Dorothy Parker: What Fresh Hell Is This?

by Marion Meade

  It was the rare column that did not contain something to make readers laugh: Crude is the name of Robert Hyde’s first novel, she reported. “It is also a criticism of it.” Margot Asquith’s latest book, she chortled, has “all the depth and glitter of a worn dime,” and she went on to speculate that “the affair between Margot Asquith and Margot Asquith will live as one of the prettiest love stories in all literature.” Dorothy was probably at her most pugilistic with how-to books. Confronted with a work about happiness, titled Happiness and written by a Yale professor, she described the book assecond only to a rubber duck as the ideal bathtub companion. It may be held in the hand without causing muscular fatigue or nerve strain, it may be neatly balanced back of the faucets, and it may be read through before the water has cooled. And if it slips down the drain pipe, all right, it slips down the drain pipe.

  Constant Reader’s best-known review was of A. A. Milne’s The House at Pooh Corner. Milne’s whimsy had always nauseated her. When she came to the word hummy, her stomach revolted. “And it is that word ‘hummy,’ my darlings,” she wrote, “that marks the first place in The House at Pooh Corner at which Tonstant Weader Fwowed up.”

  Almost from the outset, she set a precedent of being late with her copy, which was due at The New Yorker on Fridays. On Sunday mornings, someone from the magazine would telephone. Dorothy, reassuring, said that the column was finished except for the last paragraph and promised to have it for them within the hour. Throughout the day, the same routine would be repeated several times. Occasionally, she would claim she had just ripped up the column because it was awful. At that point, she would start writing.

  She joked that her lateness was unavoidable because she had to begin a column by typing her name and address in the upper left hand corner of the paper (if it did not look perfect she would retype it sometimes as often as eleven times) and because she first had to study the typewriter keyboard to see how many words could be formed from the letters in the word Corona (fifteen if she used the dictionary). Naturally, time flitted by like a steam-roller, and the first thing she knew the morning was shot and the noon whistles were blowing. The whistles meant lunchtime for most people, but not for her because, “I have an editor. I have an overdraft at the bank. I have a pain in the eye.”

  While she was unquestionably accomplished when it came to stalling, the missed deadlines at this time were due to the fact that she had undertaken more work than she could comfortably complete. In this period of fertility, when not even an attack of mumps slowed her down, she wrote some of her best stories, among them “Arrangement in Black and White,” a rather bold attack on racism that appeared in The New Yorker, and the comic but deadly serious monologue she called “A Telephone Call,” published in The Bookman. She continued to produce verse, and she also agreed to accept a second regular assignment, an editorial column for McCall’s that required her to write a chatty personal essay about New York or any subject she cared to write about each month.

  She was leading a hectic social life and staying up late, drinking a lot, but handling it well. Only occasionally did she suffer from incapacitating hangovers, which she jokingly referred to as “the rams.”

  Most of the time, she kept her hangovers to herself and insisted that she felt “perfectly fine,” a phrase she repeated so regularly that she finally used it as the title for a short story.

  Dorothy settled into a nonsexual friendship with Seward Collins. Recently, Sewie had gone into partnership with Burton Rascoe to purchase The Bookman and now was pestering her to contribute fiction. There had been a brief, friendly interlude with Howard Dietz, the MGM publicity director who was trying to break into theater as a songwriter. Their involvement did not get publicized out of deference to Dietz’s wife Betty, but in any case it soon ended. In fact, she was sweeping all males from her life except John Garrett, with whom she had begun an affair. Although Garrett practically had a neon sign emblazoned across his forehead that blinked I DONT WANT TO GET MARRIED, Dorothy couldn’t see it. She adored “his boyishness and gaiety and sweetness.” There was no denying he was striking, very tall and slim with dark brown hair, broad shoulders, and elegant clothes. At the age of thirty-five, he had never wed. He was a flirt who enjoyed being pursued and competed for by flotillas of women, especially those who were married or divorced. He also liked nothing better than to play them off against each other. In his Murray Hill flat overlooking a garden, there was a considerable collection of cigarette cases and monogrammed dressing gowns, which had been presented to him by hopeful women.

