by Marion Meade
Being a professional guest had decided drawbacks, and there were times when Dorothy accepted invitations against her better judgment. Only after she had arrived and realized her mistake too late did she begin groaning to herself: “I knew it would be terrible. Only I didn’t think it would be as bad as this. This isn’t just plain terrible; this is fancy.” She would be stuck for fifty-six hours with people she abhorred and forced to sleep in a room that reminded her of an iron maiden and drink highballs so lethal that she feared a drop on her bare skin would scar her for life. What she hated most were hostesses who announced that maybe Dorothy would consent to recite “some of her little things for us” after dinner. Dorothy gritted her teeth. “Maybe she would,” she muttered under her breath. “And maybe there was no war.”
Long Island weekends ended on Monday mornings when Dorothy caught an early train to the city. In a bad mood or hungover, she blamed her condition on the Long Island Railroad, which forced her to climb off the train at Jamaica in Queens and board another train. “No matter where I go,” she complained, “I always have to change at Jamaica.” She bet the readers of Life that if she embarked on a nonstop transatlantic journey she would be required to change at Jamaica. It was terrible.
So was going back to her flat under the eyesore El on Sixth Avenue.
Eddie, meanwhile, continued to live with her. During the summer of 1923, they spent a week together in Vermont, and now and then he accompanied her to Swope weekends. Like the rest of the Round Tablers, Dorothy and Eddie had become passionate croquet players. Eddie usually teamed up with Frank Adams, while Dorothy joined Neysa McMein’s team. When darkness fell, the Swope guests flooded the lawn with their car headlights and went on playing until dinner was served at midnight. As fervent as Dorothy could get about the game, she felt this was going too far. Watching from the Lardner porch, she shook her head. “Jesus Christ,” she exclaimed. “The heirs of the ages.”
For a change, things were running smoothly for her. She no longer wrote for The Saturday Evening Post, because after a boring weekend at George Horace Lorimer’s Pennsylvania estate Dorothy had made unflattering remarks that had got back to him. She continued to contribute regularly to Life and also began working for the Bell Syndicate, which paid exceptionally well. She and Neysa teamed up to produce a series of syndicated pieces about celebrities. She interviewed and wrote a profile of the famous person while Neysa sketched a portrait. These assignments hardly felt like work because many of their subjects—Charlie Chaplin, Irene Castle—were people they knew. When assigned to interview Luis Angel Firpo, the Argentinian heavyweight who was preparing to fight Jack Dempsey, they went to Atlantic City where Firpo was training and made a party of it.
Although Dorothy had few memories of her childhood or her mother, she intuitively disliked the Jersey shore, felt uncomfortable about spending even so much as a day there, and sometimes apologized for having had the bad luck to be born in West End. “I was cheated out of the distinction of being a native New Yorker, because I had to go and get born while the family was spending the Summer in New Jersey, but, honestly, we came back to New York right after Labor Day, so I nearly made the grade.” On this occasion, she persuaded Benchley to join them. Flanked and shielded by her two friends, she advanced on the New Jersey coastline as if she were a doughboy revisiting Argonne Forest. Firpo’s house resembled “one of those Atlantic City chalets that looks as if a cuckoo ought to spring from the door every half hour and call the time.” Dorothy was a Dempsey fan but she decided that the “Wild Bull of the Pampas” was “a very nice boy.” After watching him train for a while, they went off in search of fun and wound up at the greyhound races. In contrast with Great Neck, Atlantic City was filthy and the ocean looked so unappetizing they did not bother to go swimming. It was “a horrible dump,” Benchley declared, crowded with “the worst bunch of people I have seen outside of Coney Island.”
In the fall Charles MacArthur returned to the city and his old job at the American, and he rejoined his friends at the Round Table. Dorothy resigned herself to the fact that she could not avoid him, especially since he had become chummy with Benchley. At the end of September, when Jane Grant, Harold Ross, and Aleck Woollcott finally threw a housewarming party for their new communal house on West Forty-seventh Street, she and Charlie got together with Harpo Marx to rent a street carousel so that the neighborhood children might have rides.
