by Marion Meade
One Sunday, Dorothy made plans with Adams and Edna Ferber to motor into the country and stop at a rustic inn for luncheon. Among the Round Table regulars, she disliked Ferber second only to George Kaufman, because she categorized Edna, along with Kathleen Norris and Fannie Hurst, as a writer who manufactured potboilers. In later years she found the idea that Ferber was actually making a fortune from her overstuffed novels to be insufferable and roundly denounced her as an oil well gushing dollar bills. “I understand Ferber whistles at her typewriter. And there was that poor sucker Flaubert rolling around on his floor for three days looking for the right words.”
When she and Adams arrived at Ferber’s apartment, they found her in bed pleading illness, although to Dorothy she did not appear sick. She was wearing a frothy pink bed jacket that would have been sensational on a Ziegfeld Follies vamp but looked seriously silly on a woman as homely as Ferber. The sight amused Dorothy, who told F.P.A. afterward that Ferber “was not so ill that she did not look lovely, with the pink maribou flowing like water.” Adams was fond of Ferber, but that did not prevent him from printing Dorothy’s catty crack in The Conning Tower.
Before long Dorothy’s most persistent suitor was Seward Collins, who trailed after her as if he were a beggar at a moveable banquet, an approach guaranteed to lower himself in her esteem. Sewie’s dependency and Dorothy’s lack of respect for him supplied plenty of gossip for the Round Table, even though her friends agreed that he was precisely the sort of person she needed. To them, he was a well-heeled intellectual who wanted to marry and look after her. To Dorothy, Sewie was a fool, but in superficial ways he seemed to be suitable. He showered her with attention and presents and even paid some of her bills. She was sublimely indifferent because, once again, she had gravitated toward an ill-considered, unsatisfying relationship, having lately conceived a great affection for a married man.
Deems Taylor was the most eminent music critic in the country, a small, blond man with a bespectacled face and crinkled smile who resembled an affable gnome. Physically, he was as far removed as a man could possibly be from the movie-idol types she preferred. His tongue, as efficient as a buzz saw when it came to slicing fools into small pieces, was a match for hers. She first met him in 1920, but even before that, she had known him by reputation as “Smeed,” one of the most gifted writers of light verse to appear in The Conning Tower.
One thing she liked about him was that he disliked working as much as she did and put off assignments until the last minute. Even so, he was the most prolific, versatile person she had ever known. Apart from criticism, he was also a gifted composer, a skilled cabinetmaker, architect, painter, and illustrator. His personal life had been chaotic. During the war he married a journalist named Jane Anderson, a brilliant, strikingly beautiful, unstable woman, and both of them worked as war correspondents for the London Daily Mail. By the time Jane returned from Europe she had become lovers with writer Gilbert Seldes, and that ended their marriage. Now Taylor was married to Mary Kennedy, a Broadway actress with whom Dorothy was acquainted. In fact, Mary had been among those performing “The Everlastin’ Ingenue Blues,” the song that Dorothy and Deems had written for No Sirree. Lately Taylor had grown dissatisfied with his life. Not only had he resigned his position on the World because the job left no time for serious composing, but he and Mary had embarked on a trial separation before deciding whether or not to end their marriage.
When Dorothy first began the affair with Deems, he was only one of many men with whom she was involved, but soon her interest began to focus on him exclusively. With the neediness that invariably consumed her whenever she fell in love, she grew increasingly demanding of his affection and his time. Taylor, probably unprepared for such a development, began to back off and the romance soon began to suffer difficulties.
Things were going badly when the Round Tablers and their friends gathered to attend Frank Adams’s wedding to Esther Root on May 9. The ceremony was performed at the home of friends who lived near Greenwich, Connecticut. A number of the wedding guests arrived in extremely low spirits, because it looked as if The New Yorker would fold. Five months after its birth, the magazine’s original capital was depleted and it seemed unlikely to survive the summer season, customarily a slow period even for prosperous publications. Raoul Fleischmann had been advised that the wisest course would be to suspend publication until the fall, but Harold Ross and Jane Grant were convinced that this would mean ruin for the magazine. They had begun to seek capital elsewhere. In the midst of Adams’s nuptial festivities, Fleischmann arrived with a miraculous last-minute reprieve and announced that he had persuaded his mother to invest $100,000, enough to assure the summer issues at least.
