The sole authority on the subject seemed to be Dottie herself, and eventually she wearied of trotting forth overpolite apologies and started making wisecracks about her erstwhile husband.

  It was all his fault, she said. “Eddie doesn’t even have a sharp razor.”

  Altogether it was not a cheerful evening.

  The funny thing was, the sight of Dottie’s bandaged wrists actually aroused more suspicion than pity. After leaving that night, Jane Grant began thinking about Dottie and her husband’s razor and how she had laughed too much. Of course it was no secret that the Parkers’ married life had been “far from tranquil”—Dottie constantly mocked poor Parkie’s inadequacies—but to make him responsible for the failure of her suicide attempt was rather unfair. The whole thing didn’t make sense, Jane decided. A smart woman would not allow a bad love affair (a “setback,” Jane called such things) to drive her to “the depths of despair.” In Kansas, where she came from, setbacks made smart women show some backbone.

  Later, Jane began to wonder if Dottie’s attempt might have been a stunt. After all, she failed to kill herself, didn’t she? Even fishier was the melodramatic last-minute rescue by a delivery boy, from the Swiss Alps of all places, that suggested a Perils of Pauline two-reeler. The thought crossed Jane’s mind that Dottie might have staged the whole thing for attention, possibly to get back together with her husband or even Charlie MacArthur.

  But Jane kept her suspicions about Dottie to herself. That winter she remained preoccupied with her husband, whose problems had dominated their marriage these past four years. Harold Ross was thirty-one, a high-school dropout from Colorado who had bummed around as a hobo newspaperman and probably would have remained in the boondocks if not for the war. In Paris, working on the Stars and Stripes with Frank Adams and Aleck Woollcott, he met and fell in love with Jane, a friend of Alecks from the Times. When Harold informed her that he could never live in a sissy town like New York, she immediately set him straight about her own plans: she was returning to her job at the paper when the war ended.

  Harold had always dreamed of owning a publishing company. The big question was what kind of publication, because New York already had a dozen dailies along with a great many other periodicals. Jane favored a weekly magazine about the city, but her husband was holding out for a shipping paper that he wanted to call the Marine Gazette. Among the other ideas he considered were cheap paper books, a syndicated comic strip, and a high-class tabloid. For the longest time there was quite a bit of talk but no action. Her husband’s insecure personality and lack of business sense made it necessary for Jane to do “a great deal of prodding.” Consulting the Times’s managing editor, she learned that the amount required to start a tabloid could be as high as $5 million. That was the end of that scheme. In the meantime, they continued to live on her newspaper salary—and freelance pay from the Saturday Evening Post—and to bank his earnings from the American Legion Weekly.

  The first time Edna Ferber met Harold, at Frank and Minna’s house, she figured he must be a vagrant Frank had dragged home as a joke. With his thatch of mouse-colored bristles, a tongue hanging over his lower lip, tiny gray eyes, and a gap between his two front teeth, Harold looked like a plucked woodchuck. Even Jane admitted that her husband was downright funny-looking, “the homeliest man” she’d ever met. He seemed completely out of place among the streetwise New Yorkers at the Algonquin Round Table. A born complainer and paranoid, constantly bemoaning everything from his dental problems to the world conspiracy against him, he naturally became the butt of Round Table jokes.

  At lunch one day, he wondered if anybody had dental floss.

  “Never mind the floss,” Aleck snorted. “Get him a hawser.” Ross resembled his grandfather’s coachman, Aleck taunted.

  Coachman or not, Ross happened to be a master of grammar and syntax. Sentence structure was his passion, commas and semicolons his obsessions, H. W. Fowler’s Modern English Usage his bible. The one thing never questioned by the Round Table writers was his editorial skills, which were considerable. What they greeted with incredulity was his wacky idea of becoming a publisher. He had no business running a company.

  Tired of living in a cramped apartment on West Fifty-eighth Street, Jane and Harold were determined to buy a place of their own that year. The twin buildings were located west of the Ninth Avenue El in Hell’s Kitchen, a slum of the worst rotting tenements and warehouses, known for gang wars and prostitution. It was not the kind of neighborhood where people such as themselves usually lived, but the properties at 412 and 414 West Forty-seventh Street were relatively cheap and would be ample for living and working. To afford the price of seventeen thousand dollars, and the cost of extensive renovations, they sold a one-half interest to Aleck Woollcott and one of his college friends. Everybody would live together, along with two rental tenants, and share a living room, dining room, kitchen, and garden.

  Including Aleck was a mistake, Jane soon realized. Not only did he fuss about the service, carrying on as if he were in the presidential suite at the Plaza, but he also behaved like a child. Meals became difficult because he existed almost entirely on meat, potatoes, rice pudding, and gallons of coffee. Whenever Jane served nourishing soup or green vegetables, he sulked and refused to come to the table.