Dorothy continued to feel bitter about the abortion, but, since it was a bitterness she could not direct toward MacArthur, she deflected it onto others. Robert and Mary Sherwood were expecting a child. Nearly everyone at the Round Table found the tiny Mrs. Sherwood a thoroughgoing bully and a bore, a veteran whiner who tyrannized her husband with petulant demands to earn more money. Throughout her pregnancy, she spoke aggressively and incessantly about her symptoms and her plans to have a Caesarian. At the theater, whenever the stage action became too intense for her delicate condition, she conspicuously rose and cakewalked up the aisle, until Dorothy’s patience was exhausted. Compelled to offer congratulations after a daughter was finally born, Dorothy wired, GOOD WORK, MARY. WE ALL KNEW YOU HAD IT IN YOU, and sent the telegram collect.
Benchley, enjoying new celebrity as an actor, was appearing nightly in the Music Box Revue. He and singer Grace Moore were the hits of the show. Many theatergoers agreed with Heywood Broun when he wrote that “nothing of the season made me laugh as hard as ‘The Treasurer’s Report.’ ” Benchley had not given up his job reviewing plays for Life, which meant that he often had to be in two places at once. Finally he worked out a system: After going on stage at the Music Box at 8:50, for eight minutes, he dashed to the night’s opening where Dorothy or Don Stewart or Gertrude were covering the first act for him and explained what he had missed.
A few weeks later, without warning, he collapsed with a violent attack of arthritis. In due course, he became virtually disabled and needed crutches to get around. At the Music Box, he left the crutches in the wings and tottered on stage to deliver his monologue.
Gertrude Benchley, assessing the situation from Scarsdale, concluded that working two jobs was grueling, even if one of them required only sixty-four minutes a week. She noted that her husband rarely got home to the country before one in the morning and left for the Life office shortly before eight. Clearly this placed a great strain on his health. Dorothy, who had been paying close attention to the facts, did not make Gertrude’s assumptions. She knew exactly what had gone wrong with Benchley. She knew who had made it go wrong. The only thing she did not know was what he planned to do about it.
Chapter 7
LAUGHTER AND HOPE AND A SOCK IN THE EYE
1923-1924
Catastrophes fascinated her. In later years, living in California when summer forest fires were ravaging thousands of acres, she felt horrified at the magnitude of the holocaust, yet traveled many miles to view the blaze. At the sight of the horizon rolling endlessly in flames, she hid her face behind her hands and peered through her fingers. “Think how frightened all the little animals are,” she exclaimed, “the little squirrels, the little rabbits, all the little birds.” It was Dante’s inferno, it was Armageddon, it was the end of the world. She could scarcely believe her good fortune. “Do you think we could get any closer?” she asked the friend who had brought her. In 1923, similarly spellbound, she quietly watched Benchley’s marriage from behind crossed fingers. Not only had she made his domestic woes her chief literary material, but events in Scarsdale also influenced her feelings and subsequent decisions about her own marriage.
In the face of considerable evidence to the contrary, she persisted in regarding him as a slice of packaged white bread, unambiguous and predictable. She could not believe he would leave Gertrude. Both Dorothy and Benchley were genuinely confused. The crux of the matter was loyalty to people and concepts. Decent people, she had declared in “Such a Pretty Little Picture,” “just didn’t go away and leave their wives and family that way.” Tutored and propagandized b
y the nineteenth century, she believed that to be God’s truth, but she also suspected it was a lie because plenty of ordinary people were running away from their families in 1923. They were taking new spouses or sleeping with people who would never become their wives, or, like Eddie, just allowing themselves to be sucked up by their pasts and returning to hometowns they once had fled in revulsion. They were like Frank Adams, whose entanglement with Esther Root had made him spurn his long-suffering wife Minna after twenty years. It was impossible for Dorothy to believe that Benchley might be capable of a rebellion such as infidelity. “Good Lord,” she had written of Mr. Wheelock in “Such a Pretty Little Picture,” “the last thing he wanted was another woman.”
