Dorothy Parker: What Fresh Hell Is This?

by Marion Meade

  Three decades of rage came roaring to the surface.

  As soon as she stepped off the train at South Station two detectives pounced on her, asking if she was from New York and to state her business in Boston. Since she was decked out in creamy-white gloves, smelled of gardenias, and was obviously a gentlewoman if not an aristocrat, they let her pass.

  Boston was under martial law. Across Prison Point Bridge, in Charlestown, Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti waited in their death-house cells. The two Italian-American anarchists, fish peddler and shoemaker by professions, had been tried and found guilty of the murders of a paymaster and a guard in South Braintree, Massachusetts, on April 15, 1920. What had begun as an obscure, routine murder trial had developed into an international cause célèbre. Seven years of legal maneuvering—a tortured stew of motions, petitions, and reviews—had held off the electric chair until all legal remedies had been exhausted. Sacco and Vanzetti were to die at midnight.

  At three o’clock, Dorothy arrived at 256 Hanover Street in the North End and climbed two dark, narrow flights of stairs. Sacco-Vanzetti defense headquarters was located in a poor Italian neighborhood where peddlers’ carts made splashes of color with big ripe peaches, plums, and pears. Rookie policemen, nice-looking youngsters who seemed self-conscious, were stationed on the sidewalk. The thermometer read in the low eighties and the shabby two-room office was stifling. On the wall a poster announced JUSTICE IS THE ISSUE!, and alongside somebody had tacked up a remark being attributed to Judge Webster Thayer: I’M GONNA GET THOSE ANARCHIST BASTARDS GOOD AND PROPER.

  Heading the defense committee were Mary Donovan, formerly an industrial inspector for the Massachusetts Department of Labor, and Gardner “Pat” Jackson, a journalist who handled publicity. For both of them, Sacco and Vanzetti had become the center of their existences. On this afternoon, August tenth, discouraged beyond measure, they were almost ready to concede that the months of unrelenting letter writing and pamphleteering had been wasted. At that moment, Governor Alvan Fuller was debating at the State House on Beacon Street whether or not to grant a last-minute reprieve. Demonstrations and strikes had erupted all over the world, but in Boston the thousands of protesters that Donovan and Jackson expected to turn out were nowhere to be seen. By mid-afternoon there had rolled in only a single bus whose gaudy, red banner proclaimed SENT BY THE SACCO-VANZETTl DEFENSE COMMITTEE OF NEW YORK. Aboard were a dozen Communist Party workers.

  Dorothy had changed into an embroidered dress with a matching scarf, high-heeled ankle-strap shoes, and a Hattie Carnegie cloche; her gloves were spotless and she moved in a cloud of perfume. Donovan and Jackson stared at her as if she were an apparition. They did not stare long because an hour later she found herself leading a file of demonstrators down Beacon Street. A convoy of men in shirt-sleeves and women wearing cotton house-dresses, sensible shoes, and black armbands marched behind her in a single line. Many of them carried placards. Dorothy had only her handbag, tucked properly under one arm. The marchers were mostly local Party members, among them several well-known New York writers: New Masses editor Michael Gold and Sender Garlin from The Daily Worker. The only person she knew was John Dos Passos, who explained that he was covering the execution for the Worker and who squeezed into the queue ahead of her. Soon everyone started to sing “The Internationale,” then “The Red Flag.” Dorothy mouthed the words.

  Across the street, near the Shaw Memorial, a crowd rapidly collected. Four or five policemen stood there, twirling their clubs and observing the promenade with sleepy interest. Before long two police wagons tore up the street with their sirens screaming. The captain got out and ambled over.

  “It’s against the law to do this,” he warned. “I’ll give you seven minutes to go away.”

  Dorothy kept on walking and singing.

  Arise, ye prisoners of starvation!

  At the end of the block she turned and started back. The seven minutes passed. Nothing happened.

  Arise, ye wretched of the earth!

  Another long seven minutes ticked by. The number of gogglers across Beacon Street had grown to several hundred. The crowd wanted a glimpse of Dorothy Parker, who was being exotically identified as “the Greenwich Village poetess.” They stretched their necks and looked her clothing up and down while they sucked at bottles of soda pop, as if they were watching an American Legion parade. To her, the worst of it was the name-calling: “Bolsheviki!” “Guinea lover!” “New York nut!” “Red scum!” Some people addressed Dorothy by name. One man warned her the police were coming. She’d better run.

