Dorothy Parker: What Fresh Hell Is This?

by Marion Meade

The Democratic National Convention convened at Madison Square Garden in June. Suddenly the city was crowded with visitors and cars, new revues were opening to cash in on the convention trade, Fifth Avenue was festooned with flags, and women were wearing the new summer styles: nude-colored stockings, floppy hats, and blue-and-pink chintz dresses that looked like flowered wallpapers. At the World, Herbert Swope had installed a radio in his office, and the Round Tablers listened to the convention proceedings on the wireless, or sometimes they dropped by the Garden to hear the speeches. The Democrats finally nominated John W. Davis of West Virginia, but these historical events held little interest for Dorothy, who stuck close to her rooms on the second floor of the Algonquin, regulated her drinking, and got out quantities of work. Like every writer she knew, she wrote when she was not drinking—and she drank when she was not busy working. “We drank our heads off, but we worked like holy hell.” Despite a spell of sultry, sticky weather, so unseasonable for June, she felt better than she had in a long while. After finishing “Mr. Durant,” she began collaborating with George Kaufman on a one-act play, the first and only occasion they ever worked together.

  Famous Players—Lasky had purchased the film rights to the Kaufman-Connelly stage hit Beggar on Horseback. As part of the deal, they asked Kaufman to supply a curtain-raiser, a live playlet to be performed on the same bill as the film. Why Kaufman chose Dorothy instead of Connelly as his collaborator is puzzling, because they were not fond of each other. He felt put off by her obscenities, which he considered unladylike and offensive. She thought he was “a mess” and could see “nothing in that talent at all,” although she grudgingly admitted that he could be funny now and then. Somehow they managed to contain their disdain long enough to produce Business Is Business, a forty-minute, four-scene farce that satirized a shoe manufacturer’s obsession with making money. Kaufman at this time happened to be preoccupied with lampooning big business, and Dorothy’s contempt for commercialism was solidly underpinned by her experiences with J. Henry Rothschild and Eddie Parker. The New York Times thought it was a clever play with “scintillating ideas” and “some amusing lines,” but it is impossible to know for certain because neither author liked it enough to keep a copy.

  Many of her friends were away. She saw little of Don Stewart, who had written a comic novel, The Crazy Fool, the leading characters of which were based more or less on herself and Benchley. Neysa, married and pregnant, had taken a summer place in Mamaroneck. Aleck Woollcott, writing a biography of Irving Berlin and claiming he needed solitude to work, spent a month on Neshobe Island in Vermont. When she next saw him, he was talking about buying the wooded island as a communal summer retreat for the Round Tablers. She kept running into Harold Ross and Jane Grant who turned up at party after party, passing a hat for a weekly magazine they wanted to publish. Everywhere they went they carried a dummy of the magazine until people were bored seeing and hearing about it. They were looking for investors and hoping to raise fifty thousand dollars from friends, but nobody was biting. None of the Round Tablers believed Ross capable of starting a magazine about New York. Woollcott thought the idea sounded “crazy” and flatly refused to listen. Dorothy listened but had no cash to invest. At a party given by Ruth and Raoul Fleischmann, Jane delivered an enthusiastic pitch that succeeded in whetting Raoul’s interest. By nature a gambler who owned several racehorses and did minor speculating in Wall Street, Fleischmann reluctantly agreed to contribute twenty-five thousand dollars and office space in a building he owned on West Forty-fifth Street.

  While trying to raise the remaining twenty-five thousand dollars, Ross went ahead and assembled a small staff. He also badgered his Round Table friends to suggest a name for his magazine. Among those under consideration were Manhattan, New York Weekly, Our Town, and Truth but none of them sounded quite right. Then one day, when press agent John Peter Toohey was lunching with them at the Round Table, the subject came up again. Looking up idly from his plate, he asked what kind of magazine Ross had in mind. A magazine about New York, Ross told him. Well, Toohey replied, then call it The New Yorker, and he returned to his meal.

