by Marion Meade
Given the chance, she would do all that and more. Certainly she felt capable of destroying those who had injured her.
But I am writing little verse,
As little ladies do.
Chapter 8
“YESSIR, THE WHADDYECALL’EM BLUES”
1925
During that winter of 1925 there seemed to be no end to the number of men passing through her life and her hotel suite. Their names were “ever written on the pages of my heart—and, by the way, my dear, what was your name?” Chiefly, these visitors were in transit. It was the period that Marc Connelly was thinking of when he likened her apartment to a mailbox. Connelly’s description of one of those lovers could serve as a portrait of all:She fell in love with some of the goddamnedest terrible people. John What-the-hell-was-his-name—society boy with the famous brother, you’d know the name if I could remember it. He and his brother were very, very, very East Hampton. Handsome guy, pretty good tennis player. He was a wealthy mucker and quite a bastard. We were all delighted when she shook him off—he was dandruff. Have you got a list of her beaux? Not a full list? Well, I wouldn’t think so.
After months of hard work she was pleased to be idle. She wanted to have fun, which meant dating sizable numbers of rich, good-looking men. No doubt she felt genuinely enthusiastic about some of them, but these affairs were certainly nothing more serious than crushes. The string of men offered the illusion of accomplishment and helped to obscure the fact that Eddie Parker had dropped out of the picture by now. She insisted on being called Mrs. Parker, wearing the title as grandly as if it had been inherited. Whenever impertinent people inquired why she continued to call herself Mrs., she answered defensively that there had been a Mr. Parker once. Although she thought of Eddie in the past tense, neither of them had decided to obtain a divorce, and he remained her legal husband until 1928. Among those who remembered his existence was Gertrude Benchley, who professed from her outpost in Scarsdale to find the banishment of Parkie and his replacement by a bunch of Long Island playboys incomprehensible. “She dedicated one of her books ‘to John,’ but by the time the book came out it was quite another John! Lucky it was a common name like that.”
Dorothy learned that there were special benefits to be derived from her celebrity as a playwright, even from being a failed playwright. An attractive, successful woman who had passed the age of thirty, who no longer expected men to respect her so-called purity, was able to wield a type of power over males, not genuine power, of course, but a counterfeit that seemed real. Suddenly swarms of men seemed eager for her company, for no other reason than that she was Mrs. Dorothy Parker. She had her pick of polo players, low-brow moguls who had never heard of James Joyce, gentleman stockbrokers, and all the assorted frog-princes who congregated in Great Neck. Even those who found clever women terrifying, which included most of them, could not suppress the urge to pay court. Since sex seemed to be her only immediate reward for the failure of Close Harmony, she had every intention of milking that painful experience for its current worth. She wondered if it was worth anything, and suspected not.
Because your eyes are slant and slow,
Because your hair is sweet to touch,
My heart is high again; but oh,
I doubt if this will get me much.
Even though she felt drawn toward men with money, she secretly abominated them and undertook it as her mission to punish them, even those she genuinely liked, even those who worked hard for their money. Her attitude toward these men can be summed up in her treatment of Frank Case, the manager of the Algonquin Hotel, whom she seldom bothered to pay for her suite. She convinced herself that her presence was good publicity for the hotel, that in fact Case should feel fortunate to have her living there rent-free. One Christmas when friends asked if she planned to hang up a stocking, she said, “No, but I’m going to hang up Frank Case,” which she had, in fact, been doing all year.
She also derived satisfaction from hanging up wealthy men, thinking of them as rich Neanderthals who could well afford to pay for the privilege of being seen around town with one of New York’s most sought-after women. There were times, however, when her gorge rose and she could not control her contempt. At Ralph Pulitzer’s estate in Manhasset one evening, she stared for a long while at the face of a man sitting across from her. Then she turned to her friend Peggy Leech and blurted out, “He looks just like a pig, doesn’t he, Peggy?”