For Dorothy, F.P.A.’s wedding day was marked by an excess of champagne and caviar and unpleasant quarreling with Taylor. When Elinor Wylie and Bill Benét invited her to spend the night at their New Canaan home, she left. She squeezed into a taxi with Elinor and Bill, as did a number of the other wedding guests: Edna Millay, her husband Eugen Boissevain, her former lover Arthur Davison Ficke, and his new wife, Gladys. By the time they reached New Canaan, the fare had risen considerably from the agreed-upon price, which ended in a violent quarrel. Exhausted, everyone settled in the dining room for food and drinks to restore their nerves before heading up to bed. Dorothy remained downstairs, having a nightcap with Elinor and Arthur Ficke, when Elinor asked her to say aloud some of her verses for Ficke. Even though Dorothy had not the slightest desire to recite poetry at that hour, she made a polite effort to oblige. To her astonishment, Arthur Ficke began to offer unsolicited advice and told her that her verse could use work. Dorothy knew that Millay once had been in love with Ficke and still referred to him as her spiritual adviser, but Dorothy certainly felt no affinity toward the man and was not concerned about her spiritual development. To her, he was nothing more than an ex-lawyer and a third-rate sonneteer. His presumption that she would accept a tutorial was an added affront, because she felt competitive with Millay and hated critics’ calling her an imitator of Millay’s light verse.
Incensed, she excused herself and went up to bed. Just as she was dropping off to sleep, Wylie and Ficke rushed in because Elinor wanted to show the scars on Dorothy’s wrists, apparently to convince him that Dorothy had indeed taken suicide seriously. Dorothy burst into tears.
In some ways, Deems Taylor acted as a positive influence on her. His decision to resign from the World and devote himself to creative work impressed her deeply, inspiring her to consider carefully her own future. When she told Seward Collins that she was working on a novel, it had been a partial lie; writing a novel had been on her mind. With Taylor’s example before her, she returned to the idea, or at least to thinking about it.
In many other ways, her relations with Taylor proved a source of familiar misery, terrain she had traversed in her affair with Charles MacArthur. Both of these married men were associated with the Round Table, thus falling safely, but incestuously, into the category of extended family. Neither of them was legally or emotionally available to her, even though their marriages had tailed off to the point where they seemed to be. Dorothy was aware that Taylor felt undecided about a divorce. Depressed, her mood degenerated into morbidity. A poem she wrote in June suggests how insubstantial and unsafe rejecting men made her feel:The first time I died, I walked my ways; I followed the file of limping days.
She sensed herself plunging into that same torment again:The next time I died, they laid me deep. They spoke worn words to hallow my sleep. And I lie here warm, and I lie here dry, And watch the worms slip by, slip by.
Harold Ross agreed to publish “Epitaph,” even though death and decomposition were scarcely subjects that his readers found screamingly funny. Indeed, the poem was not the least bit entertaining. Ross ran it without her byline.
In addition to documenting her pain in her writings, she also needed to share unhappiness with her friends, particularly with Benchley. At this time he was abroad with his family, vacationing afte
r his extramarital liaison had turned cold. Adams was also in Europe on an extended honeymoon, and Aleck Woollcott, who had limited tolerance for hearing about the entanglements of heterosexual love, confided in Murdock Pemberton that the messiness of Dorothy’s affairs left him sick at his stomach and that if he ever decided to have an affair, he would choose a waitress.
As it turned out, the person most sympathetic toward Dorothy’s troubles was Ring Lardner. Encountering him at F.P.A.’s wedding, she aired her problems with Taylor and complained that she wanted to begin a novel but couldn’t find the necessary solitude. Lardner was in the middle of an extended drinking spree that had begun in early May and continued until the middle of July. Impulsively, he invited “Spark Plug” Parker, as he liked to call her, to be his houseguest. The visit would cheer her up, he promised, and she would have complete privacy to write.