  An elated Ross wrote a prospectus, a model of simplicity and clarity, that described the kind of reader he wished to reach and the kind he did not: “The New Yorker will be the magazine which is not edited for the old lady in Dubuque. It will not be concerned in what she is thinking about.” No disrespect was intended “but The New Yorker is a magazine avowedly published for a metropolitan audience....” By this time, Raoul Fleischmann was developing cold feet; he had checked with a number of experienced publishers who warned him that he had been impulsive and, in fact, rather foolish. Ross had gulled him. Increasingly disturbed, he complained as if he had been the victim of a scam. To pacify him, Ross needed to acquire some impressive window dressing for his project, and he needed it quickly. He hastily assembled a board of editors that included Dorothy, Marc Connelly, Edna Ferber, Aleck Woollcott, and George Kaufman. In this raid on the Round Table, he was unable to get Frank Adams and Heywood Broun because they were under contract to the World, and Benchley and Sherwood had contracts with Life that would not permit their association with a rival publication. After a short time, Ferber and Woollcott withdrew because they were reluctant to have their names associated with a magazine doomed to failure.

  Ever since Dorothy learned that Ross was intending to publish a sophisticated magazine, she had been smiling because he seemed wildly miscast in such a role. For most of the years she had known him, he’d been editing the American Legion Weekly, whose readers probably were the old men in Dubuque. In recent months, he had been working for the humor magazine Judge, but not so long ago she had heard him talking about starting a shipping newspaper, something he had referred to as the Marine Gazette. In her opinion, he was “almost illiterate,” a wild man who had “never read anything and didn’t know anything.” His ignorance was a Grand Canyon among ignorances, so deep that one was compelled to admire it for its sheer size. Never would she forget the evening he took her to see Nazimova in The Cherry Orchard. “At first he sat silent. Then he said, and over and over throughout the evening, in the all-but-voiceless voice of one who comes suddenly upon a trove of shining treasure, ‘Say, this is quite a play—quite a play!’ He had not seen it before. He had not heard of it.”

  With this “monolith of unsophistication” at its helm, the future of The New Yorker augured poorly. Allowing Ross to use her name for his advisory board may have been a fraud (“the only dishonest thing I ever did,” he said later about this phony board) but it meant nothing to Dorothy, who was preoccupied with Soft Music. Unlike Ferber and Woollcott, she didn’t particularly care if her name was connected with a flop. Ross explained that the advisory board might be called upon to offer editorial advice or contribute an occasional piece, but he warned that payment was out of the question. He planned to reimburse writers with stock in his company. He also wanted contributors to write under pseudonyms so that the magazine would be able to project a unique character.

  Hearing all this, Dorothy reacted by speedily putting Ross’s New Yorker out of her thoughts.

  In July, after Benchley returned to the city, Dorothy amused herself by accompanying him to the brothel operated by Polly Adler on West Fifty-fourth Street. The idea of drinking champagne in a bawdy house delighted her and she liked Polly. So did Benchley, who opened a charge account and began keeping a black kimono there. Though he played backgammon with the madam for the services of her women, which were currently going for twenty dollars a throw, he had begun thinking of Polly’s as a second home where he slept or even worked. Polly Adler was devoted to Benchley, who, she said, “lighted up my life like the sun.” She made certain that he received the finest treatment. In the mornings, he woke to find that Polly’s personal maid, Lion, had pressed his suit, washed his socks and underwear, and was waiting to serve him breakfast in bed.

  Dorothy and Benchley thought that Polly’s house could use a touch of culture, and they were pleased to
offer their assistance. They drew up a shopping list of classical and contemporary books for her bookshelves. In due course, Polly’s patrons had at their disposal a nice selection of literary works.

  At the age of thirty-four, Benchley was busy sowing his wild oats. Since he and Charlie MacArthur had been rooming together, they had become inseparable. There were times when Dorothy found herself excluded from their escapades as they bounced around the city like teenagers. They once chased the aristocratic Charles Evans Hughes down Madison Avenue, spraying him with cries of “Yah, yah, Secretary of State.” Dorothy could not enter into this sort of adolescent, alcoholic male bonding, probably luckily for her.