Donald Stewart thought that any man who got emotionally involved with Dorothy “would have found out, little by little, that she wasn’t really there.” At first this wouldn’t be apparent because she was always so much fun to be with, but eventually it would become clear that “it was her emotion; she was not worrying about your emotion.” While striking fancy poses and whipping herself into an emotional frenzy got her adrenaline moving, that white-hot heat also served a serious purpose; it generated salable verse and enabled her to deposit checks into her bank account. In this respect, she was no more calculating than Scott Fitzgerald who, in April, published his novel The Great Gatsby, which he had extracted from his and Zelda’s eighteen-month residence in Great Neck. His characters were modeled on people he had met at the Swopes’, who were some of the very same men winding up in Dorothy’s bed at the Algonquin and, eventually, in her verse. Both Dorothy and Fitzgerald were adept at sucking the juices out of people. All those pretty playboys had their practical uses. Once she had melted down and recycled them, they behaved much like men in Pasadena or Tulsa and were instantly recognizable to readers of her verse.
In the humorous verse she wrote in the mid-twenties, men were little loves who sweetly, if naïvely, presented her with “one perfect rose,” never considering that she might instead have preferred a good solid Rolls-Royce. Like exotic insects under glass, men became her subject of special study. She was prepared to announce conclusions about the entire species. Men were incapable of passing up a speakeasy, a poker game, or a golf course, which meant that they often neglected to call at the precise time they had promised, while women wasted their time waiting for them. In fact it sometimes seemed that “all your life you wait around for some damn man!” Furthermore: They were seldom capable of experiencing sexual attraction for a woman who wore glasses, unable to suppress their boasting about others with whom they slept, and perhaps most distressing, totally incapable of accepting a woman as she was. When younger, Dorothy wrote, she had done her best to indulge men in their fantasies, had even tried to change herself to suit their rattlebrained theories. Now, in her thirties, she understood that if you scratched a lover you would find a foe. It was safest, therefore, to look upon the male sex as a temporary entertainment becauseBy the time you swear you’re his,
Shivering and sighing,
And he vows his passion is
Infinite, undying—
Lady, make a note of this:
One of you is lying.
In the winter of 1925 it was she who was doing most of the lying.
“YESSIR, THE WHADDYECALL’EM BLUES” That year, Seward Collins fell in love with a cabaret singer named Lee Morse from her phonograph records, and then contrived to meet her. Her big hit was “Yessir, the Whaddyecall’em Blues.” Even though her fans liked hot tunes, she preferred romantic ballads, some of which she wrote herself. One night after a party Collins took Bunny Wilson and his wife, Mary, and several other friends to the club where Lee Morse was singing, and they wound up drinking unidentifiable, practically undrinkable liquor that was served in ginger ale bottles. When Lee Morse joined them, she confided to Mary Wilson and Alice Seldes that she was waiting for a marriage proposal from Sew, not because she planned to accept but because she wanted to be asked. Alice, knowing the twenty-six-year-old Collins to be an immature and vulnerable bachelor, warned him about Lee Morse. Before long, however, Collins stopped seeing her because he had fallen in love with Dorothy.
Seward, always called Sew or Sewie, was born in Pasadena in 1899, into a well-to-do family who owned a chain of cigar sto
res. They sent him to Princeton where he became friends with Edmund Wilson and John Peale Bishop. In 1920, after Wilson took over Benchley’s job at Vanity Fair, he brought in Collins as a regular contributor. Later, when Wilson moved to The New Republic, he continued to assign articles to Collins, whose background and liberal political views paralleled his own. By the time Collins met Dorothy, he was eager to use his wealth to further his publishing ambitions and was negotiating to buy a literary journal called The Bookman. His claim to fame fell into the area of sexology rather than literature because he owned a collection of obscene English literature said to be the largest in the world.
Collins took extreme pride in his erotica, although those who remember it say that by today’s standards it would be rated tame. What it lacked in sophistication, it more than made up for in quantity, for he was a compulsive buyer. A spectacular number of boxes and trunks were stored at his country house in Connecticut. The really wild items he kept in his Manhattan apartment, which was a virtual gallery of old and new masters. Running into Sewie at a speakeasy, Marc Connelly remembered, generally meant an invitation to stop by later for a nightcap and a look. It was not uncommon for Collins to arrange formal showings, where he would display recent acquisitions.