  “I don’t mind being arrested,” yelled Dorothy, seething.

  When finally a whistle shrieked and the police came directly at the line, the marchers broke rank and some began to run. Two policemen herded Dorothy toward a patrol wagon but she refused to get in. When the captain ordered her, she insisted on walking the three blocks to the Joy Street Station.

  The police held her arms, hustling her roughly down the middle of the street. Her high heels caught on the cobblestones. When her scarf slipped to the ground, they would not stop so that she could retrieve it. As they yanked her arms, she began to curse them. Behind her followed along a dogged crowd, shouting “Hang her!” “Give her six months!” “Kill her!” At the station, she was booked and then a sour-looking matron with a gold tooth took away her cigarettes and led her to a cell.

  Before long, Ruth Hale came to bail her out. Behind Ruth stood a flustered, panting Seward Collins. Sewie, never at a loss for words, said that he felt terrible because he had arrived late and missed the glory of being arrested. The sight of him angered Dorothy. There was still time, she told him. It was not too late to go back to the State House and get himself arrested.

  There were reporters waiting for her outside. She responded to their questions by lobbing out the wisecracks they expected of her.

  “I thought prisoners who were set free got five dollars and a suit of clothes,” she said, to loud laughter.

  “Is this your first arrest, Mrs. Parker?”

  It was, and she had found it disappointing. Her fingerprints had not been taken, “but they left me a few of theirs. The big stiffs!” She pushed up a sleeve to show that bruises were already forming.

  The execution had convulsed Boston. Overhead she saw planes circling, as if the city anticipated a full-scale invasion by the Red Army. Every policeman and fireman was on twenty-four-hour duty; grim-faced squads patrolled public buildings. Near Prison Point Bridge, streets had been roped off, and state troopers blocked the intersections. The Charlestown prison was fortified with machine guns, tear gas, and double guards wearing bulletproof vests. Dorothy persuaded a newspaper reporter to take her into the prison and once inside found that nobody paid any attention to her. She strolled around freely looking at the machine guns and patting the noses of the troopers’ horses. In the cell blocks, prisoners were screaming, “Let them out! Let them out!”

  As the evening wore on, Dorothy sat in the pressroom and observed. Dozens of telegraphers and reporters played cards and smoked, scavenging for the tiniest crumbs of news to put on the wires. The more cynical were eager-beavering ahead and filing execution pieces, as though Sacco and Vanzetti were already dead. When the warden barreled in to say he’d just heard from the governor and the execution was off, telegraph keys began to cackle madly. Five minutes later, the warden ran back—it was on—midnight, and that was final. There was a round of applause. Dorothy found a telephone and called defense headquarters. She may have been talking too loudly because she was spotted by a deputy warden who went haywire, called her an enemy spy, and threatened to have her driven out of town. Luckily for her, the man had more important things to worry about. At eleven-thirty, Warden Henry burst in again. Off again, for twelve days. That was final. Like a man whose wife has just had a baby, he passed around a box of cigars.

  Meanwhile, a pair of detectives in a Ford spent the night opposite Hanover Street headquarters. A reporter who noticed them keeping watch a
nd asked what they were doing was told that they had received a straight tip on a bomb plot. They were watching for the bombers: “Two women from New York. Ruth Hale and Dorothy Parker.”

  Dorothy arrived at Municipal Court the next morning, August 11, to discover the hallway outside the courtroom jammed with yesterday’s prisoners. They were flipping through the morning papers in search of news of their arrests and singing “The Internationale.” The corridor sounded like a musical version of Potemkin, with courthouse guards breaking in periodically with a chorus of “shut ups.” Several comrades brought Dorothy papers showing photographs of herself and John Dos Passos. Not only had they made the headlines, but she was disgusted to notice that some papers had allotted them almost as much space as they had Sacco and Vanzetti.

  She pleaded guilty and received a five-dollar fine for loitering and sauntering.

