Dorothy Parker: What Fresh Hell Is This?

by Marion Meade

  Dear Papa,

  This morning I received

  your “pome.”

  How did you do it

  all alone?

  When you come down

  on Sunday, Pa,

  No, nothing rhymes

  except cigar.

  Well, I must tell

  you, anyway

  Bring down St. Nich’las’

  next Sunday.

  This “pome” looks “kinder

  good to me.”

  With love to Rags

  from Dorothy.

  In practically every one of the three dozen letters and cards to him, she wondered “how is Rags?” and assured her father that she felt “well” and was enjoying “a good time,” but there was nothing to suggest she was. The exuberance of the previous year was missing. Left to her own devices, she moped around and spent many solitary afternoons on the Wyandotte’s cool verandah, reading and thinking. Her father expected her to have “a good time.” Clearly she had no wish to disappoint him. But just as clearly, 1906 was Helen’s big summer.

  By the fall of 1907, the Rothschilds were scattered. Helen was married, and Bert and Tiny were occupied with their baby son. Dorothy, now fourteen, was eager for adventures of her own. In September, she enrolled in a boarding school, Miss Dana’s, thirty miles away in Morristown, New Jersey. One of George Droste’s younger sisters was a student at Miss Dana’s.

  The overwhelming majority of Dana students were Episcopalians and Presbyterians, a few were Roman Catholics, but none were Jews. Henry solved the problem of admissions with a decisive lie. Dorothy’s records indicate that her parents attended the Episcopal church.

  In a blitzkrieg preparation, Mary and Annie were set to rounding up the required articles, including a golf cape and a hot-water bottle, and laboriously marking each item with Dorothy’s full name. Despite an admirable curriculum, the school did nothing to contradict Dorothy’s secret belief that she was an outsider. The typical Dana girl, Dorothy was to write, “was congenitally equipped with a restfully uninquiring mind,” and in years to come she claimed to be able to spot a Dana graduate a block away by her “general air, no matter how glorious the weather, of being dressed in expectation of heavy rains.” Dorothy took courses in algebra, Greek and American history, French, Latin, physiology, and advanced English. Her best marks were in Bible study and piano, her worst in gym. The fact that she received A’s in deportment provides the only clue to the Teutonic principles of discipline practiced at the school.

  At the end of the following March, she stopped attending classes. Whether this was due to illness or to some other cause, the records give no clue. She failed to return to Miss Dana’s in the fall of 1908, nor did she matriculate in any other school. At age fourteen her education ended, abruptly and inexplicably. As an adult, upon request only, she would list her educational credits as Blessed Sacrament and Miss Dana’s, careful not to specify that she had graduated from neither. In the company of close friends she was quick to bury the subject with a joke and say that she had “carried the daisy chain in the college of hard knocks.” It was her best camouflaged deprivation. The sole time she publicly alluded to the fact that she never finished high school was when she remarked to a newspaper reporter while a visiting professor at California State College, “Because of circumstances, I didn’t finish high school. But, by God, I read.”

  Dorothy and her father migrated from the luxurious Red House on Riverside Drive to Amsterdam Avenue and then to a somewhat less distinguished building on West Eightieth Street. Of all the Rothschild children, she alone remained with Henry and provided the companionship he required. To Dorothy at fourteen, this cloistral arrangement must have seemed natural, but by the age of twenty it had grown exceptionally deadening. There was not a sign of the personal autonomy that became her trademark. She found herself in the unenviable position of a caretaker who is totally dependent on her charge.

  In the summers, she and Henry visited Helen at Bellport, but more often they spent endless, boring weeks at resort hotels in Connecticut, which Henry seemed to enjoy. Retired by 1910, he fussed over his investments, some of which would prove to be unwise. He suffered from heart disease and secondarily from chronic worry about Dorothy’s oldest brother. Harry, unlike Bert, was not much interested in “getting ahead” and didn’t give two cents about keeping jobs. Whenever Henry got him one, he would manage to get fired. Irresponsible about spending money, lacking self-control, he was the object of Henry’s scorn, the target of his cajoling and bullying, an errant boy-man whom he felt compelled to rescue time after time. No sooner had Bert and Tiny married than Harry told his father to go jump in the lake and finally left home—he was twenty-five—and went to live with them. Subsequently he vanished altogether and was remembered in family legend as “the black sheep” who most likely had gone to the bad.