  Naturally, it was Jane, not Harold or Aleck, who got stuck running the household and finding reliable bootleggers to deliver ten-gallon cans of pure grain alcohol. It was Jane who manufactured the gin by adding drops of juniper oil, shaking and stirring over thirty-six hours, then pouring in distilled water. And it was Jane who received a grand-jury subpoena for violating the National Prohibition Act. On weekends, faced with feeding twenty or thirty unexpected guests, she began to feel like tearing her hair out. Did people think it was a boardinghouse? Worst of all was her husband’s Saturday poker gang (the Thanatopsis Literary and Inside Straight Club), whose players behaved like utter pigs, leaving behind spilled drinks and a filthy bathroom. Even with two servants it was impossible to keep up.
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br />   One day at the hairdresser’s Jane asked for a short bob.

  More, she urged, cut more.

  She would be sorry, the stylist warned.

  When Jane walked out of the salon, her head was shorn “just like a boy.” And, no, she was not sorry.

  By the time renovations were finished, the houses had been transformed into a stylish cooperative, complete with a courtyard and fountain, so inviting that members of the Round Table began treating it as a western annex of the Algonquin Hotel.

  AFTER WEEKS OF NAGGING, Esther Root persuaded Vincent that it would be healthy to spend a weekend in the country. Croton-on-Hudson was a town thirty-four miles up the river that had become a popular retreat for certain Village bohemians. At a small party on Mount Airy Road, the guests turned out to be mostly Vincent’s ex-lovers and their women: Arthur Ficke and his fiancée, Gladys Brown; Floyd Dell and his wife, B. Marie. Everyone was happy to see Vincent, the women perhaps a bit less so. Examining her with keen interest was a rather splendid-looking man, a widower who lived in the neighborhood. When the guests began playing charades, she found herself paired with Eugen Boissevain. She probably did not remember, he said, but they met once, years ago, in the Village. She did remember, sort of.

  Floyd Dell, who still could not look at Vincent without thinking that her mouth was shaped just like a valentine, noticed how quickly the two of them clicked. Soon they were playing their parts so well, he said, “it was apparent to us all that it wasn’t just acting.”

  Floyd was right. That weekend Esther took the train home alone, and Vincent moved into Eugen’s house on Mount Airy Road.

  EUGEN JAN BOISSEVAIN, some years before, had been married to Inez Milholland, the feminist heroine known for leading a parade down Washington’s Pennsylvania Avenue on a snow-white horse. In 1916, however, she lay dying in a Los Angeles hotel room. Thirty years old, a graduate of Vassar College and New York University law school, she was a figure of Amazonian brains and beauty who had become the great hope of the suffragist movement. A spellbinding speaker, an enthusiastic walker of picket lines, the champion of laundry workers and factory children, indeed an activist on behalf of almost every wrong in the world, she inspired women as readily as she terrified most men. For all her leftist opinions, cackled Max Eastman, editor of the radical Masses, she remained an idle “opera-going” rich girl who drove up to picket lines in a chauffeured touring car and busied herself with meaningless appointments. Max Eastman’s sour grapes had more to do with their broken engagement than with her political causes.

  During the fall of 1916, an election year, Inez was suffering a variety of symptoms associated with pernicious anemia. Nonetheless, she set out on a lecture tour supporting a boycott of the Democratic Party, which had failed to endorse a federal suffrage amendment. In Los Angeles, wearing a blood-red-lined cloak, she was addressing a rally—“How long shall women wait for liberty?” she said—when she collapsed.

  Trembling at her sickbed sat her husband of three years. “Shall I come with you?” he said, understandably overwrought.

  “No, you go ahead and live another life,” she replied.

  Eugen (known also as Ugin or just plain Gene) was a tall, solidly built man with dark hair and the complexion color that looked like a year-round tan. The picture of masculinity, he had a hearty laugh, a huge appetite for fun and food, and an equally huge emotional hunger to be needed. An expatriate from the Netherlands, he had never been obliged to work. The Boissevain family made its fortune operating a shipping line between Holland and Java, and his father published a leading Amsterdam newspaper. Irish on his mother’s side, Gene could boast a grandfather who’d been provost of Trinity College, Dublin. He was introduced to Inez on a steamship between New York and London; their elopement soon afterward made front-page news in the New York Times.

  Seven years after Inez’s death, forty-three years old, Gene remained unmarried, although there had been a romance with one of Isadora Duncan’s adopted dancers. Finding another famous woman was important to him. Until one came along, he preferred to remain a boulevardier and adventurer who had supposedly hunted big game in Africa and explored his psyche with Carl Jung in Switzerland. When not traveling, he operated a trading company in lower Manhattan near the seaport. He imported sugar and coffee from the Dutch East Indies and lived with his best friend, Max Eastman, in the Village.

  Although Max found him endearing, he would get annoyed when Gene’s “feminine” side took over and he started to fuss over meals and household decoration. With the pained expression of a Dutch housewife, Gene once bawled him out for wiping a razor blade on a white guest towel. (Max denied doing it.) The trouble with Gene, Max decided, was that he cared intensely “about everything that belonged to him.”