  Enamored once again with a handsome, Gentile, corporate type, wearing Roman numerals behind his name, who was in no other way remarkable, she found John Wiley Garrett II as fascinating as she once had found Edwin Pond Parker II. Although decently educated, he was a man whose interests were limited to business and sports. He shared neither her radical tendencies nor her love of literature. Later, trying to remember what they had talked about, she retained a foggy impression that he spoke about the war and about his clubs at Williams, but she couldn’t be certain because “we were both pretty fairly tight” most of the time. Alcohol transformed him into a fascinating lover, but the reality was that they had nothing in common.

  In the early months of the affair, although she never mentioned John by name, she knitted the private details of their relationship into a number of columns and stories. She had a friend, she wrote in The New Yorker, “who is trying to make a lady of me, and the first step in the uphill climb has been the gaining of my promise to keep from employing certain words,” which was why she couldn’t reveal her true opinion of Sinclair Lewis’s latest novel. In the end, she coyly identified the forbidden word as rotten but only because the magazine would not print her favorite word, shit. John, incidentally, seems to have resented her position as literary critic and complained that she never wrote about anything that people read, so the next week she reviewed something he did read, the tabloid comic strips. He further complained that her drinking and late hours were a bad influence on him.

  His behavior maddened her, especially his habit of breaking his promises to telephone. She would sit by the phone waiting and agonizing, resisting the impulse to phone him; when women phoned men, she wrote, “they know you are thinking about them and wanting them, and that makes them hate you.” She decided that men “hate you whenever you say anything you really think. You always have to keep playing little games.” For fear of losing him, she tried to contain her jealousy, but she continued to distrust him.

  At Christmas she could not deny feeling unhappy. “Sunk I am. And in a big way. It is my conviction that civilization is about to collapse.” John’s faithlessness was scarcely news, but she had hoped to break the pattern. What surprised her was his promiscuity and his stamina for deception. He was not a bit ashamed of himself and took few precautions to conceal his exploits, which Dorothy rightfully interpreted as provocative behavior. One evening Heywood Broun and Rebecca Bernstien, who were to dine with them, plowed up the stairs to Garrett’s apartment only to find themselves with front-row seats to a confrontational scene between John, Dorothy, and a musical-comedy actress. “It was a screaming match,” Bernstien remembered, “except that it was Dorothy who was doing all the screaming. I can’t remember the exact obscenities she used but she was very, very graphic.”

  “Let us leave,” Broun whispered. They shut the door and crept away.

  The winter of 1928, after a four-year separation, she finally filed for divorce from Eddie. To avoid publicity, she slipped into Hartford and, before a committee of the Superior Court, testified at a private hearing in which she cited several unpleasant episodes from her married life. The committee recommended that she be granted a divorce on the ground of intolerable cruelty. Eddie declined to contest. They did not see one another on the day of the hearing, nor did they ever meet again.

  Several months after the divorce, Eddie married Anne O’Brien, a probation officer employed by the Hartford Juvenile Court. They moved
to the small town of Haddam, Connecticut.

  Five years later, on January 7, 1933, Eddie died of Ipral (a barbituric acid derivative) poisoning. The medical examiner gave the cause of death as a self-administered overdose of a sleeping powder but concluded it was accidental. A different cause was cited by Eddie’s physician, who attributed the death to “an acute septic condition resulting from surgical procedure.” His patient, he said, recently had several teeth extracted. Eddie fell into a coma and was taken to St. Francis Hospital, where he died two days later without regaining consciousness. He was thirty-nine. His obituary noted that he had once been a stock trader with Paine Webber but mentioned no recent employment. The Hartford Courant emphasized two facts about the deceased. One was his distinguished ancestry as a grandson of the Reverend Dr. Edwin Pond Parker, pastor of the South Congregational Church and friend of Mark Twain. The other was his first marriage to Dorothy Parker, the “well-known poet.”

