by Marion Meade
All during the fall, almost every day, she bounced between the Plymouth on Forty-fourth, where The Royal Family was in rehearsals, and the New Amsterdam on Forty-second, where Show Boat was rehearsing. In the case of Show Boat, she had no official business except to sit in the empty house and observe. It was no longer her property; it was Oscar Hammerstein’s. Adapted for the musical stage, her work had been gutted, stuffed with songs and production numbers, and neatly tied up with a sentimental ending. Still, she was crazy about the music, such songs as “Ol’ Man River” and “Make Believe.” And it thrilled her to watch the chorus in bathing suits and shorts run through the various numbers like “Life upon the Wicked Stage” and to listen as Jerry Kern pounded the piano and Flo Ziegfeld yelled at the sweating dancers to get moving because, he swore, they looked like corpses. Every minute the New Amsterdam vibrated like a noisy factory, feverish, chaotic, but under tight control.
The situation was precisely the opposite at the Plymouth, where there was no heat. At eleven the Royal Family cast began rehearsing with the stage manager. At five, unshaved and surly, having just woken up, Jed Harris would finally appear. Take it from the top, he ordered nonchalantly. On the ninth day of rehearsals he fired the company without warning and paid everybody two weeks’ salary. The boy wonder claimed it was a nervous breakdown; he would need to be hospitalized very likely. When his panic attack subsided two days later, the cast was rehired. But by mid-December, when the play finally opened in Atlantic City, it was Edna who was having the breakdown. She was overheard predicting that “both plays will probably fail.”
Behind the orchestra seats she stood next to a coolheaded Jed Harris and studied the latecomers straggling in. Pay no attention, he told her. All those people—the coughers, the belchers, the sleepers—were only retired clerks and letter carriers. “Can you imagine an intelligent person living here in the winter?”
George Kaufman rushed up to them at intermission. Did Jed hear what he heard, “that tremendous fart in the lobby just as the curtain was going up”?
Yes, Jed replied, of course he heard it. Wasn’t it considerate of the fellow to relieve himself before taking his seat? Nothing, evidently, fazed the boy wonder.
On the Tuesday after Christmas, at the brand-new Ziegfeld Theater, Show Boat opened to unanimous praise, indeed the sort of fanfare that guaranteed not only a long run but also milestone status in the history of musical theater.
It was followed the very next evening by The Royal Family, which drew equally unanimous raves. Even Aleck, Edna’s biggest critic, wrote in the World that he would always remember that amazing first night as “one of the happiest evenings ever I spent in the theatre.”
On the opening night of The Royal Family, Edna stayed home and ate dinner on a tray, or so she said in her autobiography a dozen years later. That she would forgo the pleasure of attending one of the most memorable events of her life might sound puzzling, she supposed. Whether this was due to some peculiar “psychological quirk”—possibly another tummy ache?—she simply could not, or would not, say.
At least that would be her recollection of Wednesday, December 28. According to Jed Harris, however, something more complicated took place. Edna, he claimed, stopped off at his apartment on her way to the theater with a bad case of opening-night jitters. She looked quite the femme fatale, dressed to the nines in a peach-colored gown and a fur coat with scarlet lining.
As he poured champagne, Jed plied her with extravagant compliments. There was no reason to worry because the evening would go “like a house on fire.” The Royal Family was certain to become one of the biggest hits of the decade. For himself, it would mean his third success in fifteen months, but she of course would be the toast of the town: two of the most impressive shows in Broadway memory, both in one week. Two hits back-to-back. Wasn’t that a writer’s fantasy? Surely 1927–1928 would go down in theater history as “the Ferber season.” Jed knew how to pile it on.
According to Jed, some time later—how much is unclear—Edna stopped mid-sentence and looked at her watch. It was ten-thirty, she cried. She had missed her opening night.
“Without a word,” Jed was to write in his memoir, “I swung the little clock on my bedside table around. She stared at it and murmured, ‘Oh, dear, I’m so upset.’”
