Dorothy Parker: What Fresh Hell Is This?

by Marion Meade

  A week later, they made a trip to Venice with Sara and Gerald, staying at the lavish Grand Hotel and enjoying the Venetian sights. They visited glassblowing factories and stared at Titians; they ate lunch at Florian’s and swam at the Lido in the afternoons. For practically every other meal, they dined on scampi. Late in the evenings, when they had run out of amusements, they entertained themselves with a Ouija board. At first they received fairly routine messages from an American woman named Alice who claimed to have died while traveling in Europe but soon a personality who identified herself as Elinor Wylie came through and began to make ghoulish announcements about various crimes and a few poisonings. Alarmed, they abandoned the Ouija board.

  The last two days of the holiday were spent in Munich, where they drank beer at the Hofbrauhaus, attended a “not so hot” play, and went sightseeing in the rain. Gerald shopped for records by an unknown singer named Marlene Dietrich from a film called Der Blaue Engel and Dorothy bought a dachshund, Eiko von Blutenberg, whose lineage was so noble that “he has no sense and therefore is at ease in any drawing room.” He was accustomed to a diet of bratwurst because he turned up his royal nose when she offered him a dog biscuit. After they put Benchley on the sleeper for Paris, she took Eiko back to the Regina Palace Hotel and began considering a change of name—perhaps something a little less formidable. Eventually she renamed him Robinson, which was probably a tribute to the Swiss Family Robinson. Montana-Vermala seemed less lonely with the haughty Robinson trotting at her ankles.

  In the meantime, Laments for the Living had been published. Sales started off exceedingly well and the book went through four editions during the first month, but Dorothy thought she deserved critical success as well. The first batch of reviews she received from George Oppenheimer were, on the whole, quite good, but a few scorned her stories as slight. It was on the uncomplimentary critiques that she fastened. All the reviews, she cabled him, SEEM TO ME BEYOND WORDS AWFUL AM SICK THAT MY BOOK FOR YOU IS SO BAD PRETTY DISCOURAGED ABOUT EVER WRITING AGAIN. She wondered whether an intelligent reviewer had given her a decent notice. Oppenheimer replied, “They are dancing in the streets, Mrs. Parker, and drinking magnums of champagne in your honor and yet you sit there and say you will never write another book for shame.” Her neediness was so great that even Oppenheimer’s glib reassurances sounded good. He hoped that she would write eight or nine books, so that The Viking Press could pay its rent and “George can have enough money to go to Europe and see you,” because he missed her so unmercifully that he “couldn’t even go near ‘21’ without shedding tears.”

  Apart from the story for Cosmopolitan, she completed only a few poems, one of them a memoriam for a tubercular woman of her acquaintance, aged twenty-five, who had recently died.

  Once Benchley left, there were visits from other old friends that brought less pleasure. At the end of August, Scott Fitzgerald spent a week in Montana-Vermala; Zelda had entered treatment at a psychiatric hospital near Geneva, and his preoccupation with her schizophrenia and his family’s disintegration had left him insensitive to the agonies of others. One night at Harry’s, talking about the disappointments life had dealt him, he turned to Sara and said, “I don’t suppose you have ever known despair.” Dorothy was furious at him. After Scott, Don and Bea Stewart arrived. Later Stewart admitted finding the town far more oppressive than he had imagined from Dorothy’s descriptions. Despite her jokes and Gerald’s Marlene Dietrich records, the Stewarts suffered from bad dreams and insomnia, and after a few days they hurried back to Paris.