Arriving in Great Neck with her typewriter, she walked into a situation that did not bode well for concentration. As Lardner admitted afterward, he was “constantly cock-eyed.” He would stay up the whole night drinking, then sleep throughout the next day. He did no writing himself, nor did he plan to, because he had stockpiled eight weeks’ worth of columns before going off the wagon. Ellis Lardner, withdrawing as usual from his drinking, stayed out of the way and tried to live as separate an existence as she could decently manage.
To Dorothy’s dismay, the Lardner household was anything but quiet. There were four active children, not to mention friends and neighbors who seemed to be dropping in constantly. One evening when Herman Mankiewicz turned up, in a mood to barrel around the North Shore drinking and raising hell, Lardner proposed a visit to a popular speakeasy in Manhasset. Ellis chose to stay home. When Dorothy and her two companions arrived at Rene Durand’s restaurant, the smoke-filled bar was crowded with its usual clientele of big burly Irishmen. After a few drinks, Mankiewicz remembered he was once a marine and began to pick fights with some of the customers, until it was necessary for Lardner to nose in and extricate him from a fistfight. With some difficulty, he and Dorothy finally hauled him back to the house and put him to bed. The next day, after declaring that he had to hurry back to town to finish an article, Mankiewicz braced himself for the trip with a succession of highballs and did not leave until five o’clock. This was an ordinary day at the Lardners.
After a week, during which Dorothy had accomplished nothing, she decided it would be best to depart. Back in the city, she complained that her stay had been perfectly horrible. Ring had lured her to his home with the promise of privacy, but there he had pursued her all hours of the day and night so that finally she had been forced to leave, just to escape being seduced. She neglected to mention that she had found Ring’s advances flattering, just as she found him sexually attractive, and that she had left the Lardner house only after she had slept with him. Before long, her indiscreet remarks were reported back to Ellis Lardner, who considered them unkind repayment for her hospitality.
Long afterward, when Ring was dead, she told practically every one of her close friends that she once had been his mistress, which may have been a genteel term to describe what had gone on between them, but also was a considerable embellishment of what was really a midsummer diversion. At the time, emotionally involved with Taylor, she probably had chalked it up to drinking and proximity and the sort of carousing that went on in Great Neck during the season. Lardner had been drunk her entire stay, but Dorothy also knew what everyone else knew—that, despite his great devotion to Ellis, he liked to chase other women.
Soon after her return from Great Neck, the relationship with Taylor began to improve, perhaps because Mary Taylor had gone to Europe and left the field clear. Taylor was spending the summer near Stamford, Connecticut, where he and his wife owned a farm. He was busy composing a tone poem, Jurgen, which was based on a satirical novel by James Branch Cabell and which had been commissioned by the New York Symphony for an autumn premiere. Dorothy visited him and stayed the rest of the summer even though rural life held no appeal for her. The small tumbledown house, which the Taylors intended to restore as a summer home, was still primitive. It lacked electricity, plumbing, and a telephone, but had an abundance of wasps and poison ivy. She heard from Don Stewart, who had once borrowed the house to write, that a rat had bitten him on the nose while he was asleep. Nevertheless, it was largely a happy time for her and she managed to settle down to work. Whether as a result of the orderly regime or the example of Taylor’s labors, her state of mind grew less muddled during her residence at the farm.
Her original idea was to write about her family and to set the opening of the novel in her early life, perhaps in the period of her father’s marriage to Eleanor Lewis or possibly later at the time of his death, the two events that she considered of the greatest consequence. The first of these themes concerns a child of five, modeled on herself, who has been adopted by a wealthy childless couple. The mother is a terrible figure, an oblivious woman who is determined to squeeze all the life out of the child, not from misdirected affection but rather from her own gross character defects and her inability to love.
The second theme draws on her father’s last years. The Old Gentleman, as she calls him, lives with one of his two daughters, exploits her shamefully, and appears indifferent to the hardship he has brought into her existence. He is, admittedly, ill, but he also is excessively selfish and tyrannical. The mood of the writing is as somber as the mustard-colored wallpaper and the heavy, tapestried furniture in the daughter’s parlor. Other characters bear resemblances to Helen and George Droste and to Bert Rothschild and his wife, Tiny. There also is a sketch of Dorothy’s oldest brother, Harry. Unwilling to offend Bert or Helen, she took pains to disguise them. She added twenty years to her father’s age and made him eighty-four at his death. It almost seems as if the portrait drew from an even earlier time when her grandfather Thomas Marston had lived with the Rothschilds, but it is not likely that she actually remembered any details about this period.
