Dorothy Parker: What Fresh Hell Is This?

by Marion Meade

  In the earliest days of the Round Table nobody strained to make an impression. Conversation was relaxed and stories flowed unrehearsed. It never occurred to them that their remarks might be worth recording for posterity, although Frank Adams occasionally printed those that had tickled him.

  In fact, Frank Adams could be considered the Boswell of the Round Table. He unapologetically filled his column with plugs for their various activities and kept a running chronicle of the most mundane aspects of their lives:... so to Mistress Dorothy’s and found A. Woollcott there in the finest costume ever I saw off the stage; spats and a cut-away coat, and a silk high hat among the grand articles of his apparel.

  ... so to a great party at Neysa’s, and had some talk with Miss Ruth Gillmore and D. Parker.

  ... and so to dinner with R. Benchley and Mistress Dorothy Parker, and then with her to see “Back to Methusaleh.”

  To luncheon and found there Mrs. Dorothy Parker and Rob Sherwood and he feeling ill, and was for taking train to Pelham, but I drove him there with D. and she back to the city with me, very pleasant and no chatterer at all.

  ... and so uptown, and met Mistress Neysa McMein and Dottie Parker, and they asked me to walk with them and look in windows, which I promised to do if they would not beg me to buy them this or that, and they said they would not, but they teased for everything they saw, from emerald necklaces to handkerchiefs. But I was firm and bought them never a thing.

  So Dorothy, it seemed, idled away her afternoons window-shopping and partied through the nights but never was she glimpsed sweating over a typewriter—to the old lady in Dubuque, this was the perfect fantasy of the literary life, the very embodiment of New York sophistication.

  Sometimes Frank Adams could not resist repeating his own jokes for his newspaper audience. One Monday, after spending the weekend with Harold Ross in the country, he reported to the table that they had gone tobogganing. What did Ross look like tobogganing, they asked.

  “Well,” Adams answered, “you know what he looks like not tobogganing.”

  Ross, a favorite target of their ribbing, never got off a memorable crack himself. Benchley’s appearance at the table usually meant gentle humor and a comic description of his daily vicissitudes. Hurrying out of a restaurant, he asked the uniformed man at the door to get him a taxi. The man informed him frostily that he happened to be a rear admiral in the United States Navy. “That’s all right,” Benchley said, “then get me a battleship.”

  A wag passing Marc Connelly’s chair at the Round Table patted his bald, pink head. “Your head,” he remarked, “feels just like my wife’s behind.” Connelly reached up to touch himself. “Why, so it does,” he replied.

  Woollcott’s standard repartee relied heavily on insults. “Shut up, you Christ killer,” he hissed at George Kaufman, who rose to his feet and threw down his napkin. This was the last time, Kaufman said, that he was going to tolerate slurs about his race. He was going to leave, “and I hope that Mrs. Parker will walk out with me—halfway.”

  Dorothy spoke infrequently. One of her greatest talents, decided Charles Brackett, was to make a perfect comeback or to say nothing. Peggy Wood noticed that “she didn’t waste them on nobodies,” while Frank Sullivan compared her to W. C. Fields in that her funniest jokes were lost because their obscenity made them unprintable. Marc Connelly thought her best lines were spontaneous. In the street she approached a taxi.

  “I’m engaged,” the cabbie said.

  “Then be happy,” Dorothy told him.

  The Round Tablers were having the time of their lives. Very quickly they had become essential to one another, the way a shining new love drives out all other thoughts. Theirs was a special affection, magical, fierce, childlike. They were remarkably tolerant of each other’s pathologies, which in some cases they shared, and rivalry was curiously absent. Eating lunch soon became the least part of it. They met for breakfast and dinner, slept together, worked cooperatively, and went on group vacations (and on Neysa’s honeymoon after she married a mining engineer). They patronized the same physician, Woollcott’s doctor, who built a lucrative practice administering to their ailments, dispensing diet and sleeping pills and offering his all-purpose remedy for hangovers, colds, and indigestion—high colonic irrigations. The Round Table also acquired its own unofficial psychotherapist.

