Dorothy Parker: What Fresh Hell Is This?

by Marion Meade

  Being alone terrified her. It was fine when she felt happy, but if she happened to be melancholy she got “the howling horrors.” With her Round Table friends, who made her feel funny and lovable, the howling horrors could be kept at a distance.

  She closed the year 1921 at a New Year’s Eve party given by Ruth Hale and Heywood Broun in the brownstone they had newly purchased on the Upper West Side. It was a large, noisy gathering, some two hundred guests crowded into the first floor, which had been emptied of furniture and filled up with folding chairs so that anyone who wished to could practice the old custom of jumping into the new year. In place of food Ruth and Heywood provided nutrition by brewing up a huge vat of gin and orange juice, which was replenished several times during the evening.

  “A great party and merry as can be,” wrote F.P.A., noting that the house had been aglitter with celebrities. “Saw there Mistress Claire Sheridan in the prettiest pink dress ever I saw her wear.... Saw H.G. Wells, too.... Miss M. Leech there too and Mistress Pinna Cruger, one prettier than the other; but I loved Mistress Dorothy Parker the best of any of them, and loath to leave her, which I did not do till near five in the morning, and so home.”

  Chapter 6

  PAINKILLERS

  1922-1923

  She could never quite remember the day when she discovered that a drink could make her feel better. It was not hard to remember when Robert Benchley made that discovery: the evening of the championship fight between Jack Dempsey and Georges Carpentier. She had been celebrating Dempsey’s four-round victory at Tony Soma’s speakeasy with Robert Sherwood and Scott and Zelda, when Benchley came in and joined them. Although he drank nothing stronger than coffee, it was not unusual to find him at Tony’s, where he was apt to get preachy, always tut-tutting Dorothy about her Tom Collinses and grumpily sermonizing that alcohol made people act unlike themselves. That evening, however, was different. At the urging of his friends, he agreed to sample an orange blossom. When the waiter placed the drink on the white tablecloth, Benchley took a tentative sip, pulled a face, then put the glass down carefully before pronouncing his verdict.

  “I hope this place is closed by the police,” he said.

  One rainy night several weeks later, having meanwhile broadened his sampling of medicinal spirits from orange blossoms to whiskey sours, he left Tony’s with Don Stewart. Coming toward them down West Forty-ninth Street they saw a man holding an umbrella over his head. Stewart ducked under the umbrella.

  “Yale Club, please,” he instructed the astonished pedestrian.

  Off they went, leaving Benchley with his mouth open. He could not deny being impressed. After he graduated to rye, he expressed astonishment that the smell reminded him of his Uncle Albert and said that what he always thought had been his uncle’s distinctive odor had actually been whiskey fumes. Perhaps the smell also brought back memories of his father.

  Dorothy and Benchley became a regular twosome at Tony’s, where they drank from thick white china cups so heavy that they bounced on the floor without breaking. As a rule, Tony’s customers behaved fairly well, but Dorothy and Benchley in their cups would become rambunctious. When another customer showed them a watch that he claimed was indestructible, they offered to test it: They promptly slammed it against the tabletop, then threw it on the ground and began to stomp on it. Finally the dismayed owner was able to rescue his timepiece and held it up to his ear.

  “It’s stopped!” he cried.

  “Maybe you wound it too tight,” they replied together.

  Although Dorothy still found the undisguised taste of liquor disgusting, she did continue to explore drinking. Gin, she learned, could not be trusted because it made her miserably sick. After a good deal of experimentation, she found that Scotch whisky, without water, was generally quick, safe, and reliable. Eddie urged her to drink, even though Haig & Haig was selling for twelve dollars a quart at current bootleg prices, because he hoped it might lessen her endless scoldings about his drinking. Finally, she agreed. As she later revealed in a short story, drinking together meant an hour or two of cockeyed wild times, before the situation got out of hand. She turned censorious, he called her a lousy sport and an old crab, then he stalked out in a fury. Sometimes he stayed out all night and refused the next day to say where he’d been. Worse were the mornings when she woke with bruises, and she once suffered a black eye.