  But not before Dorothy quarreled with her old friend: Ever since she had published a New Yorker profile of Hemingway the previous year, Stewart had been simmering with indignation over her praise for a man who had vilified her, even if she knew nothing about it. Dorothy had commended Hemingway as a writer who, unlike others, would never traffic with the gentry who lived on the North Shore of Long Island, and Stewart had assumed those words meant him. In fact, she was probably thinking of herself and Benchley, and of the whole Round Table, who at one time or another had kowtowed to the Lovetts and the Whitneys. It pained Stewart to read her adulatory remarks about his former friend, with whom he had quarreled for her sake, and he told her that the piece had “hurt like hell.” Dorothy swore she had not been thinking of him, and after many cognacs, the misunderstanding was finally smoothed over. Despite Hemingway’s cordiality whenever they happened to meet, his private feelings remained hostile because the following year he composed another poem about her:Little drops of grain alcohol

  Little slugs of gin

  Make the mighty notions

  Make the double chin—

  Lovely Mrs. Parker in the Algonquin

  Loves her good dog Robinson

  Keeps away from sin

  Mr. Hemingway now wears glasses

  Better to see to kiss the critics’ asses—

  It seemed to be the season for quarreling. One morning at breakfast she got embroiled in a ridiculous but upsetting dispute with Gerald, who had reprimanded Baoth with a severity so stinging that Dorothy found it intolerable to witness. When she asked him not to be so hard on the boy, Gerald advised her to mind her own business. It was her business, she replied, because she thought he was being mean to his son, and she had a right to express her opinion. Finally she threatened to leave, and Gerald agreed it might be for the best.

  While that quarrel was predictably mended, she found the conflicts unsettling. In fact, the atmosphere seethed with tension and festering angers. Patrick’s ordeal had left its mark on the health of both his parents—Gerald suffered from depression and Sara, in poor physical health since her son had fallen ill, developed a gall-bladder disorder. In October, Sara traveled to Cannes for treatment and Dorothy came along as a companion for Honoria, but almost as soon as they reached the Hotel Majestic, she changed her mind about remaining with the Murphys. AM NEARLY GONE WITH LONELINESS AND DISCOURAGEMENT, she cabled Oppenheimer. It was melodramatic but true. From Cannes she cabled Benchley that it would be ALL RIGHT WITH ME IF NEVER SEE ANYONE UNDER SIXTY AGAIN and asked him to send her a kind word.

  After booking passage on the Saturnia, she wired Viking for a thousand dollars. A few days later, apologizing for being a pest, she requested another thousand because she was having difficulty paying her bills and promised Harold and George repayment from the money Cosmopolitan owed her for “Here We Are.” She remembered to cable birthday greetings to her sister, and finally, to Benchley, she reported that the Saturnia would be sailing from Cannes on November 15 andARRIVING NEW YORK SO FAR AS I CAN MAKE OUT SOME TIME IN EARLY APRIL ... AND WILL I BE GLAD TO SEE YOU DEAREST FRED.

  Getting away from it all had been fine, she wrote, but “when the day comes .that you have to tie a string around your finger to remind yourself of what it was you were forgetting, it is time for you to go back home.” Unfortunately, her bank account was so overdrawn that it looked “positively photographic,” and as a consequence she had to find walking-around money in a hurry. She wanted to retire to a vine-covered cottage in the country where she could “spend the rest of my life raising cheques,” but that idea lacked practicality, and soon she was working for The New Yorker again. In January, her Constant Reader column appeared for the first time in two years, opening with “Maybe you think I was just out in the ladies’ room all this time,” and in mid-February, when Benchley went to Hollywood for two months, she agreed to take his place as the magazine’s theater critic. She found the job of play reviewing just as unpleasant as ever. Her first review concluded with a plea, “Personal: Robert Benchley, please come home,” an appeal that might just as easily have been voiced by Gertrude Benchley.

  Benchley led a classic double life. His domestic and extramarital arrangements confined Gertrude to Scarsdale, where she seemed content to raise the boys and paste Robert’s newspaper clippings into scrapbooks. After breaking with the chorus girl, Benchley had a lengthy affair with actress Betty Starbuck. After that his love life grew too complex to do
cument easily. In addition to the prostitutes he patronized at Polly Adler’s, he made routine overtures to countless women and very often met with success. At any given time, there were four or five women openly claiming to be madly in love with him. Ending these infatuations proved difficult sometimes. The wife of a well-known banker was so eager to continue sleeping with him that she once crawled through the transom of his room at the Royalton Hotel. In 1931, he began a long-term relationship with Louise “Louie” Macy, a Smith College graduate who worked as a saleswoman at Hattie Carnegie’s fashionable shop. Their first dates were threesomes that included Dorothy, which caused Louie to conclude that Mrs. Parker was one of his lovers. The adoring Louie would do practically anything for him, including the selection of Gertrude’s Christmas gifts at Hattie Carnegie. Benchley treated her—all his women for that matter—with a protective courtliness that verged on the Victorian. Escorting her home at the end of an evening, he shook her hand and said, “Thank you very much. I had a wonderful time.” This performance misled Louie’s sister Gert so completely that it was years before she realized that Louie’s relationship with Benchley had been sexual.

