Dorothy Parker: What Fresh Hell Is This?

by Marion Meade

  Her friends, naturally, loved “Big Blonde.” So did a great many others, however. The prestigious O. Henry competition selected it as the best short story of 1929.

  The publication of “Big Blonde” marked a leap forward in her literary reputation. It also sealed the end of her relationship with Collins, who, in due course, committed professional suicide. He and his literary magazine continued to win respect for another two or three years before taking a nose dive when he began publishing political ideas that seemed to parallel Mussolini’s. It was whispered that he had become a fascist. In addition to his admiration for the Nazis, his fascination with psychic research and his claims to be receiving messages from other worlds did not reassure people either. In 1952, Edmund Wilson informed her that Sewie had died.

  “I don’t see what else he could do,” she said, as if he had killed himself. In her eyes he had, long ago.

  Technological progress, aside from the Lindbergh flight, left Dorothy cold. She never learned to drive and refused to purchase a radio, obstinately declaring “there is no force great enough to make me,” and she found movies boring. A motion picture theater was “an enlarged and magnificently decorated lethal chamber to me.” All the same, she began to revise some of those judgments slightly when Benchley filmed The Treasurer’s Report for the William Fox Studio and a few months later acted in a second short, The Sex Life of the Polyp, which were the first films to use sustained talking for more than a minute. Dorothy thought he was magnificent. She also enjoyed watching a filmed conversation with George Bernard Shaw, but the ear-splitting sound tracks of other talkies made her feel like shouting at the screen, “Oh, for heaven’s sake, shut up!”

  Three months later, she was sitting in a Culver City office building, staring at palm trees. Later, she said need of money lured her to Hollywood. Not only did the deal seem too good to pass up, but film writing also looked like easy money. She remembered thinking, “Why, I could do that with one hand tied behind me and the other on Irving Thalberg’s pulse.” Thanks partly to Howard Dietz, MGM offered her a contract paying three hundred dollars a week for three months, which added up to a tidy little sum. The disturbing part of the deal was living three thousand miles from New York. Still, the film company wooed her with excessive flattery, praising her wit and talent and telling her how much they needed clever writers like herself. A telegram arrived from John Gilbert: I HEAR SWELL NEWS ABOUT YOUR HAVING GONE MOVIE THAT’S GRAND WHEN ARE YOU ARRIVING.

  Before she left for California, she gave an interview to the Brooklyn Eagle in which she excused her defection. “It always takes more to live on than what you earn,” she said, adding that she was “always hampered by money.” She also stated that she abhorred movies, hoped the entire film industry would collapse, and predicted she would hate Hollywood because it was full of palms, which “are the ugliest vegetable God created.” After a week in Hollywood she realized that she really did hate the place, but by then it was too late.

  Her first assignment was writing dialogue for a melodrama, Madame X. The job got off to a bad start when she glimpsed an MGM publicity release that referred to her as “the internationally known author of Too Much Rope, the popular novel.” She was further dismayed to meet Irving Thalberg, production head of MGM, and realize that he had no idea who she was or why she had been hired.

  “Now let’s see,” he said to her. “What was it you wanted to do for us?”

  Her office was located at the end of a hall. “It was a lovely office but the air was oppressive, and even though I opened the windows and opened the doors, it was still depressing.” Her desk had the unmistakable fragrance of an outhouse. After days of sniffing and holding her nose, she learned why. The previous occupant had been growing mushrooms in a bottom drawer by a correspondence course with liquid manure guaranteed to produce mushrooms in any climate on earth. Other writers seemed reluctant to visit her cubicle. She felt isolated. When a sign painter arrived to letter her name on the door, she felt like bribing him to print GENTLEMEN instead.

