Dorothy Parker: What Fresh Hell Is This?

by Marion Meade

  Benchley, realizing this was his big chance, agreed that more serious pieces seemed a sensible change. He was hired at one hundred dollars a week.

  When Dorothy came to work on Monday, May 19, she found Benchley sharing her office, already hard at work. Somebody had placed a welcoming bowl of roses on his desk. With considerable formality, he addressed her as “Mrs. Parker,” and she naturally responded by calling him “Mr. Benchley.” At noon, Crowninshield invited him to the Coffee House, his luncheon club, which excluded women. For the remainder of the day Benchley was absorbed in writing an article. A few minutes after five, he set out for Grand Central Station to catch the 5:37 train for suburban Crestwood, New York.

  Robert Charles Benchley was not at all the sort of person Dorothy had been expecting. He looked like a prudish, domesticated, twenty-nine-year-old Boy Scout who played mandolin duets with his wife, went to bed at ten, and spent Sundays clipping his hedges. Such was the case.

  He was five feet ten and a half inches tall, slender with thinning sandy hair, blue eyes, and a pale face. His serviceable suits came off the racks at Rogers Peet. Since he believed strongly in taking care of his health, he wore long woolen underwear and galoshes. He suffered from hay fever in season and had a nervous habit of biting his fingernails all year round. He neither smoked, drank, nor swore, and never had he been unfaithful to his wife.

  Benchley came from a family of middle-class, small-town New En-glanders who had settled in Worcester, Massachusetts, before the Revolution. Although one of his ancestors became a lieutenant governor of the state in the 1850s, none of the Benchleys had been particularly gifted at making money. Robert Benchley’s father never got beyond clerking for the city’s mayor, a position he held for thirty years. Charlie Benchley’s lack of ambition was most likely related to his fondness for drink, an addiction that took ingenuity to indulge because his wife, Jennie, personally collected his paycheck and doled out his carfare without an extra cent. Of her two children, Jennie Benchley preferred her older son, Edmund. Robert, thirteen years younger, idolized Edmund too. When Robert was eight, Edmund was killed in the Spanish-American War. Told of her son’s death, Jennie blurted out, “Oh, why couldn’t it have been Robert?”

  To atone for those words, Jennie treated her remaining child like a prince. She even tied his shoelaces for him until he entered high school. To avenge himself on his mother, Benchley waged passive war on the female sex for the rest of his life.

  If the flora and fauna of Benchley’s homeland had been alcoholism and rejection, he grew up seemingly untouched by misfortunes of any kind. During his adolescence, a wealthy woman who claimed to have been his brother’s secret fiancée offered to pay for his education at Phillips Exeter Academy, followed by four years at Harvard. In college, where he became one of the best-liked students on campus, Benchley was editor of the Harvard Lampoon and a star of the Hasty Pudding shows. Two years after he graduated, in the class of 1912, he married Gertrude Darling, a Worcester girl whom he had known since elementary school. By the time he arrived at Vanity Fair, he seemed to be a well-adjusted family man with his personality and his life set as if in concrete. Though the couple had a small son and Gertrude was pregnant again, Benchley had yet to earn enough to support his family. He still entered the purchase of each newspaper and every postage stamp in his pocket expense book.

  It was a mystery to Dorothy why Crowninshield had selected Benchley to be managing editor and how—or even if—he had written all the loony pieces that had been appearing regularly in the magazine. On the basis of his writing, she had imagined him to have a delicious sense of the absurd, some rare and extravagant madness that she described as “a leaping of the mind,” and that others would describe as “almost-logic, the same chilly, fascinating little skid off the hard road and right up to the edge of the swamp.” Yet on first meeting her new colleague, Benchley’s lunacy was not obvious to Dorothy.

  Several days passed. Just as she was growing accustomed to sharing her office with the methodical Mr. Benchley, Crowninshield brought in another new employee and assigned him a third desk in the room. Never before had Dorothy laid eyes on anyone quite like this individual. He was a giant—six foot seven inches, stooped, rail-thin, with cavernous brown eyes and a nailbrush mustache. Robert Sherwood, a twenty-three-year-old veteran who had served in the Canadian Black Watch and had been gassed and wounded, was plainly ill because he filled the office with his gasps as he struggled for breath. Communication was difficult because he refused to speak. When a stenographer came in to take dictation from him, he sat on the floor and turned his back on the woman.