  Whenever she drank with Eddie, the alcohol tended to make her jittery. She did find that drinking without him was enjoyable and that Scotch helped her to function better. It seemed almost miraculous how little sips, spaced regularly throughout the day, could act as an effective tranquilizer.

  The best drinking company was Benchley or other Round Tablers like Heywood Broun, who had a habit of fueling himself all day long from his hip flask. Their easy masculine camaraderie allowed her to banish the most recent squabble with Eddie from her thoughts, and there was always one to forget. The liquor made her feel cheerful and loose, clever remarks spun spontaneously from her lips, until everyone was falling down with laughter and she felt appreciated and loved.

  Never did Dorothy appear drunk. But she was seldom completely sober either.

  In the spring of 1922, she was temporarily distracted from her marital troubles when the Round Tablers presented an amateur musical. A hit revue called Chauve-Souris, was running at the Forty-ninth Street Theater. The Round Table decided to rent the theater on a Sunday evening when the house was dark and to stage their own show, which they planned to call No Sirree. Dorothy’s contribution, the lyrics for a song called “The Everlastin’ Ingenue Blues,” was sung by Robert Sherwood and a chorus line of actresses that included Tallulah Bankhead, Helen Hayes, Winifred Lenihan, and a petite brunette named Mary Brandon, whom Sherwood married later that year. Benchley improvised a monologue he had dreamed up in a taxi on his way to the theater. It was a committee report delivered by an assistant treasurer called in to pinch-hit for the regular treasurer who was ill. Though this assistant was a bad speaker, he became caught up in the spell of his own oratory and got carried away. The audience seemed to find Benchley’s “Treasurer’s Report” quite droll. Musically, No Sirree must have been an intriguing oddity, for Deems Taylor wrote the music, Irving Berlin conducted the orchestra, and Jascha Heifetz provided offstage accompaniment.

  According to Laurette Taylor, who reviewed No Sirree for The New York Times, it was silly and totally amateurish, a criticism that was beside the point. The Round Tablers had a wonderful time. Afterward, the cast and audience, all friends of theirs, adjourned to Herbert and Maggie Swopes’ for a party that broke up at four in the morning.

  After that single performance of No Sirree, Benchley said, “My whole life changed its course.” Irving Berlin and his partner, Sam Harris, thought his monologue was hilarious and wondered if he might want to repeat “The Treasurer’s Report” in the next edition of The Music Box Revue. Benchley was incredulous. He hadn’t even written it down. He wondered whether appearing as a performer might be a conflict of interest for a drama critic. As a joke, he asked for five hundred dollars a week. Harris was silent for a moment, then answered, “Well, for five hundred dollars you’d better be awfully good.” A surprised Benchley promised them he would think it over.

  He and Dorothy spent so much time together that people thought of them as a couple. Edmund Wilson believed their relationship was “special” and “rather peculiar” in that Dorothy seemed to regard Benchley as “a kind of saint,” but Wilson did not suppose them to be sexually involved. Others assumed they must be. When a gossip columnist printed an item insinuating they were having an affair, Benchley was so upset that he sought out Parkie and apologized for the columnist’s malice. Even some of the Round Tablers had their suspicions. One evening when Aleck Woollcott was entertaining the son of William Allen White by taking the Harvard freshman to a first night, he began to point out celebrities in the audience. The young man seemed most interested in Benchley, whom he noticed sitting with a dark-haired woman.
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br />   He whispered to Woollcott, “And that, I suppose would be Mrs. Benchley.”

  “So I have always understood,” Woollcott replied, “but it is Mrs. Parker.” Later he attempted to excuse this bit of nastiness by claiming that he had not yet known either of them long enough to understand the “lack of romantic content” in their relations.