  Everything she had heard about Hollywood turned out to be true. Living was ridiculously expensive. At first she stayed at the Ambassador Hotel in a ten-dollar room that she thought was worth three. After she received her first paycheck and could afford to move, she lived with screenwriter Arthur Caesar and his wife, who had a big house in Beverly Hills. The parties she attended were pompous affairs, full of old fogies who had to be in bed by ten-thirty. A newspaper reported that at one gathering, she let off steam by yelling, “Come on, you so-and-sos, get a little action on this.” California weather made her sleepy, the brilliant flowers smelled like rotten, old dollar bills, and she suspected the enormous vegetables had been grown in dirty trunks. On Thanksgiving Day, when it was too hot to wear a coat, she wished she were at home where it was cold and a turkey sat in the oven at her sister’s house.

  She hoped that three months in Hollywood might cure her obsession with John Garrett, the curious sensation she had of honestly not knowing “where John leaves off and I begin.” Separation from her had not changed him. When she telephoned, he sometimes pretended they had a poor connection or claimed he couldn’t talk on account of having visitors. Nothing had changed.

  There was no lack of friends with whom she could commiserate in Hollywood. Gerald Murphy was there with Sara and the children. Murphy, an expert on Early American spirituals, had been recruited by MGM as a music consultant to King Vidor on the all-black picture Hallelujah. The Murphys agreed that the town was unappealing, and so did Bunny Wilson, who was living in a beach cottage in Santa Barbara and writing a novel. In early December, when Benchley arrived to act in three Fox pictures, he also found that he hated Hollywood. They turned into marathon complainers. On December 17, Dorothy was shattered to learn that Elinor Wylie had died the previous evening of a stroke; even Benchley’s presence could not dent her grief. “Dottie is so low that she hardly speaks even to me,” he reported to Gertrude.

  Two months passed. Through no fault of her own, she had not written a single word for Madame X because nobody instructed her what to write. Instead, she wrote dialogue for an untitled film (whose plot remained a secret too). When she had finished, she sent it to Irving Thalberg for approval. Eventually, the pages came back with a message from his secretary: “Mr. Thalberg said to tell you that you have to be careful in writing for the pictures. You always have to think of the Little Totties.” Dorothy was ready to explode.

  “God,” she moaned, “and how I hate children!”

  Given her frustration, it is not clear why she signed two more contracts in early January committing herself to work on Five O’Clock Girl and the Cecil B. DeMille film Dynamite.

  For Dynamite, she was asked to write a song, even though the picture was not a musical. Since the success of The Jazz Singer, producers were insisting that even nonmusicals use a song for exploitation purposes. To Dorothy’s mind, the theme-song craze had got out of hand with such foolishness as “Varsity Girl, I’ll Cling to You,” for Varsity Girl, but she was determined to give MGM what she imagined might please, and she concocted a snappy lyric entitled, “Dynamite Man, I Love You,” which was swiftly pronounced unacceptable. At her wit’s end to know what they wanted, she made up her mind to ask DeMille himself what the picture was about, although getting in to see him was “like riding a camel through the eye of a needle.”

  “Mr. DeMille, just tell me what this picture is about,” she croaked, fearful lest she waste a second of the producer’s precious time.

  DeMille treated her to a lengthy saga about a socialite who, in order to gain an inheritance, needs a husband and makes up her mind to marry a man who has been accused and convicted of a murder, unjustly of course, and is awaiting the end in a prison cell, with time hanging heavy on his hands and nothing for solace but his guitar, not knowing a last-minute reprieve awaits him, the whole sorry goulash wanting nothing more than a catchy tune for the poor devil to sing. By the time he got to the end, Dorothy’s eyes had rolled upward
and backward into her head.

  “Mr. DeMille, the details of these pictures must be ... my goodness, it’s just staggering.”

  DeMille said, “Ah, yes, zebras in The King of Kings. ”

  In her office, she began flipping through a Bible to find out why zebras should be in a film about the life of Christ. She wondered if she had heard wrong. Perhaps DeMille had said Hebrews.

  Next time she saw DeMille, she said, “Mr. DeMille, what were you doing with zebras?”

  He said, “Oh, the zebras. They were pulling the chariots of Mary Magdalene.” He paused. “Terrible, they kick so easily but their legs broke.”

