Dorothy Parker: What Fresh Hell Is This?

by Marion Meade

  Feeling the need for reforms in her life, she resigned her theater column in Ainslee’s, the literary magazine she joined after Vanity Fair. After five years as a drama critic, she saw relatively few plays she did not detest. She was beginning to run out of nasty cracks and to repeat herself. The magazine replaced her with a writer who aped her literary mannerisms, an irony because Dorothy was now eager to abandon them. Nineteen twenty-three marked a major turning point in her prose. Until that year, she had taken as her themes subjects that reflected not so much her own preoccupations as the country’s. Throughout the first years of the decade, she was sensitive to the mood of contemporary America. Since that mood tended to be one-dimensional and frivolous, so was her work. For her light verse, she mined and remined familiar terrain—cynical flappers, mothers from Montclair obsessed with Junior’s tonsils, self-conscious young marrieds desperate to be thoroughly modern, America’s obsession with prosperity and mediocrity. Much of what she wrote was mediocre. Nearly everything she wrote found a buyer, in itself a comment on the quality of her work.

  What seemed acceptably cute in 1921 made her wince in 1923, and mortified her by 1925. Still, the dozens of hokey verses and prose pieces that she continued to publish initially established her reputation as a humorous poet. Critic-friends such as F.P.A. and Heywood Broun held a high opinion of her verse and so did enthusiastic editors like George Horace Lorimer, who was willing to pay top dollar because it sold his magazine. The content of her verse began to change drastically, as she now marched past her readers a procession of macabre images not generally associated with popular humor. Satin gowns turn into shrouds, decomposing corpses clinically observe the activity of worms, the living dead ghoulishly deck themselves with graveyard flowers. There were alarming glimpses, no more than a series of snapshots, of the tragedies that would be recognized by twentieth century women as peculiarly their own: the gut-searing loneliness of the women who have “careers,” the women who don’t marry, the women who do but divorce; the women deprived of maternal warmth and comfort who are condemned to seek love forever in the barren soil of husbands and children and even animals; women howling primitively for nourishment, flanked on one side by rejecting mothers and on the other by rejecting lovers. Her verse began to acknowledge the timeless subject of female rage.

  As the weeks passed, her mental condition became more vigorous, as if the experience of almost dying had cathartically released pent-up energies and purged her depression. Sometimes she felt as if she had died, except that she continued to walk around, holding herself tall “with my head flung up” and carrying “between my ribs ... a gleaming pain.” She began writing another short story, “Too Bad,” this time evidently feeling more confident of herself because she was able to leave Benchley’s life as a fictional subject and move on to her own experiences for the first time:“Like your pie, Ernie?” she asked vivaciously.

  “Why, I don’t know,” he said, thinking it over. “I’m not so crazy about rhubarb, I don’t think. Are you?”

  “No, I’m not so awfully crazy about it,” she answered. “But then, I’m not really crazy about any kind of pie.”

  “Aren’t you really?” he said, politely surprised. “I like pie pretty well—some kinds of pie.”

  “Do you?” The polite surprise was hers now.

  “Why, yes,” he said. “I like a nice huckleberry pie or a nice lemon meringue pie, or a—” He lost interest in the thing himself, and his voice died away.

  Grace and Ernest Weldon are a childless couple who have been married seven years and are regarded by their friends as models of marital devotion. In reality, they are uncongenial strangers who happen to share the same bed. Warily cheerful, unbelievably polite, they have passed far beyond the point where either of them cares enough to fight, drink, or hate, and they have absolutely nothing to say to each other. The Weldons, unlike the Parkers, do not drink and are in no sense people who lead unusual lives. Otherwise, the alliances are identical. When the Weldons split up, their friends find it incomprehensible and can only murmur trite condolences: It’s too bad.

  Just as Dorothy eventually portrayed the early years of her marriage in “Big Blonde,” she recounted its demise in “Too Bad,” which appeared in the July 1923 issue of The Smart Set. The fact that she wrote and published this story while still living with Eddie indicates it was a public announcement, not only to her Round Table friends but perhaps also to Eddie and his family. The concealed message was that while they were not yet ready to part, they had given up.