  Always showing off for each other, they could be reasonably confident of receiving attention and appreciation. Their meetings were boisterous enough to attract disapproving stares from outsiders, but they took no notice. They were always their own best audience and needed no one else. If they listened endlessly to each other’s jokes, they also paid attention to each other’s routine headaches, though they tended to hide the big troubles. They were quick to offer comfort. Before long, they began to devour each other’s essences, cannibalizing the lives of the group as raw materials for their own writings. Dorothy was perhaps the first to do so.

  Their pleasure in each other’s company had another side. If they found themselves apart for any length of time, they suffered from separation anxiety. Marc Connelly remembered that sometimes after leaving the Rose Room, they would reassemble at somebody’s apartment and then spend the rest of the afternoon discussing where they were going to eat that evening. Noel Coward was amazed to run into the same group of them three times in one day, in three different places. “But don’t they ever see anyone bloody else?” he said.

  Marc Connelly could see nothing strange about all this. “We just hated being apart,” he said.

  It also was true that not one of them could tolerate being alone, which is a different thing entirely. In fact, the existence of such a group made it possible for them as individuals to avoid loneliness and self-examination. Their habit was to shove the troublesome parts of life, all the painful stuff they found hard to acknowledge, under Frank Case’s big table and pull the cloth down.

  One morning in June 1921, Dorothy was visiting the offices of Life, when she was introduced to Donald Ogden Stewart, a new acquaintance of Benchley’s and Sherwood’s. At noon they went to lunch at the Plaza Hotel for a change. When Sherwood returned to work afterward, Stewart accompanied Dorothy and Benchley back to their office. They strolled down Fifth Avenue in the sunshine with Stewart feeling euphoric and thinking that he had found two people who understood him so completely that it probably wasn’t necessary to explain his ideas or even to finish his sentences. That day, he said later, he fell in love with both of them and would remain so for the rest of his life. Stewart was in his mid-twenties, a likeable, attractive Ohioan who had come to the city only six months earlier from Columbus and established himself and his widowed mother in a tiny Village apartment. Bespectacled and prematurely balding, insecure and obsessed with money and success, he was a 1916 Yale graduate who dreamed of becoming a millionaire, but his brief experience in the business world had proved him a misfit there. A meeting in St. Paul with Scott Fitzgerald, another ambitious, impoverished Ivy Leaguer who felt like an outsider, had been fateful. The success of Fitzgerald’s recent novel This Side of Paradise had inspired Stewart to try his luck at a writing career. When he met Dorothy and Benchley, he had sold several humor pieces to Vanity Fair and The Smart Set, but he remained nervous about his ability to earn a living as a satirist.

  Dorothy found him amusing. Like herself, he was fascinated by wealth. He was, she noticed, eager to be “an enlivener of the incessant dull hours of the rich.” Even though he could not resist presenting himself as a “gay dog,” she sensed his serious side. She also praised his writing. Whenever an editor criticized him or rejected a piece, she was quick to take his side and dismiss the editor as dog excrement. If he had a hangover, she pretended to have a worse one. It was this kind of warmth and attention that Stewart badly needed.

  If he felt any sexual attraction toward her, it must have been quickly suppressed. He thought she was “absolutely devastating” with her petite figure and gorgeous big eyes, an “imp-at-large,” but she also was a married w
oman—however unhappily made no difference—and he fell into the same comradely relationship with her that Benchley had. Soon Stewart was a regular visitor at Dorothy’s apartment and at Neysa’s studio. He never was at his ease at the Round Table, because he felt obliged to say something funny, nor did he enjoy exchanging the type of barbs that Woollcott doted on. His friendship with Dorothy and Benchley provided him with constant sustenance. The others struck him as basically unfriendly. Before he joined them for lunch at the Algonquin, he fortified himself with several cocktails.

