Dorothy Parker: What Fresh Hell Is This?

by Marion Meade

  If Dorothy knew Elmer Rice by reputation, so did he know of her, and what he’d heard were reports of self-indulgence and dissipation. Mrs. Parker was, everyone said, temperamental and unreliable. But Rice had a family to support and he needed money. The Adding Machine, despite its artistic success and a two-month run, had left him broke. He now needed to finance himself while working on another expressionistic tragedy about mechanized society, The Subway. Apart from the money, Rice enjoyed the technical aspects of playwriting and had no objections to accepting a routine assignment at play-doctoring. After reading Dorothy’s first act, even though it seemed clear that she had only a dim notion of how to write for the stage, Rice could not help being impressed. Her characters were sharply defined and “the dialogue was uncannily authentic and very funny.” The problem was that “the characters, suburbanites all, just went on talking and talking.” Her first act, completely formless, ran as long as an entire play. Not without some misgiving, he decided to accept the job.

  Rice’s worries proved groundless. They quickly developed a good work routine with Dorothy doing practically all the writing while Rice concentrated on scene construction and plot development. The collaboration could not possibly have run more smoothly. Since Rice found it difficult to write at home with two small children present, he had recently rented a studio. He and Dorothy met there every few days to go over her playscript, page by page and line by line, with Rice suggesting places that needed cutting or rewriting. Once they had polished a section, they moved on to the next scene and discussed it in detail. Then Dorothy, inspired and full of awe for Rice, went home to write.

  She felt “so proud” that Rice had agreed to work with her. “I was just trembling all the time because Elmer Rice had done so many good things, and here was I, a small cluck.” It was impossible to believe that any play in which he had a hand could possibly fail. She also gained confidence from Philip Goodman’s belief in his own infallibility. With two hits to his credit, suddenly feeling affluent enough to move from Riverside Drive to Park Avenue, he waxed expansive by saying that success in the theater was not a mystery but simply a matter of being smart. Most producers were saps who failed due to stupidity. With Goodman and Rice on her side, Dorothy felt extremely optimistic.

  Working hard, incredibly hard by her standards, she was punctual about her appointments with Rice and diligent in producing promised scenes on schedule, altogether as heavenly a writing partner as anyone could wish. Rice found her “unfailingly considerate and, of course, amusing and stimulating.” More to the point, he was beguiled by this “tiny creature with big, appealing eyes” and upper-class manners, and could scarcely believe the gossip about her lethal tongue. She was the picture of elegant breeding. In his memoirs, as if he had not already made his feelings clear, he felt compelled to add chivalrously that their relations had been “cordial and easygoing, but entirely impersonal.” Not entirely, because he had wooed her persistently and excessively.

  Dorothy was not particularly attracted to Rice physically because he was not her type. She preferred tall, slim, cinematically beautiful blonds. Rice was a dour six-foot, red-haired, bespectacled Jew, who had been born Elmer Reizenstein and had changed his name because he thought Rice would look better on a marquee. He must have reminded her of a childhood she had no wish to recall and of her father, who would have dearly loved to change his name from Rothschild to Ross but lacked the nerve. She found Rice to be a gloomy individual, which mystified her because later she pointed out that he had had great success. Against her inclination and better judgment, she finally went to bed with him, but it was one of those cases in which she realized her mistake at once. They were far less compatible sexually than artistically. Dorothy got little pleasure from their several encounters because in years to come she could not resist describing Rice to friends as “without question the worst fuck I ever had.” Once having begun the affair, the problem became delicate: how to end it without wounding his feelings or, far more important, without jeopardizing her play. When she chose, Dorothy could be skilled at evoking protective feelings in men, and in this situation she probably delivered her orphan-of-the-storm impersonation. However she went about rejecting Rice, it worked.