  Nobody knew what Sherwood was supposed to do. Applying for the job, he had appeared in his Black Watch uniform, and Crownie, no doubt impressed by the kilt, had hired him for a three-month trial period at a salary that was only five dollars more than the secretaries were earning. He gave him the vague title of drama editor, but told Benchley that he was to be picture editor. Eventually Sherwood decided that his real job was to be “a sort of maid of all work.”

  He made Dorothy and Benchley so uncomfortable that before long they began lunching together just to discuss the problem. She put forth the theory that Sherwood was a “Conversation Stopper” and that, in her experience, trying to talk to a “Stopper” was like “riding on the Long Island railroad—it gets you nowhere in particular.” She also thought he looked tough and sinister. Benchley wondered how Crowninshield could have saddled him with a freak whose military exploits even remained a mystery. With so much of Sherwood to shoot at, how could the Germans have managed to hit him in both legs? He suspected that Sherwood must have been lying on his back, waving his feet in the air. The truth about Robert Sherwood did not occur to either of them. He was merely struck dumb in their presence.

  Several days later, as Dorothy and Benchley were leaving for lunch, they were surprised to find Sherwood waiting for them outside the building. Hesitant, he asked whether they would mind if he walked down West Forty-fourth Street with them—not with them actually but between them—for he was in need of protection. “In those days,” Dorothy recalled, “the Hippodrome, a block from the office, had engaged a troupe of midgets and Mr. Sherwood ... wouldn’t go down the street unless Mr. Benchley walked on one side of him and I on the other, because, with his six feet 7 inches, he was afraid the midgets might tease him if he were alone.” Looking like an ambulatory pipe organ, the editors set off down the street, but the midgets ran squeaking alongside yelling “Hey, Legs!,” warning him to duck when he crossed under the Sixth Avenue El, and demanded to know how the weather was up there. At Sixth Avenue, having outrun “the nasty little things,” Dorothy and Benchley felt obliged to invite Sherwood to join them for lunch, and the ice was finally broken.

  Back at the office, Dorothy whispered to Benchley that she was having second thoughts. Sherwood was “nice.” Benchley agreed that he was “one of the nicest guys I ever saw.” After that things began to change.

  Upon closer acquaintance, Dorothy discovered that Sherry was “pretty fast.” He wore his straw hat at a rakish angle, tried to make dates with the receptionist, and admitted to lifting a few in Broadway cabarets. One day when he acknowledged having a hangover, Benchley expressed alarm and disapproval. Dorothy sprang to Sherwood’s defense, declaring that she had once attended a cocktail party.

  Benchley was doubly shocked. “Mark my words,” he warned her, “alcohol will coarsen you.”

  Dorothy could see nothing wrong with drinking an occasional cocktail.

  Colored photographs of corpses appeared on the walls at Vanity Fair. While the atmosphere at the magazine had always been lively, now it was becoming downright rowdy. At first Crowninshield was pleased to note that his three editors had taken “an enormous shine to one another.” What he failed to understand was how much clowning was actually taking place. After Benchley told Dorothy about his enjoyment of two undertaking magazines, The Casket and Sunnyside, she decided to become a subscriber. Whenever a new issue ar
rived in the mail, the two of them stopped working to admire the pictures of cadavers, then they read aloud the humor column, “From Grave to Gay,” and howled with laughter.

  Dorothy found the magazines hilarious. “I cut out a picture out of one of them, in color, of how and where to inject the embalming fluid, and had it hung over my desk.” But in Crowninshield’s memory, there was not one but an entire row of brightly colored anatomical plates above her desk, and he asked her to remove them. “I dared suggest that they might prove a little startling to our occasional visitors, and that, perhaps, something by Marie Laurencin might do as well.” Dorothy responded to his suggestion with “the most palpable contempt.”