  “Of course,” Dorothy said. “I should have known that,” and tottered back to her office where she quickly wrote, with composer Jack King, a lovely ballad, “How Am I to Know?” When it was accepted, she informed Thalberg that she was going home. She demanded, and received, train fare back to New York. So eager was she to make her getaway that she left the home of Arthur Caesar without saying good-bye.

  Back in New York, she allowed herself to be swept away by the enthusiasm of two men who had founded The Viking Press, Harold Guinzburg and George Oppenheimer, long-time admirers who convinced her that it would be a crime if she didn’t write a novel. Guinzburg was the type of intellectual whom Dorothy could respect, a sensitive, rather scholarly man who was exceptionally solid in his knowledge of literature. In contrast, “Georgie Opp” was extroverted—a snappy dresser, a bit of a smart aleck, a man who took pride in knowing everybody worth knowing and in cultivating those he didn’t. He loved women (as friends) and set about forthwith fawning over Dorothy, flattering her shamelessly. The upshot was that she agreed to produce a novel in time to head Viking’s spring 1930 list, an astonishing promise for someone who spent three or four months on a short story, but she was counting on it being possible if she went abroad again.

  There seemed to be nothing holding her in New York, because her affair with John was over. She had a romantic’s view of broken love affairs. When an interviewer once asked if she thought it silly to kill oneself over unrequited love, she opened her eyes wide. “No,” she said. She took the same approach to the writing of novels. The solution for both was foreign travel.

  When she learned that Muriel and Allen Saalburg were planning to sail in April, she made up her mind to go over with them.

  Chapter 11

  SONNETS IN SUICIDE, OR THE LIFE OF JOHN KNOX

  1929-1932

  During a brief stay in London, she bought a pugilistic, prizewinning Dandie Dinmont terrier named Timothy, who was fourteen months old and would have been the sweetest dog in the world if not for his habit of picking fights with almost every animal that crossed his path. Dorothy took Timothy to Paris, where she had not been at the Hotel Napoléon more than a few days before she began to feel sick.

  Luckily, the Saalburgs knew of a physician, as it happened one of France’s most eminent surgeons, and they offered to accompany her to the examination. Afterward, the doctor came out to the reception room and gestured broadly to them with both arms to indicate the enlargement of the patient’s liver. Dorothy blamed the language difference for her difficulty in understanding the diagnosis and would mysteriously refer to her condition as “a dainty complaint—something the matter with my liver.” For six weeks she felt “sick and blue and lonely.” Work was out of the question, and drinking was strictly forbidden. Confined to her hotel room with only the Dandie Dinmont for company, she had visits from the Saalburgs and also a sick call from Ernest and Pauline Hemingway, who were living with their infant son near the Church of Saint-Sulpice and who were, she said, “something swell to me,” although later she admitted disliking Pauline.

  When she began to feel better, she went on a shopping spree and bought a summer fur coat made of cream-colored unborn lamb, which had “all the warmth and durability of a sheet of toilet paper.” She also ordered a number of trailing chiffon dresses and stocked up on nightgowns, chemises, and slips with matching panties for herself as well as her sister. Afterward, looking at her purchases, she realized they were “some of the most ill-advised clothes ever assembled. They were just what somebody with an afflicted liver would have picked out.” Her most costly mistake proved to be the summer fur, which she would wear only four times before shipping it home to Helen, who had little use for it either.

  At the end of June, Benchley arrived with his wife and children. Against her better judgment, Dorothy agreed to join them in a rented car on a grueling four-day journey to Antibes, where they planned to visit the Murphys. Around Gertrude, Benchley seemed strangely silent. “He simply can’t speak, in the presence of his bride, and who could? O my God, what a woman, oh, my God, what a woman!” She found it hard to believe he was the same man, so subdued was his behavior around his family. Before long, Nat and young Bub were driving her crazy. When Robert Junior had been a baby, Dorothy had been quite taken with his chubbiness and fondly nicknamed him Annie, because he reminded her of the Irish maid once employed by the Rothschilds. “Annie,” his baby fat gone, had matured into a normal, high-spirited ten-year-old who bickered and competed with his older brother. According to Benchley’s diary, crisis followed crisis: Dorothy left her passport in a restaurant, Timothy barked at every dog along the roadside, young Bub “gets in nettles making p.p.” The children’s rowdiness forced Benchley to offer a prize “to first boy not to be amusing.”