  The spring of 1911 began a wrenching year. Dorothy’s Uncle Sam, long subject to problems with his nerves, became insane and had to be committed to a sanatorium, where he soon died. Six months later, Hannah Rothschild Theobald died suddenly of a cerebral hemorrhage at the age of fifty. Then, in the winter of 1912, Martin and Lizzie Rothschild went abroad for a holiday and stayed on until April. The couple, who had remained childless, liked to live in lavish high style. As befitted persons of consequence, they had booked for their return trip first-class passages on the maiden voyage of the world’s most luxurious steamship. On the fifth night after leaving Southampton, the Titanic struck an iceberg.

  On the first lists to be posted, Lizzie Rothschild was noted as saved, but Lord [sic] Martin Rothschild’s name appeared on neither the safe nor the known-dead lists. Henry clung to hope. The following evening, in drenching rain, he stood at pier 54 as the Carpathia was being moored; the gangplank lowered and the first of the seven hundred survivors (out of two thousand passengers) began to straggle down. There at last was a dazed Lizzie in her fur coat, but no Martin. Her husband, she told them, had escorted her to a lifeboat and then stayed behind on the boat deck. For two hours she had bobbed about under the stars, watching while the Titanic slipped lower in the water, then upended and glided beneath the surface. When the Carpathia had appeared in the gray light of dawn, she had climbed up its swinging ladder and collapsed on the deck. For several hours the Carpathia had searched for small boats among the icebergs, but Lizzie had known it would be useless. Martin, she said, was at the bottom of the ocean.

  Henry was only sixty when the Titanic sank, but Martin’s death triggered a state of decline in him, leaving him full of dismal thoughts about how swiftly his family had flickered out. Now he acted feeble beyond his actual years and expected everyone to fetch and carry for him, unaware that he was being burdensome. The most important person in his life became Dorothy, who had patiently to bear the brunt of his petulance day after day. She was unable to make Helen and Bert understand that she was nearly twenty and expected more from life. Henry continued to make sentimental pilgrimages to the Lower East Side, never failing to show up at Christmas to distribute holiday tips, and he liked to take along Helen’s small son, Bill. By the end of 1913, he was keeping to the apartment and at Christmas lacked the energy to visit the old neighborhood—too bitter cold to be gadding about just to hand out a few dollars. On Christmas Eve he felt so poorly that the doctor had to be sent for. Three nights later, he died of a heart attack.

  The New York Times obituary that credited J. Henry Rothschild as a pioneer of the wholesale cloak and suit industry would have pleased this son of a fancy-goods peddler. To his funeral came former colleagues, his club friends, and board members from Mount Sinai Hospital. He was laid alongside Eliza in Woodlawn Cemetery, where his unornamented stone seems carelessly chosen next to his wife’s.

  New York in 1914 was gripped by dance fever. In restaurants and tea-rooms, even in cafeterias, people were tangoing and Castle-walking. At home they rolled back the rugs and turkey-trotted to phonograph records. For those eager to learn the syncopated dances, newspaper
s published diagrams of the latest steps, and schools began to spring up all around the city. It was at one of these dance schools that Dorothy Rothschild found employment with the only moneymaking skill she possessed—playing the piano. She purchased quantities of sheet music and practiced “The Floradora Glide” and “Everybody’s Doin’ It (Doin’ What, Turkey Trot).” She also had to master the various steps because the school expected her to help out with student instruction. Working at a dance school scarcely seemed like a respectable occupation for a gentlewoman—that year the Yale prom forbade the tango—but she didn’t care whether people approved or not.

  “After my father died, there wasn’t any money. I had to work, you see....” This was Dorothy in her favorite role: orphan vulnerable to the indignities of an unjust world. Then, as later, she enjoyed thinking of herself as poor. It seems probable that much of Henry’s fortune had melted through speculations, but it was unlikely he had left her penniless. What he did leave is a mystery because the New York Surrogate Court has no record of either will or intestate proceedings.

