Dorothy Parker: What Fresh Hell Is This?

by Marion Meade

  “Such a Pretty Little Picture” marked the beginning of her literary career, but pride in her achievement was overshadowed by the departure of Eddie, by the emptiness of the flat, and the vague but unmistakable whiff of failure. Since her obsession had arisen and walked away, there was only herself to look after, a person she had never believed worth much trouble. From another perspective, her situation had dramatically improved overnight because now she was released from a variety of humiliations. There was an opportunity to heal herself, if she desired. She did not.

  Accustomed to chaos, she hardly knew what to do with herself without Eddie and felt compelled to replace him immediately. Marc Connelly said that “when they were living together I don’t think she had any lovers. But after Eddie left, then the men were in and out of her house like mail.” But not at once. First, Dorothy fell in love.

  When she met Charles Gordon MacArthur, he was a twenty-seven-year-old newspaperman with curly brown hair, an elfin grin, and charm that left few people of either sex unaffected. Everyone who knew him, said Aleck Woollcott, “always lights up and starts talking about him as if he was a marvelous circus that had once passed his way.” MacArthur’s beginnings were rooted in poverty and violent religiosity. He was the son of a mother who died early of exhaustion and an Elmer Gantry—like evangelist father who could smell a sinner ten miles away on a windless day. Chasing the ungodly from Scranton, Pennsylvania, to Chicago, to Nyack, New York, where he finally settled down, William Telfer MacArthur believed he owned a direct line to the Almighty. Having convinced himself that his six children must be in the sulfurous grasp of Lucifer, he would line them up, MacArthur recalled, “beseech God in a firm voice to forgive us, uncover our backs and whale the hell out of us. He kept a strap soaked in vinegar to make it a finer instrument of the Lord.” At fourteen, he was sent to Wilson Academy in Nyack, a seminary with a curriculum that leaned heavily on prayer and Bible study and with an aim to train boys for the ministry and missionary work. After his mother died in 1913, he ran away to New York City and found employment as a salesman in the necktie department of Lord & Taylor.

  From there he moved to Chicago and got jobs on newspapers. During the Pershing expedition to Mexico, MacArthur joined the First Illinois Cavalry, and in the World War he served in France with the Rainbow Division. Afterward he returned to Chicago, where he became a reporter on the Herald-Examiner. By the early 1920s, he and his friend Ben Hecht had become the highest-paid newsmen in the city.

  In 1922, he went to work for the New York American, but by this time his ambition was to become a playwright. He met Aleck Woollcott in New York. As drama critic for the World, Woollcott, who had appointed himself keeper of the gateway to theatrical and literary fame, immediately began to regard MacArthur as a fabulous personal discovery. Adoring his wild sense of humor, admiring him extravagantly (as he would his next enthusiasm, Harpo Marx), Woollcott affectionately christened MacArthur “Baby Vomit” and brought him around to the Algonquin to meet his friends.

  Since playing matchmaker was one of Woollcott’s favorite avocations, he naturally thought of bringing together Charlie and the woman who was, in his words, “a blend of Little Nell and Lady Macbeth,” and whose lacy sleeve had “a bottle of vitriol concealed in its folds.” Knowing that “our Mrs. Parker,” as he possessively called her, was alone and could use cheering up, he benevolently presented Charlie to her in the manner of a retriever laying a catch at his owner’s feet. Since Woollcott knew that MacArthur had a wife, his gift was not entirely an act of generosity.

  MacArthur, in common with Dorothy, had married his first love only to see it turn out badly, which was one reason he was living in New York but his wife was not. Two years earlier, at the Herald-Examiner’s water cooler, he had met Carol Frink whose duties as the paper’s so-called Girl Reporter included covering beekeepers’ conventions or dressing up as a Western Union messenger and delivering telegrams. Frink, a petite blonde with a tiny waistline and hair cut in an Ivanhoe pageboy, was loaded with so much pep that she once turned cartwheels down Michigan Avenue, which struck MacArthur as delightful. A few months later they were married by his father and spent their honeymoon at Coney Island. Frink’s ambition to quit her job and write a novel was encouraged by her husband, who appreciated bright, literary women. In due course he bought her a typewriter, a raccoon coat, and agreed to finance a retreat in the Michigan woods, which she believed a necessary condition for serious writing without interruption.