After sitting all day at her typewriter, she felt entitled to spend her evenings drinking Scotch and socializing with Round Tablers who owned summer homes in the area. A short drive away was the ninety-seven-acre farm that Ruth Hale had purchased with her own money and named Sabine Farm, after Horace’s estate in the Sabine Hills outside Rome. The only word for Ruth’s place was squalid. The two-hundred-year-old house was a wreck, not at all like Deems’s home, where his skill as a carpenter had created at least a facsimile of civilization. Sabine Farm, recalled Ruth’s son Woodie Broun, “looked as Horace’s place must have looked after the Goths, Gauls, and Vandals had passed over it several times.” Dorothy, disgusted at the sight of a brown, worn-out toothbrush in the bathroom, had refused to acknowledge the possibility that Ruth might actually be using it to clean her teeth and insisted that it must be a broomstick she rode on Halloween. In addition to Ruth, Murdock Pemberton lived in a second house on her property, Heywood Broun had bought a place down the road, and Peggy Wood and John Weaver owned land in North Stamford.
One evening at Ruth’s, they were sitting around the fire drinking with actor Ed McNamara. Dorothy was talking about Deems when she saw a pack of rats come running out of the wall like Olympic gold medalists, pounce on something, and then speed away. Breaking off her story, she stiffened with horror. Although she loved all animals and could put up with the most eccentric behavior so long as a creature walked on four legs, she had never cared for rats and in fact feared them. When she looked over at Ruth and McNamara, they were paying no attention to the rats. They were just sitting there calmly and smiling as they waited for her to continue. A few minutes later, the rats again came sprinting toward her, until they were just a few feet away. She was sure they could not be real; on the other hand, she had not drunk enough to be experiencing the DTs. After she finished her anecdote, she said, “Does anyone but myself see giant rats in this room?”
Ruth and Ed had been planning to say, “What rats, Dottie?” but a glance at her stricken face change
d their minds. They confessed that they had been summoning the famished rats by quietly tossing bread pellets against the wall.
Several times she visited New York to look after her business affairs. For a change she was making money. Close Harmony, after reviews that compared her to George Kelly, was now in its third month in Chicago and doing excellent business. In New York, Business Is Business could be seen at the Criterion Theatre with Beggar on Horseback. On one of her trips to the city, she ran into Eddie, whom she had seen little of since his return to Hartford. In a jubilant mood, he told her that he was making money in Wall Street and had in fact cleaned up seven thousand dollars during the previous week. When he insisted on buying her a gift, she agreed to accept a dog, a seven-week-old Airedale she took with her back to the farm. On another trip she bumped into Harold Ross, who was in a far from jubilant mood. He was struggling to keep The New Yorker going with a tiny, inexperienced staff and an office that had only one typewriter. In August, circulation fell to twenty-seven hundred copies. Ross said, “I thought you were coming into the office to write a piece last week. What happened?”
Dorothy replied, “Somebody was using the pencil.”
At the end of July, she was in the city to greet Benchley, who returned alone from Europe. In an unhappy, cranky mood, he complained about the sticky weather and wished he had remained in Cap d’Antibes with his family. Dorothy planned to stay for the weekend, just long enough for a reunion with her best pal, but she hung around until the following Wednesday. She attended a few shows, even though everything she saw looked stale, and she spent many hours at Tony Soma’s with Benchley, catching him up on her news and listening to his stories of good times in Paris with Don Stewart and a likeable friend of Stewart’s, a newspaper stringer by the name of Ernest Hemingway. At Tony’s one night, she learned that Frank Sullivan was struggling to find material for The Conning Tower while F.P.A. was on his honeymoon. She mailed him two poems the next day. “If you can’t use these, give them to some poor family,” she wrote Sullivan, who was greatly moved by her generosity because The Conning Tower paid nothing for verse.