  Her affair with Rice left no scars and taught her something useful about herself. As she noted ruefully in “Ballade at Thirty-five,” she was invariably attracted to men who would reject her. On the other hand, once a man began to pay her excessive attention she tended to quickly lose interest:This, no song of an ingénue,

  This, no ballad of innocence;

  This, the rhyme of a lady who

  Followed ever her natural bents.

  This, a solo of sapience.

  This, a chantey of sophistry,

  This, the sum of experiments—

  I loved them until they loved me.

  That was, she explained, as Nature had made her.

  According to Elmer Rice, Dorothy’s play owed its merit more to her shrewd observations and pungent lines than to the plot. “It was a simple tale of a suburban householder who, bedeviled by a sweetly dominating wife and an insufferable brat, finds solace in the companionship of a neighbor, a former chorus girl; but habit and convention are too strong, and the spark flickers out.”

  It is possible to see how Dorothy subtly redrew the characters from “Such a Pretty Little Picture”—the doormat Mr. Wheelock becomes Ed Graham, his shrewish wife is renamed Harriet, and Sister remains Sister—and then went on to introduce a serpent into their suburban Eden. She is Belle Sheridan, an ex-chorus girl, now married to an alcoholic playboy who, having brought her to “Homecrest” (forty-seven minutes from Grand Central) has now tired of her and spends his time trysting with other women in the city. The Sheridans live next door to the Grahams. Ed is afraid of his wife, who constantly denigrates him as a useless fool and refuses to let him play his mandolin or smoke his pipe in the house. Belle is equally unhappy in her marriage, and both are extremely lonely. One day Belle, who plays the piano, invites Ed to bring over his mandolin. They play duets, they talk, they laugh, and they kiss. As the evening progresses, they give in to their attraction for each other and to their mutual neediness and impulsively decide to run away together. It’s possible, Ed insists, to begin life all over again.

  When he goes next door to pack, he speedily loses his nerve and terrifies himself by wondering what they will do once they get to the city. Go to a hotel? Register as husband and wife? Make love? Will he be able to satisfy a beautiful woman like Belle when his only sexual experiences have been with his wife?

  At the last moment, when Belle notices his fear, she decides to go alone, perhaps secretly relieved knowing she won’t be burdened with him but grateful that he helped her decide to leave her husband. “Don’t you worry about me,” she cries out. “I’m fine. Why, the minute I decided to break away I knew it was what I’d ought to do all along. It was just three years out of my life, that’s all. Now I’m back where I belong.” This is Belle’s creator speaking about her own marriage, for, in many ways, Belle Sheridan is evocative of Dorothy’s actual experiences with Eddie, as well as her imagined fears of what her life would have become if she’d accompanied him to Hartford. Belle’s superficial characteristics—her mentality, her theatrical clothes, her statuesque figure—all seem to be based on Benchley’s mistress, however.

  In the final scene, Dorothy wants to show that her hero’s experience with the chorus girl has changed his life too, by giving him more confidence in his masculinity. Now he talks back to his wife and spanks his daughter. As the curtain falls, he is seen sitting defiantly in his living room puffing on his pipe and strumming “that Blue Danube song” on his mandolin.

  Constantly on Dorothy’s mind was the issue of choice, not only as the essence of her play but a practical predicament for her and Benchley. Should she reconcile with Eddie? Should Benchley leave his family for a woman he loved? Was the correct decision for her also right for him as well? How many times they had debated these qu
estions. It was their own existential refrain, a piano and mandolin duet they had been practicing for years. At stake, for both of them, was nothing less than their identities and their fears that living, or rather misliving, would transform them into the types of people they most despised.

  The play was a love letter to Robert Benchley, who had helped her to wrench free of a dying marriage. Like Belle Sheridan, Dorothy felt “so sure” that she had made the right choice. Her advice to Benchley was “Don’t do it! You stay here!” because she was convinced that his family “would always be on your mind.” She wanted freedom for herself, but needed him to remain a father and husband, solid and leanable, upholding the traditional values of family sanctity.