  By 1922, their relationship must have been fraying badly because Frink was not with MacArthur when he moved to New York. While they were separated geographically, the estrangement was far from final. Charlie continued to write her regularly, signing his letters “Charliecums” and similar baby-talking diminutives. Still, he was an unhappy man. Aside from knowing by now that Carol had little talent for writing fiction, he also suffered from loneliness and felt considerable antagonism toward his new home. New York, unlike Chicago, which he considered a reporter’s paradise, struck him as a phony, smart-aleck town more suitable for press agents than for newspapermen. Newspaper reporters customarily were hearty drinkers, but MacArthur drank more than most. Soon he was putting away a quart of Scotch every night. He was not a good-natured drunk. Hanging around subway entrances, he would yell, “God damn New Yorker! Deny you’re a lousy New Yorker!” More than one lousy New Yorker punched him in the mouth. Once, on a spree with his writer friend Gene Fowler, he began to feel sorry for the lonely dogs at the ASPCA pound and decided something should be done for them. Buying birthday cakes at a fancy French bakery, he delivered the sweets in a taxi. “My good man,” he announced to the ASPCA porter, “we’ve come to jubilate with your charges.”

  The attraction between Dorothy and Charles MacArthur was immediate and intense, a case of, Marc Connelly thought, “a two-ton truck meetin’ another two-ton truck. That was a collision on the highway there.” She made no secret of the fact that she found him the answer to her prayers or that she was captivated by his sense of humor and a playful recklessness reminiscent of Eddie Parker when she first had made his acquaintance. Soon they were seen constantly in each other’s company, at theater openings, at a party Irene Castle gave for her husband, at Tony Soma’s and numerous other speakeasies (and they were once caught by federal agents in a raid). In the late afternoons they usually could be found at Neysa’s studio, where Anita Loos caught a glimpse of Dorothy looking like a woman very much in love. It seemed clear to her that Dorothy’s “crush” was ill-advised, because MacArthur struck her as a playboy “not to be pinned down by any one girl.”

  Dorothy, meanwhile, was busily composing love poetry for Charlie who was, she wrote, her “one love,” a man for whom she wore her heart “like a wet, red stain” on her sleeve for all to see. The Round Tablers, who first had received the news of the affair with amusement, were now amazed at Dorothy’s innocence. Not only was she serious about Charlie but she seemed to expect that he would reciprocate the intensity of her feelings.

  MacArthur found her irresistible. She was the type of woman to whom he had always been drawn, even though he probably realized that this type was not necessarily what he needed. To him she was a pretty, successful writer with a Rabelaisian wit and a manner that seemed to be frankly sexual. There is no reason to believe that he regarded her as much more than a casual flirtation. He had disliked being married and now, technically single again, he was enjoying himself. In New York a few months, he had already established a reputation as a woman-chaser who bounced from bed to bed. Neysa McMein presented him with a rubber stamp that printed I LOVE YOU, a convenience in his many conquests, and Marc Connelly summed him up as “just a bird looking for the right twig to land on.” Dorothy chose to ignore the fact that he never remained on any twig for long.

  She was distraught when she saw him with other women and could not help bursting into tears, expecting that the sight of her pain might convince him of how deeply she loved him. “Lips that taste of tears,” she wrote,
“are the best for kissing.” Charlie did not agree. He was losing interest in her.

  To Dorothy’s consternation, she realized that she was pregnant. She had once dreamed of bearing Eddie’s child and only common sense had mercifully outrun her desire for maternity. She felt reluctant to let go of either her lover or her baby. Procrastinating, she worked on a Post piece about novelists who, like Scott Fitzgerald, make fortunes writing about the rebellious younger generation. She lived from day to day in bewildered agony, alternately denying and accepting the certainties of her situation. “It’s not the tragedies that kill us,” she believed. “It’s the messes. I can’t stand messes.” Her untimely pregnancy, a tragedy, also qualified as a sorry mess. She found herself, at the age of twenty-nine, married, pregnant, and carrying the child of another man, also married. Reluctance to abort the fetus only partially accounted for her paralysis. She seems to have been waiting, hoping that Charlie would return to her, hoping like a small child herself that painful choices would magically dissolve and allow them to dramatically shed their legal spouses before riding away into the sunset with their love child.