  Actually, theirs was very much a romance of the unconsummated, nineteenth-century variety, when the poetic notion of soul mates was not considered extraordinary. Dorothy’s devotion was sororal. Benchley was her precious companion and closest conndant—and she also loved him. There was nothing remarkable about this because his male friends also found him lovable. Don Stewart said it was hard not to love Benchley, because he made people feel warm and clever. “If he had been a woman,” Stewart declared, “I would have married him.”

  If Stewart had been married to Benchley, he would have seen little of his spouse. How serious an issue Dorothy was between the Benchleys is unknown, but Gertrude would have a lot bigger problems than Mrs. Parker.

  That spring, it became clear that Eddie wanted to end their marriage. As Dorothy would recount in “Big Blonde,”

  Each time he left the place in a rage, he threatened never to come back. She did not believe him, nor did she consider separation. Somewhere in her head or her heart was the lazy, nebulous hope that things would change and she and Herbie settle suddenly into soothing married life. Here was her home, her furniture, her husband, her station. She summoned no alternatives.

  Suddenly Eddie painted New York City as Gomorrah. He thought that if he returned to Hartford, perhaps he would be able to pull himself together and make a fresh start. Apparently Dorothy refused to take him seriously because she expressed her reaction in a poem that imagined their life together away from the city. The verse is mockingly titled “Day-Dreams”:We’d build a little bungalow

  If you and I were one,

  And carefully we’d plan it so

  We’d get the morning sun.

  I’d rise each day at rosy dawn

  And bustle gaily down;

  In evening’s cool, you’d spray the lawn

  When you came back from town.

  She promised to buy a cookbook and learn to cook, and even if the casserole turned out burnt and dry, she knew he would be understanding. She would sew and scrub. If her mind required cultivation she would join a women’s club.

  If you and I were one, my dear,

  A model life we’d lead.

  We’d travel on, from year to year,

  At no increase of speed.

  Ah, clear to me the vision of

  The things that we should do!

  And so I think it best, my love,

  To string along as two.

  A thumb of the nose was her answer to Hartford, and then the ball was back in his court. After so many furious but empty threats, she did not believe he would actually leave. They continued to string along as a couple. Memorial Day found them in Hartford visiting his family. Dorothy took with her a draft of a lengthy article, some nine or ten months overdue, that she had been promising The Saturday Evening Post. It was about out-of-town visitors in New York. Guilty about her tardiness and feeling frantic, she found that the trip provided incentive because she was able to base some of the provincials in the piece on the Parkers and their friends. In a seizure of inspiration, she dispatched it to the editor:Maybe it’s the New England influence—we are up with my in-laws for over the holiday—but this simply won’t turn out funny. I don’t dare keep it any longer, and so I’m taking a shot at sending it anyway. I look for the worst—

  Hopefully, Dorothy Parker

  George Horace Lorimer must have been pleased because “Welcome Home” was published a few weeks later.

  There was no trip to Connecticut for the Fourth of July. They spent a tense holiday in the city and went to dinner with Frank Adams. Quite soon after this the final explosion took place, and Eddie left for Hartford by himself. With the exception of Benchley, the Round Tablers did not receive an accurate account of the parting. Their assumption, which Dorothy did not bother to correct, was that the separation had been amicable, with Parkie begging her to come along and Dottie naturally refusing because she could not leave the Algonquin to live in a place where people had the mentalities of fruit flies. Not until seven years later, when she dealt with the scene in her fiction, did she describe her husband’s anger and her bewilderment over the impossible actually happening. One day she came home to find him stuffing clothes into a suitcase. When he insisted that he was finished, she did not attempt to talk him out of the decision.

  As she had written in “Day-Dreams,” she honestly felt they would be better off apart. But that had been theory and had nothing to do with the emotions that now swept over her, a sadness that she took good care to conceal. Wishing to avoid pity, she proceeded to face her friends well-armored. She pretended that nothing of particular significance had taken place. When some people suggested that Parkie would surely return, she spikily insisted they were wrong and in any case she didn’t care. Privately, she was dwelling on her estranged husband in an obsessive way. Any day she was able to chase him from her thoughts successfully, with the help of Scotch, she counted as a victory.