In her autobiography Edna omitted any mention of visiting Jed’s apartment on opening night, let alone climbing into his bed. Even if something did take place, she probably wanted to obliterate the memory. As she found out a few days later, Jed really was a cruel man who enjoyed terrifying people. During a chatty phone conversation with George toward the end of the week, Jed paused and said, without warning, “I’m going to close the play.”
Close? He wanted to close The Royal Family? George had suspected Jed was a mental case, but now he was sure. “But why, for God’s sake!” he answered. They’d got raves.
Exactly, Jed said. But it wasn’t performing at the box office.
Well, it was Christmas, for God’s sake. The show just needed a chance to build, George said.
Sure, but they weren’t selling out. A play that gets rave reviews but doesn’t sell out ought to close.
“Listen to me,” George finally said. He was coming over to Jed’s apartment. If Jed insisted on closing The Royal Family, well and good. But George would have no choice but to kill him.
The Royal Family did close, but not until December 1928, after a run of 345 performances.
THE HAPPIEST PLACES in New York City were speakeasies, especially Tony’s, where Dottie dropped in faithfully on most evenings. As everybody knew, even a tiny swallow of bad bootleg liquor could cause pains in the back of the head, but Tony Soma’s customers felt confident of getting superior stuff. She must have downed thousands of drinks there and never regretted a single one. Chain-smoking Herbert Tareytons, mooching Luckies or Camels if she ran out, forgetting to eat, or ordering a steak sandwich if she thought of it, she considered Tony’s joint her own private club.
Nothing was more fun than drinking. After finding out the hard way that she had no better friend than scotch whiskey—Haig & Haig if she could get it, or “White Hearse”—she refused to touch any drink with a name: no planter’s punches, mint juleps, Tom Collinses, not even Manhattans, although occasionally she would accept a sidecar. It made no sense to waste time on those syrupy things that had been invented for the sole purpose of disguising bad alcohol. Few pleasures were as cheap and joyous as a bottle of scotch.
She made no secret of the fact she got tight a lot. But that did not make a person an alcoholic. Even supposing she did drink too much now and then, it was no more than anybody else—drinking was a normal part of civilized life, and New York was a hard-drinking town. Besides, she could stop anytime she wanted. One time when she teased Marc Connelly that she was thinking of going on the wagon, he grimaced like a Park Avenue specialist with a hypochondriac. Don’t be foolish, her old friend advised. He knew somebody who’d stopped and it didn’t make a bit of difference.
She thought he should be the last person to offer advice on drinking. Without his noticing, she told him, three owls had roosted in his mouth. They were tiny, of course, not really objectionable, but wait until they tried to bring home a houseguest.
Occasionally, she would test her willpower by refusing a drink. A few minutes later, however, she’d change her mind in the manner of a guest unwilling to disappoint her host. Well, she would say, maybe a little one. So frequently did she request “just a little one”—it became a joke among her friends—that she wound up writing a story for The New Yorker with that very title. Usually it was more efficient to water her drinks. “Make it awfully weak,” she whispered, in a voice suggesting she might be doing everyone a favor. “Just cambric scotch.” Thank God, nobody took her seriously. Certainly not Mr. Benchley her bosom drinking companion who no longer managed to attend all the plays he reviewed for Life. Alcohol had taken its toll on not only his professional duties but also his physique, which bore no re
semblance to the trim boyish editor she’d known at Vanity Fair.
To her indignation, silly stories about their drinking were rife. It was rumored that they once staggered out of Tony’s on a spring night, only to discover the air had suddenly turned wintry and West Forty-ninth Street lay under a soft white blanket. Padding toward them through the powdery snow, without making a sound, came a procession of elephants, each holding the tail of the animal ahead.
“That does it,” Bob cried. “From now on I’m on the wagon.” Whereupon, the story went, they ducked inside for another round to steady their nerves.