  In the fall she was busy rehearsing for another Round Table theatrical production. Encouraged by the success of No Sirree, the group was mounting a full-scale revue at the Punch and Judy Theatre where they hoped for an extended run. Dorothy and Benchley collaborated on a one-act drama, Nero, whose plot had little to do with Roman emperors but whose characters included Cardinal Richelieu playing solitaire, Generals Lee and Grant, Queen Victoria, and the New York Giants winning a pennant. The Forty-niners had other sketches concocted by Ring Lardner, Heywood Broun, and Howard Dietz and was staged by George Kaufman and Marc Connelly. Despite the considerable talent involved, it was a grab bag of hit-and-miss sketches, mostly miss. The Forty-niners opened on a rainy evening in early November and ran fifteen performances before closing. Frank Crowninshield said that maybe he missed the point “but was it all supposed to be taking place in an insane asylum?” Even Woollcott was embarrassed and admitted that the show “wasn’t fun. Not at all.”

  Dorothy, in the meantime, could delay no longer. After the revue folded, her doctor performed a legal hospital abortion. There was no problem about obtaining one, so long as she had the means to pay. Her guilt and anguish were exacerbated by the doctor, who was upset to discover in the operating room that she was further along than she had known or had admitted to him. Either from the physician’s remarks or perhaps from glimpsing the fetal material, she became convinced that the embryo’s hands were already formed, confirming her suspicion that she had done something truly wicked.

  For a while afterward, she numbly resisted the temptation to speak about the experience, but, in time, the truth became known to her friends. It was a subject she brought up periodically, usually late at night at Tony’s, when she had drunk a great deal and verged on brimming over with great emotional cloudbursts. Then, with little discrimination, she would unburden herself to her drinking companions, mostly males who classified abortion stories as woman talk and wished she would go home and sleep it off. Despite herself, she went on talking, haunted by the memory of the operation.

  Cruel stories began to make the rounds of the speakeasies. She was quoted as saying that the experience served her right for having put all her eggs in one bastard. Another piece of gossip reported that MacArthur had contributed thirty dollars toward the cost of the abortion, which had prompted Dorothy to declare that it was like Judas making a refund.

  On Christmas Day eight plays opened. It made her angry to imagine that others were at home checking on the fires caused by their Christmas tree candles or strolling to the ice box for a nibble of cold turkey, but she had no tree or turkey, no comfortable fireside where she might warm herself. Her apartment, despite the presence of Woodrow Wilson and Onan, seemed the saddest, loneliest place on the face of the earth, and to top it off she had to “wrap her shabby garments about her and rush out into the bitter night, to see as many as possible of the new plays.”

  Most of the time she was tired and depressed. Her tears could be stirred by almost anything—a stray cat, the horses on Sixth Avenue, their heads drooping. She began sleeping all day until it was time to dress and go out for the evening. Scotch, she found, only made her sleepy, and when she woke up, she felt worse than ever. Reveries, visions of serenity, slithered into her head and stuck there. She could not pinpoint any one moment when she first decided to kill herself. Instead it seemed as if the idea had been a possibility as long as she could remember, like an ache that could be ignored most of the time but then began to throb unexpectedly. In truth, she had no great passion for violence. What she objected to was existence, its futility, its complicated surges of sadness that always left her feeling more surprised than angry. Taking herself through a single day presented no burden, but having to repeat the effort day after day was tiresome.

  She became intrigued with suicide and began to research the subject like a bloodhound sniffing out a scent. She took the trouble to pore over daily newspapers in pursuit of suicide accounts, hoping to find useful details. Far from frightening her, the universe of self-inflicted destruction seemed cozy and reassuring, almost spellbinding. Somehow she managed to get through a bleak holiday.

  At 412 West Forty-seventh Street, Jane Grant and Harold Ross’s newly purchased brownstone, there was a tree hung with gifts for their friends. Ruth Hale and Heywood Broun gave their annual New Year’s Eve party. Dorothy joined an informal bridge class with Jane, Peggy Leech, and Winifred Lenihan. They began meeting once a week at each other’s homes to brush up on their game. She kept her expression cheerful at parties while she continued privately to obsess on ways to kill herself. She wondered how people actually went about it.