  In September, Philip Goodman discovered that life as a Broadway producer was not all roses. His new musical, Dear Sir, was practically laughed off the stage on opening night when a horse in the cast defecated on stage, distracting performers and audience alike. Although the show had music and lyrics by Jerome Kern and Howard Dietz, the critics decided that the production was indeed manure, and it folded after fifteen performances. Goodman, unnerved, ordered production temporarily suspended on Soft Music and indicated he would probably abandon it altogether.

  Shortly after the failure of Dear Sir, Goodman suffered a second blow when his next offering, The Mongrel, directed by Dorothy’s friend Winnie Lenihan, also proved mediocre and had to be withdrawn. By now, Goodman was devastated and decided that he wouldn’t proceed with Dorothy’s play unless he was able to find someone willing to coproduce and stage it. To her relief, he finally persuaded Arthur Hopkins to be his partner. Hopkins, an Ohioan by birth, taciturn by temperament, was a veteran producer with many successes to his credit, among them such quality dramas as Hedda Gabler and Anna Christie. At first, the addition of Hopkins did not displease Dorothy. Nor did she object when Goodman and Hopkins changed the name of the drama from Soft Music to Close Harmony, even though the latter seemed to her no great improvement over the former. But once rehearsals began, she became increasingly worried about Hopkins’s directorial technique, because he seemed to have none.

  Each day at noon, after the cast had been put through their paces by the stage manager, Hopkins drifted in and leaned against the proscenium arch. He looked on almost indifferently, rarely if ever interrupting, and occasionally took an actress or actor aside for a few moments of whispering. After a while—a very short while—he departed for the day. It had been explained to Dorothy that Hopkins believed performers should work out their own readings and stage business, but watching him in action was far from reassuring. She caustically dubbed his directorial style “the Arthur Hopkins honor system of direction.”

  While Dorothy worried, Hopkins leased one of New York’s most expensive theaters, the Gaiety, for the sum of four thousand dollars a week and announced to the papers that Close Harmony would open on December 1. This further alarmed Dorothy, who knew from her experience as a drama critic that attendance is always poor before Christmas. When she voiced her doubts to Hopkins, he brushed them away.

  “Whenever you open this play,” he assured her, “it will run for a year. ”

  Close Harmony had its out-of-town preview in Wilmington, Delaware. Dorothy and Elmer Rice accompanied the cast, who were traveling in a reserved parlor car. A private compartment had been set aside at one end of the car for the writers and producers, but at the last minute they were joined by several of the actresses, including Georgie Drew Mendum, who had been cast as the Gertrude Benchley character. Dorothy disliked Mendum almost as much as she did Mrs. Benchley. A garrulous descendent of two theatrical royal families, the Barrymores and the Drews, she was in the habit of regaling people with stories about dear Jack and dear Ethel, as well as other members of the clan. On the train she talked nonstop. Elmer Rice remembered that since the train did not have a dining car, there was no escape from her. He and Dorothy and the two producers fidgeted and stared out the window at the New Jersey farmland. “We were trapped, elbow to elbow, knee to knee,” Rice said.

  When the train pulled into Wilmington, everyone disembarked and began straggling down the platform toward the taxi stand. Dorothy, watching them leave, remained near the train door with Goodman and Rice.

  “Let’s go to Baltimore,” she said.

  Without a word, they grabbed their suitcases and climbed back on the train just as it was pulling out. Only then did her bewildered companions begin to object. What could she be thinking of, because there was plenty to do that evening in Wilmington.

  “I’m terribly sorry,” she said, “but I just couldn’t look at them anymore.”

  It was after eight when they arrived in Baltimore, starving. Goodman telephoned Henry Mencken, who invited them to his hotel for drinks and dinner. Not only did Dorothy respect Mencken as an innovative publisher, but also she had a personal reason for feeling warm toward him: he had published every short story she had written thus far. On this particular evening, she was disappointed to find him coarse and insensitive. Even allowing for the immense quantities of alcohol they were consuming, Mencken acted badly. When he began to tell jokes about blacks, Dorothy bristled and decided to leave. She refused to spend the night in Baltimore and made Rice take her to Wilmington, even though it meant riding a milk train that got them there at three in the morning.