That was a downright lie. All along she knew those were circus elephants on their way to the Garden. If anybody was going to peddle pink-elephant jokes about Dorothy Parker, it ought to be Dorothy Parker. Her New Yorker column, which might have been called “Reading and Writing and Nursing Hangovers,” was frequently used for personal confessions about, for example, her bouts with “the rams.” That was when she felt afraid to turn around abruptly for fear of seeing “a Little Mean Man about eighteen inches tall, wearing a yellow slicker and roller-skates.” She was well acquainted with the rams, as well as the less virulent strain known as the German rams, but happily the condition was never terminal. Usually it could be traced to a stalk of bad celery at dinner. Of course, she could not deny that a severe case of the rams was like something out of Gounod’s Faust. Those rams qualified to be preserved “in the Smithsonian under glass.”
JOHN WILEY GARRETT II had little going for him besides his looks. In his case, that might have been sufficient, because he was a strikingly handsome fellow in his mid-thirties, athletic, with long legs and dark brown hair, who knew how to wear expensively tailored suits. His passions were war, sports, and business. Dottie might’ve expected an Ivy League graduate to pick up a book occasionally. But no. Practically illiterate, he had the gall to complain that her column never mentioned books that ordinary people read, so she reviewed something he did read, the tabloid comics.
The main trouble with John was that they had nothing in common, a fact she preferred to ignore. Most of the time “we were both pretty fairly tight,” she realized later. Another problem with John: he slept with other women, she discovered.
Not true, he insisted.
Then why was his apartment full of monogrammed dressing gowns? And what about all those expensive cigarette cases?
She hated sitting in his Murray Hill apartment and listening to the telephone ring and ring, as it always did, with calls from women eager to make dates. “You damned stallion!” lashes out a character in her short story “Dusk before Fireworks.” Why does she work herself up over nothing, the man replies. She knows damn well that she comes first with him.
Obviously John was a liar. On the other hand, he stayed with her, didn’t he? He was thirty-five and would have to settle down sometime.
Could life get any worse? Very likely, because suddenly she had to be rushed to the Presbyterian Hospital, a place she ordinarily patronized for overdoses and abortions. But this time it was a respectable ailment, abdominal pain, which turned out to be not the bad scotch she had self-diagnosed but appendicitis. After the operation she retired to her new apartment (above a piano store on Fifth Avenue) for a month’s convalescence. It would be nice to have indoor entertainment, she thought, something exciting like an electric train. “Hell, while I’m up, I wish I had a couple of professional hockey teams.” Worst of all, the doctors banned drinking, although her cooperation was far from religious. As a result of this sudden shift in her normal schedule, without cocktail parties and midnight forays to Tony’s—without even giving it much thought—she began writing a short story. Once it got under way, the project moved surprisingly fast, as if the Presbyterian doctors had quietly removed her writer’s block during the appendectomy.
“Big Blonde” is the story of a wholesale dress model who is married to an alcoholic. Once he leaves her, and Hazel Morse must fend for herself, she becomes a hard-drinking, good-sport party girl who entertains—and is kept by—a series of Seventh Avenue buyers from cities such as Des Moines and Houston. Eventually she is derailed by life, age, and loneliness. Hazel goes into the bathroom and begins to swallow sleeping powders with water until the “splintering misery” suddenly oozes away and she feels as excited as a child about to receive an “unanticipated gift.” The next day she is found unconscious by her maid, who pokes, shakes, and finally calls for help.
For months Dottie kept tinkering with the story, still obsessive about putting in commas and pulling them out. It was the longest piece of fiction she had ever undertaken, almost a novella, nearly three times the length of her usual work. Judging the story too long, and certainly too depressing, for The New Yorker, she gave it to The Bookman, the highly respected literary journal that Sewie’s father had recently purchased for him. Published in February 1929, “Big Blonde” was pure Parker. The story won the prestigious O. Henry Award as the Best American Short Story of 1929. Ironically, it also drew a complaint from the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, not on the grounds of obscenity but for giving readers explicit instructions on how to procure illegal drugs.
Nobody could say that drinking interfered with her writing. She was in top form, and the proof of her control over drinking—for the last time, she was not an alcoholic—was that she could write “Big Blonde,” a story about a drunk who could not control her drinking. On top of that, she managed to produce a second collection of verse, Sunset Gun, which turned out to be another excellent seller. That year her royalties amounted to the incredible sum of $5,708.95, not bad for someone as poor as a parish mouse. If this kept on, she might wind up filthy rich like everybody else she knew and require the services of an accountant.