  Soon after Dorothy’s return to New York, she met a reporter who worked for the New York Sun, a husky, sandy-haired man with a cheerful manner that put people at ease. His name was John McClain, and he was twenty-seven years old. A native of Marion, Ohio, he had played football at Brown where he had been one of the so-called Iron Men, players who never needed a substitute. He returned to Ohio for graduate work at Kenyon College. In spite of his education, McClain remained on the bottom rung of the ladder in New York journalism. He frequently was assigned to cover shipping news and strove for promotion to the Sun’s regular ship reporter. For the time being, he scraped along on little money, rode the subway to work, and lived on Morton Street in the Village, where the flat he shared with two other young men seldom knew heat or hot water.

  In more ways than one, McClain was a hungry man, determined not to live in a cold-water flat any longer than necessary. Among his assets were blond good looks and a well-built, athletic body, in which he took great pride. He kept fit with regular workouts at a gym. A friend later described him as pink and white, “the male equivalent of a Rubens nude,” while another observer graphically portrayed him as “a bohunk.” So often had women told him he was good in bed that he had come to believe it. He realized that one way to infiltrate New York’s smart circles might be on the arms of well-known women. Not bothering to bandy words among his friends, McClain bluntly announced his premeditated campaign of fornicating his way to a more satisfying life. His first success was torch singer Libby Holman. Before long, he was frequenting saloons like Tony’s and Moriarty’s, where his winning demeanor and convivial drinking skills made him popular with the literary crowd.

  McClain knew Dorothy by reputation only, because his arrival in the city had coincided with her absence from it. One night they were introduced at Tony’s, and McClain set out being seductive and ingratiating. While he may have been genuinely attracted to her, it was probably also true that had she not been a celebrity he wouldn’t have glanced twice at a woman ten years his senior. At that particular time she was looking far from her best anyway. Her face remained lovely—at times she still resembled an adolescent—but her body was bloated from alcohol and her chin was doubling. This failed to deter McClain, who escorted her back to the Algonquin and settled down for the night.

  Afterward, he bragged to friends about his success. He boasted that Dorothy had assured him he was a good lover and added that she knew some tricks herself, which he enumerated as if she were a neighborhood tart.

  Meanwhile, Dorothy assumed that John McClain’s desire was genuine and rejoiced at her good fortune. At first they had enjoyable times together because he was star-struck, awed by the glamour of her life, and eager for introductions to people in the literary community.

  One of her regular drinking companions was John O’Hara, whom she had known since 1928 as a reporter and rewrite man on the New York Herald Tribune. Dorothy believed his short stories showed unusual promise and steadfastly championed him to editors as a coming major writer, at a time when others doubted he was exceptional. Although O’Hara was not physically attractive to her—he had bad teeth and acne—she enjoyed his company late at night when he joined her at Tony’s. She assured him he would never be happy because he was a genius, and she further bet him that if Ernest Hemingway read some of his stories he would want to cut his own throat. “I am sorry to be compelled to add,” O’Hara wrote to his brother, “that Mrs. Parker was tight, but I understand she has told other people the same thing about me,” and he was right. O’Hara admired John McClain whose dashing self-assurance and success with women represented the type of male O’Hara wished he could be.