  The more engulfed she felt by the unpalatable aspects of her marriage, the more extravagantly did she unfold her serial accounts of Eddie’s misadventures. The pratfalls she described to the Round Table were actually rooted in reality; chaos was his norm. Like most addicts, he leapfrogged naturally from crisis to crisis and created trouble out of thin air, then professed himself surprised at finding himself in a mess. It was not that Eddie nearly fell into manholes because he was accident prone, but rather that he was accident prone because he was an alcoholic. Whether or not Dorothy understood she was dealing with a sick man is not clear. Her preoccupation with him grew until he became the focus of her existence and nearly all her sentences began with the word he. She spoke of him endlessly and compulsively because she was unable to do otherwise.

  If Eddie’s misfortunes fit an alcoholic archetype, her behavior likewise began to fall into the common patterns of those who live with alcoholics. When not trying to control his drinking by urging him to stop, she was busy covering up for him: The mornings he could not go to his office, she was the one who reported him ill; when he passed out, she put him to bed; when he was sick, she held his head. Increasingly her energy was sapped by efforts to keep him on the track, until she began to lose sight of the dangers facing herself.

  Throughout 1921, she ground out bushels of fluff for Life or The Saturday Evening Post, much of it humorous light verse that appealed to the same audience who gobbled up Scott Fitzgerald’s frothy flapper stories. Fluff was short, silly, easy to write, and it paid the bills. Typical of her verse at this period was “Song for the First of the Month”:Money cannot fill our needs,

  Bags of gold have little worth;

  Thoughtful ways and kindly deeds

  Make a heaven here on earth.

  Riches do not always score,

  Loving words are better far.

  Just one helpful act is more

  Than a gaudy motor car.

  Happy thoughts contentment bring

  Crabbed millionaires can’t know;

  Money doesn’t mean a thing,—

  Try to tell the butcher so!

  She judged such early work to be inferior; never would any of it be included in her collected writings.

  Articles, by virtue of their length, required concentration, which she often lacked. When assignments failed to get done, letters had to be written, charm turned on, convincing excuses offered. To Thomas Masson, an editor at the The Saturday Evening Post and an admirer of her work, she wrote shameless alibis.

  I am ashamed to offer you excuses again, but this has been a ghastly week for us. My husband has had an attack of appendicitis, and they are not sure yet what is going to happen about it. They are still freezing it, which is a pleasant process, and they think they may still get it to listen to reason that way.

  Most likely Masson, who had worked with Dorothy at Life, knew her well enough not to be taken in by the sad story of Eddie’s frozen appendix, but he did consider her the best woman humorist in the country. At first she had completely fooled him with her luminous eyes and enthusiastic promises. Then, Masson recalled, “you sit around and wait for her to finish what she has begun. That is, if she has begun. The probability is that she hasn’t begun.”

  When he inquired about her progress, she would say that the idea they had agreed upon was rotten. Be that as it may, she was working on it anyway. Next, he would be driving through Connecticut when he would stop at a speakeasy and see Dorothy drinking with Heywood Broun and Marc Connelly. Did she pretend that she didn’t see him?—certainly not. Her greeting would be warm, her manner unconcerned. If not for the fact that she was recovering from a near-fatal illness, she said, she would have finished his piece long ago. Masson could never bring himself to reproach her. Months later, after he had given up, she would send him the article.

  Tom Masson found her exasperating because he felt she was “a born artist” who could easily win an important place in American literature if only she settled down and wrote. But “she refuses to write,” he reflected sadly. “All of her things are asides.”

  Eddie blamed her for everything. He called her a nag who made his life miserable, so that it was necessary for him to get drunk. By now she was accustomed to walking on eggs with him, never able to predict when a casual remark or an unthinking glance would be misinterpreted and send him spinning into rage or melancholia. Inexplicable as it seemed to her, he would be friendly in one breath, spitting abuse in the next.

  Margalo Gillmore, eating one day at the Round Table, watched the expression on Dorothy’s face and thought that it reminded her of a cocker spaniel. “She had eyes like one of those lovely, sad dogs, eyes with deep circles under them.” Gillmore decided that she must have been weeping into her pillow all night to get eyes like that.