  In August, she passed her twenty-ninth birthday with little pleasure or enthusiasm. Twenty-nine was dangerously close to thirty, which meant to her that the best years of her life were already behind, and all she had to show for them was a failed marriage. Her considerable achievements seemed trivial and suddenly unsatisfying.

  Even though Dorothy became known for writing about uniquely female experiences, the theme of her first attempt at short fiction was male oppression, and the oppressed male was Robert Benchley. That she would write about him rather than herself was hardly surprising and certainly not coincidental. In her verse as in her fiction, she always wrote about herself or else drew portraits of people she knew, describing them so vividly that everyone in her circle knew exactly to whom she was referring. She was almost incapable of doing purely imagined characters or situations. In 1922, not yet prepared to expose herself, writing about her own failed marriage proved far too difficult. It was logical for her to address Benchley’s problem, with which she strongly identified anyway.

  By the end of the summer, after many months of meticulous work to perfect the story, she finally finished “Such a Pretty Little Picture.” It begins with a man standing in his yard in summer, clipping his hedges, the evening cool with the smell of grass and the funny before-supper quiet of a suburban street. He is daydreaming. Mr. Wheelock is a wimp, an undistinguished man who has no first name and needs none because both his wife and daughter call him “Daddy.” He secretly longs to flee:Some summer evening like this, say, when Adelaide was sewing on buttons, up on the porch, and Sister was playing somewhere about. A pleasant, quiet evening it must be, with the shadows lying long on the street that led from their house to the station. He would put down the garden shears, or the hose, or whatever he happened to be puttering with—not throw the thing down, you know, just put it quietly aside—and walk out of the gate and down the street, and that would be the last they’d see of him. He would time it so that he’d just make the 6:03 for the city comfortably.

  Mr. Wheelock, like James Thurber’s Walter Mitty, contents himself with fantasies and continues to clip his hedges, while his wife and daughter look on from the porch and neighbors passing by remark on what a pretty domestic picture the family makes.

  In this tale, Dorothy sensitively developed a character living out the most common, banal of circumstances. Nothing Mr. Wheelock does surprises us, for he is us, the part of us that knows sometimes we cannot do anything we like with our lives, because it is just not possible. While her portrait of Robert Benchley was incomplete, the general outline conformed to his situation and it was uniquely his truth.

  She sold “Such a Pretty Little Picture” to The Smart Set, a nonconformist literary magazine, coedited by Henry Mencken
and George Jean Nathan, which doted on realistic stories that spoke out against the ignorance and pretensions of the so-called average American. Even though it published superior writers such as Eugene O’Neill and D. H. Lawrence, the pay was modest, probably less than fifty dollars. A dozen years later, when Burton Rascoe was editing a Smart Set anthology and asked permission to include the story, Dorothy replied that “its mother thinks it’s the best thing she ever wrote, which would make it about on a parallel (oh, all right!) with the work of Carolyn Wells’s middle period.”

  Writing fiction was a torturous process for her. When she insisted that it took her six months to complete a story, it was often the case. Instead of making a first draft, she thought out each paragraph beforehand and then laboriously wrote it down in longhand sentence by sentence. She may have been careless about many aspects of living, but she was obsessively careful, a perfectionist, in her writing. Nothing pleased her and she couldn’t “write five words but that I change seven.” She named her characters from the obituary columns or the telephone book. The notion of jotting down ideas and phrases in a writer’s journal appealed to her and she managed to start one “but I could never remember where I put the damn thing.” Finally she typed out the story on her typewriter, a tool that frustrated and mystified her, as did all machines. Once, stymied in a struggle to change a ribbon, she abandoned the machine in disgust and quietly resolved the problem by buying a new one.