Dorothy Parker: What Fresh Hell Is This?

by Marion Meade

  From their first meeting, Crowninshield had been immensely taken with Dorothy and his admiration had continued to grow. He would describe her as wearinghorn-rimmed eyeglasses, which she removed quickly if anyone spoke to her suddenly. She had, too—perhaps the result of nervousness—a habit of blinking and fluttering her eyelids. She had a fondness for Chypre, as a perfume, and for flat-heeled shoes, sometimes for black patent leather pumps with black bows, She walked, whatever her shoes might be, with short, quick steps. Her suits, in the winter, at any rate, were tailor-made. Her hats were large and turned up at the brim. Green, as a colour, seemed to appeal to her greatly, whether in a dress, hat, or scarf.

  More important, seldom had he encountered anyone, man or woman, with so sharp a tongue and so keen a sense of mockery. Even though she could be difficult, this was to be expected in such an excessively opinionated person. He concluded that “her peceptions were so sure, her judgment so unerring, that she always seemed to hit the centre of the mark.”

  In the fall of 1917, after she had been slaving in Edna Chase’s kingdom for two and a half years, Crowninshield arranged for Dorothy’s transfer to Vanity Fair, noting that Chase had “turned her over to my tender care” as if she was a sickly moppet. He forgot to add that Edna Chase was by no means unhappy to be rid of someone who showed signs of developing into a genuine enfant terrible.

  The next few months, having no idea what to do with Dorothy, Crowninshield gave her routine editorial tasks and also published several more of her hate songs. At the end of the year, he had a daring idea. P. G. “Plum” Wodehouse, the magazine’s drama critic, had coauthored a hit musical comedy and wished to take an indefinite leave of absence. Crowninshield decided to name Dorothy as Wodehouse’s successor. Not only did this reflect his faith in her, but also it happened to be a brilliant promotional gimmick for Vanity Fair.

  Dorothy could not have been more amazed. She had spun out her line in hope of reeling in a modest-sized fish and instead had hauled up a whale.

  From the beginning, she set out to make herself noticed. In her first column, New York’s only woman drama critic described herself as “a tired business woman” who was “seeking innocent diversion”—which was the reason she had chosen to review a batch of five musical comedies. With the exception of Wodehouse’s Oh, Lady, Lady!, where she deemed it politic to lay praise on thick, she proceeded to slice up the rest with a poison stiletto. Since it is always more fun to revile than extol and because abuse was practically reflexive with her, she made it her modus operandi. One show, for example, got her recommendation as an excellent place to do knitting and “if you don’t knit, bring a book.” With another, she refused to print the names of author or cast, declaring that she was “not going to tell on them.” There was a show she ignored entirely, instead reviewing the performance of a woman seated next to her who had been searching for a lost glove. Certain chorus lines were damned for consisting of “kind, motherly-looking women,” the locations of her seats criticized, and certain prominent producers chastized for low taste.

  Altogether her debut in the April 1918 issue was a bravura performance that assured maximum pleasure to Vanity Fair readers and maximum annoyance to Broadway entrepreneurs.

  If the beginning of Dorothy’s reputation as a wit can be pinpointed, it would be that spring, for it was then, when she was twenty-four, that she began to attract the attention of an audience broader and more sophisticated than the readership of a fashion magazine. What makes that particular column so interesting is its rejection of the prevailing standards for female writing and thinking. She had chosen to present herself not so much as a bad girl but as a bad boy, a firecracker who was aggressively proud of being tough, quirky, feisty, a variation on the basic Becky Sharp model, and she managed to carry it off with terrific style and humor. She was putting on an act, but it was an act that seemed as if it might sell. Now she began to see what shape her future might take.

  Life as a married woman was turning out to be dull as mud. Dorothy left the boardinghouse and moved to an apartment in a handsome building on West Seventy-first Street, the block directly behind the brownstone that Henry Rothschild had owned when Eliza was alive. Dorothy’s new, non-Jewish name may have completed the superficial obliteration of Dorothy Rothschild, but choosing to live a few hundred yards from the Rothschild house, the place where she had spent her most secure years, might be construed as an indication of her ambivalence toward this disloyalty. She made no effort to turn the flat into a home because once Eddie returned they would be moving anyway. Her suits hanging next to his civilian clothes in the closet, the kitchen bare of food and drink, she took her meals in restaurants and continued to live in much the same transient fashion as she had at the rooming house.

  Although she would not admit it, she had an acute aversion toward homemaking. Granted, she had not been brought up to concern herself with such matters, but most women in 1918, even those raised with servants, were nonetheless able to care for themselves in an emergency. Dorothy was not. So phobic was her reaction to domesticity that she would have starved before boiling herself an egg. Throughout her life, she would eat bacon raw claiming she had no idea how to cook it. The mechanics of laundry would be equally mysterious—when she removed her underwear, she threw the soiled lingerie back into the drawer with the clean and let a maid, if there was one, figure it out.