But her pretty little picture had begun to fade.
Robert Benchley had evolved a pessimistic theory. Each of us, he believed, whether we like it or not, tends to become the type of person we hate most. The idea was thoroughly repulsive to Dorothy. All the same, she had to admit there was something in it that spoke a simple truth. Like all of us who can be more clearsighted about our friends’ stupidities than our own, she could see the accuracy of the thesis at work in Benchley’s life. Only too well did she understand what he feared becoming—a weakling, a failure, a self-pitying drunk—for she felt the identical fears for herself.
The previous summer, while hesitating over whether to accept Irving Berlin’s offer to perform, Benchley stopped at the Western Union office in the Biltmore Hotel, a building that was near Grand Central Station and through which he passed regularly. One day he struck up a friendly conversation with a nineteen-year-old Western Union telephone operator.
By the time the third Music Box Revue opened on September 24 with Robert Benchley as a headliner, the stagestruck young woman no longer worked at Western Union for seventeen dollars a week. Although her name was listed in the playbill, she had no lines, nor did she sing or dance. She was a show girl and, as show girls customarily do, she wore spectacular costumes and impersonated things. In the show’s opening number, “The Calendar,” she was the month of November. In other sketches, she played a nightgown and a fish. In the space of a few weeks, having exceeded her wildest dreams, she had risen from phone operator to the stage of an Irving Berlin hit. The person to whom she owed her discovery was a prominent, exceptionally kind drama critic who appeared to be crazy about her.
Dorothy thought that Benchley’s protégée was “very inferior,” reported Edmund Wilson. It was an opinion shared by other scandalized Round Tablers, in fact by practically everyone who knew Benchley. That he would make a fool of himself over an unimportant woman bewildered them. Never for a moment did anyone publicly question the morality of his having a beautiful teenage mistress—to have objected on that ground would have been the ultimate vulgarity—but rather it was the Proustian ferocity of his obsession that shocked them. Was Benchley going to end up a besotted Charles Swann and want to marry her? His behavior suggested that possibility. Inexperienced at adultery, he was full of extravagant compliments and delighted in explaining to Dorothy why he found the show girl admirable. She had majesty; she entered a room, he said, with the presence “of a queen.” He described her to Edmund Wilson as resembling a grand duchess. When Wilson finally met her, she told him that she was planning to audition for a “leg and fanny show.” Wilson decided she was a floozy, “quite a pretty blonde with thick ankles, who, however, I thought, had something of that hard-eyed prostitute stare, the result of there being no coherence or purpose in a woman’s emotional life.”
Had there been purpose in her life it would have been frustrated. Dorothy, a worldly-wise twenty-nine, could have told her about wayward married men:Lady, lady, should you met
One whose ways are all discreet,
One who murmurs that his wife
Is the lodestar of his life,
One who keeps assuring you
That he never was untrue,
Never loved another one ...
Lady, lady, better run!
Dorothy had no advice to give Benchley’s new companion, who was not the sort of female she could value or befriend. She appreciated her no more than she did Gertrude, whom she also considered to be a ninny and undeserving of Benchley. On the other hand, neither the show girl with her lack of sophistication nor Gertrude with her suburban matron mentality presented any competition for Dorothy’s unique relationship with Benchley. She continued to be his confidante and hand-holder.
Several times a week Dorothy made a point of dropping in at the Music Box to hear Benchley deliver his monologue, the perfect starting point for an evening’s round of partying. Recently she had discovered the pleasures of champagne and promptly composed a paean to her new drink: “Three be the things I shall never attain: / Envy, content, and sufficient champagne.” Apparently, there were plenty of evenings when she did obtain sufficient champagne. After a performance of the Music Box Revue, remembered Don Stewart, “Irving Berlin came with us up to Dorothy’s apartment where we celebrated my twenty-ninth birthday and with the aid of champagne helped Irving write the last two lines of a new song called ‘What’ll I Do?’ ” She genuinely enjoyed the parties, even if she did wake up feeling wretched the next morning. A doctor had warned a friend of Bunny Wilson’s that if he continued to drink his toes might fall off and that very night he went to a party and got drunk again. In his place, Dorothy would have done the same thing.