Dorothy had known Collins casually for several years but paid him slight attention. Not only was he six years her junior, but he was undistinguished physically, being of medium height and pale, mousy coloring. He had an ingratiating smile and was a talker, which annoyed some people, but his friends found him witty and amusing. When Edmund Wilson drew up an imaginary guest list for an ideal party, he put Sewie and Dorothy near the top.
Despite Collins’s infatuation with Lee Morse, he was very much aware of Dorothy, very admiring, and flirted discreetly. His interest in sexology did not mean he personally was sexually emancipated. In contrast to Benchley, for example, who was too busy copulating to gaze at pictures of people doing it, Collins was strictly a spectactor who, according to Marc Connelly, always comported himself like a gentleman around women and who behaved “like a nice guy.” Nice guys did not impress Dorothy.
That spring he backed her into a corner at a party and smothered her with excessive compliments. He seemed exactly the sort of man she had meant when she wrote, in “Experience,” that “some men fawn and flatter.” Not long after that, someone at The Bookman, Collins no doubt, enthused over the prettiest spring hat in New York. “It was on the head of no less a beautiful person than the pleasant Dorothy Parker, maker of plays and verses and dramatic criticism. It was large and low and green—pale green, along the side was a sheaf of pussy willows. There’s a hat to square yourself with, sir.” Seeing Dorothy’s intense eyes next to the pussy willows knocked all thoughts of Lee Morse out of his head for good.
The Bookman also reported that Dorothy was working on a play and would soon embark on a novel, inaccurate information supplied by Dorothy herself. On the evening she had blabbed all this to Collins, the night she was wearing the pussy willow hat, she had been in the company of Elinor Wylie. She had spoken about a new novel she had started, and Dorothy, not wishing to be outdone, had fabricated a fictitious work schedule on the spot. She couldn’t get rid of Collins fast enough. He was one of those naïfs who assumed writers must always be busy writing, just as dentists were forever drilling. Routine though his questions may have been he greatly irritated her.
Meanwhile, the first issue of The New Yorker was published on February 21. Jane Grant admitted that she and Ross were “not proud” of its debut. F.P.A. expressed disappointment: “To H. Ross’s, and he showed me a copy of the New Yorker, which is to be issued on Tuesday, but most of it seemed too frothy for my liking.” James Thurber called it, without exaggerating, “the outstanding flop of 1925.” Ross had been expecting his board of editors to help out with contributions and found their lack of assistance disheartening. The first issue appeared without the Round Tablers, nor were they present in succeeding issues. The single exception was Dorothy, who contributed drama reviews for the first two issues under the byline “Last Night.” Despite the pseudonym, there is no doubt of their authorship: “... we bashfully admit that we wept, and lavishly; but on the other hand, it is but fair to admit that we are that way. All you have to do is drop a hat, and if we are in any kind of form we will break down and cry like a little tired child.”
For the second issue, again out of the goodness of her heart, she turned in another theater review, as well as a poem, “Cassandra Drops Into Verse,” and a short story, “A Certain Lady.” Then, except for some unsigned verse in July, she was not heard from until September, when she sent in the poem “Rainy Night.”
During the The New Yorker’s first year, she regarded her contributions as charitable donations, certainly not what she considered serious work. In any case, she wanted to be paid.
Writing, she decided, was turning out to be a nasty profession. “And what do you do, Mrs. Parker. Oh, I write. There’s a hot job for a healthy woman.” It was a pity she hadn’t the foresight to have taken a course in interior decorating, she said. Why anybody would choose a career as a writer mystified her, and she swore that if she had a choice she would prefer to clean out ferry boats, peddle fish, or be a Broadway chorus boy. The problem was, “I wish I didn’t have to work at all. I was made for love, anyway.” Since that was not to be, she wished that she knew how to write prose that would earn a lot of money. Poetry was not the answer. “This is a fine thing to be doing, at my age, sitting here making up sissy verses about broken hearts and that tripe,” and getting a dollar a line for it. What she actually wanted was payment “in chunks, not drips.”