  On the day the divorce became final, Dorothy spent the evening with John Garrett at Jack and Charlie’s speakeasy, where later they were joined by Heywood Broun and writer Mildred Gilman, at that time Broun’s secretary and assistant. Gilman recalls that Dorothy went to pieces.

  Even though she hadn’t seen Eddie Parker for years, and never said a good word about him, this was a terrible time for her. She carried on and kept running off to the ladies room to cry, and the men kept sending me after her because she had this tendency toward committing suicide, and she also had a habit of giving all her money to the ladies-room attendant. After this happened three or four times, I was getting bored stiff. Finally, John rose in all his Wall Street finery and announced emphatically that he had to go to the gentleman’s room, to which Dorothy muttered, “He really has to use the telephone but he doesn’t want to admit it.”

  That spring she tried to temper her drinking with highballs that were just little ones, “awfully weak; just cambric Scotch,” and talked about needing more dogs. May marked the publication of Sunset Gun, her second volume of verse. Boni and Liveright did a hefty first printing of ten thousand copies, along with a fancy numbered and autographed special edition of 250 copies that was priced at $7.50. Dorothy switched titles at the last moment from the rather cheerful Songs for the Nearest Harmonica to the darker Sunset Gun, a reference to the cannon that is traditionally fired at the end of the day when the flag is lowered. Reviews were, if anything, even more enthusiastic than for Enough Rope. In the Saturday Review, Bill Benét repeated the question some people were asking: “Is it as good as Enough Rope?” Benét emphatically believed it was and went on to call Sunset Gun “a moth-gray cloak of demureness hiding spangled ribaldry, a razor-keen intellect mocking a head dark with desperation.” As for its author, “Long may she wave!”

  In Sunset Gun Dorothy included a concise poem written for The New Yorker before she met John Garrett, which she called “Three-Volume Novel,” although in the collection she downgraded it to “Two-Volume Novel”:The sun’s gone dim, and

  The moon’s turned black;

  For I loved him, and

  He didn’t love back.

  She dedicated Sunset Gun to John, but the situation remained as unsatisfactory as ever. She was not prepared to send him packing, nor could she accept him as he was. Her emotional dependence on him was contrasted by the autonomy she exhibited in other areas of her life. She left the Algonquin, where Round Table lunches had become less frequent, and moved into a furnished flat on East Fifty-fourth Street, off Fifth Avenue, two flights above a piano store. She paid seventy-five dollars a month for a living room, a tiny bedroom, and a kitchenette with all the usual useless conveniences. Only the ice box interested her, because the White Rock needed to be chilled.

  Dorothy’s nightly cocktail parties took place as always at her new apartment. One evening, when a large crowd had assembled, Mildred Gilman happened to enter Dorothy’s bedroom to get to the bathroom at about the same time as Robert Benchley went in to make a telephone call. Dorothy noticed and later saw them coming out of the bedroom together. Jumping to conclusions and furious at Mildred, whom she supposed to have lured Benchley into the room, she waited until Mildred had left before informing Heywood Broun that his secretary was a slut. When this got back to Gilman, a divorcee with a small son, she was so upset that she asked Benchley to tell Heywood the truth. She also wondered why Dorothy would have fabricated such a mean story. Benchley, too, found it baffling.

  She is quite given to telling of assaults on John by various ladies (I have never heard you included in the list, but have heard only part of the list) but this [is] the first time that I have ever been made the hero. It sounds like one of Dottie’s vivid word-pictures to illustrate my helplessness in the clutches of any attractive woman.... Incidentally, you don’t suppose for one minute that, if I had any reason to believe that you had designs on my person, you would have left that room inviolate, do you?

  Allen Saalburg remembered Dorothy as “half-soused a good deal of the time, and that’s when her worst qualities came out.” A certain amount of the respect she commanded was rooted in “very strong fear. People were afraid of being jumped on from behind.”