  The next day, exhausted and hung over, she sat in the darkened theater with Arthur Hopkins during dress rehearsal and decided that the play was insipid. Hopkins appeared to be studying the bouncing breasts of Wanda Lyon, the actress playing Belle Sheridan.

  “Dorothy,” he said, “don’t you think she ought to wear a brassiere in this scene?”

  “God, no,” she replied. “You’ve got to have something in the show that moves.”

  On opening night, the first laugh of the evening was hers, in response to a wry telegram she received from Benchley. THAT OLD FILLING HAS JUST COME OUT, it read. After that, the laughs came from the audience who chortled straight through until the curtain fell. The next day, when she saw that the local critics had hailed the show a winner, she began to hope again. During her years as a drama critic, she had complained incessantly about tedious opening nights, but watching people on stage speaking words she had written was another matter entirely. It was “the most exciting thing in the world.” When Close Harmony opened in New York the following week, she was still feeling euphoric and confident enough of success to throw an opening-night party at the Algonquin.

  Despite excellent reviews and hosannas for “Miss Dorothy Parker, who is known as New York’s brightest girl,” customers were slow to buy tickets. The third week, after a matinee when the house was practically empty, Dorothy sent a telegram to Benchley that read, CLOSE HARMONY DID A COOL NINETY DOLLARS AT THE MATINEE. ASK THE BOYS IN THE BACK ROOM WHAT THEY WILL HAVE. By guaranteeing the Gaiety Theater four thousand dollars a week, Hopkins could not afford to carry the play. A week later, he posted the closing notice. The play had run twenty-four performances and grossed less than ten thousand dollars. Hopkins subsequently assigned touring rights to another producer, who changed the play’s name to The Lady Next Door and opened it in Chicago the following summer. There it played fifteen weeks, followed by another ten weeks in smaller Midwestern cities, to fine reviews and substantial houses. As Elmer Rice later wrote, “These things are inexplicable.” Ring Lardner was also puzzled. Writing to Scott Fitzgerald in Rome, he reported that Close Harmony was a good play that had gotten great notices and still it failed. To Dorothy the failure seemed nothing short of astonishing, an enormously bad joke that she could not comprehend and would be unable to talk about. In years to come, when asked about it, she supposed that “it was dull,” and yet “how do you know about your own.”

  Philip Goodman, who had enough of the theater, went to Paris for the winter. He and Hopkins may have been relying on the enthusiastic support of the Round Table to ensure success and a long run. Perhaps they also had counted on its being a spicy open secret that the play concerned Robert Benchley, but audiences were not privy to t
his titillating bit of rialto gossip. Benchley had the unenviable task of reviewing a work based on his own messy domestic life, but with which he could not admit any connection. He found the play deeply moving, especially the scene in which James Spottswood and Wanda Lyon play a mandolin and piano duet to the tune of “The Sunshine of Your Smile,” and decided it was “just about as heartbreaking a thing as we have ever seen on the stage.” On the evening that he attended Close Harmony the audience apparently began to laugh during this scene and he took it badly. In his Life review he inferred that they must have severe personality disorders and singled them out “for special and painful extermination next Monday morning, rain or shine.” If he saw anyone so much as daring to grin during the scene “you will receive, on leaving the lobby, one special souvenir crash on the skull which will make it awfully difficult for you to laugh at anything again. That’s final.” Close Harmony was, in his opinion, closer to “magnificent tragedy” than to comedy.

  Both Dorothy and Benchley felt murderous but as usual they veiled their anger with humor. Dorothy wished she could be a pirate so that she might cut out the hearts of everyone she hated. After the play closed she wrote a revealing poem for Life and called it “Song of Perfect Propriety”:Oh, I should like to ride the seas,

  A roaring buccaneer;

  A cutlass banging at my knees,

  A dirk behind my ear.

  And when my captives’ chains would clank

  I’d howl with glee and drink,

  And then fling out the quivering plank

  And watch the beggars sink.

  I’d like to straddle gory decks,

  And dig in laden sands,

  And know the feel of throbbing necks

  Between my knotted hands.

  Oh, I should like to strut and curse

  Among my blackguard crew....