  Several days later, Dorothy and Ruth were at the dock when Vanzetti’s sister, Luiga, arrived on the Aquitania. It was clear at once that Luiga would be worthless to the defense; she had only come, she said, to guide her brother back to the Catholic faith so that he would be prepared to meet his maker.

  Dorothy remained briefly in New York, trying to persuade her friends to join the protesters. She had no trouble talking Sewie into contributing thirty-five hundred dollars, which was used to purchase full-page ads in The New York Times and other major papers. Benchley had already testified before the Lowell Committee about an indiscreet remark of Judge Thayer’s in the Worcester Golf Club locker room; later, he filed a writ of protest with the court. Heywood Broun used his World column to write movingly on behalf of the condemned men, and Ruth Hale was as deeply involved with the defense committee as Dorothy was. Don Stewart wasn’t interested and made no attempt to understand. Dorothy found the indifferent behavior of other friends extremely vexing. “Those people at the Round Table didn’t know a bloody thing. They thought we were fools to go up and demonstrate for Sacco and Vanzetti.” She supposed them ignorant because “they didn’t know and they just didn’t think about anything but the theater.” That was no excuse in her opinion.

  On her return to Boston, she spent long hours at Hanover Street helping with whatever tasks needed to be done. She worked in the back room, where Gardner “Pat” Jackson was always typing at the long oak table, and soon developed a little-girl crush on the tweedily handsome Coloradan who had been a reporter on the Boston Globe. Since the opportunity for personal conversation was limited, and she was too shy to approach him directly, she dropped breathless notes full of superlatives into his lap as she left the room. Pat Jackson was, she wrote, a very great human being, precisely the kind of perfect man she had always wanted to spend her life with. “These adoring businesses,” as Jackson described the notes, were embarrassing and he did not reciprocate because, “I had my work to do.”

  Plenty of visitors milled through the office. The weekend before the new execution date saw the arrival of a number of prominent writers: Susan Glaspell, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Mary Heaton Vorse, Upton Sinclair, and Katherine Anne Porter. John Dos Passos returned. They picketed the State House, got themselves arrested, and defense headquarters promptly bailed them out at twenty-five dollars each. It had become almost a routine.

  Throughout the day, the defense workers sometimes drank to steady their nerves, and each evening they tottered out to eat spicy spaghetti at one of the Italian restaurants along Hanover Street. Mother Gaboni’s, third floor back, was rated the best. Mother Gaboni, a fine cook, had two bootlegger sons and served big jugs of home-made red wine. Since red wine gave Dorothy a mighty high, she jokingly referred to it as the “Red Badge of Courage.”

  The pressroom felt like an oven because all the windows had been nailed shut for fear a bomb would be thrown in. At eleven o’clock Dorothy telephoned Pat Jackson to tell him that there was a rumor, erroneous as it turned out, that the killings might be held up. As Jackson remembered it, on the night of the execution Dorothy “was able to get admitted to the prison for last words with Sacco and Vanzetti,” but this memory is confirmed by no other source. Near twelve-thirty, the Associated Press reporter who had been chosen by lot to witness the electrocutions returned to the pressroom with the details. “No features,” he announced. “Entirely colorless.” Neither man had confessed. Sacco’s last words were “Viva L’anarchia!” and somebody asked if anarchia was spelled with a k. Vanzetti shook hands with everyone, then like a gentleman thanked the warden for his many courtesies, and lastly said he forgave everyone. Correction: He forgave some people.

  The insensitive remarks of the reporters seared Dorothy: “The little infant Jesus!” “Ain’t they lambs, those Reds?” Listening to them sickened her.

  At Hanover Street, the telephone rang and rang, but nobody picked it up. Finally, the rooms were hushed. Dorothy sat with Jackson, Vanzetti’s friend Aldino Felicani, and a few others. None of them spoke. For a long time they sat staring at their knees. Then, Jackson hoisted himself up and said he was going for a walk. Felicani followed him.

  After a while Dorothy staggered down the stairs. The empty street in the gray hour between night and morning breathed coldness. It was August 23. The day before had been her thirty-fourth birthday.