  Abruptly the old life vanished. The apartment she had shared with her father was given up, its contents sold or dispersed to Bert and Helen. There were some lovely crystal glasses that Helen wished to keep. She considered it important to save family photographs and letters and the verses written by her father and sister. Dorothy had no interest in artifacts from her first twenty years.

  The first months after her father’s death she must have lived with her brother—or else Helen and George took her in. Neither situation would have been to her liking, because Bert and Tiny had a particularly lively six-year-old son and an obnoxious parrot who flew free about the apartment. Though Helen had no parrot, she did have a five-year-old boy and a husband whom Dorothy considered to be “the most horrible, disgusting, outrageous German, the worst kind of German.” Any extended stay with her relatives would have been intolerable.

  She spent the summer of 1914 at the dance school, not unhappily, for the job was fun and she met plenty of new people. At the same time that she was memorizing song hits, she was also trying to write the light verses that were immensely popular before the war. When she subsequently admitted that she had “fallen” into writing, it was strictly the truth. There was a good reason she never planned to become a writer, but rather blundered into it. She regarded poetry and fiction as literature, a serious business requiring special gifts. Her self-view had always been constricted and her concept of her abilities even more limited, although her fantasies would always be grandiose. She invented herself as a writer as she went along. At this age, she had a keen interest in the theater. She said she had been stagestruck and had entertained vague theatrical ambitions, but what shape these might have taken she never made plain, perhaps had not imagined herself. As for verses, they did not qualify as genuine writing. If her father could do them, couldn’t anybody?

  Beyond the fact that her rhymes had been a means of pleasing him, she now wrote because it was fun and because everybody seemed to be doing “very nice light verse.” She was careful about rhyming the first and third lines of quatrains and fussed over masculine and feminine endings. Such work “didn’t do any harm, and it was work that didn’t roughen our hands or your mind; just as you can say of knitting,” which she also enjoyed. All the New York papers (and in 1914 there were more than a dozen) published light verse, but the Mount Everest of verse publishers was the New York Tribune, where Franklin Pierce Adams conducted a column called The Conning Tower. F.P.A. printed only the wittiest contributions and never paid a penny for any of them. It was considered a great honor to be published anonymously by Adams and to receive an invitation to his annual dinner, where he bestowed a gold watch on the poet he most admired.

  There is no way of knowing how many submissions Dorothy made to The Conning Tower, The Saturday Evening Post, to all the likely markets, and how many rejections she received. Her typical subjects epitomized trivia: wrong telephone numbers, bloopers made at the bridge table, the pros and cons of nutmeg in rice pudding. In late 1914, she wrote a poem that poked fun at married women summering at resort hotels, those same hotels where she had stayed with Helen and later with her father. She had quietly and contemptuously observed the upper-middle-class matrons, imprisoned in their banalities and self-righteous bigotries. All the long summer afternoons, fixtures on shady hotel porches, they had chattered about the same diets, the same servants, the same unexamined frustrations. In winter, these women transferred their perorations and fancy sewing to city parlors, where they served tea and peppermint creams and triangular sandwiches made from the remains of last night’s chicken. Again and again in her writing Dorothy would return to these women, and for good reason. She feared becoming one of them.

  “My husband says, often, ‘Elise,

  You feel things too deeply, you do—’ ”

  “Yes, forty a month, if you please,

  Oh, servants impose on me, too.”

  “I don’t want the vote for myself,

  But women with property, dear—”

  “I think the poor girl’s on the shelf,

  She’s talking about her ‘career.’ ”

  Her rapid interleaving of colloquial fragments was an original and amusing technique, but such parallelisms allowed for little progression of ideas, and the nine individual stanzas in “Any Porch,” despite their bite, soon grew repetitious. Nonetheless, she had nothing to lose by sending it to the new Condé Nast magazine, Vanity Fair.