  For the rest of the year, they preserved appearances. In contrast to the frenzied years, they lived peaceably, and once they had accepted the hopelessness of their situation, began to behave like schoolchildren showing their best manners. An understanding of who had been at fault was important to Dorothy. In seeking causes, she blamed the Rothschilds and went on to flagellate herself because as a half-Jew she should have known better than to have married a Gentile, particularly a Gentile above her station. In the peculiar poem inspired by this analysis, she hastened to absolve Eddie from any responsibility in the matter:Who was there had seen us

  Wouldn’t bid him run?

  Heavy lay between us

  All our sires had done.

  In the anti-Semitic “Dark Girl’s Rhyme,” where her self-loathing suddenly bobs to the surface, Eddie’s forebears are portrayed as far from perfect but her own people are dark, very nearly evil, “devil-gotten sinners” dismissed by the Gentile world as fools. Eddie’s rejection of her was only natural. She ignored such factors as their immaturity and the emotional fissures caused by a world war. She also pushed aside the devastating injuries done to their marriage by alcohol and morphine dependencies, which enabled her to avoid asking two crucial questions: What caused her attraction to an addict in the first place, and what was it about her that drew unstable men? She never acknowledged her need for the chemically addicted. It seemed a random event rather than a pattern. Since she could not confront the issue, it was always there, the prepared trap into which she would stumble again and again.

  The healing scars on her wrists almost defied detection. As they faded, so did her earlier sense of despair. Suddenly she seemed to be having fun and prospering, earning decent money from Life and The Saturday Evening Post for verse and long feature articles. She guessed that it would be a long time before she made, as she wrote, “a few million—I figure, by the way things are running now, I ought to have it piled up somewhere around the late spring of 2651.” She and Benchley had given up their office. Though she was working from her apartment, they continued to take a close interest in each other’s writing and even collaborated on an advertising brochure for Stetson hats. In “What a Man’s Hat Means to Me,” she was in her usual droll form:I don’t say that I am one of those big business women that make anywhere between ten and twelve dollars a month, in their spare time, by reading character from the shape of the hair-cut or the relative positions of the mouth and the ear. In fact, if I were to sit down and tell you how often I have been fooled on some of the most popular facial characteristics, we’d be here all afternoon. All I say is, give me a good, honest look at a man’s hat and the way he wears it, and I’ll tell you what he is within five pounds, or give you your money back.

  That winter she became friendly with the tall, dark-haired poet Elinor Wylie, whose work Dorothy admired. Most likely, they met for the first time at one of Mrs. Simeon Ford’s poetry dinners, rather hoity-toity literary affairs at which writers were served an excellent meal in exchange for an after-dinner recitation. (“Everyone,” Mrs. Ford would remind her more retiring guests, “must sing for his supper.”) During dinner, conversation turned enthusiastically to Walt Whitman, with one of the guests declaring that the two greatest people who had ever lived must have been Whitman and Jesus Christ. Wylie, asked for her opinion, named John Milton as her favorite poet. Amid cries of general horror and disapproving murmurs of “She says she likes Milton!” (all of which had to be repeated loudly f
or the deaf Mrs. Ford), the fan of Whitman and Jesus turned to Wylie and said, “I thought you were a good poet. You haven’t been influenced by Milton!” To which Wylie promptly replied, “You admire Jesus Christ, but you don’t behave like him, do you?” Dorothy could not help liking Elinor at once.

  Wylie, reputedly a femme fatale, was thirty-seven. Her personal life had been marked by a number of tragedies, including the suicides of a brother and sister, and also by the juiciest sort of scandal. She had been born Elinor Hoyt into a socially prominent Philadelphia family. In 1906 she married a handsome, well-born schizophrenic named Philip Hichborn and bore a son. Four years later, leaving behind her infant, she ran away with Horace Wylie, a married Washington attorney and lived with him in Europe under an assumed name. Wylie suffered from periods of despondency. Once, the story goes, she appeared at the apartment of Katherine Anne Porter, saying that she planned to kill herself and Porter was the only friend she wished to bid farewell. An annoyed Porter replied, “Well, good-bye Elinor,” and shut the door. Having finally married Wylie, she had divorced him and now planned to marry the poet William Rose Benét.