  During the autumn after the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti, new people entered her life, and because they contrasted so strongly with what she had witnessed, she welcomed them. The ideas she had heard in Boston had struck a live nerve somewhere, and now she began proudly calling herself a socialist. “My heart and soul are with the cause of socialism,” she announced. The odd choice of company she began to keep did not reflect her politics however. Some of her new friends were bankers and Wall Street businessmen, some of them millionaires, but all of them conspicuous capitalists whose political consciousness had not been raised. Although Dorothy still had the run of the Swopes’ place and regularly visited other estates along Long Island’s North Shore, she got to know the new bunch through Benchley and Stewart: John Hay “Jock” Whitney, his sister, Joan Whitney Payson, Pierpont and Marise Morgan, and Robert and Adele Lovett.

  These attractive, moneyed socialites found the circles in which they had grown up too stuffy for their tastes. Amusing writers like Dorothy and Benchley were much in demand. Their talent and gaiety were considered charming, and their company welcomed in drawing rooms and on trips. The previous spring, Jock Whitney had taken Benchley to see the Grand National in England. Stewart and Benchley liked this crowd very much. Dorothy, who tended to trust their judgment, went along with these associations, which she would later deride as products of the natural social-climbing instincts of indigent writers. Still, these friendships had undeniable advantages because the rich could be generous suppliers of cottages on their estates for little or no rent, memberships in racquet and tennis clubs, and gifts of money and stocks.

  Dorothy’s closest friend in the group was Adele Quartley Brown Lovett, daughter of investment banker James Brown, wife of Robert A. Lovett (a partner in Brown Brothers Harriman & Company and secretary of Defense in the 1950s), and mother of two children. Famous for her dinner parties, Adele Lovett was a witty and elegant blond clotheshorse who cultivated the Round Table writers and made a big effort to befriend Dorothy. Dorothy gave the impression of reciprocating Adele Lovett’s esteem for several years, even dedicating a book to her, although Adele and her Brahmin manners grated on her nerves. Finally, as an indignant Lovett said herself, she “dropped us like hot potatoes.” The truth was that Dorothy tolerated her wealthy friends and even gave the appearance of enjoying their company. There was a wonderful tawdriness to be found in their drawing rooms, where she was sure to meet “over-eager portrait-painters, playwrights of dubious sexes, professional conversationalists, and society ladies not yet quite divorced.” Their stupidities were of course ideal targets for all manner of wisecracks and gossip. Dorothy appreciated the rich for their houses, cars, servants, and clothes, but, with a few exceptions, she invariably found them dull, silly, and almost totally ignora
nt.

  About this time she met John Wiley Garrett II, an investment banker with the private banking firm of Hallgarten & Company. Garrett was the same age as Dorothy, although she sometimes described him as “a very good-looking young man indeed,” or as “a graceful young man ever carefully dropping references to his long, unfinished list of easy conquests,” so that it seemed as though he were significantly younger. He was born on December 3, 1893, in St. Louis, attended the Kent School, and graduated from Williams College in 1915. During the war, he served in France as a captain in the 103rd Field Artillery, and immediately afterward began working in Wall Street. He sailed and played golf and tennis, and he belonged to The Leash and Downtown Association and the American Legion. Politically he was about as far right as he could get, a stereotype of a reactionary Republican. (During the Depression, Edmund Wilson remembered him as someone upon whom he might base a fictional character who thought President Hoover was doing a fine job.)

  Dorothy broke off with Seward Collins and fell in love with John Garrett, who looked like a romantic lover and had a voice as “intimate as the rustle of sheets.”

  On October 1, she took over the “Recent Books” column in The New Yorker, under the pseudonym “Constant Reader.” Need of money was her reason for assuming the responsibility of a regular weekly assignment. She started out cautiously and the reviews were relatively benign during the early weeks. As a reviewer, she did poorly with quality books, usually slopping adjectives like “beautiful” and “exquisite” all over the page. By the end of the first month, reviewing a memoir by President Warren Harding’s mistress and the mother of his illegitimate child, Dorothy had worked herself into a properly bilious mood. An effort had been made to suppress Nan Britton’s creation because police had invaded the printing plant to seize the plates. “Lady,” Dorothy was dying to tell the author, “those weren’t policemen; they were critics of literature dressed up.”