Their lives held so many worries and potential worries; sobriety held no allure whatsoever. She worried about Benchley, who ached in every joint and went on stage with temperatures of 103. These ailments may or may not have been connected with his emotional distress, but his doctor diagnosed them as grippe and latent arthritis. Whatever the cause, he was increasingly incapacitated. The conflict could not have been more clear: He was in love, but he could not abandon Gertrude and his children. His attitude was that both women had claims on him, that neither would scarcely know how to tie her shoes without him. There was a period of several months when Benchley was seeking a way out of his predicament, caught at some crossroads between show business and suburbia and agonizing about what to do. During this time, Dorothy conceived the idea of writing a play about Benchley and his attachment to a chorus girl.
In January 1924, Dorothy accompanied Neysa McMein and Irving Berlin on a winter holiday to Miami Beach. When she returned, she and Eddie parted for a second time. He went back to Hartford, and it seemed likely that this second attempt at separation would be permanent, though they continued to be in contact. Since he planned to trade on Wall Street and would be in New York from time to time, he wanted to keep the flat for himself (and, in fact, paid the rent for another two years). Dorothy stayed for several months before moving to the Algonquin Hotel, where she rented a furnished suite.
Henry Mencken called the Algonquin the most comfortable hotel in America. “The distance from the front door to the elevator is only forty feet,” he wrote, “an important consideration to a man whose friends all drink too much, and sometimes press the stuff on him.” The hotel offered Dorothy hot water that was actually hot and a front desk to call if she ever needed anything. She quickly discovered that the simplicity and lack of responsibility connected with hotel living suited her taste perfectly. The limited space also pleased her. Among institutional furnishings she felt free and organized. The Algonquin, of all hotels, was already a second home to her: She had only to ride an elevator to take her place at the Round Table, just as she had once walked across the hall to reach Neysa’s parties. She had not outgrown her need to be in close proximity to the Round Tablers’ hangouts.
Installed in her new home, she settled down to work. Writing had become her salvation. Although she had never written a play, she had done dramatic sketches and songs for the Round Table productions and saw no reason why she could not write a full-length show. Unlike her work habits for fiction, when she wrote so slowly that her typewriter practically spun cobwebs, she found herself tearing off page after page of typescript.
&n
bsp; When she had completed a first act, she showed it to Philip Goodman, an advertising man turned theatrical producer who had made a fortune with two recent hits, including Poppy with W. C. Fields. Dorothy had a social relationship with the gourmandizing Goodman and occasionally visited his home for dinner. As a result of his recent successes, Goodman was riding a winning streak and felt confident about his ability to pick winners. He expressed generous praise for what Dorothy had written so far; no doubt, he was intrigued by the idea of a roman à clef about Benchley and his personal problems. He cautioned her that the manuscript needed work and suggested she team up with an experienced playwright. If she liked, he would hunt around, maybe find somebody like Elmer Rice for her. Dorothy could only nod enthusiastically. Aware of Rice’s considerable accomplishments, she knew that he was being called America’s Ibsen. She had praised The Adding Machine as an important play. For these reasons, she doubted if he would be interested in her project. Her excitement mounted, nevertheless, while she waited for Goodman to arrange a match.
Goodman’s daughter Ruth, fourteen at the time, recalls meeting Dorothy in front of the Fifth Avenue building where her father had his offices. “I was sitting outside in the car with my mother when an enchanting little woman came to the side of the car with my father. She was in a blue serge dress with an Eton jacket and a very neat little blouse, extremely soignée, and she was holding on to a Boston terrier she had on a leash, a very feisty little animal. She sat between my mother and me on the backseat and was confidential about her dog. She didn’t want him to hear what she said, and it was one of those side-of-the-mouth undertones as she discussed how impossible he was, how rude he was to her friends. I couldn’t possibly imagine what he put her through each day.”