  If the Ford parties were made bearable for Dorothy by the presence of Elinor Wylie, sometimes she encountered less welcome people such as Mercedes de Acosta, a face out of the past. The little rich girl who had been Dorothy’s ally at Blessed Sacrament was the author of a novel and two books of verse. A twenties jet-setter who numbered among her intimate friends Eleanora Duse, Marlene Dietrich, and Sarah Bernhardt, Mercedes had married, but it appeared to be a marriage of companionship because her affairs with women were an open secret. Despite their common cause against the nuns at the age of seven, Dorothy was far from appreciative at seeing Mercedes, nor did she wish to be reminded of Blessed Sacrament, where she had spent some of the worst years of her life.

  Sailboats from the Manhasset Yacht Club dotted the choppy green water of the Sound when Dorothy made her first visit to the pleasure domes of the very rich. The modest resort towns along the ragged southern shore of Long Island had been familiar to her since childhood, but the north shore constituted an entirely different world. It was not called the Gold Coast for nothing. On East Shore Road in the town of Great Neck, Herbert and Maggie Swope rented an ornate old mansion overlooking the bay. Across an empty field was Ring Lardner’s house, while Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald lived on nearby Gateway Drive. It was the Swopes’ house that Dorothy made her weekend headquarters throughout most of the twenties.

  Herbert Bayard Swope was considered by his contemporaries to be the foremost newspaper reporter of his generation. He was big and overbearing, with the velocity of a human hurricane, the tastes of a Roman emperor, and hair the color of carrots. Cocksure, bouncing from one enthusiasm to the next, he was a compulsive talker and namedropper. The Round Tablers held a high opinion of the man, which had nothing to do with the fact that at one time or another he had employed most of them. Woollcott, F.P.A., Deems Taylor, even Benchley for a brief period, were all World columnists, as was Heywood Broun who said of Swope that if he sounded like a big bluff that was only ten percent right. “He is a big bluff but in addition to that he’s got the stuff.” Having the stuff meant that Swope had won the first Pulitzer Prize for reporting in 1917 for his work as a war correspondent and had gone on to become executive editor of the World three years later. Although the paper did not belong to him, he often behaved as if it did and its owner Ralph Pulitzer didn’t seem to mind. When Swope retired from the World in 1928, at the age of forty-six, he sold his interest for six million dollars.

  Swope and his wife liked to live on a lavish scale. At Great Neck they turned their house into a summer playground for friends and assorted gatecrashers. Their parties served as the inspiration and model for Scott Fitzgerald as he began writing The Great Gatsby that summer. Seldom were formal invitations issued. People jumped into their cars and drove until, somehow, they ended at the Swopes’ door. The world and its mistress, as Fitzgerald wrote, gathered at Gatsby’s house and “twinkled hilariously on the lawn.” They chatted endlessly about theater gossip and antiques; they drank and passed out and revived, and they talked stock tips and horse racing. Some of those who accepted Herbert Swope’s hospitality in Great Neck paid him, as they did Jay Gatsby, the subtle tribute of knowing little about him.

  Across the way, sipping Canadian ale on his porch, Ring Lardner observed the Swope pageant with annoyance. He seemed irked that his neighbor was running “an almost continuous house party.” There were large numbers of people roaming the woods because the Swopes liked to organize treasure hunts that sent guests scurrying through the shrubbery in search of sapphire cufflinks and other gewgaws. Sometimes the city folks got confused and forgot where they were staying, “for they wander in at all hours demanding refreshment and entertainment at the place that happens to be nearest at the moment,” Lardner complained. Maggie Swope, who smugly called her house “an absolutely seething bordello of interesting people,” showed no trace of concern for her censorious neighbors. Scott Fitzgerald happily described Great Neck as “a very drunken town full of intoxicated people and retired debauchees + actresses,” and thought it was wonderful. Others claimed that anything could happen there. Despite Lardner’s grumbling that the town was becoming a “social sewer,” his complaints seem forced and he too was probably enjoying the spectacle.