  When the time finally came, it was easy. Midway through January, on a gray Sunday when mountains of dirty snow melted at the curbs, she slept until late afternoon, as was her habit. It was unusually quiet in the flat because the Sixth Avenue elevated trains ran less frequently on Sundays. The room smelled of perfume, whiskey, and dog droppings, all aromas to which her nose had become inured. Feeling wretched, she huddled under the bed clothes with a bottle and a glass, drinking until she could delay getting up no longer. That evening she was supposed to go to the theater. When she did get out of bed, she hurriedly dialed the Swiss Alps restaurant to order up a meal and then pottered off to the bathroom where her eyes alighted on a discarded razor that Eddie had left behind, an object that must have been in plain view for six months. Whiskey, she would write in “Big Blonde,” “could still soothe her for most of the time, but there were sudden, inexplicable moments when the cloud fell treacherously away from her.”

  She cut the long bluish vein on her left wrist, then quickly slashed at the right one.

  Some time later, when the Swiss Alps brought her dinner, she was slumped unconscious on the bathroom floor and rushed by ambulance to Presbyterian Hospital.

  When Dorothy was sufficiently recovered to receive visitors, she prepared her performance. Even though she looked wan and still felt weak from crying, she greeted her Round Table friends with a cheerful grin and her customary barrage of four-letter words. Pale-blue ribbons were gaily tied around her bandaged wrists, and she waved her arms for emphasis as if she were proudly sporting a pair of diamond bracelets from Cartier’s. Had she been candid about her despair, they might have been forced to acknowledge the depth of her suffering and probably would have responded in a manner more suitable to the occasion. Playing it for laughs, she gave them an easy out.

  By the time she left Presbyterian, her self-mutilation had found its place in Round Table lore as one of her unpredictable eccentricities, a gesture not to be taken wholly seriously since she had the foresight to arrange for her own rescue by the Swiss Alps. This version enabled them to shrug off Dorothy’s unhappiness. Marc Connelly was not the only one who had the mistaken impression that “it was a little bit of theater, a young lady’s romantic concept of Victorian melodrama. Coffin
s and all that, you know.” According to Margalo Gillmore, “some people believed she did it because she wanted attention, although I didn’t understand that because she had a lot of attention.”

  Convalescing at home, she was finally well enough to entertain the bridge group. Jane Grant and the others knew she had tried to kill herself but Dorothy chose not to mention her bandaged wrists, which she had tied with black velvet ribbon and oversized bows.

  “What’s the matter, Dottie?” someone finally asked.

  “I suppose you might as well know,” she answered defensively. “I slashed my wrists. Eddie doesn’t even have a sharp razor.” It was the sort of tough talk that discouraged expressions of sympathy.

  Toward the end of January, Eddie returned from Hartford and quietly moved in with her. Dorothy agreed to try again because it seemed to be a logical solution, but she was not optimistic about their future. Charles MacArthur had returned to Chicago, there was no man in her life, and she felt grateful to have someone there. On Valentine’s Day it snowed almost all day and the city looked wonderful through swirling snowflakes. That evening they made their way through the snow-silented streets of the Upper West Side to attend a dinner at Frank and Minna Adams’s apartment. The only other guests were Frank Case and his wife Bertha. Everyone made a special effort to make Parkie feel at home and to regard them as a couple again.

  Soon afterward Neysa McMein did an oil painting of Dorothy. She was, Neysa declared, “a design” that was perfect in proportion and linear beauty. She insisted that in her experience no more than five women in a hundred could be called designs. Since Dorothy had always considered her figure badly proportioned, she may have suspected Neysa of pulling her leg but she did agree to pose for the painting, which subsequently was exhibited at the Chicago Art Institute and won an award. Dressed in a simple frock with a demure white collar, she looked at once younger and older than her twenty-nine years. She seems noticeably thin and pale, fragile, her hands clasped tensely on her knees. Her eyes seem to be regarding the world with the dulled cynicism of a woman who knows a great deal more than the viewer.