  Although Eddie frequently threatened to leave, she couldn’t or wouldn’t take him seriously. Nor did she consider leaving him. Marriage was supposed to be forever, a view Eddie presumably shared because he did not carry out his threats. They struggled on as best they could.

  Unhappy as she was in her marriage, she did not notice other couples having a better time of it and there were some whom she judged to be doing far worse.

  Robert Sherwood introduced her to Scott Fitzgerald and his bride shortly after their marriage, when they were honeymooning at the Biltmore Hotel and working strenuously to carve out daring reputations for themselves. The management requested their departure. Dorothy already knew Scott slightly, having met him in 1919 when he was working at a ninety-dollar-a-week job for an advertising agency and living in a dismal room in Morningside Heights. Penniless, talking about a novel he wanted to write, he had regaled Dorothy with stories about someone he planned to marry, referring to her as “the most beautiful girl in Alabama and Georgia,” even though he was in the midst of a torrid liaison with an English actress. Eventually he had drifted back to the Midwest, but he had returned to the city after selling his novel to Scribner’s, and with him he had brought his Zelda Sayre.

  Dorothy suggested to Edmund Wilson that they meet for lunch with the Fitzgeralds. They went to the Algonquin, where they sat not at the Round Table but at one of the banquettes. Dorothy quickly broke the ice.

  “This looks like a road company of the Last Supper,” she said.

  She believed Scott to be a gifted writer, but found his wife ordinary. She chewed gum and looked like a Kewpie doll. “She was very blonde with a candy box face and a little bow mouth, very much on a small scale and there was something petulant about her.” If Zelda didn’t get her way, she turned sulky.

  Whatever Zelda may have lacked as an individual, the Fitzgeralds impressed her as a couple, looking robust with health, as though they had “just stepped out of the sun.” When they moved into a flat around the corner from her building, she visited them. It was hard to understand how Scott got any writing done because the place was a mess, with overflowing ashtrays and unmade beds. Their lives seemed to consist of an endless round of parties and hangovers. If Scott’s drinking rivaled Eddie’s, Zelda’s consumption was impressive too. Toward the end of the year, despite earnings of twenty thousand dollars, Scott told Dorothy that he was completely broke. She lent him a hundred dollars. Not long afterward, Scott admitted that the money had disappeared. He suspected Zelda had hidden it. They fought constantly and themselves predicted their marriage couldn’t succeed.

  While most of Dorothy’s wedded friends were less noisy about their troubl
es than the Fitzgeralds, their marriages seemed no better. Benchley—or Fred, as she had begun to call him—was in a dreadful mess. George Kaufman had stopped sleeping with Beatrice. Frank Adams bedded a succession of young women, whose names he flaunted in his column for his wife and a million New Yorkers to read over their morning coffee. Dorothy could find nothing inspiring about the marriages of Heywood Broun and Harold Ross. Ruth Hale and Jane Grant, paragons of feminist strength, may have kept their maiden names, but they spent much of their time running households and entertaining their husbands’ friends, exactly like those oppressed wives who had relinquished their names.

  Another marriage that had gone sour was her sister’s. After a dozen years and two children with George Droste, Helen had finally made the difficult decision to call it quits. Ever since the Droste bakery had been sold to the National Biscuit Company, George had been assured of wealth whether he cared to work or not; mostly he did not. While Dorothy’s contact with Bert and Mate was increasingly infrequent, she remained close to “Mrs. Drots.” She confided in her about the troubles with Eddie and was equally familiar with Helen’s discontentment and George’s infidelities. Her sister had never supported herself, but was accustomed to money and maids. How she might manage on her own was problematic. Helen also feared that if she divorced George he might remarry, sire more children, and disinherit Bill and Lel. The obvious solution was not to divorce him, but that meant Helen would never be able to remarry either. To Dorothy it seemed inconceivable that she and Helen, born well-off and having made so-called good marriages, could be working their way down to poverty. Life was growing increasingly complex for the daughters of J. Henry Rothschild.