  By early summer the finished play was delivered to Philip Goodman, who scheduled it for the coming season. It was duly copyrighted under the title Soft Music and all concerned with the project were feeling pleased as they looked forward to a lucrative run in the fall.

  Reality, by this time, had surpassed fiction in terms of strangeness. In the play, Dorothy had recorded some of the changes in the way people were viewing marriage and the family. Belle Sheridan returns to the city and her theatrical life, while Ed remains in Homecrest, unhappy but faithful to his commitments. It was an indecisive but wholly appropriate ending for the mid-twenties, when marriages ordained to last forever were splitting apart at the slightest pressure, and startled people were sitting in the wreckage, their futures in doubt. When institutions taken for granted kept blowing up in people’s faces, a reevaluation was clearly indicated. It was no coincidence that one of Dorothy’s characters chooses to abandon marriage as a dangerous way of life while the other sticks around and tries to make minor repairs. Unlike Ed Graham, this was not the choice that Benchley finally made.

  On the surface, nothing had seemed to change in his relationship with Gertrude, nothing mentioned about harsh realities such as separation or divorce. Gertrude later admitted that her husband hated Scarsdale and that making the trip home each night was “too much for him,” but she was quick to point out that he called her once or twice a day, as if that had made up for his absence. “People asked me if we were going to be divorced,” an idea she scornfully dismissed as “absurd.” Benchley himself later summed up his philosophy for James Thurber by saying that “a man had his wife, whatever their relationship might be, and that was that. The rest was his own business.”

  Benchley was determined to have his freedom, and the solution that he devised called for a caper more inventive than anything Dorothy had dreamed up for Soft Music. By all accounts, other than his own and Gertrude’s, he left the suburbs and appeared there only as an occasional visitor. After his arthritic attack, his physician is said to have given him a choice between commuting to Scarsdale and continuing in the Music Box Revue. Since Benchley was contractually obligated to Irving Berlin and Sam Harris, he insisted that he had no choice and promptly rented an apartment on Madison Avenue. Gertrude had to be content with the assurance that he would come home on weekends. If she liked, she was welcome to commute into the city every evening and join him at the theater. If this seemed to offer a fair compromise, it was nothing of the sort because it was a man’s solution. As any mother responsible for the care of small children knows, dashing into the city at the end of the day and returning home after midnight would be an exhausting schedule on any regular basis. As for Benchley’s vow to join Gertrude in the country on Sundays, he became so reluctant to attend those Sunday dinners that he could not bring himself to board the train. His marriage operated according to the rules he set forth, and Gertrude, presumably, came to realize that she had been granted a Victorian divorce, with all the legal rights of a wife but none of the conjugal privileges of companionship. In exchange for Benchley’s discretion with his mistresses, she looked the other way, and they began to live a lie.

  The Music Box Revue closed in June 1924 after a nine-month run. The following Monday morning Benchley appeared at the Life office and asked Robert Sherwood for an advance on his salary as drama critic because he owed back rent on his apartment. Sherwood was shocked. Like most of Benchley’s friends, he had assumed that Benchley was growing rich and salting away his wealth in savings bonds, so that he would be free to work on the serious books he talked about writing, “which shows how much I knew,” Sherwood later commented.

  As Dorothy knew, Benchley had been spending every penny of his acting salary of five hundred dollars a week. By then, he had been on a spree for nearly a year, and he remained on it throughout the rest of his life. One of the poems she published in The New Yorker was called “For R.C.B.” It emphatically summed up her approval of the new Benchley, who said the hell with conscience:Life comes a-hurrying,

  Or life lags slow;

  But you’ve stopped worrying—

  Let it go!

  Some call it gloomy,

  Some call it jake;

  They’re very little to me—

  Let them eat cake!

  Some find it fair,

  Some think it hooey,

  Many people care;

  But we don’t, do we?