  Dorothy had experienced abdominal pain in the winter and wondered if she might have appendicitis, but the discomfort was slight. Instead of reporting it to Dr. Barach, she bought a book about appendicitis and self-diagnosed the symptoms as a fancy hangover, “just the effects of that new Scotch of mine which, friends tell me, must have been specially made by the Borgias.” One Monday afternoon toward the end of May, she suddenly developed severe pain and began running a temperature. This time she did send for Barach, who diagnosed acute appendicitis and sent her to Presbyterian Hospital, where she was operated on the same evening.

  When Aleck Woollcott came to visit,I found her hard at work. Because of posterity and her creditors, I was loath to intrude, but she, being entranced at any interruption, greeted me from her cot of pain, waved me to a chair, offered me a cigarette, and rang a bell. I wondered if this could possibly be for drinks. “No,” she said sadly, “it is supposed to fetch the night nurse, so I ring it whenever I want an hour of uninterrupted privacy.”

  She gave her address as Bedpan Alley and requested a typewriter, insisting that the size of the hospital bill made it necessary for her to write her way out of the place. Ignoring the fact that she had two best-selling books in print—and loath to shell out the fruits of her success to Presbyterian Hospital—she tried to think of someone who might want to underwrite an extravagance like an appendectomy. Bea Stewart assumed the hospital expenses would not be a problem, since they had rich friends who would be pleased to help out.

  “No rich people,” Dorothy cautioned. Dorothy never took money from people she disliked.

  Dorothy agreed that John Gilbert would be the logical candidate to approach. Although he earned ten thousand dollars a week in Hollywood, he did not qualify as “rich people” by her definition. Gilbert responded to Bea’s telegram by promptly wiring the money, which she asked the telegraph office to pay out in one-dollar bills. Stuffing the cash into a paper bag, she marched into Dorothy’s room and tore open the bag to let the green leaves blow around like a hurricane in a cabbage patch. The nurses failed to find this amusing.

  “Is this insanity?” one of them asked sourly and stalked out.

  “It’s a form of it,” Bea replied.

  After three weeks at Presbyterian, Dorothy faced a month’s convalescence at home. She was miserably bored. Before long she was wishing that she owned an electric train. “Hell, while I’m up, I wish I had a couple of professional hockey teams.” To kill time she read fiction, which reminded her of her own failures in that genre. Despite everything, her ambition still was to write a novel. Real writers, in her eyes, seldom limited themselves to short fiction. More than ever, she felt a need to prove herself a real writer. Short-story collections never sold well because literature was measured by the yard and people wanted their money’s worth. She began to work on a story
that would not be quite long enough to qualify as a novella, but was two or three times the length of anything she had attempted so far. It was possibly the finest story she ever wrote. To read it is to envisage her laying down a sentence, laboriously shaping it until it seemed simple, then going on to the next sentence and doing likewise, so carefully crafted is this story.

  It can be described as a parable of a woman who loses her way, condemned to live and wander. Hazel Morse is a wholesale dress model, good sport, wife, ex-wife, swell drinker, animal lover, unsuccessful suicide, and big blonde. The story readily suggests Dorothy and presents a fictionalized account of some bad things that had happened to her. “Big Blonde” is perhaps the most intensely autobiographical of all her fiction. Certainly, it was no accident that she opens the story in the garment industry, where Hazel has been employed as a model for many years and where she has perfected her good-sport role with dress buyers from Des Moines and Houston. Like her heroine, Dorothy had her own origins in the garment business; although Seventh Avenue was a world she despised, it was as familiar to her as breathing.

  After tinkering with the story off and on for the rest of the year, she allowed Seward Collins to publish it in The Bookman as a favor, because she might have placed it in a more distinguished magazine. When “Big Blonde” appeared in February 1929, it brought her unanimous praise. F.P.A.’s reaction in The Conning Tower typified the enthusiasm:... So had a beaker of milk with O. Hering the architect, and so home and read a tayle of Dorothy Parker’s in the February Bookman, called “Big Blonde,” the best short story I have read in so long a time that I cannot say. I would nominate that lady for a membership in the Dudless Writers’ Club, a sacred society, whose only other member I can think of at this moment is A. E. Housman.