  Already Crownie’s la-dee-dah mannerisms were beginning to grate on Benchley’s New England nerves, but Dorothy said that she felt sorry for Crownie. He was “a lovely man, but puzzled,” and she had to admit that “we behaved extremely badly.”

  After several weeks of this, Crowninshield privately began to think of the magazine as a lions’ den with himself in the uncomfortable position of tamer. No doubt his editors were still cubs, “amazing whelps” he called them, whose teeth were not yet sharp and whose claws had not grown long, but they seemed to be animals nonetheless. Later on he described their antics more benignly: “Indeed I believe that in no period of their lives did the three find more enjoyment, make more friends, or work as hard, or as easily.” In the early summer of 1919, the problem was that the cubs weren’t working particularly hard and sometimes they weren’t working at all. They were expected in the office at eight-thirty but often showed up late, then spent the mornings in enthusiastic personal conversations, took long lunch hours at Child’s, and went home early. Whenever it was necessary for Sherwood to leave the office, even though the midgets had left town, he would say, “Walk down the street with me,” and all three would nip out for some air. Dorothy remembered that “Mr. Benchley and I would leave our jobs and guide him down the street. I can’t tell you, we had more fun.”

  Condé Nast was far from entertained. He instructed the business manager to enforce the company’s tardy rule with a memo warning that latecomers would be required to fill out a slip explaining why they were late. Benchley was the first to receive one. His reply, hundreds of words in tiny handwriting covering a slip of paper the size of a playing card, unfolded a sorrowful tale of how he had arrived early, heard that the Hippodrome’s elephants had got loose, offered to round them up, chased them up to Seventy-second Street and down West End Avenue to the Hudson River docks where they were trying to board the boats of the Fall River Line, and finally herded them back to the Hippodrome, thereby averting a major marine disaster but unfortunately causing him to be eleven minutes late for work.

  This was his first and last tardy slip, but the battle lines had been silently drawn up, with the whelps on one side, Condé Nast on the other, and a nervous Crowninshield in the middle.

  At the end of June, Nast and Crowninshield departed for a two-month trip abroad and left Benchley in charge of publishing two issues of the magazine with the assistance of Dorothy and Sherwood. What made Nast imagine this would be a sensible plan is hard to fathom. On the day of sailing the editors appeared at the Aquitania with a floral horseshoe, the tackiest one they had been able to buy, and offered exuberant bon voyage wishes to their bosses. Liberated, they trooped back to the office and immediately began to go haywire. Naturally they kept hours that suited them. They also took steps to upgrade Sherwood’s position and salary. Unable to authorize a raise, Benchley did the next best thing and assigned him several articles to write. The first piece he turned in was a piece of juvenalia better suited to a college humor magazine than the country’s most sophisticated monthly, but Benchley purchased it for seventy-five dollars, a higher price than some well-known contributors were getting. When the editor of the men’s fashion department went on vacation leaving a half-finished column, Sherwood completed it with predictions that best-dressed men would soon be wearing waistcoats trimmed with cut jade and peg-topped trousers. This cracked Benchley up, and he and Dorothy sent it off to the printer. Nobody, they assured each other, ever read the stupid column anyway.

  In June, Dorothy received an invitation to attend a luncheon at the Algonquin Hotel, a party hosted by two theatrical press agents to welcome Alexander Woollcott, The New York Times’s drama critic, back from the war.

  Woollcott was a fat, bespectacled man of thirty-two whose smallish features tended to sink like raisins into a pudding of jowls and double chins. A master of the insult, he already had acquired a considerable reputation for bitchiness. It was said that entering into conversation with him was like petting an overfed Persian cat who had just sharpened its claws. Those who found his personality uncomfortable dismissed him as a one-man freak show, but to his intimate friends—and in time they would be a cult numbering in the hundreds and ranging from Eleanor Roosevelt to the Marx brothers—he was an acquired taste. They would vie with each other to find the right words to describe his personality: “Old Vitriol and Violets,” James Thurber dubbed him; Louisa M. Woollcott, said Howard Dietz; a New Jersey Nero in a pinafore, according to Edna Ferber. George Jean Nathan called him “the Seidlitz powder of Times Square” but the only epithet to capture the whole man was George Kaufman’s one-word label, “Improbable.”