  Dorothy and Benchley tried to strengthen each other by proclaiming how little they cared for public opinion, but it was wishful thinking and, in the long run, not helpful to either of them. It is not surprising that Gertrude’s initial dislike of Dorothy was hardening. Mrs. Benchley was determined to make no overtly hostile statement, but could not resist an occasional acid aside. In retrospect, she told an interviewer, Dorothy “wasn’t a very nice person—well, no. I won’t say that. Whenever she came up here, she never helped with the dishes—fled upstairs.” A cardinal sin in Gertrude’s book was coming to dinner and not offering to help with the washing up. (It never occurred to Dorothy to wash up her own dishes.) Nor did Gertrude truly understand why Dorothy had separated from Eddie Parker. She professed to be puzzled that “she was fond of him” and yet there were “so many [men] after that.”

  About this time Dorothy was confronted by a curious situation when her best friend and her ex-lover decided to live together. One night Benchley encountered Charles MacArthur near the punch bowl at a cocktail party and impulsively said that if MacArthur ever needed a place to stay he could share his apartment.

  “I’m a late sleeper,” warned MacArthur.

  “Delighted to hear it,” Benchley replied.

  Once MacArthur moved into the fourth-floor walk-up on Madison Avenue, where the two men lived for the next three years, Dorothy could not escape his presence without giving up the company of Benchley. As a result, the three of them were often together.

  While finishing up the play, Dorothy had put aside other assignments, which now were due or overdue. Always reluctant to refuse offers of money, she had responded favorably to one from publisher George Palmer Putnam, who had cooked up an unusual idea for a serialized mystery novel. Nineteen well-known writers had been invited each to contribute a chapter. Dorothy had unthinkingly accepted, perhaps hoping that when the time came, she would be able to dash off her chapter effortlessly. No writing, even froth, came easily to her. Carolyn Wells had written the first chapter of Bobbed Hair, Woollcott the second, and now the collaborative murder story had a plot whose complications almost defied description and, alas, had magically progressed to chapter seven. It was Dorothy’s turn.

  Her standard, well-practiced evasions did not work with Putnam, who was publishing the serial monthly in Collier’s before it appeared as a book and breathing impatiently down her neck. She was further distracted by Benchley’s surgery for his arthritic problems and his subsequent departure for Nantucket to recuperate. After he had gone, the traffic in and out of her Algonquin suite seemed to grow unusually heavy. A number of people had the habit of dropping in and ordering a club sandwich from room service. There was a continual parade of waiters coming and going with pots of coffee. None of this commotion contributed to her concentration. After taking her out to dinner and a show one night, MacArthur reported to Woollcott
that she had finally finished the chapter but only after Putnam had threatened to call out the police and fire departments.

  A snapshot taken that summer found its way into Aleck Woollcott’s photo album: Dorothy posing with Aleck, Art Samuels, Harpo Marx, and Charlie, who is seated cozily at Dorothy’s side, their shoulders touching, the faintest of smiles on their mouths, smiles of complicity. Her continuing intimacy with MacArthur, who had become romantically involved with comedienne Beatrice Lillie, is interesting in view of other writing she was now doing. As friendly as she had become with him, she had not forgotten or forgiven his rejection of her or the pain he had caused her. The result was a bitter story, her third, this one dealing with the subject of abortion. In “Mr. Durant,” she ventured to characterize MacArthur as a middle-aged monster of a husband and father who tyrannizes his family as well as his mistress and who gets rid of his children’s dog while they sleep. The need to write this story must have been intense because she faced the problem of disguising the identities of Charlie and herself. In the story she exaggerated herself as a naïve, pathetic twenty-year-old stenographer in a rubber plant, a classic victim. Despite her off-beat theme and an extremely hostile portrayal of unfaithful husbands who impregnate their mistresses, she sold the story to Henry Mencken for his new magazine, The American Mercury, and it was published in the September issue. While she had painted MacArthur as a brutally insensitive man, this did not seem to interfere with their cordial relations. Possibly he chose not to recognize himself in “Mr. Durant.”