  William Faulkner, another friend of Dorothy’s, impressed her as a vulnerable country boy in desperate need of her protection. She introduced him to the Round Table and her New Yorker friends, and she further made sure he received a welcome in the drawing rooms of rich people like Adele and Robert Lovett. In the fall of 1931, when Faulkner was staying at the Algonquin, she gave a cocktail party in his honor. He turned up late with an old friend of his, Eric Devine, by which time most of the guests were gassed. So was the hostess, who proudly passed around manuscript pages from Light in August, the novel he was working on at the time. Eric Devine recalled that John McClain was so firmly glued to Dorothy’s side as to leave no doubt about the intimacy of their relations.

  With or without McClain, Dorothy and Robinson went out every night. Some people felt sorry for poor Robinson who would try to sleep under a table in the smoke and noise of Tony’s at two or three in the morning. Given her love for animals, Frank Sullivan thought, “she could have been a little more considerate.” He might have been more disapproving had he known that when Dorothy took her nightly sleeping pills she sometimes fed one to Robinson so that he wouldn’t wake up too early the next day.

  Occasionally there was an evening memorable for its serenity. Once she and John were drinking double Scotches at Tony’s with a group that included Benchley, Vernon Duke, and Monty Woolley, when the conversation turned sentimentally to Paris and the city’s special beauty in springtime. “Oh,” somebody sighed, “to be in Paris now that April’s there!” What a great title for a song, Duke recalled remarking, whereupon the obliging Tony Soma escorted them upstairs to a delapidated piano, and Duke composed the music for “April in Paris,” while everyone hummed along quietly.

  With a new man in her life, Dorothy felt compelled to slim down and smarten up her appearance. As she had done with John Garrett, she telephoned McClain every day to arrange their meeting later in the evening. She expected to be the only woman in his life, but this John behaved remarkably like the old one and soon began to vocalize his martyrdom. He felt smothered, resented her demands, and began to invent engagements. Increasingly, he told Dorothy that he was fatigued after work, then he had to work out at the gym, and after that he was exhausted and simply wanted to crawl back to his flat and tumble into bed. To his friends McClain grumbled that Dorothy refused to leave him alone and it took all of his ingenuity to escape her.

  At the outset, some of Dorothy’s friends sized up McClain as a social climber and a sponge who had no qualms about taking advantage of her. Bea Stewart despised him, and others tried to caution Dorothy, but she disregarded their warnings. She was even able to find humor in John’s social aspirations and his gargantuan appetite for women who owned penthouses and luxurious country estates. He was only twenty-seven and she made up her mind to be tolerant of his imperfections.

  At one of her cocktail parties, to which McClain had been invited, she waited expectantly for him to suggest dinner together. He said nothing and finally asked if he might use her telephone. Everyone in the room could hear him confirming a dinner engagement elsewhere, and off he went. Dorothy broke the tension with a quip and a shrug.

  “I have no squash courts,” she s
aid. “What can I do?”

  What she did was to write about her lover, although he proved less inspiring than his predecessors. Death and Taxes, a collection of verse published that year by Viking, was mostly written before she met McClain, but a few of the poems apply to him: “Every love’s the love before / In a duller dress.” She entertained her friends with postmortems on the latest outrage he had perpetrated. After a quarrel, when he called her a lousy lay and slammed out, she said that his body had gone to his head. She described him as a male prostitute, who mistook her for a stepladder so that he could climb into the beds of famous women. When she once learned that a wealthy Long Island socialite had invited him to her home for the weekend, Dorothy predicted that he would be back “as soon as he has licked all the gilt off her ass.”

  Depressed, Dorothy described 1932 as “this year of hell” and again attempted to kill herself, this time with barbiturates, after preparing a last will and testament and setting it aside for Benchley’s attention. “Any royalties on my books are to go to John McClain. My clothes and my wrist-watch to my sister, Helen Droste, also my little dog Robinson—Dorothy Parker.” But her resolve to die was not particularly solid. On a Thursday evening at the end of February, she made her departure with sleeping powders, but it was apparently the will of God that she be shipped back like an undelivered letter, to the Hotel Algonquin, 59 West Forty-fourth Street, New York City, return receipt attached. On Friday afternoon, feeling like a cadaver but nonetheless very much alive, she managed to call Dr. Barach and explain what had happened.