  The Long Island season began in the spring and continued until Thanksgiving. During these months it was Dorothy’s habit to arrive at the Swopes’ on late Saturday afternoon and settle down on the verandah overlooking the circular driveway with a glass of imported Scotch, all of the Swope liquor having been tested and certified by a competent pharmacist. There she waited for the other guests to assemble. At that hour, it was not unusual to find that her host and hostess had not yet risen for the day, but she generally had plenty of company. Frank Adams might be there, as would Ruth Gordon and her husband Gregory Kelly, Robert and Mary Sherwood, and Ethel Barrymore; Heywood Broun and Aleck Woollcott would be organizing a croquet game; invariably she found an assortment of politicians, gamblers, and poets. Often Dorothy got into conversation with a close friend of Swope’s, a man with a thatch of white hair who she learned was Bernard Baruch. Despite their talks, he continued to mystify her. She knew that he was speculator-rich, negotiated armistices, and kept going to Washington to see President Coolidge, but still she could not figure out exactly what he did. There were two things that would always bewilder her, she joked: how zippers worked and the exact function of Bernard Baruch.

  At the Swopes’, tea was served at six or seven, dinner at midnight. No guest of his, Swope boasted, went to bed before three in the morning, although some of them passed out long before that. Maggie Swope engaged two shifts of servants and spent a thousand dollars a week on groceries. If ever Dorothy felt hungry in the middle of the night, she could order a steak or a bottle of champagne. When she awoke on Sundays at noon and rang for breakfast, it was brought on a tray with pink breakfast china that matched the pink linen napkins, along with an assortment of newspapers. The Swopes’ stylish yet vulgar way of living attracted and disgusted Dorothy, who hated their money but wished it was hers. She never wore out her welcome at their house because the only unforgivable sin in their eyes was dullness. Dorothy, never dull, was the perfect guest, who could always rise to the occasion. Seated once next to Governor Albert Ritchie of Maryland, she listened politely as a series of questions were addressed to the governor about the state of the union. When this high-toned colloquy was interrupted by a drunk’s noisy belch, she turned to the offender and said she would ask the governor to pardon him.

  Dorothy repaid the Swopes’ hospitality by giving them a dog. Their collection of pedigreed pets included an imported English pug that had been a gift from Baruch, two Pekinese, and several German shepherds. Her contribution to their menagerie of purebreds was a cur she rescued on Sixth Avenue after she saw a truck driver kicking it aside. Scooping up the filthy animal, she took her to Neysa’s stu
dio, gave her a bath, and named her Amy. The dog proved to be a good-natured coquette whose only bad habit was a perverse craving for Neysa’s rose madder paints, so Dorothy decided that Amy would be happier living in the country, perhaps in fancy country like Great Neck. The idea of Amy the mongrel installed in the Swopes’ kennel pleased her greatly.

  Other estates where Dorothy became a regular weekend house guest included Ralph Pulitzer’s mansion in Manhasset and Averell Harriman’s family seat, Arden House, on the Hudson River. On one visit there, Dorothy took the precaution of bringing along a box of candy because she found the food inedible. Once each summer the banker Otto Kahn permitted Aleck Woollcott to plan an entire weekend and dictate the guest list. Woollcott was free to invite whomever he wished, so long as they were not stupid or boring. Dorothy and fifty or sixty others who happened to be in Woollcott’s good graces at the moment trooped out to Kahn’s 126-room French chateau at Cold Spring Harbor, Long Island. Addie Kahn, having checked Woollcott’s guest list, would flee to New York, leaving her husband alone to entertain “your zoo.” At Kahn’s nine-million-dollar monument to the golden age of capitalism, Dorothy and the Round Tablers consumed fountains of mint juleps and gin rickeys, played Ping-Pong and charades and wild, emotional games of croquet that knocked over garden furniture and broke windows in the greenhouse. Their behavior at meals was not much better. “Can I order from the menu?” Frank Adams asked the footman standing behind his chair. “Or do I have to take the blue-plate special?” Kahn, presiding over the table in the grand ballroom with his dachshunds at his feet, only smiled.