  These days, hungry for company, she took to dropping in on her sister, who recently had given birth to a second child, a daughter also named Helen, nicknamed Lel. Helen Droste’s marriage show signs of erosion. Dorothy had never been crazy about her brother-in-law, but now it seemed clear that Helen was far from contented with the party-loving George. Dorothy, playing with her niece, would talk of having a baby when the war ended, when her husband returned.

  Eddie’s company remained in the States. It moved from New Jersey to Pennsylvania, then south to North Carolina before shifting to Jersey again. Dorothy wrote him nearly every day, but she never felt satisfied with her letters. Had she been able to express herself fully she would have poured out her loneliness, but she knew that Eddie, with his low tolerance for teary confidences, would not appreciate gloomy mail. To cheer him up, she related amusing incidents that had taken place at the office and sometimes enclosed copies of her verses, which had begun appearing regularly in the magazine. She yearned to receive love letters but had to content herself with his postcards, usually addressed to “Mrs. Edwin P. Parker, 2nd,” in care of Vanity Fair. His messages were marvels of brevity that began “Dear” and ended abruptly “Ed,” while sandwiched in between were one or two lines that might have been written to anyone.

  Several times when he was based near New York, she rushed to visit him, but their reunions were not particularly successful. The shyness they showed toward each other dismayed her. In fact, Eddie seemed so distant that she felt as if they were not married at all, which made her cry. The sight of her woebegone face had the effect of deflating Eddie further, first making him impatient and then angry. She saw him as unreasonable, and there were fearful quarrels in hotel rooms.

  Eddie’s drinking must have contributed to the instability of their relationship, although it was an issue that Dorothy found impossible to address because Eddie refused to admit he had a problem. In his company, he was considered a hard drinker, and after the morning when he had appeared at reveille white-faced, hung over, and looking as if he had arisen from the grave, his friends began to call him Spook, a nickname that stuck. One weekend when the company was based at Syracuse, he received a furlough and boarded the night train to New York. Eager to begin celebrating, he finished a pint of whiskey and promptly passed out. When he came to at Grand Central the next morning, he staggered off the train and bought another bottle, then drank in earnest for the remainder of his leave. Some of Eddie’s friends felt sorry for his wife.

  In May 1918, his division crossed to France on an Australian troop carrier and was rushed to the British front for additional training. In J
uly, when the long-awaited counteroffensive began, he got his baptism during the Soissons offensive and after that was never far from the front lines. He took part in the Saint-Mihiel fighting and the battle of Meuse-Argonne. The fighting was more savage than First Lieutenant Edwin Parker could ever have imagined. While he had not wished to be a combatant, he discovered that transporting the wounded had special horrors. Ambulance drivers made their runs at night, lumbering without lights over shell-pitted roads, driving and making repairs under intense bombardment. Shifts of twenty-four and thirty-six hours were standard. Eddie drove to the first-aid stations behind the trenches and waited while the litter bearers loaded the wounded into his machine; then he set off for the nearest field hospital, picking his way through the darkness and dodging supply convoys and shell holes. Arriving at the hospital, it was not unusual to find that he had been driving a hearse, and he soon trained himself to have as few feelings as possible about the bloodstained shapes in his rear van.

  One night as he was returning to the hospital, a shell exploded on the road, and before he could slam on his brakes, the machine hurtled into the crater, where it remained for almost two days. When help came, the van held four corpses. Eddie was fortunate to escape with only minor physical injuries.

  During his four months at the front, hard liquor was all but impossible to obtain but other painkillers were not. Dorothy later said that “they had dope in the ambulance,” and she named morphine as the substance to which her husband became addicted. While opiates were not as a rule carried in the ambulances themselves, they certainly were available at field hospitals and dressing stations. No doubt, Eddie was not the only one to get through the war with the aid of drugs.

  Dorothy continued to gain prestige as a critic. The public loved her and repeated her witticisms; theatrical producers viewed her as a piranha and dreaded the sight of her tiptoeing down the aisles. It was what she had dreamed of. Very quickly she learned that play reviewing offered unlimited opportunities for bellyaching, one of her favorite pastimes. After only a few months on the job, she informed her readers that “sometimes I think it can’t be true.... There couldn’t be plays as bad as these. In the first place, no one would write them, and in the second place, no one would produce them.” Since bad plays were the rule, however, her life was becoming “a long succession of thin evenings.” By summer she was calling her job “a dog’s life.” In the autumn when the new season began it turned out to be true; some weeks there were nine or ten premieres, and she had to race from theater to theater. Very little of what she saw proved amusing. “It may be,” she wrote grimly, “that a life of toil has blunted my perception of the humorous.”

  More than pressure and bad plays was agitating her. Her nerves raw from worrying about Eddie, she found herself easily distracted. Ushers with flashlights, latecomers, even the sound of applause irritated her. “It isn’t only one sort of fiend that makes my evenings miserable,” she grumbled, for she also felt like lashing out at umbrellas, opera glasses, and rattling programs. Worst were the pairs of happy lovers she noticed at musical comedies, couples who reminded her of herself and Eddie. “They always behave in the theatre as if they were the only ones in the house.” Their hand-holding and “interchanging of meaningful glances” made her feel terrible, and in a fit of sour grapes she wished that she could have them barred from Broadway theaters.