  VINCENT WROTE an affectionate little verse about a man obsessed with his flower bulbs. At night, lying awake next to his lover, he imagines the damage field mice are doing to the precious bulbs outside his window. She slipped the first draft of “Hyacinth” into a sealed envelope containing a photo and lock of her hair and gave it to Gene.

  There was no need to tell him she was ill, perhaps even needed to be hospitalized. At his house in Croton he insisted she stay in bed and be nursed by him and his servants. Several days a week he drove her into the city for examinations by specialists. When stomach and bowel X rays turned out to be inconclusive, he advised her to undergo the exploratory surgery being recommended by the doctors.

  In Croton with Gene, Vincent had to rely on good-hearted friends such as Bunny to shop and run errands for her in the city. To Arthur Ficke she sent an itemized list: “walking-stick in left-hand back corner of closet;” Macy’s soap, the “big brown hexagonal ones;” and “bunch of typed poems for new book.” Sounding relieved at the prospect of Vincent safely married, Art joked to Kay, “Aren’t you glad she isn’t going to die a virgin? I am.” Gene, he said, was the only man on earth, except Charlie and Howard, “who could possibly marry a Millay without paying for it with his life and liver.”

  Several days after meeting Gene, Vincent learned that she had won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry. The prestigious awards, still in their infancy, had been established in 1917 by a newspaper publisher, Joseph Pulitzer, to recognize excellence in journalism, letters (both fiction and nonfiction), and drama, with the poetry prize added as an afterthought five years later. Having published nothing in 1922, and consequently technically ineligible, Vincent was a surprise winner. Her most recent book, Second April, was released in time to be a 1922 finalist but the prize had gone to Edwin Arlington Robinson. The Pulitzer jury continued to find her deserving, however, and bent the requirements in order to assemble a package of her work: an expanded edition of A Few Figs from Thistles and a pamphlet edition of “The Ballad of the Harp-Weaver,” together with eight sonnets that had been published in American Poetry, 1922: A Miscellany. She was the first woman to win the prize, whose purse of one thousand dollars seemed like a fortune.

  When news of the award was announced in the Portland Evening Express—“Maine Girl Wins Pulitzer Prize for Book of Verse”—an immensely excited Cora bought stacks of papers and sent clippings to everyone she knew. Vincent, however, had little energy to write anyone, including her mother, but when she did, in June, it was not to talk of literary prizes. Did Cora remember meeting a man named Eugen Boissevain in Waverly Place? Well, she was going to like him because “I love him very much & am going to marry him. There!!!”

  Before they tied the knot, sometime during the summer, she planned to bring him to Maine. “Won’t that be fun?” Gene had given her a car, a “beautiful big Mercer.”

  The letter offered little clue about Eugen. Was he young or old, single or married? A poet or a plumber?

  Vincent was perfectly happy to let Norma supply the details, including the pronunciation of her new boyfriend’s name (you-gin, not you-jean). Norma, in turn, told Cora that he was over forty but looked youthful, in fact acted like a kid. Tanned from cavorting in his garden wearing
only a batik loincloth, he was good-looking, in Norma’s opinion. Compared with some of the skunks in Vincent’s past, this one seemed the best of the lot and might turn out to be a “bully good husband.” As for assets, he was not really, really rich, but he had run through a couple of fortunes and conceivably could make another. He could, on the other hand, buy just about anything he wanted—houses, cars, the best medical treatment—and certainly would be able to support “our Ed St. Bincent” in the manner she deserved.

  LIKE ANY YOUNG WIFE in Great Neck, Zelda was eager to entertain and show off her sweet Babbitt house. She invited the movie scenarist Anita Loos to come out from the city. When dinner was announced, Scott was nowhere about, and so Zelda and Anita took their places at the candlelit table and began eating without him. During the meal Scott, without warning, bounded into the dining room.

  “I’m going to kill you two!” he yelled. A lit candelabra sailed through the air.

  He was obviously drunk. The wine cooler was next, followed by the leg of lamb on its silver platter, which persuaded Anita and Zelda he might be serious. They sprang up and beat a hasty retreat.

  They returned to the house some time later to find Scott sitting quietly outside near the road and eating dirt. He was “a swine,” he said. The two women offered no argument. After that Anita Loos steered clear of the Fitzgeralds.

  It was the hottest June on record, with temperatures brushing one hundred. Zelda wheezed and broke into eczema, but she never knew why. With Scottie leading a separate life in the care of her nurse, Zelda quickly fell into a leisurely Southern routine of lazy days she had known as a teenager. Mornings, she woke late and ate peaches for breakfast before going off to the country club for golf and swimming. In the grueling heat of the afternoon she had a fine time being lazy. No eating, no reading, just solitude and pleasant sounds. She invented a refreshing lemon cooler, three parts gin to one part water and the juice of a lemon. A reporter from the Louisville Courier-Journal made an appointment to interview her, and she got dressed up in country-club clothes and seated herself in the living room. As it turned out, the questions could not have been more lame. How did it feel to be “the heroine of her husband’s books”? Was it fun being “the living prototype” of the liberated American flapper?