Despite her jokes, the painful truth was that sometimes she found herself exceedingly hard up. “She was ignorant about money,” a friend said. “All she knew was that she needed it.” Given her attraction-repulsion about money, the way she went about practicing economies was peculiarly her own. She continued to give the Algonquin IOUs in lieu of her rent. Since she was always asked out to dinner, meals were not a problem. She was even able to arrange the expense of entertaining so that it cost her nothing but the price of club soda and ice. Most afternoons around five, people came in for drinks. A frequent visitor at the ritual cocktail hour was painter Allen Saalburg, who would drop in with his wife, the fashion designer Muriel King. “Dottie needed to have people around her all the time but she never had any money. So everybody would bring a bottle and put it down some place, to show they had earned their right to be there. She welcomed almost anybody.”
Her chief expenses were for necessities: clothing, perfume, Johnny Walker cigarettes, and liquor. And now she hired a part-time maid. Ivy (whose surname has been lost) was a young black woman who supported herself and a small son. She was said to be an accomplished cook, but, since Dorothy seldom ate at home, she had no use for Ivy’s culinary skills. In the morning Ivy would arrive and brew coffee. If Dorothy was still asleep, as was generally the case, Ivy moved softly around the suite, tidying up the dirty glasses from the previous evening and washing and ironing Dorothy’s designer nightgowns. By noon, she was ready to move on to her other employers. Sometimes, if Dorothy was giving a more formal cocktail party, Ivy would return to pass drinks. While she seems to have performed these minimal duties perfectly well—Dorothy swore she would never entrust her laundry to anyone else—Dorothy still professed to find her inadequate. It pleased her to have people around who lent themselves to dramatization, as Eddie had. For the moment, Ivy was the chosen one. With characteristic deviltry, Dorothy complained freely about her, until Ivy became infamous as a slovenly, abnormally inefficient horror whom Dorothy lacked the heart to discharge.
When Dorothy’s Boston terrier, Woodrow Wilson, died, she grieved extravagantly for him. He had reminded her of Rags, and after Eddie left, he had been her constant companion wherever she went. Although it could never be said that Dorothy had actually trained him, the dog had somehow learned to comport himself decorously in speakeasies, parlors, and offices. Thou
gh Woodrow Wilson’s passing left a gap in her life, she could not bring herself to take the disloyal step of replacing him.
Throughout the spring of 1925, restless and dissatisfied, she began to draw closer to the Round Tablers again. Benchley was often away. Frequent excursions to the hinterlands to deliver “The Treasurer’s Report” on the vaudeville circuit had become a necessity, because he had grown accustomed to earning a large salary, living a spendthrift life, and piling up debts. In his absence, Dorothy turned for companionship to Frank Adams, who was currently single again. Dorothy had always liked Minna Adams, a former “Floradora girl” who had been unable to bear children and instead babied her husband and her cat Mistah. Dorothy had taken no sides in their breakup.
For as long as she had known F.P.A., he had chased women, although his amorous techniques overflowed with hostility. At a party when he made advances toward a statuesque ingenue, she accused him of caring only about her body. Adams promptly agreed and cautioned her to take good care of it because when it was gone she would have nothing left. Sometimes he gave a titillating kick to his affairs by mentioning the women in his column as Mistress so and so.
Edna Millay had introduced him to Esther Sayles Root, an accomplished woman in her early thirties who studied music. Adams had fallen in love. The affair turned serious and resulted in his divorce. They planned to marry.
In the interim, Adams depended on women friends like Dorothy to fuss over him, even though his behavior was more highstrung and grouchy than ever and he was not the most cheerful of companions. Dorothy went out of her way to humor him. At a dinner they attended at George and Beatrice Kaufman’s, he whined into her ear throughout the meal about the necessity for paying his income tax, but Dorothy was able to supply little consolation. Filing tax returns often slipped her mind, and she claimed to have once told a tax collector that she had stayed home all day on March fifteenth but nobody came. When Dorothy coaxed Adams into joining a card game, he groused about disliking hearts and, to prove it, promptly lost eighteen dollars. On another occasion, a party to which she had not been invited, she obligingly trotted around to his apartment and helped him dress.