  A native of Red Bank, New Jersey, he was the maternal grandson of a founder of the Phalanx, a Fourieristic commune that was a lesser known but more successful counterpart of Brook Farm: Owing to his father’s frequent absences, Woollcott grew up in genteel poverty among his mother’s people at the Phalanx. After graduating in 1909 from Hamilton College, he worked briefly as a teller with the Chemical National Bank of New York while trying to obtain a reporter’s job on The New York Times. His literary style leaned heavily on the side of lavender and old lace, but he successfully resisted all impulses to improve it. If not one of the worst writers in America, he surely ranked among the top ten. Even his friends made fun of his style and were genuinely surprised to realize just how atrocious it actually was. (Even more surprising was the amount of money he earned by it.) In 1912, the Times appointed him drama critic, a position in which his taste for overripe adjectives seemed acceptable.

  Still a virgin in his early twenties, a repressed, bewildered, presumably homosexual male who adored dressing in women’s clothing and fantasized becoming a mother, he must have been terrified at the thought of sex with either gender. When he developed mumps at twenty-two and his physician warned that the illness in adult men might affect potency, Woollcott apparently decided to use this as a convenient means of resolving the troubling issue of his sexuality. Thereafter he played the role of a “semi-eunuch” who was physically incapable of consummating the sex act. As a substitute for sex, he indulged himself by wearing scarlet-lined opera capes, insulting friends with greetings like “Hello, repulsive,” and eating enormously and exquisitely until his weight swung up to a blimpish 255 pounds.

  Since Woollcott enlisted as a medical orderly as soon as war was declared, Dorothy had never encountered her colleague from the Times on opening nights. The hosts of the welcome-home luncheon, John Peter Toohey and Murdock Pemberton, sent her an invitation simply because she was Vanity Fair’s critic. They apparently did not think to invite Benchley and Sherwood. Dorothy, who went nowhere without them, insisted they accompany her to the Algonquin, where a long table had been decorated with American flags and a green felt banner that intentionally misspelled Woollcott’s last name.

  Some thirty-five guests showed up, nearly all of them theatrical reporters, critics, and columnists from the daily papers, just the sort of people whom press agents might be expected to court. The most important journalist at the table was Franklin Pierce Adams, a mythical figure to Dorothy, who never missed reading The Conning Tower. Not only did he publish the type of verse she was laboring to write, but several times a week he ran a parody of The Diary of Samuel Pepys, recounting in mock Elizabethan English his flirtations, his frailti
es, the opening nights he attended, the books he read, and the celebrities he habitually met. To be mentioned in F.P.A.’s column was a distinction of the highest order.

  Adams was a personal friend of Woollcott’s. In Paris they had served together on the staff of the American Expeditionary Force’s weekly newspaper, Stars and Stripes, as had another of the guests, former Private Harold Ross, the paper’s managing editor. Ross had developed a love-hate relationship with Woollcott, whom he thought of as “a fat duchess with the emotions of a fish.” On their first meeting, Ross viewed Sergeant Woollcott with suspicion when he had come strutting into the Stars and Stripes office.

  “Where’d you work before?” Ross asked.

  “The New York Times,” Woollcott pronounced in his most pompous voice. “Dramatic critic.”

  Ross broke into raucous laughter. No real man would work at a sissy profession like drama critic.

  “You know,” Woollcott said to him, “you remind me a great deal of my grandfather’s coachman.”

  To this Ross would never be able to think of a suitable retort because there was none—he would always look as if he had tumbled off the train from Sauk Center. None of the Stars and Stripes writers would have won beauty prizes. F.P.A.’s beak nose and long, scraggly neck once led Irvin Cobb, seeing a stuffed moosehead, to exclaim, “My God, they’ve shot Frank Adams.” Harold Ross’s looks were pitiful. His hands, feet, ears, and mouth were too big, his gray eyes too small, a thicket of stiffish, mouse-colored bristles shot out of his scalp, and a large gap separated his two upper front teeth. When Ross once asked Woollcott for dental floss, Woollcott called out, “Never mind the floss, get him a hawser.”