  Gertrude regarded travel for children as an opportunity for education. Assuming the role of teacher and tour guide, she pointed out Roman ruins and conducted spelling contests. At one point, almost unhinged by the racket, Dorothy told Gertrude that she was considering surgery to reduce the size of her breasts. What prompted her to cook up such a peculiar confidence would be interesting to know. On the other hand, as she wrote to Aleck Woollcott, “I have a collection of Mrs. Benchleiana that will knock your justly prize right eye out.”

  At Villa America, Sara and Gerald installed the Benchley family in one of their guest houses and put Dorothy and Timothy in the other, the bastide, which resembled a picture-book Normandy farmhouse with plumbing and electricity and exquisite decorations. It stood surrounded by fig trees laden with purple fruit, which was fine, she said, “except that I hate figs in any form.” The weather was glorious and suddenly Dorothy felt fired with “deferred health and twilit energy.” She began swimming two kilometers a day; she devoured the accounts of murders and dismemberings in the Nice papers; and she played with the Murphy children—eleven-year-old Honoria, eight-year-old Patrick, who had a stomach ailment requiring a special diet, and ten-year-old Baoth, who named a chicken after her. When the chicken turned out to be a rooster, Baoth shrugged philosophically and said, “What is that of difference?” Dorothy’s hair grew long and she began to gain weight.

  From Antibes, Dorothy sent The New Yorker three poems and two short stories. She was barreling ahead on her novel, to which she had given the intriguing title Sonnets in Suicide, or the Life of John Knox. Numerous pages got torn up, and what was left failed to please her entirely but, she said, “it’s an awful pile of work, just the same.” Daily she prayed, “Dear God, please make me stop writing like a woman. For Jesus Christ’s sake, amen.”

  Among the old friends she saw were the Fitzgeralds, who had rented a villa near Cannes. Zelda, who seemed tired and more remote than usual, was gravitating toward her ultimate breakdown, but Dorothy was unaware of her problems. It was Scott, jittery, argumentative, and often obnoxiously drunk, who seemed to be in poor shape. Jealous of the hospitality that Sara and Gerald were lavishing on Dorothy, he wrote petulantly to Hemingway that the Murphys were putting on their most elaborate performance for her benefit but she didn’t seem to appreciate it.

  At Villa America she was content to live quietly. Everyone told her that the Riviera social scene that summer was terrible because every “tripe” was there, including Rosie Dolly and Peggy Hopkins Joyce. Still, she never knew who might turn up. Adele Lovett came over for four days,
just to see Benchley she claimed, but left in disgust because he was tied up with his family every minute. Jack Gilbert and Ina Claire arrived on their honeymoon. Benchley, walking along the street in Cannes, came face to face with his former mistress, who was in the company of her current boyfriend, and she cut him dead. That evening, shaken by the encounter, he managed to give Gertrude the slip, and he and Dorothy sallied forth to get “absolutely blotto.”

  Dorothy had dutifully cut back on her drinking, but that night she got so drunk that she wound up in bed with a good-looking international polo star, the heir to a carpeting fortune. “The lucky man was Laddie Sanford,” she wrote Helen, “and we wouldn’t know each other even if we ever did see each other again. And I don’t even feel embarrassed about it, because I can’t tell you how little sex means to me now. Or at least I can’t tell you how little I think sex means to me now. And polo players wouldn’t count, anyway.”

  Unfortunately, the drunken encounter with Sanford triggered her memories of John Garrett. Before leaving New York, despite her suspicion that he was involved with at least two other women, she felt pleased when he told her that he too would be in France that summer. She must cable her address so they might rendezvous somewhere for a week or two, he insisted. Although she read of his arrival in the Paris Herald, she failed to hear from him and finally wired to say she wished they could be friends. He responded with a collect telegram: DELIGHTED WIRE ALWAYS, three words whose studied ambiguity seemed downright spooky to her.