  One of the editors at Vanity Fair had hung a detailed map of France above his desk with flags indicating the exact positions of the American army. Dorothy noticed that his daily ritual was to check the morning papers as soon as he got to his desk, then to shift the locations of the flags. Since she disliked this editor, a posturing and immensely pompous man who wore a pince-nez attached to a black ribbon, and since “I didn’t have anything better to do,” she decided to give him a twitch or two.

  Arriving at the office early, she rearranged his flags to show the kaiser winning. Then she sat down at her desk, put on her glasses, and pretended to work. Albert Lee, attributing the falsified map to German spies, would spend the rest of the morning correcting the flags. Bedeviling Lee was highly satisfying to Dorothy, well worth the loss of a half hour’s sleep.

  The armistice was signed on November 11. She attributed the fact that her sixteen-month marriage had been racked by tension to global rather than personal debacle and counted on the future being different. When she learned that Eddie had been reassigned to occupation duty in Germany, she felt terribly disappointed.

  After the first of the year, she received a picture postcard of Cochem castle, a popular Rhineland tourist attraction on the Mosel River.

  “Dear,” he wrote to her, “if you can send me a cake of working soap I think I can arrange to buy this castle.” As usual, the card was hastily signed “Ed.”

  He failed to mention, perhaps did not know, that Koblenz was his destination, nor did he say a word about loving or missing her, or even wishing-she-was-there. Instead he sounded absurdly cheerful. She began immediately to imagine him loose in Germany, roustabouting with his cronies or the fräuleins and surely consuming quantities of white wine. It was another seven months before she saw him again.

  Chapter 4

  CUB LIONS

  1919

  In the summer of 1919, New York teemed with returning veterans who were taking up jobs they had left or just beginning careers deferred by the war. Among the newcomers determined to make his mark in the literary marketplace was twenty-four-year old Edmund “Bunny” Wilson. He had postulated for himself a twofold strategy for success: get something in print and, if possible, get it in Vanity Fair. Around this time, Dorothy had been given the additional duty of reading manuscript submissions, stacks of them. Previously the processing of unsolicited manuscripts had been done by Albert Lee, whose system of elimination had been swift and efficient: He attached rejection slips and returned them unread to their authors. Dorothy felt obliged to read the pieces before rejecting them. From time to time, she came across writing that showed promise. When Wilson submitted some prose he had written for the Nassau Literary Review while an undergraduate at Princeton, she brought it to Crowninshield’s attention. He invited Wilson to come in for a talk.

  Wilson, nicknamed “Bunny” in the nursery by his mother, had curly red hair that was already thinning. He sought acceptance for his writing but was particularly needy in other respects. Having only recently worked up the courage to purchase his first condom in a Greenwich Village drugstore, he looked forward to remedying his lack of sexual experience. When he met Dorothy at Vanity Fair, there may have been more than one idea on his mind. As they shook hands, he shyly looked her over. Even though she was Mrs. Parker, she must have impressed him as a woman who might possibly be available. Despite his attraction, he felt put off—so he would claim—by what seemed to him an excessive use of perfume. A demon with an atomizer in her hands, Dorothy had a lifelong habit of spraying her head and shoulders with clouds of scent. It made her feel feminine and secure. Friends of hers remember that she always smelled delicious, but Wilson was clearly overwhelmed by the fragrance. “Although she was fairly pretty and although I needed a girl, what I considered the vulgarity of her too much perfume prevented me from paying her court.” Having hit upon a plausible excuse for rejecting Dorothy, before she could reject him, he went on to complain that “the hand with which I had shaken hers kept the scent of her perfume all day,” but evidently he was not sufficiently distressed to think of washing his hands.

  The randy Bunny Wilson was not the only one to find Mrs. Parker attractive—and not the first to find her intimidating either. Her appearance without a male escort at first-nights and her pugnacious literary style gave people the impression she might be approachable, although any man who tried found himself face to face with the old-fashioned manners of a Victorian matron. Dorothy was too much the war bride ever to consider infidelity. The notion of sleeping with other men revolted her almost as much as the thought that Eddie might be seeking the bed of some German woman.r />
  During the months while she was waiting for him to come home, changes were taking place at Vanity Fair. All winter Crowninshield had talked about offering the managing editorship to Robert Benchley, a writer who had been contributing humorous pieces for nearly five years, but nothing had come of the idea. Benchley, who had spent the war writing publicity for sales of war bonds as well as free-lancing, was now growing impatient. When a friend resigned as associate editor of Collier’s, Benchley had a chance for the job. He used this as a lever to force a decision from Vanity Fair. Publisher Condé Nast decided to interview him. He told Benchley that the magazine definitely required changes. In his opinion, it needed to be upgraded with serious articles.