Confident of her ability to handle just about anything, she decided to give Hollywood a try. Not that she was carried away by the idea of screenwriting. Quite the opposite, she couldn’t stand motion pictures—stepping into a theater prompted hellish visions of “an enlarged and a magnificently decorated lethal chamber”—especially the new talking pictures. She always felt like shouting at the screen, “Oh, for heaven’s sake, shut up!” Mercifully, interest in film proved unnecessary. By this time the smell of money had wafted across the continent to the nostrils of New York writers. “Millions to be grabbed out here,” Herman Mankiewicz wired Ben Hecht, “and your only competition is idiots. Don’t let this get around.” An idiot she wasn’t. From MGM, Dottie obtained the sweetest deal, a three-month contract for three hundred dollars a week (three thousand dollars in current dollars). Subletting her apartment, she departed for the Coast in November.
MADAME EGOROVA wanted to know why.
It was the same question everybody asked Zelda, but Lubov Egorova expected an answer. Why did she wait until now?
Zelda’s standard reply was that she had studied dancing as a child, that probably the idea had been at the back of her mind ever since, but in truth she hardly knew the reason herself. The distractions of living, she finally said. She was busy.
And she was no longer busy? The woman looking at her coldly, a former principal ballerina at St. Petersburg’s Maryinsky Theater, was middle-aged with a dramatic white face and eyes full of anguish. She shrugged aside Zelda’s excuses and continued to stare. You are too old, she said.
Clutching her valise, Zelda stammered that she found Russian ballet thrilling.
What had she seen?
La Chatte. (La Chatte was a work choreographed by George Balanchine.) She would give anything to dance La Chatte someday. There was no emotion on the Russian’s face. Don’t get your hopes up, Madame said, and sent her off to change clothes.
In April, Zelda and Scott had decided to close Ellerslie and spend a few months in Paris, where they rented a flat in a nondescript building across from the Luxembourg Gardens and hired a Mlle Delplangue to look after six-year-old Scottie.
That summer marked the true beginning of Zelda’s training in classical ballet. Each morning she rose lon
g before Scott and braced herself with coffee and cigarettes before heading off to class. The Egorova ballet school was located on the top floor of the Olympia Music Hall over on Boulevard des Capucines. To reach the studio, she had to make her way to the stage entrance of the music hall, around the corner on rue Caumartin, and walk through the wings of the theater, along the concrete walls, up seven flights of stairs to a large bare room of blue walls and scrubbed floors. Under the skylight the room was redolent of female flesh and sweat and “reeked of hard work,” she wrote.
From the start Zelda found herself powerfully drawn to Lubov Egorova. Born in St. Petersburg, a graduate of the Imperial School of Ballet, Madame Egorova was considered a brilliant exponent of Russian classical ballet. During her career at the Maryinsky Theater, where she was known for her daring pirouettes and beautiful legs, she danced all the big leading roles: Aurora in Sleeping Beauty and Odette in Swan Lake. After retiring and opening her own school, it was to her that Serge Diaghilev’s dancers would come for coaching.
At forty-seven, Madame Egorova was one of the best teachers in Paris. Her private students were divided into two groups: sober-faced young dancers in modest circumstances; and the offspring of the wealthy or famous being pushed into lessons, children such as Sara and Gerald’s daughter, Honoria, and James and Nora Joyce’s daughter, Lucia. In this setting Zelda stood out as a misfit, not just because of her age, or her position as a rich foreigner and wife of a famous writer, but because of the way she treated Madame. In the morning she arrived at the studio carrying a bouquet from the flower stalls near La Madeleine, lilacs and tulips, lemony carnations “perfumed with the taste of hard candy,” garden roses “purple as raspberry puddings,” the most glorious combination of blooms that she could pluck. To the ritual of the daily flowers were added invitations to tea at Rumplemeyer’s, dinner at Hôtel George V, and concert tickets for Madame and her husband. Such largesse from pupils was not expected, but not rejected either. Dance instruction was a cash business, at least in the case of students such as Zelda, who paid three hundred dollars a month in fees.