  One morning the mail brought a letter of acceptance and a check for twelve dollars. She dressed up in her best suit and hat and splashed herself with cologne. By the time she reached Vanity Fair and marched into the office of editor Frank Crowninshield, she had picked up an impressive head of steam. She told him:“Any Porch” was “the first thing” she had ever written.

  Her father had died just “a month or two” earlier. She was an orphan.

  She was working at a dance school, even though she lacked “the faintest idea” how to teach, couldn’t distinguish the lame duck from the bunny hug, and was expecting to be fired any day.

  She was “tiring” of a musical career, which she had learned was not a bowl of cherries.

  “A literary life” would suit her far better.

  Could Mr. Crowninshield give her a job?

  Crownie, as he was called, who had come from a distinguished New England family and spent his youth abroad, was one of the most notorious snobs in New York. People seldom found this an offensive quality in him, for he was full of seeming modesty and charming self-deprecations. He was a gentleman of wit and urbanity—tall and slender with an elegant mustache, watchful brown eyes, and a carnation in his buttonhole. Never had he touched alcohol or tobacco or had a sexual relationship with a woman to anyone’s knowledge (although he had no objections to others’ indulging), and he scorned modern conveniences such as telephone directories, saying of someone, “But how will we ever get in touch with him? He’s not in the Social Register.” When Crownie needed to hire secretaries, he never inquired about typing and shorthand skills; what mattered to him was that a woman be well-bred and come from a “good” family. Sizing up Dorothy, he must have been impressed because he gave her an enigmatic smile and promised to keep her in mind; for what he did not say.

  Her stratagem unsuccessful, she continued to work at the dance school. A few months later, Crownie informed her that there was a position open on the staff of Vogue, Vanity Fair’s sister magazine, at a salary of ten dollars a week. It was her chance and she took it.

  Her father had once written a poem that told her of a brightly lit place.

  If to your Papa you are good

  You shall have both clothes and food

  You shall live on milk and honey

  And never know the need of money

  Hadn’t she been good to Papa? And now see what had happened: His fantastical paradise of milk and honey was going to be hers. She tentatively inaugurated her new freedom by moving int
o a boardinghouse at 103rd Street and Broadway, a location that lay precisely equidistant between Bert’s apartment and Helen’s. For eight dollars a week, she received a room the size of a pantry and two meals—and the idea that perhaps she could become a famous writer.

  “I thought,” she said, “I was Edith Sitwell.”

  This was her turning point. With the sale of “Any Porch” to Vanity Fair, she passed out of her father’s refracted world and stepped onto the stage of the real Vanity Fair, where all wares seemed to be for sale, all trophies inevitable, all her silvered daydreams made real.

  Chapter 3

  VANITY FAIR

  1915-1919

  It was easier for a camel to navigate a needle’s eye than for an ambitious woman to achieve literary grandeur on Vogue, which had precious little interest in nurturing another Edith Sitwell. All the magazine needed for its copy department was a person sufficiently familiar with the English language to spell decently and write picture captions. Since Vogue’s fortnightly issues were overstuffed with photos and pattern illustrations, there was always a stack of art waiting for captions.

  At first Dorothy felt thrilled to be working there. For a page of underwear she chose a line from Shakespeare, “Brevity is the soul of wit,” to which she applied a fashionable twist: “From these foundations of the autumn wardrobe, one may learn that brevity is the soul of lingerie.” Producing this drivel proved to be a tedious, thankless task. Before long she lost her determination to sound literary and tried to relieve her frustration as best she could. She took one look at a photograph of a model wearing a tarted-up but very expensive nightgown that seemed meant for a courtesan and decided to tweak the noses of both Vogue and its readers. This time she borrowed from a nursery rhyme: “There was a little girl who had a little curl, right in the middle of her forehead. When she was good she was very very good, and when she was bad she wore this divine nightdress of rose-colored mousseline de soie, trimmed with frothy Valenciennes lace.” To presume that Vogue readers might be having sex was surely an idea to set Palm Beach and Newport reeling. Dorothy was able to breeze her prose past the copy desk. Only at the last moment, in proofs, did someone catch and exterminate the subversive caption.